Congress is supposed to exercise oversight of all government agencies, and its intelligence oversight committees are supposed to monitor the CIA. But a new report from the McClatchy news service says that there are allegations that the CIA turned the tables and started monitoring the intelligence committees, by spying on members of the staff of those committees.
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The average age of people who watch Fox News is 68. That means that many people’s parents and grandparents get their news almost exclusively from a cable news channel that deliberately sets about feeding a demonstrably false narrative aimed at pursuing an agenda that is a mix of enriching the wealthy, despising the poor and working class, ginning up viewership with fake controversies, making the audience feel that they are constant siege by hostile forces, and advancing the interests of the Republican party and its Tea Party base.
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The Ugandan president recently signed into law a bill passed by parliament that criminalizes homosexuality and imposes harsh penalties on homosexuals. This action was strongly urged by some American evangelicals who have taken their anti-gay hate message global, looking for countries that might be open to their message given that the people back home are increasingly rejecting it.
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It is no secret that the Republican party and their Tea Party base hate the Affordable Care Act with a passion. The House of Republicans is soon expected to pass for the 50th time the repeal of the Act. In trying to drum up opposition, they have resorted to spreading stories about ordinary people who have been harmed by Obamacare by finding that they have to pay higher premiums and so forth, and running ads purportedly featuring such victims.
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There are lots of things to dislike about the Affordable Care Act. The one thing that is undoubtedly good is the expansion in the eligibility criteria for Medicaid (that along with Medicare is the closest thing the US has to a single-payer system) so that people who earned a little too much to qualify for it earlier but earn too little to get the subsidies could not get access to affordable health care.
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Brian Resnick has a roundup of all the crazy rumors that are eagerly and widely propagated in conservative circles. I suspect two causes for this absurdity. I think that the internet has enabled these crazy rumors to gain much wider currency than before. And the fact that Barack Obama is not white means that there is a solid core of racists who would like nothing better than to believe bad things about him.
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The truth of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus’s famous line that “In war, truth is the first casualty” keeps getting demonstrated over and over again. The latest example is the effort by the US government to revise the history of the Vietnam war. During that war, the US government kept insisting that things were going fine even as the reporters on the ground could see for themselves that things were going horribly wrong. The evening press briefings provided by the military became known as the ‘Five O’clock Follies” and the source of much dark humor.
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Nowhere is the power of business to drive US government actions more glaringly obvious than the way that taxpayer money gets spent on weapons systems that are not needed and sometimes don’t even work. The defense industry has long ago figured out that if you spread out production facilities around the country and especially in places where key politicians are from, you can be pretty confident that the system will never be eliminated, even if the military itself does not want it.
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Bill Maher discusses the recent trend of people having all the power acting like they are the oppressed ones. And as the oligarchy and their lackeys fight furiously against raising the minimum wage at all, let alone to anything even remotely resembling a living wage, he raises the reasonable question of why we are not considering a cap on incomes.
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So now that Russia is sending its troops into the Crimean region of Ukraine, it is time for the US to once again conveniently forget the past and its own actions and discover international law and express outrage at the very idea of a big power sending its forces into another country. And the western media will follow its lead and the public will be none the wiser, except for those who do not suffer from long-term political memory loss syndrome, a serious affliction that is endemic among the western government and media elite.
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