It’s looking more and more unlikely that Edward Snowden will go to Ecuador, but Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is headed to Russia for a visit, and there are rumors that he may take Snowden back with him.
Snowden has been staying at hotels near the Moscow airport, he’s not stuck in a plastic seat in the transit area lounge.
“Now the House will destroy immigration reform”
Alex Pareene, Salon
“You’ll Never Know if the NSA Is Breaking the Law — or Keeping You Safe”
Philip Bump, AP
“George Zimmerman decided Trayvon Martin’s fate on Feb. 26, 2012, and now a jury will decide his. A jury that, by the way, is part of a justice system that is not supposed to exclusively serve the best educated and most articulate of our citizenry. So now would be a good time to point out that Jeantel’s weight, her nails, her sex, her color – these things have precisely jack to do with her account of what happened the night Travyon Martin died. Justice is supposed to serve teenagers too, and people who party and who don’t hide it when they’re angry or flustered, and women who can’t read cursive. It’s supposed to serve people whose dialogue wasn’t written for them by David E. Kelley. Remember that. Remember that Rachel Jeantel is not the one on trial.”
Mary Elizabeth Williams, “The smearing of Rachel Jeantel,” Salon
We think of the federal government as having gobbled up and pre-empted so much power at the expense of the state, but right now, when you look at abortion rights, voting rights, and gay marriage, the states are very much in control of whether or not we get to exercise our constitutional rights. If you live in a GOP-controlled state, fuhgeddaboudit.
They didn’t get the 70 votes they’d hoped for, but in the end it was 68-32, with 14 Republicans voting for it, plus all 52 Dems and 2 Independents.
But John Boehner said today that he will invoke the Hastert rule (nothing gets to the House floor unless approved by a majority of the majority) on any immigration bill that might emerge from a Conference Committee. It tough to imagine a bill that would get a majority of the crazy Republicans in the House also getting approved by the Senate and signed by the Prez. Any Conference bill that could pass the Senate would have to pass the House with mostly Dems and a few R’s.
GDP growth for the first quarter of 2013 has been revised down, from 2.4% to 1.8%.
When the number was initially reported as 2.4%, the Powers That Be said the stupid sequester and the tax increases that kicked in on January 1st weren’t having much of an effect on the economy. The Powers That Be were obviously wrong.
The CIA is prohibited from doing domestic surveillance.
Yet, the NYT has a front-page story* about four CIA officers who were embedded with the New York City police. In response to a FOIA request, the Times got a declassified executive summary of a CIA Inspector General report from December 2011 about this relationship, which apparently occurred between 2002 and 2012. They say it isn’t going on now, but how the hell do we know who and what to believe anymore?
* “C.I.A. Sees Concerns on Ties to New York Police,” Charlie Savage
Over at Talking Points Memo, Sahil Kapur calls Justice Scalia’s gay marriage dissent “flaming.”
Edward Snowden is still at the airport in Moscow and doesn’t seem about to leave any time soon.
Ecuador says their decision on granting him asylum could take two months, which is how long it took them to decide on Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who lives at the Ecuador Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden.
Ecuador says they could protect Snowden sooner if he got to their embassy in Moscow, but Russia won’t let him leave the transit area of the airport because he doesn’t have a visa to enter Russia.
Meanwhile, the U. S. is still trying to convince the Russians to turn Snowden over.
Embattled Farmers 