Yesterday the Pulitzer prizes for 2013, considered the apex of establishment US journalistic achievement, were announced. Of those the public service prize is the most coveted and the committee stunned the world by giving it to Edward Snowden, adding to the Polk award that he received earlier in the year.
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Al Madrigal of The Daily Show looked at how the Spanish language media promoted the Affordable Care Act to encourage people to sign up and how that was covered by Fox News.
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In a surprise move, the Nevada Republican party voted to strip language from its party platform that opposed same-sex marriage and abortion. This is quite a stunning development.
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The Daily Show chronicles the continuing decline of Congress into a body that seems to be purely becoming a punching bag for comedians, such as producing over-the-top campaign ads
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Given all the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ spy agencies intercepting the communications of individuals all over the globe, the obvious question that arises is to what extent they were involved in the Heartbleed bug, the weakness in the OpenSSL protocol that enables third parties to extract 64K chunks of information at a time from targeted computers without the hosts being aware, a security problem so serious that it even caused the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing.
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Andrew Rice of New York magazine had an entertaining description of the Polk Awards last night where Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman received the award for National Security Reporting for their work on the Snowden documents. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian who supported the printing of the first major articles, also was present to pick up a well-deserved award for his paper.
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Once the US and western powers accepted that it was ok for the elected government of Ukraine to be overthrown by unrest (either spontaneous or secretly instigated by the US) caused ostensibly by what were essentially policy differences over whether the county should move closer to the west or Russia, things that are normally decided by elections, it seems that it has now become the norm in that country for people in various parts of it to take things into their own hands.
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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras entered the US today. They are here to receive their Polk Awards for National Security Reporting at an event to be held today in New York City.
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The drone operators who remotely order the missiles that blow up people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else the US is killing people refer to the victims of their airstrikes as ‘bug splats’, presumably because of the resemblance of the images they receive after the strike to what one sees on the wind shields of cars. This is part of the general dehumanizing that is adopted when you are killing people in cold blood from a distance.
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It has long been true that the rich and well-connected got better treatment from law enforcement and the justice system than the poor and powerless. But that brutal fact was usually hidden behind a façade that claimed that the system was impartial and fair. The image of the statue of a blindfolded Lady Justice holding evenly balanced scales (like the one on the right) is part of the architecture of the US Supreme Court building and is used to personify this idea that justice is dispensed without favor.
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