I have been railing at the way that the US has used the war on terror to undermine basic civil liberties. In its efforts to hide its misdeeds, the war it has waged on whistleblowers and the reporters who convey their revelations has been nothing short of disgraceful.
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The Daily Show weighed in on the big court case of the week, that of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, with a couple of good segments.
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Laura Poitras has a new story out in Der Spiegel today about how the NSA and GCHQ targeted 122 world leaders for spying, in addition to leading German telecommunications companies and particularly their engineers, using a hitherto secret court order to do so.
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The oral arguments from the Hobby Lobby contraceptive case that was heard before the US Supreme Court on Tuesday can be heard online here, where the concurrent scrolling of the transcript along with the spoken word and identification of the speaker makes things much clearer.
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Stephen Colbert did a bit where he satirized Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington football team, for his ham-handed efforts to sanitize his use of an offensive name for the team. Colbert did this the way he usually does, by taking what the target of his humor did and carrying it to the extreme. Of course, it was to be expected that some would get angry at that satire and Anthony Zurcher explains what the fuss was about.
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Today is the day that NSA director Keith Alexander leaves his post. I would be very happy about this except that it is very likely that his replacement will be cut from the same cloth of being a smooth liar.
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Stephen Colbert is willing to endorse Joni Ernst’s candidacy for US Senate in Iowa as long as she keeps far away from him. In this clip, he explains why. (Since Comedy Central revamped their website, embedded clips are glitchy. If the one below does not work properly, follow this link.)
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As close followers of US politics know, the US does not elect its president by direct popular vote. Instead it has an institution called the Electoral College whose members vote for the president. The electoral college consist of 538 votes apportioned among the states corresponding exactly to the total of their members of the House of Representatives (that varies with the population) and comes to 435 total plus two each for the Senate, that gives 100 more. The extra three votes consist of two for Puerto Rico and one are for Washington DC. This means that the winner has to get 270 electoral college votes.
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The power struggle in the Westboro Baptist church since the death of founder and patriarch Fred Phelps seems to be ending with new leadership emerging, says Fred’s son Nate Phelps who defected from the church a long time ago but who keeps in touch with other defectors who still live in Topeka, Kansas.
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Jacob Appelbaum, a US computer security researcher who works with WikiLeaks and about whom I wrote back in 2012 because of the harassment he receives every single time he returns to the US after traveling abroad, gave a presentation at the 30C3 Conference held in Germany in December 2013.
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