US plays good cop-bad cop with Russia

The US is clearly trying the good ‘cop-bad cop tactic’ in its efforts to have the Russians hand Edward Snowden back to the US.

In the bad cop role, we have the usual idiots like Lindsey Graham issuing what seem like daily threats to the Russians that if they grant Snowden asylum, there will be repercussions like a US boycott of the Winter Olympics. That, of course, is never going to happen. But the US congress is introducing legislation mandating some sort of sanctions to any country that gives Snowden asylum. [Read more…]

When a coup is not a coup

Remember when someone in the White House derided those of us he described as stuck in a “reality-based community”, saying “That’s not the way the world really works anymore, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”? Democrats had a field day with that because the speaker was the much-hated Karl Rove at the height of his hubris during the Bush administration. It was taken as symbolic of the arrogance of that administration.

Well, reality denial is back, and in a big way. [Read more…]

The Nancy Pelosi two-step

Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic politician that conservatives love to hate. She is painted as the San Francisco liberal who stands for everything they despise. And she is also the darling of ‘Democratic liberals’, that group of people who support liberal issues as long as their party supports it. But in reality she is just another political apparatchik in the service of power. [Read more…]

Press intimidated at Manning ‘trial’

Xeni Jardin reports that the press covering the final arguments yesterday at the ‘trial’ (i.e., which is the name that the Obama administration gives to the farcical proceedings presided over by a military judge who has been clearly hostile to Bradley Manning) are being intimidated by heavily-armed military police looking over their shoulders as they type, forbidding the use of Twitter, shutting down internet service, forbidding the use of the internet when it is up, etc. [Read more…]

The shame of child brides

The plight of many young girls in parts of the world is horrendous, ranging all the way from being denied equal access to education to suffering genital mutilation and being forced to marry older men. In a report, Human Rights Watch says that Yemen is a country in which child marraige is common because here is no legal minimum age and girls as young as eight are married off, denying them the right to a childhood and education, and often suffering serious abuse. [Read more…]

Sabotaging the government becomes the Republican party platform

I am not a big fan of Obamacare, seeing it as needlessly complicated and unwieldy and a boon to the rapacious and parasitic health insurance industries. I would have much preferred a government-administered single payer system, such as expanding Medicare to cover everyone, not just the elderly. But Obamacare is better than what we have now if for no other reason than many more people, especially the poor, will get some health care coverage. But in the latest example of the right-wingers going nuts, they have started a campaign to urge people without health insurance to not to buy even the subsidized coverage that the Obamacare plan’s individual mandate offers. [Read more…]

An open letter to the media by 28 scholars

The coverage of the efforts by Edward Snowden to get asylum in the four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Nicaragua) has been accompanied by much snickering among the chattering classes about the ‘irony’ that a whistleblower championing transparency would seek asylum in countries that supposedly do not themselves have much press freedom. This ignores the obvious fact, of course, that now that he has largely achieved his goal of blowing the lid off the US government’s actions, his primary task is to find a country that will not let him fall into the hands of the repressive Obama regime. [Read more…]