For the really serious stuff they assemble the Very Serious People
by digby
CNN has assembled a diverse panel to discuss the challenge posed by ISIS: pic.twitter.com/1QIKYYceGw— Arif Rafiq (@ArifCRafiq) June 3, 2015
"what digby sez..."
Month: June 2015
More Village navel gazing
by digby
There have now been at least 20 stories filed about this. Seriously, stop the presses!!!
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign prohibited a Daily Mail journalist from covering its Monday event in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the designated print pool reporter, marking the latest spat with the press over access.
McClatchy’s Anita Kumar tweeted that Clinton’s press vans left for the event without Daily Mail U.S. Political Editor David Martosko, who was scheduled to cover it and provide a pool report to journalists unable to attend because of space limitations.
The Clinton traveling press corps, like the White House Correspondents’ Association, has established a pool rotation for campaign events that can’t accommodate large numbers of journalists. Traditionally, journalists, rather than the campaign or administration being covered, decide who serves as pool reporter for the group. So journalists unsurprisingly took issue with the campaign’s decision.
If you are wondering why people think the news media is boring and useless, this would be why. I understand why reporters would be miffed over this sort of thing. But they really should stop and think about whether anybody else in the country could possibly give a damn about it.
Having said that, Clinton’s people should serve these people some lobster and Dove bars so at least they’ll be in a sugar coma most of the time.
It really is all about them …
Update: Notice that they forgot to mention just who it was that was left off the press bus. C&L has the details:
Before Martosko was exiled to The Daily Mail, he was the editor of Tucker Carlson’s hack site, the Daily Caller. He set about the work of ratfcking with a purpose there, lying about Senator Robert Menendez and hookers in order to try and knock Menendez out of contention.
More of his resumé, via Mother Jones:
Before Daily Caller Editor in Chief Tucker Carlson hired him in 2011—a controversial choice given Martosko’s previous arrests and lack of experience in journalism—Martosko spent a decade working for Richard Berman, a longtime PR operative behind a number of industry-backed campaigns. At Berman and Company, Martosko served as the director of research for the Center for Consumer Freedom, a Berman-run nonprofit that opposes new laws on food and beverages. CCF, which is funded by the food and beverage industry, runs Humane Watch, a website that posts derogatory information about the Humane Society of the United States. Martosko was the site’s “founding editor.” CCF also operates Activist Cash, a website that compiles biographical information on groups and individuals that engage in “anti-consumer activism.”
What a guy.
Journalists will defend him but not Glenn Greenwald.
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They have a plan. To help themselves.
by digby
Ryan said that should the Supreme Court deem the federal subsidies unconstitutional and leave six million people uninsured, the GOP has “a solution that addresses this law. We’ll have a solution for the people caught in this law, so that they’re not caught in the lurch.”
His offer of providing people both insurance and “freedom from Obamacare” was extraordinarily vague, though, so much so that Wallace became visibly annoyed. “For all the complaints,” he said, “we’re five years into Obamacare and Republicans have still not come up with a coherent plan that will ensure that all of those millions of people will get coverage.”
Ryan repeatedly refused to offer specific details about what the Republican’s “freedom from Obamacare” insurance plan would entail, offering instead political platitudes. “We will have an answer,” he said, sounding less like a politician and more like a kid at summer camp trying to convince his bunkmates of the existence of his Canadian girlfriend. “We will have a solution.”
Ryan said his party would provide the public with details of this plan once it had a chance to “customize” it after the Supreme Court invalidates Obamacare.
It’s progress that Ryan admits that people will be left in the lurch so that’s something. But I’m sure they can come up with some fake fix that they can force Obama to veto so it’s all good. For Republicans. You see, when he’s talking about people being left in the lurch that’s who he’s really talking about.
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It’s the inequality, stupid
by Tom Sullivan
Robert Reich looks at the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s “near-death experience” in Congress last week and explains that it is not that unions have gotten stronger or that the president has gotten weaker, but that the public no longer supports these trade deals. By about 2 to 1, as it works out. All the arguments in favor “are less persuasive in this era of staggering inequality.” Faced with the in-your-face unfairness of promised benefits accruing primarily to those in the top one percent, the public feels relatively worse off even if they are better off in some absolute sense. Reich writes:
To illustrate the point, consider a simple game I conduct with my students. I have them split up into pairs and ask them to imagine I’m giving $1,000 to one member of each pair.
