The vote to bring the ENDA legislation to the senate floor for a debate and vote was 61-30, with seven Republicans joining 54 members of the Democratic caucus (Democrat Claire McCaskill was absent) to overcome the filibuster. The actual vote on the bill will take place on Monday and is sure to pass. [Read more…]

When it comes to issues of war, we are aware of the famous military-industrial complex that exerts enormous influence in setting the agenda and driving the nation into one war after another. But what is less noted is the military-pundit-think tank complex where people pose on TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and blogs as disinterested analysts when in actual fact they are often paid, directly or indirectly (by the Pentagon, companies, and think tanks) by interests that benefit directly from war. [Read more…]

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is a bill that seeks to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. In a just world, that should be a no-brainer. But although the bill has been introduced in Congress since 1994, it has never passed. [Read more…]

The US government and supporters of the authoritarian state say that snooping on everyone all over the globe is standard practice, everyone does it, and hence the cascade of NSA revelations are no big deal and that the only reason the US does more of it than others is that they have the technology to do so. [Read more…]

Now that opinion is increasingly turning against the NSA’s spying activities, the supposed supervisors and watchdogs of these programs in the White House and Congress are scurrying to deflect blame from themselves and we are seeing the familiar ‘rogue elephant’ theory emerging, suggesting that the NSA was doing things on its own initiative and that the policy makers at the top were unaware. [Read more…]

New Jersey governor Chris Christie clearly has ambitions to run for the presidency in 2016. It is also clear that he is pushing the ‘maverick’ shtick that worked for John McCain, at least as far as getting the Republican nomination was concerned, and to aim for the support of the party establishment, territory that is open since all the other putative candidates (Rand Paul, Ted Crux, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry) seem to be angling for the Tea Party wing’s support. He clearly wants to be portrayed as the straight-talking, no-nonsense, get-stuff-done, not-totally-nuts kind of guy. [Read more…]

Leading Germans, including some from chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party, are calling for Germany to give Edward Snowden asylum, with the former general secretary saying “Snowden has done the western world a great service. It is now up to us to help him.” This suggests that the tide is definitely shifting in his favor, despite a massive US effort to portray Snowden as a traitor and a criminal. [Read more…]

Some of us old-timers will recall the time when the word ‘gay’ started to become identified with homosexuality and calls for equality for people of all sexual orientations, and the phrases ‘gay rights’ and ‘gay liberation’ came into vogue. Since at the same time homosexuality was still strongly stigmatized, some would complain that the word gay was being been appropriated by the ‘gay lobby’ and that they could no longer use the word with its original meaning of being happy because people might misunderstand. [Read more…]

The Obama administration and its allies in Congress and the media have defended the widespread global spying by the NSA on the grounds that it has prevented 54 terrorist attacks, giving the impression that most of them were aimed at the US. This became accepted as a fact, as unchallenged statements by authority figures often do, and one hears it being thrown around by supporters of the authoritarian national security state. [Read more…]