Hope for the future lies with young outsiders

As expected, there has been a lot of chatter about the personal life of Edward Snowden, even to the extent of details about his girl friend. What surprised me is the amount of time spent on the fact that he did not graduate from high school and had some community college education, and yet at the age of just 29 had a very well-paying job with a major firm that gave him access to a lot of top-secret government information. This is clearly troubling to some people. [Read more…]

How The Daily Show is made

I have been impressed with the ability of shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to fairly consistently deliver high quality topical news comedy. Starting today, host Jon Stewart takes a hiatus for two months to make a film about an Iranian journalist. Jon Oliver will take the anchor chair in his absence and The Guardian used that transition to interview Oliver about his own career. In the process, the article shed some light into how each show is constructed. [Read more…]

An excellent interview with Glenn Greenwald

The Guardian and its team of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Spencer Ackerman, and Ewen MacAskill, have become the go-to source for news on the government’s massive surveillance program.

I am pretty certain that Edward Snowden chose Greenwald as the conduit for his whistleblowing because of the latter’s consistent and principled stand for government transparency, rare in a media landscape where people worry about loyalty to ‘their’ team and anxiously want to ingratiate themselves with one party or another or are afraid of antagonizing their sources in the government and military establishment. [Read more…]

Tennessee’s insane health care plan

I need to take a break from my obsessive coverage of the whistleblower story so I thought that I would take a look at the insanity that lies behind some of the opposition to Obamacare.

Under Obamacare, states have the option of expanding the number of poor people eligible to receive care under Medicaid, with the federal government picking up most of the bill. This would be a boon for many people. But governors of many states, all Republicans, have chosen not to accept this offer because they do not want to have anything to do with anything that might make Obamacare more acceptable, even though they are spiting their own people. Of course, they do not say so directly, manufacturing other reasons for their rejection. [Read more…]