Stephen Colbert bids a sad farewell to Michele Bachmann.
The Colbert Report
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(This clip aired on June 4, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
A new Pew survey confirms what observers have long intuited, that most people (72%) now see the legalization of same sex marriage a inevitable, up from 59% in 2004. What is significant is that 59% of opponents see it as inevitable too. Even though they seem resigned to it, it is still a divisive issue with just 51% favoring same-sex marriage and older, religious, Republicans, blacks, and those with less education showing the most opposition. [Read more…]
One of the reasons for my view that religion is a bad thing that I would like to see disappear is because it encourages people to believe in magical thinking and thus makes them easy prey to all manner of charlatans who take advantage of their gullibility. [Read more…]
Why can’t Jews and Muslims get along politically in the Middle East when the two religions clearly have so much in common when it comes to trampling on the rights of women? [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald says that the recent leaks by whistleblowers are precursors and more ae to come soon. This is excellent news.
Candidate Barack Obama in 2008 praised whistleblowers as providing a valuable service to the country but after being elected has not only not mentioned favorably even a single whisteblower, he has been one of the most vicious presidents on record in persecuting them. [Read more…]
There is more information on the atheist monument to be placed in the courthouse grounds in Bradford County in Florida that I wrote about earlier. [Read more…]
The back-to-back revelations this week that the government has been working with internet and telecommunications companies to sweep up everyone’s phone records and also to tap into the servers of internet providers, has provided startling confirmation of long-held suspicions that we now have an out-of-control national security state that does not give a damn about the constitution or individual right but will use, under the guise of the bogus war on terror, any of the extremely powerful weapons at its disposal to achieve whatever it thinks it wants or needs. We have allowed the creation of a national security behemoth and that behemoth is turning on us, as such behemoths always do. Both political parties are complicit in this, as are members of congress, the judiciary, the military, and major corporations. [Read more…]
It looks like going to the FISA court and getting warrants for each new effort at widespread trawling of phone records was too much trouble for the Obama administration, even though that court is notorious for being a rubber stamp. Yet another major revelation today says that they have decided to simply get blanket permission once and for all for authorization to tap directly into the servers of major internet companies and take what they want. [Read more…]
[Update: Jesselyn Radack, who has vigorously defended the cause of whistleblowers, pans this documentary as shallow and biased.]
[Update2: Danny Schecter also blasts the film and provides important information on the unusual government-corporate backing that it got that may explain its apparent negatives of Assange, Manning, and WikiLeaks. (Thanks to Pierce R. Butler in the comments.)]
Academy award winning documentarian Alex Gibney has released a new one We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. The film’s website is here and here’s the trailer. [Read more…]
Someone has leaked to Glenn Greenwald a secret court order that shows that the Obama administration has obtained from Verizon detailed records of all its customers. The suspicions are that the government has obtained similar records from other phone companies as well. [Read more…]