Lon Snowden has had the nerve to say that his son is better off in Russia than in the US.

[I]n a telephone interview with the Associated Press, the elder Snowden said he had lost faith in recent weeks that his son would be treated fairly by the justice department. He now thinks his 30-year-old son is better off avoiding the US if possible until an administration that respects the constitution comes into office. [Read more…]

In an interview today on the ABC TV’s This Week, Glenn Greenwald says that this coming week will see the release of yet another story that backs up one of Edward Snowden’s most explosive allegations that has been vigorously denied by the government, that low-level people in the NSA could, if they wished, search through all the records they have collected and listen in to the stored phone calls of anyone at all, including the president. [Read more…]

You may recall that in George Orwell’s book 1984, historical events and the documents recording them were regularly re-written to conform to what the current political situation required. The process involved taking existing publications, destroying them, and replacing them with new ones that said the opposite of what the earlier ones said, and then pretending that the old ones had never existed. [Read more…]

The US is clearly trying the good ‘cop-bad cop tactic’ in its efforts to have the Russians hand Edward Snowden back to the US.

In the bad cop role, we have the usual idiots like Lindsey Graham issuing what seem like daily threats to the Russians that if they grant Snowden asylum, there will be repercussions like a US boycott of the Winter Olympics. That, of course, is never going to happen. But the US congress is introducing legislation mandating some sort of sanctions to any country that gives Snowden asylum. [Read more…]

Florida Democratic congressman Alan Grayson will be holding hearings on Wednesday where, for a change, critics of the NSA (including the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and Glenn Greenwald) will be invited to counter all the misleading information that government witnesses have been making about the spying programs. [Read more…]

Remember when someone in the White House derided those of us he described as stuck in a “reality-based community”, saying “That’s not the way the world really works anymore, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”? Democrats had a field day with that because the speaker was the much-hated Karl Rove at the height of his hubris during the Bush administration. It was taken as symbolic of the arrogance of that administration.

Well, reality denial is back, and in a big way. [Read more…]

Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic politician that conservatives love to hate. She is painted as the San Francisco liberal who stands for everything they despise. And she is also the darling of ‘Democratic liberals’, that group of people who support liberal issues as long as their party supports it. But in reality she is just another political apparatchik in the service of power. [Read more…]

Xeni Jardin reports that the press covering the final arguments yesterday at the ‘trial’ (i.e., which is the name that the Obama administration gives to the farcical proceedings presided over by a military judge who has been clearly hostile to Bradley Manning) are being intimidated by heavily-armed military police looking over their shoulders as they type, forbidding the use of Twitter, shutting down internet service, forbidding the use of the internet when it is up, etc. [Read more…]

The plight of many young girls in parts of the world is horrendous, ranging all the way from being denied equal access to education to suffering genital mutilation and being forced to marry older men. In a report, Human Rights Watch says that Yemen is a country in which child marraige is common because here is no legal minimum age and girls as young as eight are married off, denying them the right to a childhood and education, and often suffering serious abuse. [Read more…]