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.

[Read more…]

It should be clear to any observer that the US government sees the law as merely a convenience, to be invoked when it serves its interest and ignored if it interferes at all with its ability to do whatever it wants. But while should be obvious that the US government has absolutely no respect for the law, president Obama and his loyalists still have to mouth pieties about how they value the rule of law. In order to maintain this fig leaf, they resort to contorted reasoning that is mainly designed to provide Congress, the courts, and the public with the defense that while one may not like what the government is doing, it is at least technically within the law. [Read more…]

Peter Van Buren, a State Department whistleblower himself, writes about what it feels like during the time. He says that unlike himself and other earlier whistleblowers who naively thought that the government would be grateful for their acts of conscience, Snowden probably was far more realistic and thus likely to be afraid of what might happen to him. [Read more…]

The NSA revelations, as promised, keep coming.

The latest is that the US has been spying heavily on its closest allies in the EU. This has, predictably, not gone over well with the Europeans who are miffed at the idea that their own friends are spying on them. The language emerging from them has been exceedingly harsh, suggesting that this may not be the usual faux outrage designed simply to pacify their own citizens. The reaction has been more of a sense of betrayal of trust, like that of someone discovering that their lover has been snooping through all their personal things. John Kerry’s ‘surely everyone does this’ defense is not going down well. [Read more…]

Reports have suggested that Edward Snowden’s ultimate destination is Ecuador although that country seems to be cooling on the idea recently. But despite that, Ecuador has gone out of its way to tell the US that it will not be bullied by them to hand over Snowden. Juan Cole lists all the awful things that the US has done to Ecuador in the past as the reasons why that country is taking this stance. [Read more…]

One of the frequently recurring arguments offered by those supporting the widespread NSA surveillance programs is that this should not bother anyone who has nothing to hide. While this is a spurious argument at the best of times, it has a sinister corollary in that people who do take steps to protect their privacy may be assumed by the government to be up to no good, even though there are many reasons for guarding one’s personal information that have nothing to do with any form of criminality, let alone terrorism. [Read more…]

You may recall that I wrote about a recent report put out by young Republicans that surveyed the views of young people in general and what they found was that the Republican party was viewed very unfavorably, being described with words like closed-minded, racist, rigid, and old-fashioned. The young Republicans think that the party only cares about protecting those who have already made it rich and does not care about those who are still struggling to find their feet. Since almost all people, but especially the young, fall into the latter category, this has to hurt. [Read more…]