Can anyone harbor even the slightest illusion that the US Senate is the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’, as it frequently boasts itself to be, after this latest episode. It happened when Louisiana senator David Vitter decided that he would block senate business until he got his way. [Read more…]
ProPublica had a disturbing report about an attempt to censor a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Matthew Green, an expert on cryptography, who blogged about the NSA’s efforts at breaking encryptions. The university, which is physically located very close to the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, does a lot of work for the NSA, especially in its Applied Physics Laboratory. [Read more…]
Bill Di Blasio won the Democratic primary for the mayoralty of New York City and will likely be elected mayor in the general election. He is reputedly a progressive who has opposed things like the random ‘stop and frisk’ tactic by police that targeted young men of color and was favored by outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg. [Read more…]
It is quite astonishing how when it comes to diplomacy, the US finds it so hard to take yes for an answer.
Take for example Syria. Whether or not chemical weapons were used and by whom, I think all reasonable people would agree that getting rid of those weapons anywhere is a good thing. And that is what we seem to be moving towards in Syria as a result of the Russian/Syrian plan triggered by John Kerry’s remark. It is going to take some time. After all, the US is far behind schedule on its own promises to reduce its chemical weapons stockpile. [Read more…]
The Russian president Vladimir Putin took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to give Americans a short lecture on history and international law and why bombing Syria without UN authorization would be wrong. [Read more…]
As sure as sunrise follows sunset, the possibility of war breeds a new generation of ‘experts’ and ‘analysts’ who occupy the numerous ideological think tanks and make the media rounds providing seemingly impartial analysis but in reality pushing an agenda of their own, usually in favor of war. [Read more…]
The latest revelation from the Edward Snowden documents is that the NSA hands over raw intelligence containing personal data it has collected on Americans to Israel. The top secret memorandum of understanding between the US and Israel has been released that show that the US did not place any legal limits on the use of the data by Israel though even if it had, it hardly seems likely that the Israeli authorities would have felt constrained by them. [Read more…]
There are a lot of people in the US who advocate for war. The neoconservatives are one such group, because they have as their goal the projection of US power all over the globe to establish complete dominance. The Israel lobby is another group that seeks to have the US act on Israel’s behalf and attack and destabilize and even overthrow all the Middle Eastern countries that it sees as enemies. And of course, there is the military-industrial complex that makes a lot of money out of the death and destruction wreaked by the US on other people. [Read more…]
Both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report weighed in on the bad arguments being made both for and against war with Syria. [Read more…]
We can all breathe a sigh of relief that the impending war with Syria has been at least postponed. It is clear that it was the massive and rising antiwar sentiment that put a check on the Obama administration and its war-loving supporters to back off (at least temporarily) from their threats to bomb Syria and instead accept the offer of Russia to find a diplomatic solution. The Obama administration’s Syria policy was incoherent and based on hypocritical fear-mongering and his speech last night reflected all those things. [Read more…]