Katrina vanden Heuvel (editor of the Nation magazine) and Stephen F. Cohen (professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton) published the results of a long interview that they had with Edward Snowden in Russia and it offers interesting glimpses of what his life is like now.
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When it comes to current events, we like to think that we base our opinions about the news on facts. But very often we do not have the facts at hand and may not have the time or the ability to summon them at short notice. Even if we do have a smartphone with us when we are engaged with someone in a discussion, it is very rarely that we actually use it to get the required information to make sure that we are right. We go with what we think we know to be true.
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In an earlier post, I expressed my discomfort with getting a mailing stating how many times I had voted in the past five elections and the average for my neighborhood. But Darren Smith says that in some areas mailings are a getting far more specific, to the point of being vaguely intimidating. He quotes from one such letter:
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I read a news item recently about a 90-year old man who was arrested (twice!) in Fort Lauderdale because he violated a city ordinance that prohibited people from feeding homeless people in public. While the city asserts that it is doing so for the good of the homeless, one cannot help but have the suspicion that the real reason is that they don’t want the sight of homeless people to ruin the tourist experience for this popular vacation spot.
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The US Supreme Court on Friday decided to hear the case King v. Burwell of whether the subsidies provided by the health exchanges set up by the federal government under Obamacare are constitutional. This is ominous. Why?
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Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California is one of the most progressive members of Congress. In this interview with Stephen Colbert, she also shows that she is a pretty good sport. It is one of the silliest of such interviews by Colbert that I have seen and he pushes the limits quite a bit but Lee does not flinch and gives as good as she gets.
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The revelations of CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi’s abusive behavior towards women have been stunning. Among many women who moved in the same circles as he did, his behavior was apparently common knowledge and they took care to avoid him and quietly passed the warning along to other women who might be unsuspecting. But that quiet network was not enough to prevent some women from not knowing and thus falling victim. To make it worse, there was also a belief among some that he was gay, thus leading some women to put their guard down in his presence and think that he only wanted to be their friend. Among men, the reactions were all over the place but the primary one was why no women had publicly accused him of behaviors that had been apparently going on for a long time.
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Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show points out the things that the Democratic party did not talk about during the election. I am not saying that doing so would have changed the outcome but it was curious how they ran such a defensive, and even apologetic, campaign when they did have some achievements to their credit.
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Despite all the media hype about how crucial this mid-term election was and the much-ballyhooed sophisticated methods each party supposedly had developed for getting their supporters to the polls, the number of people who actually voted may turn out to be a historic low. As NPR’s Robert Siegel reports:
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Whoever the candidates and parties are, in US elections there is always one certain winner.
(This clip aired on November 4, 2014. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)