Watch how Ed Kilgore, a supposedly ‘liberal’ news commentator who has been a Democratic party operative, contributes to the government counter-offensive to bringing down Snowden. See if you can count how many innuendos he packs into the short passage. He pretty much follows the expected script. Kilgore’s contribution is to call Snowden a narcissist.
It is a perfect example of innuendo and we can expect much more of this type of thing in the days to come, especially from Obama supporters.
It looks like going to the FISA court and getting warrants for each new effort at widespread trawling of phone records was too much trouble for the Obama administration, even though that court is notorious for being a rubber stamp. Yet another major revelation today says that they have decided to simply get blanket permission once and for all for authorization to tap directly into the servers of major internet companies and take what they want. [Read more…]
Via Kevin Drum I came across this graphic that shows that health care costs in the US are much higher than those in other developed countries. This should, of course, come as no surprise to anyone.
But why is this the case? Many of the easy answers don’t quite cover it. This article by Elisabeth Rosenthal from which the graphic is taken looks at possible explanations. [Read more…]
I am in San Francisco for a conference and so will not be able to blog or moderate comments as frequently as usual. My apologies.
These wind-powered sculptures by Theo Jansen are amazing to behold. I have shown them before but they are so beautiful that I wanted newcomers to this blog to see them. [Read more…]
You would think that with Barack Obama’s re-election, those who had sought to deny his legitimacy to hold the office for the last four years would have finally given up. But you would be wrong because they are convinced that they are fighting for truth and justice and have a tenacity that defies all reason. And in this cause, lo! lawyer/dentist/real estate agent/Birther Queen Orly Taitz’s name, like Abou Ben Adhem‘s, leads all the rest. [Read more…]
At a news conference in Thailand on November 18, president Obama made the following comments concerning the violence in Gaza and Israel: [Read more…]
Thanks to sophisticated polling techniques, presidential elections in the US have narrowed their attention to not just the few so-called ‘swing states’, but to the handful of undecided voters in those states who can swing an election either way. They are the players while the rest of us have become spectators. So who are these undecided voters that so much attention is lavished over? [Read more…]
Rick Santorum seems to be determined to match Herman Cain in creating apocalyptic visions of what a second term for president Obama would look like that are close to self-parodies. [Read more…]
Two people in England have been convicted of the murder of a teenage relative whom they believed to be using witchcraft, and who drowned in a bath during a forced exorcism. The story of the boy’s final hours was so ghastly [Read more…]