So the governor of Arizona Jan Brewer has vetoed the bill that would allow people who have ‘sincerely’ held religious beliefs to not serve those whom they disapprove of (i.e., members of the LGBT community), saying that the bill would have ‘unintended consequences’ (translation: the business community was telling me that they would suffer and Arizona could even lose the hosting of next year’s Super Bowl).
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Jon Perr displays ten graphs that chart various economic measures over the last century or so. These include the share of total income by the top income brackets, CEO-to-worker compensation ratios, marginal tax rates for the highest income levels, effective tax rates, average incomes, and more. The graphs are spectacular in their clarity even if depressing in their implications. I reproduce just one because it is illustrative of a point that I wish to make.
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Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore on The Daily Show have another one of their insightful and entertaining discussions about race in America, this time about the revisionist idea that slavery was not the cause of the southern secession that led to the Civil War and that if that socialist Abraham Lincoln had not been such a hothead and rushed to war but had instead been patient and used capitalistic ideas, the bloodshed could have been avoided.
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Glenn Greenwald has an important new piece out at The Intercept that says that the NSA and the GCHQ are launching attacks on individuals and targets who have nothing to do with terrorism and in the process are committing acts that would be criminal and severely prosecuted if done by anyone else. They manipulate social media for this purpose.
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Some of you may have heard about the group Femen, that consists of young women who stage demonstrations while going topless with messages painted on their bodies and doing other things aimed at drawing a lot of media attention for the causes they support. They have announced that they are bringing their campaign to the US by setting up an office here to train and coordinate activities. [Warning: Link has a photo of a topless Femen member.]
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There has been a spate of news reports of aggrieved plutocrats grumbling about how mean people are to them these days, and how nobody seems to appreciate the fact that they worked hard for their money unlike the rest of us moochers and looters and that they are so exceptionally gifted that they deserve even more. While much scorn has been directed at those who have said these things publicly, what they say among themselves privately is even worse.
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The winter Olympics in Sochi have ended and, as far as I can tell, went off pretty smoothly. All the dark predictions of a fiasco or even terrorist attacks that the US media endlessly speculated about before the games did not occur.
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It turns out that there is another NSA whistleblower in addition to Edward Snowden. Cory Doctorow writes that an anonymous leaker has revealed to a German publication Bild am Sonntag that the NSA has been spying on senior German government officials as well as the chancellor Angela Merkel, something that Snowden hinted at in his interview with the German TV station ARD.
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As a result of cases in other states in which photographers and florists and bakers were sued for declining to provide their services at the weddings of same-sex couples, the thoughtful legislators of Arizona decided that they needed to protect their own citizens who dislike gays from similar lawsuits and both the state house and senate passed laws that said that any business could deny service to anyone, not just gay people, for religious reasons if those beliefs are held ‘sincerely’. The bill is now awaiting the signature of Arizona governor Jan Brewer. If she does not veto it by Friday, it becomes law.
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Former longtime Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren says in a long essay what many of us have been saying all along, that despite all the posturing about divided government and gridlock and nothing getting done, in reality there is an underlying, unspoken, smoothly operating consensus on some things that result in certain policies that benefit a select few, the oligarchy, getting implemented with little or no discussion. He gives the group behind it a name and calls them the ‘Deep State’.
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