Obama’s hypocrisy and petulance on display again

The Ukraine situation has once again shown that when president Obama is faced with an international situation where the sheer brute force of the US cannot be used to get his way, he resorts to childish language and taunts. This happened last year when Edward Snowden took refuge in Russia to escape from the clutches of the US security apparatus and president Putin ignored US calls to hand him over. Then Obama gave a press conference where he made the extraordinary comment that Putin looked like “he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom”, hardly the way to speak about a foreign leader.
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NSA storing every single phone call in one country

In a lesser noticed story that is once again based on Edward Snowden’s documents, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani write in the Washington Post that the NSA has “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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Michelle Obama, pastry Nazi?

For some reason, people seem to be seeking ways to attack Michelle Obama although as far as I can see, she seems to have been an exemplary First Lady. The fact that nothing has stuck suggests that she has been very savvy about her words and behavior. One continuous strain has been to mock her focus on childhood obesity and her drive to get people to eat more healthily and exercise and has been used to paint her as some kind of health food fanatic.
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More evidence of NSA’s political and industrial espionage

Der Spiegel has released another big story yesterday based on the Edward Snowden documents, this time targeting China’s top political leaders and companies that pose a threat to American technology companies. It seems likely that this news release was timed to coincide with Michelle Obama’s current visit to China so that the news would have maximum impact.
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How much did foreign government leaders know about NSA spying?

As the Edward Snowden revelations keep coming out about how the NSA and GCHQ and the rest of the ‘Five Eyes’ club have been pretty much spying on everyone including the leaders of foreign governments, there have been loud protestations about these practices by foreign leaders that this was being done without their knowledge and consent. As Glenn Greenwald poses the question: “Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be, in order to distance themselves from surveillance operations that became highly controversial once disclosed?”
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Punch-drunk NSA

As the Snowden hits keep coming, the NSA seems to be flailing around like a punch-drunk boxer, aiming at random. For example, Dan Froomkin at The Intercept reports on the bizarre reaction by Robert Litt, general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, when asked by top news editors to show exactly what damage had been caused by the Edward Snowden revelations.
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Lawrence Walsh dead at 102

The Special Prosecutor appointed to investigate the Iran-Contra affair died yesterday at the age of 102. His work on the case highlights for me two things. One is the danger of prejudging people based on the labels that are affixed to them; and the other is how we have a system whereby criminal acts in the service of power are excused and condoned at the highest levels.
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