The lawyers for Stephen Kim, who is serving a 13-month jail term for talking to a reporter about a classified matter that was considered minor, are asking the Department of Justice to immediately release him from jail, saying that the plea deal they made with David Petraeus reveals a “profound double standard”. Peter Maass at The Intercept has the details.
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One of the good things about the loosening of travel restrictions to Cuba is that more and more people from the US will get to mingle with the Cuban population and find out what the people there are really like and rid themselves of absurd misconceptions about them.
In this clip, Conan O’Brien visits one of the factories where they produce their world-famous cigars entirely by hand to see how they do it and to try his hand at making one. Note the expressions of the woman in the beige dress on his right.
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Within the space of two days, the following things happened to me during my daily commute.
A car that was behind moved into the left lane and passed me and then drifted right back into my path, forcing me to brake sharply and cut to the right to avoid colliding with it. At the next light the car was halted and I drove up next to it to glare at the idiot who was driving the flashy BMW. Of course, the young man did not see me because he was too busy reading what was on his damn phone!
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I do my own taxes. Over the years, I have figured out the increasing number of forms that I have to fill out. They are not that difficult for anyone who can do simple arithmetic and is comfortable with “if …, then …” logical reasoning.
I do not use a professional tax preparer since I figure I will be able to exercise more care since I know the information well and can devote careful attention to it, rather than someone who has to deal with a whole lot of forms and documents. I also do not use the commercial software out of principle. I resent the fact that the government has made a deal with these software companies to not provide their own direct online tax filing system, which would be the logical thing to do. I do not see why I should give my personal data to a private company that lobbies to keep the tax rules complicated so that more people would come to them.
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Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept weighs in on the absurdity of the US targeting Venezuela as a threat to it because of its human rights violations, a topic that I wrote about a few days ago, when I pointed out that it is the US that has been waging a long-standing covert and not-so-covert war against that country’s government.
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This Woody Allen production that he wrote and directed has a plot that readers of this blog will be able to easily relate to. It is 1928 and Colin Firth plays a famous magician and illusionist who also has a second career as a debunker of all those who claim to be mediums who can talk to the dead or other supernatural powers. He is a total materialist and rationalist and has never failed to expose anyone who came under his investigative gaze. Think of James Randi but even more so.
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American exceptionalism is prone to making claims that the US is the greatest country on Earth in every aspect and always has been. The true believers likely think that the Garden of Eden was here and that Jesus was an American too. In this spirit, the US senate keeps boasting that it is the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body though it is telling that as far as I can tell no one other than its own members gives it that title because not only is it false, recent years have shown that calling the behavior of its members childish would be to give children a bad name.
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Apologists for the torture program authorized by the Bush-Cheney regime, that was carried out in Guantanamo and at US prison sites around the world as well as in the various ‘black sites’, have argued that these practices were perfectly lawful, going directly in the face of accepted knowledge that such acts were indeed torture.
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The letter sent by 47 US senators to Iran continues to send shock waves through the political establishment. The White House has gleefully listed many US newspaper editorial boards that have roundly condemned it. About 250,000 people have signed a petition calling for the prosecution of the senators for treason. Even Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei has slammed the letter as showing the ‘disintegration’ of US politics.
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While the media and political pundits have all but anointed Hillary Clinton as the inevitable nominee of the party for 2016, there are two other people who I think would be much better candidates. Both of them have made moves that suggest that they will seek the nomination though neither has formally announced it. But then, neither has Clinton.
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