I tell them the recipients can keep some of the money only on condition they reach a deal with their partner on how it’s to be divided up. They have to offer their partner a portion of the $1,000, and their partner must either accept or decline. If the partner declines, neither of them gets a penny.
You might think many recipients of the imaginary $1,000 would offer their partner one dollar, which the partner would gladly accept. After all, a dollar is better than nothing. Everyone is better off.
But that’s not what happens. Most partners decline any offer under $250 – even though that means neither of them gets anything.
[snip]
When a game seems arbitrary, people are often willing to sacrifice gains for themselves in order to prevent others from walking away with far more – a result that strikes them as inherently wrong.
Even a monkey can figure that out. Just not the One Percent.
Guess who’s being groomed for a promotion?
by digby
If you said Patrick Murphy, you’d be right. Chuck Schumer is very high on Murphy to fill Marco Rubio’s Senate seat. You see, only in the Democratic Party do they go out of their way to promote from among the top 10 congressmen who vote with the other party for the Senate. This can only be because they like that voting pattern and would like more of this, (which just happened last week):
On Tuesday night, Murphy was the only Democrat in the House to vote for two amendments by Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, aimed at blocking funding for the train. One Posey amendment failed on a 260-173 vote and another failed on a 275-148 vote. Grayson joined the rest of the Democratic caucus– including Palm Beach County Reps. Lois Frankel, Ted Deutch and Alcee Hastings– in opposing the Posey amendments. Grayson sent out a press release saying he “rallied with Congresswoman Corrine Brown (FL-5) and nearly every other House Democrat Tuesday night” to oppose the “anti-transportation” amendments. Grayson’s release also singles out Murphy as “the lone Democrat to side with Posey and the majority of Republicans who voted to hamper private financing for All Aboard Florida.”
Said Grayson: “All Aboard Florida will improve the lives of thousands of Floridians … Mr. Posey’s amendments will limit investment in projects like All Aboard Florida, and put us even farther behind the rest of the world when it comes to high-speed rail. We have an opportunity to improve the environment, get cars off the roads, and help the economies of both Miami and Orlando with this project. It makes zero sense to do anything that slows it down.” Murphy, on Facebook, posted: “My colleague Rep. Bill Posey offered several amendments to the Transportation spending bill this week to prohibit funding for All Aboard Florida. I’m very disappointed to see that the House did not approve his amendments, but we’ll continue to work together to stop All Aboard Florida.”
Murphy was the only Democrat in the Florida delegation to vote with the Republicans to gut a transportation bill. Why in the world would the Party think he’d be an asset in the Senate?
Florida isn’t one of those classic Red States where you have no choice but to find the most conservative Democrat they can find (and then lose anyway.) It’s a classic swing state that already boasts a Democratic Senator who is in the mainstream of his party. You’ll have to ask Schumer and gang why they feel they need to recruit a right winger for that seat.
Luckily, there are real progressives in Florida like Grayson who will likely run against Murphy in the primary. But the DC insiders really want Murphy. Apparently, it’s just getting too hard to past the centrist/conservative agenda with all those progressives in congress.
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Ok, the world is getting really freaky now
by digby
Residents of Tbilisi, Georgia, were warned to stay off the streets on Sunday lest they encounter one of the lions, tigers, bears or other beasts set free from the city zoo after floodwaters devastated the center of the capital.
At least 12 people died in the floods and 24 were reported missing, according to Davit Narmania, the mayor of Tbilisi. “Not all the animals that fled from the zoo have been caught yet,” the mayor was quoted as saying by Russia’s Interfax news agency. “Therefore I would ask the population to avoid moving around the city except in cases of acute need.”
