Glenn Greenwald writes about a troubling legal case in which the US government intervened in a private civil suit and persuaded the judge that the case should be dismissed because having a trial would compromise national security. What made it unusual was that this was on the surface a run-of-the-mill case between two parties that ostensibly had no connection to the government
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Tim Dowling captures something that had been vaguely bugging me for some time but that I could not quite put my finger on, and that is the way that some people in the US, when someone in their organization is exposed as doing something outrageous or criminal, are quick to say “This is not who we are”.
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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman operates in two modes. He is either completely wrong or given to superficial platitudes written in an appallingly bad style. But like all the other warmongers who occupy the top niches of the US political-media establishment, there is no problem for which more bloodshed is not the preferred solution.
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Glenn Greenwald comes out with another shocking story in The Intercept about the kinds of threats that the US uses against its allies if they gave asylum to Edward Snowden.
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Recently my daughter told me that her friend from high school, whom I also know and happens to be the daughter of a colleague, had got married and was pregnant. She is in a same-sex marriage. Another colleague of mine, also in a same-sex marriage, just had a baby too. What struck me was how ordinary this news seemed to me. Just a decade ago, same-sex couples getting married and giving birth to children would have been big news. Now I find myself responding pretty much the way I would to news of an opposite-sex marriage and pregnancy of people I know, happy for the couple, wishing them well, and then moving on to other things.
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American exceptionalists are always claiming that the US is the greatest nation in the world and the best at practically anything that matters. Unfortunately, the rest of the world does not see it in the same way and marvel at how deficient we are in areas like health care, social and economic mobility, infrastructure, public services, and other quality of life measures.
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In his latest investigative piece, he highlights why it really is a crime how so many colleges exploit their student athletes.
Politicians in the US are proud of boasting that it is the world’s greatest democracy. That is part of the routine pandering that the public has come to expect, along with being the sole possessor of many civic and even personal virtues. But according to this year’s Electoral Integrity Project report, when it comes to electoral integrity, a measure of whether “polling day ends with disputes about ballot-box fraud, corruption, and flawed registers”, surely one of the most basic elements of a democracy, the US ranks a lowly 45th among the 127 nations it surveyed in 2014.
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The lawyers for Stephen Kim, who is serving a 13-month jail term for talking to a reporter about a classified matter that was considered minor, are asking the Department of Justice to immediately release him from jail, saying that the plea deal they made with David Petraeus reveals a “profound double standard”. Peter Maass at The Intercept has the details.
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I do my own taxes. Over the years, I have figured out the increasing number of forms that I have to fill out. They are not that difficult for anyone who can do simple arithmetic and is comfortable with “if …, then …” logical reasoning.
I do not use a professional tax preparer since I figure I will be able to exercise more care since I know the information well and can devote careful attention to it, rather than someone who has to deal with a whole lot of forms and documents. I also do not use the commercial software out of principle. I resent the fact that the government has made a deal with these software companies to not provide their own direct online tax filing system, which would be the logical thing to do. I do not see why I should give my personal data to a private company that lobbies to keep the tax rules complicated so that more people would come to them.
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