McConnelling goes mainstream

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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Vote ‘No’ on Issue 7

The Cleveland area is going through another round of wealthy sports owners putting the squeeze on residents to enrich themselves. To recap, a couple of decades ago the county passed taxes to pay for building three major sports stadiums downtown for baseball, basketball, and football. Of course, while people paid for the stadiums with their taxes, team owners were the ones who reaped the benefits.
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The BRICS on Crimea

In covering Ukraine and Crimea, much of the western press has given the indication that Russia has been isolated internationally on this issue. But that is not quite the case. Much of the analysis has focused on the G8 grouping of nations that is dominated by US allies such as the NATO countries. But there are other economic groupings such as the BRICS alliance consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and it turns out that that alliance has unanimously backed Russia’s position.
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Female leaders of Muslim majority countries

Islam is not one of the religions that come to mind when one thinks of providing equal status for women. Its rules about their dress and behavior in public are notorious for their restrictiveness. But at the same time, as Juan Cole points out, there is the curious phenomenon that many Muslim-majority countries have had women as their leaders, almost all of them elected to office. Here’s his list.
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Was the NSA spying on me?

During Jacob Appelbaum’s talk about how he suspected that Apple might be colluding with the NSA to enable the agency to spy on people, he spoke about how they could take control of your cell phones, saying “They would be able to break into this phone, almost certainly, and turn on the microphone” and that the NSA builds fake cell phone towers to grab and store data. One of the things that Edward Snowden revealed was that the NSA had the capability to remotely turn on the cameras in people’s computers so that they could spy on them.
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Christie and the Adelson audition

The Daily Show has some commentary on Chris Christie, starting with the investigation that he commissioned that (surprise!) cleared him of any involvement with the closing of the lanes on the George Washington Bridge and then moving on to join the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls who groveled before Sheldon Adelson in what has been dubbed ‘the Adelson primary’.
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Stop the nuclear bomb fear mongering

Younger people today are fortunate that they grew up in a post-Cold War era, where the fear of a nuclear war has been lifted. So it is despicable when politicians try to re-create the fears of that era by using one of the worst fear mongering tactics, and that is to scare people about the possible use of a nuclear device in a populated area. Cynical politicians use that to justify any and all abuses of the violation of people’s civil rights and privacy, by arguing that if they are not allowed to do what they want, this awful scenario may well be the consequence.
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