So the case for Congress voting war against Syria is taking the usual turn from the merits of the war itself to how it will affect domestic politics and the elections in 2014 and 2016, and what it means for Israel. These are the topics that our chattering classes really care about. And of course the obligatory comparison with Hitler is brought up because no stampede to war is complete with invoking the latest incarnation of good old Adolph as the enemy. [Read more…]

I can understand why some black people use the n-word though it causes great discomfort to others. They are trying to turn the insult around and reclaim the word, the way that the gay community is trying to do with some words that were used against them in a derogatory way. [Read more…]

President Obama’s claim that he welcomes the debate over the NSA’s activities and planned to have one but that he objects to the fact that Edward Snowden revealed the things that he supposedly wants to discuss was obviously a lie. Does anyone seriously think that in the absence of Snowden, Obama would have one day voluntarily told the public what has been going on? [Read more…]

(Thanks to reader Marcus Ranum)

I found this article that contains comments from Russian president Vladimir Putin that shed an interesting light on the sequence of events that led to Edward Snowden ending up in Russia and his relationship with Putin. The report also says that even though he has little money, Snowden is settling in and learning the language. [Read more…]

In an interview he said this: “You know, Senator Chuck Hagel, when he was senator, Senator Chuck Hagel, now secretary of Defense, and when I was a senator, we opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq, but we know full well how that evidence was used to persuade all of us that authority ought to be given.” [Read more…]

Poor David Cameron. Apparently Britain’s prime minister is smarting from the fact that parliament’s refusal to give him authority to wage war on Syria has resulted in him being at the receiving end of petty indignities at the G20 summit, being treated like just another person there, rather than reflecting in the aura of being president Obama’s BFF. Nobody seems to care anymore about what he thinks about anything. [Read more…]

Although Libya has vanished from the US news front pages, it may be good to revisit that country to see what has happened since the US last attacked another country. (At least I think it was the last, it is hard to keep track of all the US military campaigns.) Patrick Cockburn writes that two years after that attack, Libya has descended into lawlessness and ruin, a country that now resembles Somalia, where militias fight for control of land, with a weak government unable to do much about it. [Read more…]

The Guardian, ProPublica and the New York Times yesterday simultaneously published articles on the latest revelation to come out of the Edward Snowden documents and they are doozies. The articles reveal that the government has been very successful in trying to break the encryption codes that are used to protect all our data, like our medical records and bank accounts and everything else. And it reveals that US tech companies (both hardware and software) have colluded with the government to provide backdoor access to the government in order to gain that access. The result is a system where little or nothing in our lives is safe from the prying eyes of the government. [Read more…]

President Obama seems to be trying to wriggle out of his ‘red line’ comment, perhaps realizing that if the Syria attack goes badly awry, then people will use that statement to suggest that it was he who was solely responsible for getting the US into the mess even if Congress authorized him to act, since it was that statement that people are repeatedly using to suggest that US ‘credibility’ is on the line. [Read more…]