On this July 4th holiday when the nation goes through the annual ritual of celebrating its history and praising itself for the freedoms it gained from the British 237 years ago, it is sobering to realize that it has, almost casually, allowed the government to gut those very freedoms leaving just a brittle, hollowed-out shell that looks good on paper but has little or no substance.
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A nationwide campaign of protests is being organized for the Independence Day holiday tomorrow against widespread government spying. It is being organized by the coalition Restore the Fourth, where the ‘Fourth’ is a pun on the date as well as the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures”. [Read more…]

With all the attention so far on the US government scooping up the electronic communication records (email, phone calls, internet use, etc.) of people around the globe, we could be excused for thinking that old-fashioned postal mail was the only thing that was safe from their prying eyes. It now turns out that even our snail mail is tracked by the government, something that a victim discovered by accident when he discovered a card that had been inadvertently placed in his mail that contained instructions that his mail was to be monitored. [Read more…]

In a letter of apology to senator Diane Feinstein, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has admitted that he lied under oath to Congress. So what will happen to him now? Probably nothing. [Read more…]

Although president Obama disdainfully says that he would not scramble jets to prevent Edward Snowden from traveling to another country, suggesting that Snowden is not important enough for him, there is no reason to believe him because he and his administration have has proven themselves to be liars. [Read more…]

Puzzles intrigue me, whatever form they take. This is to explain why I am revisiting what might seem to be a dead issue: the question of how it could be that the Romney campaign could have been taken by surprise by their loss in 2012. How it could be that they seemed so confident right up until election night that they were going to win? Romney later said that the first sign he had that he was in trouble was late on election night when Florida’s result took a long time coming. He had thought he would win that state easily. But how could that be since even casual observers like me realized well in advance that things looked bad for them? [Read more…]

Glenn Greenwald gave a speech last Friday at the Socialism 2013 conference. It was his first speech after he broke the NSA whistleblowing story. He gives a fascinating account of his encounter with Edward Snowden and what he observed of his motivations. He is scathing about the state of contemporary major American media, saying that this episode has exposed how subservient they are to the US government. [Read more…]

Following the Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage, Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas), a member of the House of Representatives, has introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the decisions. The only positive feature of this bill is that it is very simple, consisting in its entirety of just two sentences:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

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