I have been gratified that this blog seems to attract a sophisticated and knowledgeable commentariat, people who add greatly to the information and quality of the discourse. I have learned a lot from them. Hence it is surprising and a little jarring to once in a way find comments that seem to display a level of argument that is well below the norm. I usually treat them as momentary aberrations and ignore them but there has been one recurring theme that perhaps needs to be addressed. [Read more…]

Nate Cohn discusses the results of a new Pew survey of president Obama’s support and where it is dropping. [Read more…]

Clare Daly calls him a war criminal and a hypocrite in parliament and accuses the Irish government of ‘pimping’ and ‘prostituting’ their country in service to the Americans. [Read more…]

Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife manages to pull off an incredibly difficult triple Axel, pivoting smoothly from the topic of obesity in Mexico to US immigration policy. [Read more…]

The revelations by Edward Snowden have brought to light so many things that the government has kept from us and set in motion many actions that were not possible before. Thanks to reader Marcus Ranum, here are five major things we have learned about the original warrantless wiretapping program called STELLAR WIND that was started under president Bush. [Read more…]

Mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau explains to Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman how metadata can give you so much useful information that listening in to the conversation may not be necessary. [Read more…]

Watch how Ed Kilgore, a supposedly ‘liberal’ news commentator who has been a Democratic party operative, contributes to the government counter-offensive to bringing down Snowden. See if you can count how many innuendos he packs into the short passage. He pretty much follows the expected script. Kilgore’s contribution is to call Snowden a narcissist.

It is a perfect example of innuendo and we can expect much more of this type of thing in the days to come, especially from Obama supporters.

It looks like going to the FISA court and getting warrants for each new effort at widespread trawling of phone records was too much trouble for the Obama administration, even though that court is notorious for being a rubber stamp. Yet another major revelation today says that they have decided to simply get blanket permission once and for all for authorization to tap directly into the servers of major internet companies and take what they want. [Read more…]

Via Kevin Drum I came across this graphic that shows that health care costs in the US are much higher than those in other developed countries. This should, of course, come as no surprise to anyone.

But why is this the case? Many of the easy answers don’t quite cover it. This article by Elisabeth Rosenthal from which the graphic is taken looks at possible explanations. [Read more…]