“President Obama has quietly issued an executive order that, in a state of emergency, prioritizes government communication over civilian.” So states CNN Newsroom (“Government re-prioritizing US communication,” July 9, 2012) in a sentence whose single adverb, “quietly,” resounds with unsettling connotations to complement its already unsettling informational content. Dana Kerr elaborates for CNET: President Barack…
Category: Government & Politics
The story behind the Supreme Court’s health care decision
A rather riveting and somewhat disturbing piece of journalism from CBS News about the inner story behind Chief Justice Roberts’ late-in-the-game flip-flop: Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court’s four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama’s health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his…
The dumbing of American political speech has truly apocalyptic implications
NPR reported it this morning, and I listened with rapt attention during my commute to work: It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a…
It’s the Republicans’ fault. Seriously.
Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Thus, the essay that appeared by them in The Washington Post six days ago, and that set off a kind of seismic chain reaction of positive and negative responses among readers…
Silently Witnessing World War III
This morning, not long after sitting for 20 minutes or so of meditation, while I was drinking my coffee and checking my news feeds, I came across a headline announcing “US gives Iran ‘last chance’ warning over shutting down nuclear facility.” Right after that I saw a separate one announcing that “Russia Is Massing Troops…
A real-life Skynet?
Last week Wired magazine made waves by publishing an epic article about a vast spy center that’s currently being built by America’s National Security Agency in the Utah desert. The real bombshell was the revelation that the project is ground zero for a galactically powerful and all-encompassing surveillance program that targets literally all communications and…
The NSA is building America’s biggest spy center, and “Everybody’s a target”
Recently, in response to Google’s Orwellian collapsing and combining of 60 separate privacy policies (the better to construct a Master Profile of its users for selling and surveilling), I took pains to extricate myself from the tentacular grasp of its many products. I’m now Google Free and Loving It (although I did, yes, include three…
Pentagon says it has no records of bin Laden death
Just one word, uttered with full ironical, scorn-filled inflection: Seriously? The hunt for Osama bin Laden took nearly a decade. It could take even longer to uncover U.S. government emails, planning reports, photographs and more that would shed light on how an elite team of U.S. Navy Seals killed the world’s most wanted terrorist. Ten…
Rolling Stone: The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read
If this development isn’t significant, then I don’t know what is. Earlier this week [in February], the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified…
MSNBC explains how Goldman Sachs stole billions from U.S. taxpayers with government help
Unbelievable. Not the news that Goldman Sachs used its no-strings-attached government money from Hank Paulson’s bank industry bailout last fall to earn inconceivable amounts of money in a titanically underhanded manner, but the fact that mainstream media heavyweight MSNBC would feature such a raw exposé as this one: The quick version (quicker than watching the…