Snowden’s ‘ancestors’ come forward

I have written before about the secret COINTELPRO spying program that was set up by the FBI in 1956 against those people the government considered enemies, although they were mostly engaged is legitimate political activities. As now, the covered up its spying and other wrongdoing in thick layers of secrecy that enabled it to brazenly lie to the public about its activities, while simultaneously saying that they had to protect the country from its enemies, which in those Cold War days were the Dirty Reds. One feature of authoritarian states is that they need an enemy, external or internal, all the time in order to justify their policies and will manufacture one if necessary. [Read more…]

Look in the mirror, Luntz

Some of you may remember Lee Atwater. He was a Republican political operative, a wunderkind, known for his vicious, ruthless style who would do anything to help his candidate win, especially using racist messages in overt and coded language. He worked for George H. W. Bush and ran a particularly vicious campaign against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. He was diagnosed with aggressive form of brain cancer in 1990, converted to Catholicism, and tearfully issued apologies to all he had harmed in his slash-and-burn career, though it is suspected that even those apologies were fake and manipulative. He died in 1991 at the age of 40. [Read more…]

With friends like these …

I do not know who Paul Carr is (apart from the fact that he is a Briton who lives in the US and agrees with the call by the New York Times for ‘clemency’ for Snowden, whatever that might mean) but his piece on Edward Snowden is dripping with the condescension that we have come to expect from some of the media who seem to be obsessed with finding personality flaws in him, while grudgingly acknowledging the importance of the information he released. [Read more…]

The Tea Party up close and personal

After writing about Max Blumenthal, I recalled earlier work that he did on US domestic politics and a short documentary in 2010 that took a look at the Tea Party and its wealthy backers and the racist messages that drove much of the rhetoric. It was the standard Blumenthal method of going to their meetings and talking with them and you can see the angry reaction from people like the late Andrew Breitbart, while Blumenthal remains calm with a smile on his face. (For some reason, the 28-minute documentary is followed by 12 minutes of a blank screen.) [Read more…]

The Republican civil war takes shape

While America has shifted into the mode of near-constant electioneering, even numbered years are particularly bad since they feature elections to House and Senate seats. Matt Taibbi writes that one thing that will be interesting to watch is the Republican party leadership trying to wrest back control from the very people they promoted in years gone by as the ‘real Americans’. He says that the US Chamber of Commerce is bankrolling this effort to the tune of $50 million to prevent ‘loser’ candidates from being the party’s nominees. [Read more…]

Max Blumenthal on the Israeli apartheid state

Joshua Frank interviews Max Blumenthal about his new book Goliath and how it has exposed the many PEPs (progressive except for Palestine) in the US who will talk freely against injustice except when it comes to the apartheid policies of Israel and the support it gets from the US government and Congress as a result of the powerful Israel lobby. On this issue, the PEPs become strangely silent or attack those who try to bring greater awareness to what life in Israel is really like. [Read more…]