Why Snowden cannot get a fair trial in the US

Many of those angered by Edward Snowden’s disclosures try to imply cowardice in his part and say that in order to prove that he is an honorable man, he should come back to the US, give himself up to the authorities, and allow his case to work its way through the legal system, pointing to Daniel Ellsberg’s example. This is, of course, disingenuous. Ellsberg himself says that things are very different now and that the Obama administration is much worse than Nixon’s in the way it treats whistleblowers and that Snowden did the right thing in leaving the country. [Read more…]

Update on the Mount Soledad cross saga

When we last discussed this story, on December 12, 2013 a US District Court judge had ordered the removal of the huge cross on the top of Mount Soledad, staying his order for 90 days until any appeals are filed and heard. The Ninth Circle Court of Appeals had ruled that the cross standing on federally owned land was a violation of the Establishment Clause and the situation needed to be remedied in some way and while the District Court judge said he disagreed with the ruling, given the constraints the Appeals Court had imposed, he saw no option other than its removal. [Read more…]

Sherlock review (no spoilers)

I watched the season 3 premiere of Sherlock last night on PBS. The series is loosely based on the Conan Doyle stories updated to the modern period. It was fun. What the show lacks in plausibility it makes up in the way that the characters are drawn and portrayed. The casting of the main characters is first rate. The first episode of the new season was broadcast in the UK on January 1, 2014 but the big secret that people were waiting to see revealed was not reported widely in the US and I managed to avoid reading about it. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-4: The role of history and tradition

Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education laying out the neutrality requirement that governments needed to comply with when it came to religion (that I summarized in part 3) basically said that the government had to be strictly neutral between religious sects and also between religion and non-religion. That latter requirement has been particularly difficult to implement without requiring the government to not have anything to do with religion at all and over time we have seen a steady weakening of the resolve to implement it. [Read more…]

New wild and baseless allegations about Snowden

I mentioned before how Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Diane Feinstein, heads of the intelligence committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate respectively, are two of the most ardent supporters of the national security state and its coercive apparatus. When it comes to supporting authoritarianism, there is no partisan gridlock because both of them work as a single team. As I predicted yesterday, both are already indicating reluctance about even president Obama’s limited reforms of the NSA. [Read more…]

The ethics of blog advertising

You will have noticed that there are ads on this blog. The people who run the FreethoughtBlogs site have contracts with various agencies to place the ads and when people click on the ads, it generates a small amount of money for the network that is then distributed to the various bloggers. The ads that appear are based on some sort of algorithm that looks at the content of the page as well as the browsing and search engine queries history of the person viewing the page. So two people viewing the same page at the same time may well see different ads. [Read more…]

Health care costs and the ACA

Steven Brill has an article in Time describing how some of the very people who would benefit most from the Affordable Care Act have been misled by the virulent anti-Obamacare campaign to think that it is a terrible program and would do nothing for them. He also highlights the way that hospital monopolies and the reluctance of people to change providers prevent a truly competitive system from being created that would lower costs. [Read more…]

Obama’s speech on government spying

President Obama gave an eagerly anticipated speech yesterday outlining his plans for the reform of the NSA. You can see the speech and read the transcript here. While the initial quick reactions amongst the punditry were mixed, more careful reading of his words reveal (as usual) that there is less than meets the eye. It is once again vintage Obama, using his skill with words to make the unacceptable palatable. [Read more…]