One question that has been in the minds of people following the release of the Edward Snowden documents is when the revelations will finally come to an end and whether there are any major ones among those left. There have been hints by Snowden and Glenn Greenwald that some major revelation was in the offing and in an interview with GQ magazine, Greenwald provides some specific answers.
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This is a good film despite the fact that its central premise is a well-worn one, that of a dysfunctional family that has dispersed as the children became adults but then reconvene in the family home in an isolated part of Oklahoma due to a tragedy. In the course of a day or two, long-simmering feuds and rivalries and resentments resurface and long-suppressed secrets are revealed. Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the prototype of such dramas.
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Although I have sworn off professional football for a multitude of reasons, I was glad to see that Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams, even if it was in the very last round and just seven players shy of not being selected at all. Professional football is seen as an outpost of a weird idea of masculinity and to have an openly gay player become part of that world is progress on a broad social level, though in narrow terms of Sam’s personal health it would have been better for him if he were not drafted and left football and became an accountant or something and not suffer traumatic brain injury for the next decade.
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We know that some Republican controlled states have refused the Medicaid expansion portion of Affordable Care Act even though the federal government will fully fund it for the first three years and then after that will pay for at least 95% of the cost. By any measure, accepting the expansion should have been a no-brainer for the states and the only reason that it was refused is because those states did not want to do anything that might be construed as supporting Obamacare. As a result, poor people in those states who do not earn enough to qualify for the subsidies in Obamacare are left without any affordable insurance.
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Owners of dogs don’t need much convincing to believe that their pets can sense their moods and respond accordingly. But now scientists have done something quite remarkable and that is to train dogs to lie so still that their brains can be studied in an MRI machine and their response to emotionally loaded sounds analyzed and compared to those of human subjects.
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Glenn Greenwald has a new book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State that will be out tomorrow about his involvement with the Edward Snowden revelations. In one chapter that has been excerpted in the Guardian, he describes the hectic day that Snowden’s identity was revealed and the cat-and-mouse game they had to play to keep his location in Hong Kong secret, and the few days immediately before and after. Although I have been following this story closely, this still was a gripping read.
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The bishop of the Cleveland diocese has issued a letter outlining the terms of the contract that all elementary teachers at more than 100 elementary schools must sign. The letter explicitly spells out its “morality clause” in detail, giving a long list of activities teachers must agree to avoid, even outside of school, or they will lose their jobs. The church is essentially telling teachers that they have jurisdiction over their entire lives.
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Some of the best segments on The Daily Show are when host Jon Stewart talks to ‘Senior Black Correspondent’ Larry Wilmore about current issues involving race. Those chats are both funny and provide pretty good insight into how America deals with race.
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Federal courts had already declined to rule that the inclusion of the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional largely on the basis that they had earlier ruled that no one could be forced to say the Pledge and thus saying it was voluntary. A new strategy had sought to eliminate it by appealing to state constitutions, with cases in Massachusetts and New Jersey already underway and others pending in other states.
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In a comment, Bryan informs me that yet another child of Shirley Phelps-Roper, the daughter of the late Fred Phelps, has defected from the Westboro Baptist Church that Phelps founded, joining three of his siblings in exile. Six siblings still remain in the WBC.
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