In Montgomery County in Pennsylvania, the Register of Wills D. Bruce Hanes said that he had decided to grant licenses to gay couples to get married because he wants to come down “on the right side of history and the law”, despite a state law forbidding such marriages. Two female couples have already received licenses and got married. I am not sure what will happen when the couples apply for marriage benefits or file taxes jointly.

Recall that there is already a legal challenge to the Pennsylvania law that the state’s attorney general has said that she will not defend. The Republican governor has not said what he will do yet.

There is an important vote taking place today in Congress. An amendment that seeks to cut funding for the NSA’s bulk collection of people’s communication records under the Patriot Act has been proposed to the big Defense Authorization bill by a bipartisan coalition of libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats. [Read more…]

It looks like the paperwork for temporary asylum has been finally approved that allows Edward Snowden to leave the confines of the Moscow airport. [Update: Or maybe not.] [Read more…]

I forgot to mention one thing in my post about how I gauge the effectiveness of the Obama propaganda system by the way that his supporters in my social circle now say things in support of Obama’s actions in almost identical terms to the way that Bush/Cheney supporters defended them. [Read more…]

[UPDATE: You can read the full text of the judge’s ruling here. It is pretty strong stuff. This was not a full trial but a request for a restraining order against the state and thus applies only to this case, but the wording of the reasoning suggests that the judge thinks it should hold widely.]

A federal judge in Cincinnati has ruled that even state officials in Ohio must recognize the rights of same-sex couples that were legally married in other states. This is a significant expansion of the US Supreme Court ruling in the DOMA case where the federal government was told that it had to recognize those rights. The judge’s ruling is a major development because Ohio still has on its books the constitutional amendment passed in 2004 that says that marriage is between a man and a woman only, and steps are currently underway to repeal that provision. [Read more…]

Anyone who writes anything critical of Israel in a public forum can expect pushback from members of what has come to be known as ‘the Israel lobby’, those individuals and groups that seek to silence any honest discussion of the Middle East. [Read more…]

It looks like federal regulators have decided to let a top investment bank executive off lightly after she and her bank manipulated the energy markets so that the states of California and Michigan ended up paying $83 million in “excessive” payments to her employer JPMorgan Chase. [Read more…]

In my post on former president Carter expressing support for what Edward Snowden did and adding that “America has no functioning democracy at this moment”, I expressed surprise that there has not been a huge outcry over the remarks. Indeed, while Carter said this at a closed-door function in Atlanta, it was a German magazine Der Spiegel that first reported it. I wondered if Carter would walk back his statements but he has not done so, so we have to assume his stands by his remarks. [Read more…]

Scott Horton looks closely at the parallels and differences between what the NSA has been caught doing and what the East German secret police Stasi did during the Cold War.

The fact that such comparisons are being seriously discussed shows how deep is the rot.