Oklahoma is the state where the botched execution of Clayton Lockett brought the issue of capital punishment back into the spotlight. It turns out that that state is the most gung-ho when it comes to killing people, having the most executions per capita in the US (although Texas which comes in second has the greatest absolute number ) and taking an almost perverse pride in doing so.
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Stephen Colbert interviews a Tea Party candidate for Congress who has a very interesting life outside of politics. These interviews where he goes off-site are some of his funniest bits.
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By now it should be no surprise that whenever the US accuses another country of doing something wrong, it is also very likely the case that they are doing the same thing. This hypocrisy has become so routine that one wonders whether one should even both to comment on it, but it is still necessary. The latest is the revelation about what the US has been doing with routers.
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All the super-patriots who rallied around Cliven Bundy to protect his god given right to not pay the grazing fees that everyone else pays because he is the reincarnation of George Washington or something are now finding out that it actually costs money even if you are just hanging around doing nothing.
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One question that has been in the minds of people following the release of the Edward Snowden documents is when the revelations will finally come to an end and whether there are any major ones among those left. There have been hints by Snowden and Glenn Greenwald that some major revelation was in the offing and in an interview with GQ magazine, Greenwald provides some specific answers.
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This is a good film despite the fact that its central premise is a well-worn one, that of a dysfunctional family that has dispersed as the children became adults but then reconvene in the family home in an isolated part of Oklahoma due to a tragedy. In the course of a day or two, long-simmering feuds and rivalries and resentments resurface and long-suppressed secrets are revealed. Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the prototype of such dramas.
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Although I have sworn off professional football for a multitude of reasons, I was glad to see that Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams, even if it was in the very last round and just seven players shy of not being selected at all. Professional football is seen as an outpost of a weird idea of masculinity and to have an openly gay player become part of that world is progress on a broad social level, though in narrow terms of Sam’s personal health it would have been better for him if he were not drafted and left football and became an accountant or something and not suffer traumatic brain injury for the next decade.
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We know that some Republican controlled states have refused the Medicaid expansion portion of Affordable Care Act even though the federal government will fully fund it for the first three years and then after that will pay for at least 95% of the cost. By any measure, accepting the expansion should have been a no-brainer for the states and the only reason that it was refused is because those states did not want to do anything that might be construed as supporting Obamacare. As a result, poor people in those states who do not earn enough to qualify for the subsidies in Obamacare are left without any affordable insurance.
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Owners of dogs don’t need much convincing to believe that their pets can sense their moods and respond accordingly. But now scientists have done something quite remarkable and that is to train dogs to lie so still that their brains can be studied in an MRI machine and their response to emotionally loaded sounds analyzed and compared to those of human subjects.
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Glenn Greenwald has a new book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State that will be out tomorrow about his involvement with the Edward Snowden revelations. In one chapter that has been excerpted in the Guardian, he describes the hectic day that Snowden’s identity was revealed and the cat-and-mouse game they had to play to keep his location in Hong Kong secret, and the few days immediately before and after. Although I have been following this story closely, this still was a gripping read.
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