IAN MILLHISER, - Think Progress
Stephan: The gutting of the Voting Rights Act in a blatantly partisan way by the activist Rightist Supreme Court produced the rash of voter suppression legislation we have seen being passed in all states where the Theocratic Right has control. It should have been obvious to a child this would happen, and I have no doubt that this is exactly what the Rightist court had in mind. One Justice at least has the courage to say, 'I told you so.' Here is her thinking.
I didn’t want to be right,
No Comments
Stephan: There is a mindset emerging in the government, not a particularly new or original mindset, one quite common to authoritarian governments. The mindset says, give us your money, and don't ask what we are doing. We are above the law, or we write the law in such a way that we are not in violation of it. This is explicitly what the Constitution is designed block. Goodbye Constitution. We'll invoke your symbolism, but your freedoms are no longer useful to our aims.
Court cases are often cures for insomnia, but every so often a lawsuit is an eye-opening journey through the looking glass. One of those is suddenly upon us - and we should be thankful because it finally provides an unfiltered look at our government.
You may not know about this case, but you should. Called Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, it illustrates the extremism driving the policies being made in the public’s name.
The first thing you should know about this case is that it is simply about a man who wants to know why his grandson is dead. That’s right - in this age of endless war, a grandfather named Nasser Al-Aulaqi is having to go to court to try to compel the U.S. government to explain why it killed his grandson in a drone strike despite never charging the 16-year-old American citizen with a crime.
Another thing you should know is the specific defense the government is mounting in this case. As the New York Times reported, the Obama administration’s Deputy Attorney General Brian Hauck first declared that courts have no right to oversee executive-branch decisions to extrajudicially assassinate Americans. He also insisted that the White House already provides adequate due process for […]
No Comments
JOHN NAUGHTON , - The Guardian/Observer (U.K.)
Stephan: As this story rolls out I am increasingly struck by the fact that the American corporate media has turned the Snowden Affair into a rather pedestrian thriller script completely missing the point. I ask myself are the reporters too dumb to see this, or is this a conscious choice. I think it is the later. You can see why American News is so often substance free. We can spend weeks talking about an absurd, and emotionally damaged little man sending pictures of his penis around the net, but an issue like fundamental freedoms, civil liberties, whoa that would be like real journalism. We don't do that anymore. This is a really chilling trend.
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.
In a way, it doesn’t matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users’ data.
Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a […]
No Comments
DAVID CORN, Washington Bureau Chief - Mother Jones
Stephan: I have held this story for a couple of days waiting to see the rebuttal. Nothing meaningful has been forthcoming. To my mind there are two main takeaways from this story. One is that another aging group of Theocratic whites are trying to preserve the power they and their friends control. The other is that the wife of a sitting United States Associate Justice is one of the ringleaders of this little Rightwing gang. I do not see how a sitting Justice can at one and the same time render impartial judgment for the country as a whole while having a lobbyist spouse who is actively trying to subvert an inclusive democracy. It is astonishing to me that this goes on almost without comment by the corporate media, the Congress, or the White House.
Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington-including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner-has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for ‘a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,’ according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell-including aides to congressional Republicans-cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and ‘clueless’ GOP congressional leaders. They devise strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. And the Groundswell gang is mounting a behind-the-scenes organized effort to eradicate the outsize influence of GOP über-strategist/pundit Karl Rove within Republican and conservative ranks. (For more on Groundswell’s ‘two front war’ against Rove-a major clash on the right-click here [5].)
One of the influential conservatives guiding the group is Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, a columnist […]
No Comments
LYNN STUART PARRAMORE, Senior Editor - Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This is a really good take on what is happening financially, and why it has a deadening effect on technological development. When immediate profit is your only priority, there are no correcting forces, and you slowly go off course in terms of wellness. Until you crash. We ask the wrong questions so we get the wrong answers.
Author’s note: This post is based on papers presented and remarks made during a *conference panel I moderated featuring William Lazonick of U Mass-Lowell, Jan Kregel of the Levy Institute and Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO.
Whatever happened to innovation in America? President Obama told us that our future depends on it. Across the political spectrum, everyone pretty much agrees that innovation is vital to prosperity.
So why aren’t we getting the job done? Clearly, we’re in desperate need of clean technology that won’t poison us. Our information and communications systems are not up to snuff. Our infrastructure is outdated and crumbling before our eyes. We’re not investing enough in these areas, and it shows. Yet they’re necessary not only for America’s economic health, but for stability and prosperity around the globe.
The U.S. used to be the envy of the world when it came to innovation, making things that dazzled the world and enhanced the lives of millions. But the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a bipartisan think-tank that ranks 36 countries according to innovation-based competitiveness, tells us we’re getting pushed aside on the global innovation stage. In 2009, to the surprise of those conducting the study, the U.S. ranked #4 in […]
No Comments
