How to deal with an establishment journalist

People often have the illusion that the BBC is an impartial news source. But in reality its journalists are as much establishment supporters of their government as the major news sources in the US. In this interview with Glenn Greenwald on the BBC program Newsnight, Kristy Ward demonstrates all the characteristics of an establishment journalist, such as taking government statements at face value and truthful (which is quite extraordinary given the high level of mendacity that they have displayed) and treating with high skepticism the statements of those who challenge the government’s version of events instead of treating both with the same high degree of skepticism. [Read more…]

Politics as tests of purity

Politics, as Otto von Bismarck famously said back in 1867, is the art of the possible.

This means that a good politician knows that what is needed is the ability to craft a policy that enough people can be persuaded to sign on to so that it can be implemented. But one of the things that can prevent this is when the issue being fought over shifts subtly from the original one that can be bridged by political compromise to a new, and more difficult, one that is based on intangibles that are hard to negotiate over. [Read more…]

What the government ordered Lavabit to do

Lavabit was the encrypted email service that Edward Snowden used. Thanks to a court order that revealed hitherto secret hearings, we now know what prompted Ladar Levison, the founder of the company, to close the service.

The US government ordered the company to hand over the encryption keys to not only Snowden’s account but to every one of the 400,000 people who used the service. Basically, the government wanted Lavabit to defeat its own system, by allowing the FBI to install a “pen register trap and trace device” that could monitor all the email metadata. Levison had previously complied with targeted court orders to hand over data about specific individuals but balked at giving blanket access to everyone’s accounts. [Read more…]

Meet the nominals

The rise of the religiously unaffiliated (referred to as the ‘nones’) in the US to about 20% of the population has already been widely noted and commented upon. These are people who say that they do not identify with any particular religion or religious institution or heritage, although they may not consider themselves to be atheists or agnostics.

But there is another group that has not been as closely measured and that is the group that may still belong to some religious denomination but are not committed at all to the doctrines of that institution. Such people have now also been given a label (because as a society we love giving people labels) and are called the ‘nominals’, “people who claim a religious identity but may live it in name only”. [Read more…]

The most disgusting aspect of the Affordable Care Act battle

Whatever one may think of the Affordable Care Act, there are some incontrovertible benefits that it provides. It makes health insurance affordable for the tens of millions of people (many of whom are children) who currently do not have employer-based coverage and could not get insurance on the private markets because of the high cost and/or because they had pre-existing conditions. This situation was an absolute scandal, forcing people to forego not only the peace of mind that comes with knowing that one can see a doctor or go to a hospital if needed, but also not being able to afford treatment for life-threatening illnesses. [Read more…]

More on Boehner’s dilemma

Robert Costa writes for the National Review and thus has access to Republican party insiders. He confirms and expands on what I wrote about two days ago about the dilemma facing John Boehner, who is as conservative as most of his members but is powerless as a deal maker because the tools to bribe and punish people to follow his lead are simply not there anymore. So he has become largely a follower. [Read more…]