I wrote earlier about the puzzling insistence of the Republican party pursuing policies on birth control that are guaranteed to alienate women. Jonathan Capehart describes how they seem to be deliberately pursuing policies that alienate African Americans and Latinos as well. [Read more…]
It is quite amazing how casually some Americans can talk about using nuclear weapons against Iran, given what we know about the long-term, drastic, and indiscriminate effects of such weapons. Usually they shy away from saying so directly and couch it in terms of saying that “all options are on the table” or “no options are off the table”. [Read more…]
Apparently fearful that NSA employees might face critical comments and displeasure over the work they do from the families and friends when they got together over the Thanksgiving holidays, some higher ups at the NSA thoughtfully provided them with a set of talking points on how to defend working for an organization that has received such a black eye. [Read more…]
Bloomberg news has been having a conflict with the Chinese government after it ran a series of stories about the wealth of senior Chinese government officials. In seeming retaliation for this, a British reporter for Bloomberg was not allowed to attend a press conference with British prime minister David Cameron and his Chinese counterpart in Beijing yesterday. [Read more…]
When it comes to Christian heresies, right wing Christians think that they are blameless and it is only those permissive left-wingers who support progressive causes who are deviating from orthodoxy. But Chris Hedges, a progressive journalist who is also a Christian and studied for three years at Harvard Divinity school early in life, argues that the opposite is true, and that is the Christian right who are the true heretics. [Read more…]
There is a very good reason why political parties should keep their distance from religious institutions. The former need to be able to adapt to changing social values and new political realities while the latter, locked in as they are to doctrines that are supposedly god given and unchanging, tend to be unable to evolve so easily. So if by a fortuitous set of circumstances, the values of major organized religions and a political party coincide, that may result in short term electoral success for the party but it would be mistake for the party to identify itself too strongly with the values of the religions because at some point the paths will inevitably diverge because social realities change faster than religious doctrines. [Read more…]
The Wall Street Journal has an article quoting key lawmakers who are members of the congressional intelligence committees, the very bodies who are supposedly secretly briefed on all the government’s activities, saying that the people of the US are even less safe now than they were before 9/11. [Read more…]
The Christian Science Monitor has published a timeline of all the ‘imminent’ nuclear threats supposedly posed by Iran since 1979. One can also see this headline from an Israeli paper in 1984 stating that “Iran in final stages of production of nuclear bomb”. [Read more…]
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the massive NSA spying program has less to do with combating terrorism and is instead just a modern and highly sophisticated version of COINTELPRO (COounter INTELligence PROgram), the secret spying network the FBI set up in 1956 to supposedly combat the threat of Communism but expanded to infiltrate, monitor, subvert, and destroy those organizations whose activists were simply engaged in actions that the US government did not like. Rising public protests against the Vietnam war and social and economic injustice was something that the government was determined to suppress. [Read more…]
I was interested in this story about how some major communications companies are shocked that the NSA tapped into their networks via the cables. Companies like Google and Yahoo say that the NSA got entry into its data systems without their knowledge. [Read more…]