While there have been calls for James Clapper, president Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, to resign because of his admitted lies to Congress, Obama continues to defend him, only saying that Clapper should have been ‘more careful’ in his testimony to Congress, i.e., it’s ok if he lies but he should be more careful to not get caught. Of course, liars have to stand together since Obama has also been complicit in these lies.
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Long time readers of this blog know that Orly Taitz is my all time favorite person. Search her name on my blog and you will find so many entries that I fear that it is bordering on an obsession. But I cannot help it because she is so adorable. I feel I know her so well that although we have never met, I feel comfortable calling her by her first name, especially since she commented once on this blog. I feel that it makes us close even though, alas, it appears from her comment that she does not hold me in the same high esteem that I have for her.
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We have all heard about how modern campaigns in the US now depend heavily on data mining, where information about each individual voter is collected to create a profile that enables campaigns to get a pretty good idea of how you will vote, maybe even before you yourself have consciously decided.
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The incestuous relationship between the big investment banks and the US Treasury Department, nowhere more exemplified than by the revolving door between the two sectors, is one of the big scandals of our time. The pattern is for Secretaries of the Treasury to come from Wall Street firms or investment banks, do favors for their friends while in office, and then return there once they leave. The current secretary Jack Lew is a slight exception in that he had served only two years on Wall Street as COO of Citigroup. It will be interesting to see whether he will take a lucrative job on Wall Street once he leaves office.
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It turns out that the global Big Brother spy system of the ‘Five Eyes’ group (consisting of the US’s NSA, British GCHQ, Australian Signals Directorate, Canada’s CSEC, and New Zealand) has been gathering and storing webcam traffic using a system called Optic Nerve. They sampled and stored images once every five minutes.
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President Obama’s trusted sidekick, the confirmed liar James Clapper, whines in a softball interview with Eli Lake of The Daily Beast (these people never agree to give interviews to people they know will ask hard questions) about how actually he is the victim and how his family suffers when they read the bad things people say about him.
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So the governor of Arizona Jan Brewer has vetoed the bill that would allow people who have ‘sincerely’ held religious beliefs to not serve those whom they disapprove of (i.e., members of the LGBT community), saying that the bill would have ‘unintended consequences’ (translation: the business community was telling me that they would suffer and Arizona could even lose the hosting of next year’s Super Bowl).
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Jon Perr displays ten graphs that chart various economic measures over the last century or so. These include the share of total income by the top income brackets, CEO-to-worker compensation ratios, marginal tax rates for the highest income levels, effective tax rates, average incomes, and more. The graphs are spectacular in their clarity even if depressing in their implications. I reproduce just one because it is illustrative of a point that I wish to make.
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Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore on The Daily Show have another one of their insightful and entertaining discussions about race in America, this time about the revisionist idea that slavery was not the cause of the southern secession that led to the Civil War and that if that socialist Abraham Lincoln had not been such a hothead and rushed to war but had instead been patient and used capitalistic ideas, the bloodshed could have been avoided.
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Glenn Greenwald has an important new piece out at The Intercept that says that the NSA and the GCHQ are launching attacks on individuals and targets who have nothing to do with terrorism and in the process are committing acts that would be criminal and severely prosecuted if done by anyone else. They manipulate social media for this purpose.
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