I was reading the Wall Street Journal that the conference hotel provides and came across this article today that suggests that there are splits between the three groups that are providing support to Edward Snowden: Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald, and Snowden’s father’s husband and wife legal team of Bruce and Mattie Fein. Mattie Fein said that they were concerned that the other two groups were not acting in Snowden’s best interests and were working for their own benefit and even trying to make money off him. [Read more…]
There have been a spate of recent cases involving fraud at the major banks and this may give the impression that the government is finally cracking down on them. Matt Taibbi argues that we need to look very carefully at the outcomes of these prosecutions to see if they are really serious. [Read more…]
I think that pope Francis has picked up a few ideas from president Obama. Recall that Obama came into office as the agent of hope and change, who would reverse the course of the Bush administration and bring about transparency and a commitment to end the civil and human rights abuses. Many people who hated what the Bush/Cheney regime had wrought bought into that at least partially and supported him enthusiastically. [Read more…]
Although we might have thought that the US Supreme Court had ended the debate over California’s Proposition 8, that was not quite the case. Opponents argued that the US District Court case that overturned the proposition that voided the ban on same-sex marriage only allowed the two couples who brought that suit to get married and did not carry statewide implications. [Read more…]
I have previously expressed surprise that the Republican party had chosen Obamacare, of all things, as the issue that the were going to fight to the death, even though the dry details of a health care policy that actually is quite business-friendly are not the kind of things that press emotional hot buttons to arouse strong passions. That is usually the domain of GRAGGS (guns, race, abortion, gays, god, sex) issues. [Read more…]
Stephen Walt amusingly suggests that since the NSA has now been caught illegally spying on Americans in America, why not turn its massive powers for good and not evil by using it to track down, identify, and put out of business all those robocallers that annoy the hell out of people? [Read more…]
What the NSA revelations have shown is the extent of the national security state that we live in. In order to achieve this stealthily, the government has developed the technique of having secret meanings for ordinary words, so that they can claim legality and transparency and due process when in reality they have none of those things. [Read more…]
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen writes about what he calls the ‘Snowden effect’ and lists all the things that has resulted from the revelations that Edward Snowden has made about the NSA.
It is highly telling that the highly secretive president Obama has been put on the defensive and forced to discuss these things as a result of the revelations and amusing to see him act as if he always wanted to discuss these issues, when in reality he has moved heaven and Earth to increase secrecy and prosecute whistleblowers. [Read more…]
