 Today the Associated Press reported that the Department of Justice has collected the telephone calling records of many of its reporters and editors. By obtaining these records, the DOJ has struck a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news. As James Madison understood, "a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy, or perhaps both." AP had it right when it told Attorney General Holder that it was "a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights
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Murder Is Our National Sport
 Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States believes in regeneration through violence. We have carried out blood baths on foreign soil and on our own land for generations in the vain quest of a better world. And the worse it gets, the deeper our e
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Harriet Sherwood and Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem
The Guardian, Tuesday 7 May 2013
Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fi
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 President Obama nominated Chicago mogul and longtime friend Penny Pritzker for Commerce secretary. Here’s what you need to know about her:
1) She’s a longtime supporter of the president. Pritzker, 54, first met President Obama and his wife, Michelle, at a Chicago YMCA in the early 1990s while her children were playing basketball and Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson, was coaching. Since then, she has been an important supporter and has helped raise millions of dollars for his political campaigns since he ran for the Senate in 2004. During Obama's 2008 White House run, Pritzker served as the national chairwoman of his campaign financ
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by Dean Baker
In polite circles in the United States’ support for free trade is a bit like proper bathing habits. It is taken for granted. Only the hopelessly crude and unwashed would not support free trade. The Obama administration is pursuing two major "free trade" agreements that in fact have very little to do with free trade and are likely to hurt those without the mo
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And when are anti-GMO activist groups going to stop saying they’re "shocked and disappointed” by the president? Shocked and disappointed is polite-speak and politically correct reaction. It’s baloney. 
Don’t you get it? Obama has never been on your side. He never deserved your trust. Disappointment implies he was your buddy and then unaccountably walked away. The man is a politician. He’s a liar. Different pols have different styles of lying. Some pretend they’re your friend before they screw you over and leave you in the dust. I’ve previously published Obama’s track record as Monsanto’s number-one political supporter in America. Meet Monsanto’s prime lobbyist, Barack Obama: A d v e r t i s e m e n t After his victory in the 2008 elect
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 I’ve been focused on economic policy lately, so I sort of missed the big push to rehabilitate Bush’s image; also, as a premature anti-Bushist who pointed out how terrible a president he was back when everyone else was praising him as a Great Leader, I’m kind of worn out on the subject.
But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out.
From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair.
But I think there was something even bigger, in s
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(Reuters) - Tens of millions of U.S. dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, according to the New York Times, citing current and former advisers to the Afghan leader. The so-called "ghost money" was meant to buy influence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan, the newspaper quoted U.S. officials as saying. "The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan", one American official said, "was the United States." The CIA declined to comment on the report and the U.S. State Department did not immediately comment. The New York Times did not publish any comment from Karzai or his office. "We called it ‘ghost money'," Khalil Roman, who served as Karzai's chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York Times. "It came
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If you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in the sub-arctic range — an icy 15 percent by last count — all you have to do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate pay worship at the altar of corporations, banks and other special interests at the expense of public aspirations and need.
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