I am not a big fan of Obamacare, seeing it as needlessly complicated and unwieldy and a boon to the rapacious and parasitic health insurance industries. I would have much preferred a government-administered single payer system, such as expanding Medicare to cover everyone, not just the elderly. But Obamacare is better than what we have now if for no other reason than many more people, especially the poor, will get some health care coverage. But in the latest example of the right-wingers going nuts, they have started a campaign to urge people without health insurance to not to buy even the subsidized coverage that the Obamacare plan’s individual mandate offers. [Read more…]

Given that over the past decade the US has refused to hand over to Russia about 20 people they have wanted for alleged crimes, I was wondering how long it would be before the Russians were pushed over the edge by being sanctimoniously told that they had an obligation to hand Edward Snowden to the US. It looks like that moment has arrived. [Read more…]

The amendment to the Defense Authorization bill that that I wrote about yesterday that sought to defund just one NSA program, its ability to collect bulk records of American’s telephone records, lost by a close vote of 217 to 205 with 12 not voting, despite massive White House lobbying to defeat it. [Read more…]

In Montgomery County in Pennsylvania, the Register of Wills D. Bruce Hanes said that he had decided to grant licenses to gay couples to get married because he wants to come down “on the right side of history and the law”, despite a state law forbidding such marriages. Two female couples have already received licenses and got married. I am not sure what will happen when the couples apply for marriage benefits or file taxes jointly.

Recall that there is already a legal challenge to the Pennsylvania law that the state’s attorney general has said that she will not defend. The Republican governor has not said what he will do yet.

There is an important vote taking place today in Congress. An amendment that seeks to cut funding for the NSA’s bulk collection of people’s communication records under the Patriot Act has been proposed to the big Defense Authorization bill by a bipartisan coalition of libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats. [Read more…]

It looks like the paperwork for temporary asylum has been finally approved that allows Edward Snowden to leave the confines of the Moscow airport. [Update: Or maybe not.] [Read more…]

I forgot to mention one thing in my post about how I gauge the effectiveness of the Obama propaganda system by the way that his supporters in my social circle now say things in support of Obama’s actions in almost identical terms to the way that Bush/Cheney supporters defended them. [Read more…]

[UPDATE: You can read the full text of the judge’s ruling here. It is pretty strong stuff. This was not a full trial but a request for a restraining order against the state and thus applies only to this case, but the wording of the reasoning suggests that the judge thinks it should hold widely.]

A federal judge in Cincinnati has ruled that even state officials in Ohio must recognize the rights of same-sex couples that were legally married in other states. This is a significant expansion of the US Supreme Court ruling in the DOMA case where the federal government was told that it had to recognize those rights. The judge’s ruling is a major development because Ohio still has on its books the constitutional amendment passed in 2004 that says that marriage is between a man and a woman only, and steps are currently underway to repeal that provision. [Read more…]

Anyone who writes anything critical of Israel in a public forum can expect pushback from members of what has come to be known as ‘the Israel lobby’, those individuals and groups that seek to silence any honest discussion of the Middle East. [Read more…]