As a result of the revelations by Edward Snowden of abuse by the NSA, president Obama promised an ‘independent’ review of the agencies activities, a promise that was immediately belied by the fact that he said the panel would work under the supervision of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who still has his job despite getting caught blatantly lying under oath. [Read more…]
I have railed before at how the big banks have been able to escape serious consequences for their acts that threw the global economy into turmoil and caused hardships for so many. While they have had fines levied against them, the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agencies entrusted with maintaining accountability, were satisfied to simply levy fines on the banks without threatening the senior executives with jail time, which would be the best way to deter future malfeasance. The fines themselves, even though large by normal standards, were usually just a few days’ profits for the banks that they could absorb as the cost of doing business. [Read more…]
Lawrence E. Rafferty writes about the appalling line of questioning that a woman received at a military judicial proceeding over allegations of rape. He quotes from a report in the New York Times:
For roughly 30 hours over several days, defense lawyers for three former United States Naval Academy football players grilled a female midshipman about her sexual habits. In a public hearing, they asked the woman, who has accused the three athletes of raping her, whether she wore a bra, how wide she opened her mouth during oral sex and whether she had apologized to another midshipman with whom she had intercourse “for being a ho.”
The ghastly events unfolding in a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya unfortunately did not come as a complete surprise to me. Ever since I completed reading Jeremy Scahill’s book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (2013), where he traces to evolution of the global war on terror, I felt that it was only a matter of time before some atrocity occurred either in that country or Ethiopia or both. [Read more…]
The House of Representatives voted late last week to cut the budget for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (popularly referred to ‘food stamps’) by $40 billion over ten years. The vote was close (217-210) and the bill now goes to the senate. The Des Moines Register has come out with a scathing editorial against the cutting of SNAP benefits, comparing the meager allowance with how lavishly the state’s members of Congress spend on their own food on trips at taxpayer expense. [Read more…]
My children are now adults and live on their own and own smart phones. But we did not buy them cell phones when they were in high school. Why? For no deep reason other than a general family philosophy of not buying stuff unless you really have a need for it. [Read more…]
In a long profile in Foreign Policy, Shane Harris describes Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, as a cowboy who disdained the law and felt that he could do what he needed to do to get the results he wanted. [Read more…]
The actor Hugh Jackman was interviewed on The Daily Show about his new film Prisoners. I have seen him being interviewed before and he seems to have a very good-natured and engaging personality but I have never actually seen any film of his. Since I am not a big fan of the superhero genre, I have not gone out of my way to see his Wolverine films, which seem to constitute a big part of his oeuvre. [Read more…]
The only local media I consume is the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper and the NPR affiliate WCPN.
The newspaper has shifted to a strange model. It used to publish seven days a week and provide home delivery. Beginning in August, it still publishes a print newspaper seven days a week but has home delivery only on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On the other three days one has to buy the print edition at a store or from a vending machine. The newspapers on the three days on which there is no home delivery are slimmer in size and the other four days are supposedly bigger to compensate for that. [Read more…]
It was less that a year ago that General David Petraeus was the golden boy of US military strategy, the supposed genius who had turned around US fortunes in Iraq prior to the withdrawal. Members of Congress treated him as some kind of oracle whose words must be followed by even the president and competed to see who could praise him the most. Criticisms of him were treated as if they were blasphemy, as could be seen from the howls of outrage when the group MoveOn.org put out an ad in 2007 against the Iraq war that made a bad pun on his name. [Read more…]