Spare me the sob stories

Jonathan Turley provides a good take-down of Hillary Clinton’s self-serving assertions in her new book, where she tries to minimize her culpability for endorsing the invasion of Iraq and tries to bond with economically struggling people by saying that she and her husband were ‘dead broke’ when they left the White House and had to struggle to pay their mortgage their daughter’s college tuition.
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The open carry issue

The recent exploits of members of the group Open Carry Texas carrying massive guns around in public places and into restaurants and other business venues, and the reaction to it, has been a good example of how rubbing your rights into other people’s faces may not always be in your best interest. The best way to support the right of free speech may not be to stand on a street corner and talk to every person who passes by. Instead of being impressed by your commitment to upholding free speech, they are more likely to think you are a crazy person.
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Timothy Geithner as Chauncey Gardner

As has been documented in books and articles by people like Neil Barofsky and Jesse Eisenger, Timothy Geithner symbolized the worst elements of government subservience to Wall Street. While ostensibly a public servant as head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and later Treasury Secretary during the turbulent period up to, during, and following the financial crisis of 2008, his main goal seemed to be to protect the interests of Wall Street banks rather than the public who paid his salary and whose interests he was supposed to be safeguarding.
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Our unequal legal system

There is no question that the Occupy Wall Street movement alarmed the ruling classes because of its exposure of the class war being waged in this country by wealthy against the rest of us. The Daily Show talks about how the law enforcement and justice systems are tilted so heavily in favor of the oligarchy, a reflection of the entrenched nature of the class war being waged.
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When turnabout is not a good idea

When we see these movements by Christians to insert prayer into schools and government meetings and to put up monuments to the Ten Commandments and other religious symbols in public spaces, the natural reaction has been to encourage non-Christian groups also exercise the same right to have official sanction of their religion by saying their own prayers and putting up their own monuments.
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A small puzzle

The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats are in for a shellacking in the 2014 elections, and likely to lose seats in the House of Representatives and even lose their majority in the Senate, leading to even greater gridlock in the next two years. But at the same time, the Republicans are advocating social and economic policies that are supposedly alienating women, minorities, the 99%, and the young.
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Greenwald and his critics

Today is the anniversary of the first news report based on the Edward Snowden documents and it is interesting to look back at how perceptions have changed over that time about Snowden and the journalists he used as a conduit for that information. A fascinating aspect has been the reactions of the so-called ‘liberal’ media because they got squeezed between the principle that transparency about how government works is always to be preferred and their desire to protect president Obama and his administration who have been revealed to be liars and law-breakers when is comes to spying on people.
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