It was not immediately clear how many animals were on the loose and how many had been killed in the floods. A usually burbling stream that feeds through a narrow gorge in parts of downtown Tbilisi turned into a raging torrent that burst its banks after heavy rains on Saturday night, local news reports said.
Images from the city underscored the animal anarchy — one showed a group of people herding a hippopotamus along a street choked with mud, after it had been hit by a tranquilizer dart. Others showed the corpses of animals amid the debris of wrecked cars and buildings. A bear perched above the roiling waters on an air-conditioning unit.
A special police team was dispatched to the neighborhoods around the zoo to hunt for the roaming animals, according to local television reports.
Some of the animals were killed when they could not be captured, the report said, including six wolves found on the grounds of a children’s hospital as well as a bear and a hyena. Some residents expressed indignation at those killings, but officials said various animals were too aggressive to be captured.
The director of the zoo, Zurab Gurielidze, called for an investigation into the killing of the animals. “If an animal attacked people, it’s one thing,” he was quoted as saying by Interfax. “I know that no order was issued to kill animals. Some policemen exceeded their authority.”
Zoo workers were quoted as saying that a full animal census was impossible because parts of the zoo remained under water, but a popular albino lion called Sumba was found shot dead on the grounds.
I realize floods have happened forever and that there have been times zoo animals escaped into big cities. But there’s just something that feels so contemporary about this one.
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The chokehold
by digby
If you read nothing else today, read this long article in the New York Times about the Eric Garner death. We know the basic outlines of the story but there are some new details that I, at least, hadn’t seen. Like this:
In the hours after Mr. Garner died, an initial five-page internal report prepared for senior police commanders, known as a 49, did not refer to contact with his neck. The report, as well as the actions of supervisors involved, is part of the review by the New York Police Department, a spokesman said.
Instead, the report quotes by name a witness who described seeing how “the two officers each took Mr. Garner by the arms and put him on the ground.” That same witness, Taisha Allen, later said she told the grand jury on Staten Island that she saw a chokehold. She said the statement attributed to her in the report was not accurate.
Without video of his final struggle, Mr. Garner’s death may have attracted little notice or uproar. Without seeing it, the world would not have known exactly how he died.
The video images were cited in the final autopsy report as one of the factors that led the city medical examiner to conclude that the chokehold and chest compression by the police caused Mr. Garner’s death. Absent the video, many in the Police Department would have gone on believing his death to have been solely caused by his health problems: obesity, asthma and hypertensive cardiovascular disease. The autopsy report, which is confidential, was provided by a person close to Mr. Garner’s family.
“We didn’t know anything about a chokehold or hands to the neck until the video came out,” said a former senior police official with direct knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his access to confidential department information. “We found out when everyone else did.”
I don’t know which worse: if they were in on the lie and are lying again or that they learned about the lie and didn’t take drastic action to hold the liars accountable. I guess it doesn’t matter.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating look at the entire affair. It does not reflect well on the NYPD to say the least.
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The concerns of the 1%
by digby
Since they pretty much own the political system outright, this should tell you what our government will be concerned about as well. Via DKos:
If you wonder why the government is obsessively concerned with cutting the safety net programs because of deficits that chart might answer your question.
And keep in mind that just having “liberal” billionaires fight conservative billionaires isn’t really going to work. They’re still billionaires. And even if every last one of them were Franklin and Eleanor reincarnated, conservative billionaires will always outnumber the liberal billionaires. By a factor of 1000.
That came from the Campaign for America’s Future conference on populism last month. Bob Borosage’s speech was quite compelling, I thought:
The New Populism arises from the stark truth about today’s America: Too few people control too much money and power, and they’re using that control to rig the rules to protect and extend their privileges.
This economy does not work for working people. This isn’t an accident. It isn’t an act of God. It isn’t due to forces of technology and globalization that can’t be changed. It isn’t a mistake. It is a power grab.
Decades of deregulation and top-end tax cuts, of soaring CEO pay and assaults on unions, of conservative myths and market fundamentalism have recreated Gilded Age extremes of wealth and power. Once more a new American plutocracy is emerging, doing what plutocrats always do – corrupting government to protect and expand their fortunes.
