Washington is a town of euphemisms. When I read that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar had announced that he is leaving his cabinet post in March to “spend time with his family”, my first reaction was that he had been asked to leave for some reason or other, essentially fired from his post, and that he was being allowed to do so gracefully. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald has a must-read piece that reveals what is actually going on in the investigations and prosecutions of people like Aaron Swartz. He says that Aaron Swartz was a pawn in the US government’s war against one antagonist that challenges their power and that they feel they have insufficient control over – hackers. [Read more…]
Anyone paying any attention knows that news reporting on TV is being steadily replaced by groups of talking heads discussing events. It costs a lot less to invite a few people to a studio to shoot the breeze about current events than to have actual reporters going deep into stories. [Read more…]
When preacher Rick Warren was picked to give the prayer at the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama, there were protests about his anti gay views but not enough to have the invitation withdrawn. This year the inaugural committee picked preacher Louie Giglio to give the benediction on January 20th but when videos surfaced that he too had preached anti-gay messages in the past and protests again erupted, he withdrew from the proceedings, likely because he would have been disinvited anyway. [Read more…]
Having a hereditary monarchy in this day and age seems ridiculous. Having an official state church is equally ridiculous. When both anachronisms are simultaneously present, they give birth to the kind of absurd controversy currently taking place in the UK. [Read more…]
To be eligible to be president of the US, one must meet the ‘natural born citizen’ constitutional requirement of Article II, Section 1. It is accepted that if one is born in the US, then this status is automatically conferred on you. This is why the birthers are so desperate to show that Obama’s birth occurred elsewhere. [Read more…]
Joel Diaz recounts a remarkable experience in Columbus, Ohio when he and a gay friend started being harassed when they were holding hands and chatting while waiting in line at a popular pizza truck. A man in front of them told them to stop doing stuff that indicated that they were gay. This is when things got interesting. [Read more…]
Not being very technology savvy, I had never heard of Aaron Swartz before his suicide yesterday at the age of 26. It turns out that he was a computer whiz who had developed at a very young age, among other things, RSS and Redditt. His main passion was to enhance the free flow of information and he was a fierce advocate of internet freedom and critic of those who would privately profit from the free work of others, which is what eventually led to actions that put him in the cross hairs of the legal system. (See the history of the case here.) [Read more…]
The so-called ‘debt crisis’ has spawned a lot of groups ostensibly for the purpose of suggesting ways to reduce it. But as this news report suggests, the members of one such group known as ‘Fix the Debt’ may not be as disinterested as they claim to be, because they simultaneously serve other businesses that are directly affected by the measures they propose. [Read more…]