While the US government has been using the ‘everybody does it’ excuse to downplay the damaging effects of the Snowden revelations, one can only imagine the outrage if it were discovered that (say) the Germans or the Brazilians had been eavesdropping into all president Obama’s communications. It is this asymmetry about the latest revelations of spying that are triggering some actions. [Read more…]
It is no secret that many prescription drugs are extremely expensive. Much of the price is not due to the actual cost of manufacture but due to the companies that produced them seeking to recoup the costs of their research and development and marketing investment plus their profit margin. The difficult question is how to balance the legitimate needs of the drug companies to stay in business while preventing them from simply gouging sick people for profit. What seems to be the case, at least in the US, is that the insatiable desire for profits by the drug companies are the main driver of the rapidly increasing prices. Timothy Noah says that drug companies make huge profits while artificially inflating the cost of bringing new drugs to market. [Read more…]
The war between the crazies and the not-crazies in the Republican party seems to be shifting into high gear. Always keep in mind that this division in not ideological at all, except on the most minor issues. The party is pretty much united in wanting to march lock step into a future in which the few rich control everything, the poor are kicked to the curb, the social safety net shredded, the diminishing middle class squeezed, and a backward Christian mentality determines all social values. [Read more…]
The NSA revelations seems to be steadily making relations between the US and Germany worse. Yesterday Der Spiegel had another blockbuster report based on the Snowden documents that the US was spying on chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone for over ten years, even before she became chancellor, and that president Obama has known about it for some time and has lied about it. [Read more…]
The revelations from the Snowden documents have been coming out slowly and as an analyst said on NPR, this is having a far greater impact than if they had been dumped all at once. Observers have noticed that the releases tend to coincide with important events where the people and agenda affected by the release are in the news. [Read more…]
Don Yelton, the Republican party official in North Carolina who was forced to resign because of the stupid things he said to The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi made the usual excuse that his remarks had been ‘taken out of context’ and the interview edited to make him look bad. [Read more…]
The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi had an interview with a North Carolina Republican party official Don Yelton about why the state was passing new restrictive voting laws. He couldn’t seem to believe his ears at what the man was saying. [Read more…]
From reader Sarah, I heard the story of Dutch writer Niels Gerson Lohman who describes what happened to him as he was trying to enter the US from Canada by train. He had spent the year traveling all over the world and had hoped to end the trip by visiting New Orleans, a city that his father had spoken of fondly. But the US Customs and Border Protection people had other ideas. After a lengthy questioning and searching of his belongings on the train, they then took him off it so that the train left without him and took him into a corrugated tin shed. [Read more…]