A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a news story in which it was reported that the NSA had “built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place.”
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Tom O’Donnell imagines what it would look like if Ayn Rand and her devotees ran the country according to their ideas. It begins:
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
The spat between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA about what to do with the 6,300-page report on torture headed towards some kind of partial resolution with the committee voting 11-3 to declassify and release only about 500 pages, not the full report. This consists of just the Executive Summary and conclusions but the CIA opposes even this limited release and while president Obama has said in general terms that he supports declassification and release, in typical shifty fashion he has not yet made it clear what exactly he proposes to do and in fact has withheld documents in his possession that the committee wanted.
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The Daily Show looks at how bizarre have become the policies and attitudes in the US about guns where safety measures concerning real that would seem so commonsensical are viewed as unthinkable impositions on gun ownership, while children merely pretending to play with guns are seem as a terrible threat.
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One of the signs that a nation has reached an oligarchic state in which control over major decisions has become vested in a super-wealthy class working through its puppets is that the normal institutions of governance by elected representatives start to sink into irrelevance and become almost clownish in their operations.
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One of the common misconceptions heavily promoted by successive Israeli governments and their lobby in the US is that Israel keeps making generous offers of peace towards the Palestinians but keeps getting rebuffed, and that this is the main hindrance to achieving peace. That this goes against all the facts has been repeatedly pointed out but it has become one of those zombie lies that is trotted out routinely and is reinforced by the western media to justify Israeli excesses, apartheid policies, and the steady and continuous encroachment of Palestinian lands by the expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories.
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Via reader Marcus Ranum, I learned of this story where it has been revealed that the US government agency known as USAID (US Agency for International Development) set up a fake Twitter network to create the impression of popular unrest against the Cuban government.
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It was clear that Jon Stewart was livid at what he saw as the implications of the US Supreme decision in the case McCutcheon v. FEC and he devoted three segments to the topic.
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While using money to influence politicians is becoming increasingly blatant following the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United and McCutcheon rulings, there are still a few fig leaves that exist. One is that there should be no coordination between political campaigns and the SuperPACs that support them. Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Colbert’s lawyer Trevor Potter had a brilliant series during the 2012 elections showing how easy it was, using nods and winks, for politicians get around SuperPAC restrictions.
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