The New York Times published an opinion piece by Edward Snowden on yesterday’s second anniversary of his revelations, where he justifiably expressed satisfaction at some of the changes his actions have wrought.
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Stephen Colbert has been out of the news while he plans his return to TV as the replacement for David Letterman on CBS’s The Late Show that begins on September 8. But he has been busy growing a beard and has put out a short video promotion for his show that suggests that even without the conservative mask he has been wearing for so long, he is still funny.
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On June 5, 2013, the first of the stories based on Edward Snowden’s documents were published, creating a firestorm of attention around what had been a vast secret data-gathering operation conducted y the NSA under the maxim of ‘collect it all’, where they sought to gather up everyone’s communications. I went back to my own archives to see what I had written then on June 6, June 6, June 7, and June 8 and it was clear from the very beginning that this was a major scandal. Snowden revealed his identity on June 9, surprising everyone by being a young, soft-spoken person with deep principles..
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Social and religious conservatives are worried that the US Supreme Court is going to announce soon that it is unconstitutional to ban same-sex marriages, and fear that this will lead to the end of the world. They have been issuing vague warnings that they will defy the decision, though it is not clear what form those actions could take.
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A few days ago, I excerpted some of former president Eisenhower’s criticisms of the cost of war. What follows is an excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler of the United States Marine Corps, that goes even further.
War is just a racket.
…A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
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As the Middle East continues to spiral into chaos as a result of the mess that the US has created in that region, it is remarkable that the very same people who were responsible for that disaster are being invited back by the media to provide analyses of what should be done now. And their advice tends to be uniformly the same: send more weapons to one of other faction in that conflict to fight on behalf of the US.
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The difficulty with election campaigns is that it is easy for candidates to promise the moon and then change their views when they get elected and it comes to actual implementation of policies. So comparing them is hard. But in the case of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, both have served at the same time in the US Senate from January 2007 to January 2009 and this gives us a good way to directly compare their records by looking at how they voted on the same issues.
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In a post two days ago, I expressed puzzlement about why some were so cruel towards transgender people, harassing them unmercifully. I suggested that they may have felt somehow threatened by them, though I could not see why. Now from the mouth of the odious Rush Limbaugh commenting on Caitlyn Jenner, we get a further clue.
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After much manufactured drama, the USA Freedom Act (which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring) has been signed into law by president Obama, modifying key provisions of the USA Patriot Act (which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism).
As I have said before, you know that any legislation that has such contrived and tortured acronyms has to be a piece of rubbish intended to either hide something truly noxious or is utterly useless and is meant to provide window dressing to hide inaction.
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And so we have senator Lindsey Graham, a man who is perpetually terrified that all of us are going to die from one catastrophe or another, announcing that he too is entering the race for the Republican nomination for president. This was undoubtedly good news for The Daily Show, to be exceeded in its comedic potential only by Donald Trump also joining the race.
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