It turns out that in March this year, congressman Frank Wolf, chair of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee initiated a bill that incredibly was allowed to become a law that prohibited Chinese nationals, even those who are already in the US and working at US universities and other institutions, from even setting foot in a NASA building. The reason given was the risk of espionage. [Read more…]
Old timers will remember the name Vo Nguyen Giap. He was the legendary leader of the North Vietnamese army who is credited with leading the Vietnamese to victory over much more powerful armies, first famously defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and later successfully resisting the US invasion of his country and forcing them out, leading to the reunification of Vietnam in 1975. [Read more…]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly alarmed at the way that Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani has made inroads in the west and the thaw that seems to be occurring between Iran and the US. The goal of Israel has been to have the US go to war with Iran and so you could expect him to use his annual speech to the UN to whip up alarm about the extreme danger posed by Iran’s nuclear program and urge that everything be done to completely dismantle it. But it would be hard to top the comedic effect produced by last year’s speech with the ridiculous cartoon of a bomb that spawned numerous parodies inspired by the similarities to the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny. [Read more…]
We have been repeatedly told by the NSA and its supporters inside and outside the government about how valuable the massive privacy invasions were because they stopped a large number of terrorist plots, possibly 54 of them. Marcy Wheeler says that under close questioning from senator Patrick Leahy, NSA director Keith Alexander admitted that it actually may have been at most two plots. [Read more…]
Politics, as Otto von Bismarck famously said back in 1867, is the art of the possible.
This means that a good politician knows that what is needed is the ability to craft a policy that enough people can be persuaded to sign on to so that it can be implemented. But one of the things that can prevent this is when the issue being fought over shifts subtly from the original one that can be bridged by political compromise to a new, and more difficult, one that is based on intangibles that are hard to negotiate over. [Read more…]
It looks like Jon Stewart will not run out of opportunities to express his outrage and mockery at the ridiculous state of governing in the US. [Read more…]
Lavabit was the encrypted email service that Edward Snowden used. Thanks to a court order that revealed hitherto secret hearings, we now know what prompted Ladar Levison, the founder of the company, to close the service.
The US government ordered the company to hand over the encryption keys to not only Snowden’s account but to every one of the 400,000 people who used the service. Basically, the government wanted Lavabit to defeat its own system, by allowing the FBI to install a “pen register trap and trace device” that could monitor all the email metadata. Levison had previously complied with targeted court orders to hand over data about specific individuals but balked at giving blanket access to everyone’s accounts. [Read more…]
Whatever one may think of the Affordable Care Act, there are some incontrovertible benefits that it provides. It makes health insurance affordable for the tens of millions of people (many of whom are children) who currently do not have employer-based coverage and could not get insurance on the private markets because of the high cost and/or because they had pre-existing conditions. This situation was an absolute scandal, forcing people to forego not only the peace of mind that comes with knowing that one can see a doctor or go to a hospital if needed, but also not being able to afford treatment for life-threatening illnesses. [Read more…]
Jon Stewart is at his best when explaining politics by stripping away the absurd ways that the media frames the discussion, thus exposing the essential features of the conflict. [Read more…]
Robert Costa writes for the National Review and thus has access to Republican party insiders. He confirms and expands on what I wrote about two days ago about the dilemma facing John Boehner, who is as conservative as most of his members but is powerless as a deal maker because the tools to bribe and punish people to follow his lead are simply not there anymore. So he has become largely a follower. [Read more…]