New Jersey governor Chris Christie clearly has ambitions to run for the presidency in 2016. It is also clear that he is pushing the ‘maverick’ shtick that worked for John McCain, at least as far as getting the Republican nomination was concerned, and to aim for the support of the party establishment, territory that is open since all the other putative candidates (Rand Paul, Ted Crux, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry) seem to be angling for the Tea Party wing’s support. He clearly wants to be portrayed as the straight-talking, no-nonsense, get-stuff-done, not-totally-nuts kind of guy. [Read more…]

Leading Germans, including some from chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party, are calling for Germany to give Edward Snowden asylum, with the former general secretary saying “Snowden has done the western world a great service. It is now up to us to help him.” This suggests that the tide is definitely shifting in his favor, despite a massive US effort to portray Snowden as a traitor and a criminal. [Read more…]

Some of us old-timers will recall the time when the word ‘gay’ started to become identified with homosexuality and calls for equality for people of all sexual orientations, and the phrases ‘gay rights’ and ‘gay liberation’ came into vogue. Since at the same time homosexuality was still strongly stigmatized, some would complain that the word gay was being been appropriated by the ‘gay lobby’ and that they could no longer use the word with its original meaning of being happy because people might misunderstand. [Read more…]

The Obama administration and its allies in Congress and the media have defended the widespread global spying by the NSA on the grounds that it has prevented 54 terrorist attacks, giving the impression that most of them were aimed at the US. This became accepted as a fact, as unchallenged statements by authority figures often do, and one hears it being thrown around by supporters of the authoritarian national security state. [Read more…]

Starting today, there will be cuts in the benefits paid to poor families under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program. [Read more…]

The repeated revelations of how the US and UK governments have spied massively on everyone has had the desired effect of turning public opinion against this practice and now all those responsible are trying to evade blame. The revelations of spying on the leaders of friendly nations has been particularly embarrassing for the elites. So we have now entered the stage where everyone who had a hand in this (the White House, the NSA, Congress) is trying to blame everyone else for the fiasco. This is a good thing because it is when there are splits among the ruling elites that we get a glimpse of how things really work. [Read more…]

And the Edward Snowden hits keep coming.

Barton Gellman, one of the outlets for the NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, has another big story that expands yet again the range of spying done by the NSA on American companies and Americans, even to the extent of storing actual content and not just metadata. [Read more…]