“Mississippi may not shift its obligation to respect the established constitutional rights of its citizens to another state.”
Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in an opinion that will allow Mississippi’s only remaining abortion clinic to stay open.
A good day for the women of Mississippi and women all over America.
Glenn Greenwald is close to releasing more Snowden documents. The next group will reveal “what kinds of citizens are being targeted by the NSA.”
Washington super-lawyer Plato Cacheris is representing Edward Snowden in talks with the Justice Department, seeking a plea deal that would let Snowden come home. If anyone can get Snowden a decent deal, it’s Plato.
Okay, so the Prez says it’s perfectly fine to release these five top Taliban terrorists. But at the same time, the Prez says we’re in so much danger from the terrorists that he has to gather everybody’s phone calls and emails.
So all of us average, loyal Americans who are being watched constantly are a threat, but the real bad guys aren’t?
This inexcusable, incoherent policy gives us the worst of both worlds — putting our lives more at risk while taking away our rights.
How can anyone justify both the Taliban deal and the NSA surveillance?
Glenn Greenwald is going to do a piece from his Snowden documents disclosing actual names of Americans targeted by the NSA. It will be very interesting to see who they’re going after and why.
The House passed the USA FREEDOM Act today, which is supposed to fix the PATRIOT Act and rein in the NSA, but falls far short of what we need to get our rights back. The vote was 303-121, with 179 Republicans and 124 Democrats in favor. The bill now goes to the Senate, but I doubt it will get fixed enough to keep this from being a huge wasted opportunity to restore our privacy.
Here’s James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the chief sponsor of the bill: “Let me be clear: I wish this bill did more. To my colleagues who lament the changes, I agree with you. The privacy groups who are upset about lost provisions, I share your disappointment.”
Here’s Zoe Logren (D-California), who supported the bill that came out of the Judiciary Committee, but voted against the final bill: “This is not the bill that was voted out of the Judiciary Committee unanimously. Regrettably, we have learned that if we leave any ambiguity in the law [on bulk data collection], the intelligence agency will run a truck through that ambiguity.”
Companies like Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and Facebook had supported the original bill, but did not support the final version, believing that it contains a loophole for government surveillance of our Internet data.
The bill also dropped the provision creating an independent public advocate at the FISA court. It removed provisions about public reports from the government about its targeting activity and FISA court requests.
The bill requires phone companies to keep records for 18 months, with the NSA having to get a court order to access those records.
“No cow justifies the atmosphere of intimidation which currently exists nor the limitation of constitutional rights that are sacred to all Nevadans.”
Gov. Brian Sandoval (R-Nevada) about Cliven Bundy and the BLM.
Um, Brian, this isn’t about cows, it’s about the rule of law.
“Certainly, many of the Snowden-fueled disclosures following the original NSA revelation have been gratuitous and harmful; those, and his sheltering in Russia rather than arguing his case in a U.S. court, raise doubts about his motives. But the original NSA leaks were justified because U.S. intelligence officials had misled the public and members of Congress about the program. There’s no value of ‘oversight’ if the overseers are being fed lies.”
Dana Milbank, WaPo
“Pretty soon, there was an armed standoff as men with guns assembled around the ranch. The BLM people wisely backed off, and there was a great cock-a-doodle-do’ing all over the right, because Cliven Bundy’s inalienable right to get something for nothing from the rest of us had been upheld with Second Amendment enthusiasm. Bear in mind that Bundy’s entire position is that he can not pay his bills, and that he can ignore a federal judge, because he feels the federal government is illegitimate. … This is conservatism — and, therefore, Republicanism — playing footsie with sedition. This is not the first time, either.
“Republican politicians, especially in the west, have slow-danced with the militia movement for quite some time. A Republican congresswoman named Helen Chenoweth was so close to the movement that, after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, she pronounced herself upset that the government had failed truly to understand the militia movement.
“In the states, the Republican party has embraced the traditional historical basis for this movement, having actively discussed — and, in some cases, tried to implement — the doctrine of nullification. This, of course, was the fundamental theoretical basis for the greatest act of sedition of all time, and one for which too many people seem overly nostalgic these days. The difference between the present moment, and the days when Helen Chenoweth was riding the range, of course, is the fact that there is a powerful and loud right-wing media infrastructure at the disposal of the people peddling this constitutional poison. Americans For Prosperity jumped right on the Bundy case. Of course, AFP — and the Koch brothers who fund it — isn’t in this for airy philosophical debates on the role of government. They’re in it to break the control of the federal government over the lands that they want to exploit for their own profit, and they are willing to help engage the single most destructive political theory in the country’s history to help them do it. It is reckless and dangerous, and anybody who gets used by these people is a sap. And useful idiots, like Sean Hannity and all the someones like him, are going to get somebody killed behind this stuff.”
“Range War in Nevada,” Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
I get party differences over abortion, gay marriage, taxing and spending, etc. But why shouldn’t D’s and R’s agree that a man who refuses to pay his grazing fees is a criminal and should be punished, not celebrated? I thought the GOP was supposed to be the “law and order” party. Why are they all freaked out about food stamp fraud, but don’t want this guy to pay the million bucks he owes?
Guardian US and The Washington Post have won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting of Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosures.
Embattled Farmers 