Americans don’t tolerate self-perpetuating aristocracies easily. Opposition to aristocratic wealth is as American as apple pie, dating back to the American Revolution, to Jefferson who warned about the “aristocracy of monied corporations.”
The Populist Tradition
The movement that gave populism its name swept out of the Plains states in the late 19th century as small farmers and steelworkers, day laborers and sharecroppers came together to take on the trusts, the railroads, the distant banks that were impoverishing them.
They railed against a government that handed public lands to the railroads, kept interest rates high, coddled monopolies and cracked the heads of workers trying to organize.
But in challenging the corrupted government, they came to a profound realization: that in the emerging industrial economy, simply cutting back government and limiting its powers would only free monopolies and banks to gouge even more from workaday Americans.
They concluded that they had to take back the government, turning it from the arm of the privileged to the people’s ally.
This led to two other challenges. First, they had to mobilize people to counter what Roosevelt called “organized money.”
And second, protest wasn’t enough. They had to invent new ideas, sweeping reforms to make the economy work for working people.
That populist movement lasted only a few years as an independent party, but the reforms it championed set the agenda for progressives for more than half a century – the minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, antitrust laws, the progressive income tax, a flat ban on subsidies to private corporations, and worker cooperatives. It mobilized millions around a new monetary policy. It pushed to expand democracy through direct elections of senators, initiatives and referenda. There’s a direct line from the Omaha Platform of the People’s Party in 1892 to FDR’s Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, whose 50th anniversary we honor this week.
Today’s new populism stands in that tradition.
People aren’t worried that the rich have lots of money. This isn’t about envy; it is about power – that the privileged and entrenched interests rig the game, so the economy does not work for working people.
Billionaires like Sheldon Anderson toy with politicians as if they were miniature plastic puppets. Millionaires pay lower taxes than their secretaries. Multinationals stash profits abroad and pay lower taxes than mom-and-pop stores. After all, as hotel magnate Leona Helmsley famously said, “only little people pay taxes.”
Wall Street bankers – the folks whose excesses blew up the economy and cost millions their homes and their jobs – were bailed out. Now they are back, posturing as masters of the universe once more, apparently immune from prosecution for the epidemic of fraud they profited from. Jails, after all, are for little people.
The top 1 percent is capturing fully 95 percent of the nation’s income growth. CEO salaries are up and corporate profits hit record heights, while workers incomes are stagnating and insecurity is rising.
Mobilized People vs. Mobilized Money
What will it take to make this economy work for working people again? Mobilized people will need to take on organized money. Investments in areas vital to our future can be paid for with progressive taxes. But redistribution isn’t enough. Sweeping structural reforms – expanding shared security, making work pay, curbing Wall Street speculation, balancing trade and more – are essential to any new deal.
The American people get it. They don’t need to be convinced on the issues. CAF is issuing a report today at PopulistMajority.org that documents the simple fact: the majority of Americans are with us. Citizens United? Four of five Americans want it repealed, including three-fourths of Republicans. Raise the minimum wage? No question. Curb Wall Street? Lloyd Blankfein may think Goldman Sachs is doing “God’s work,” but Americans want more accountability. Protect Social Security and Medicare? Even Tea Partiers agree.
This new populism is not something we have to invent. It is already stirring. It is Occupy Wall Street putting Gilded Age inequality at the center of our political debate. It’s exploited low-wage workers protesting fast-food restaurants in over 150 cities. A left-right congressional coalition forming against continuing ruinous corporate trade policies. Moral Monday protests against the assault on voting rights and the vulnerable mobilizing thousands in North Carolina and are spreading to Georgia and South Carolina. A feisty citizen’s opposition growing in rural areas to block big oil’s effort to frack their lands.
We can see it in the culture. The new Pope condemning the modern “idolatry of money” and the “tyranny of unfettered capitalism.” Or bizarrely, a 685-page book by an obscure French economist about wealth inequality heading the best-seller lists along with Danielle Steele’s steamy new novel, “First Sight.”
Forceful leaders are emerging like senators Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders; Rep. Keith Ellison; New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. The demand for change is rising from activists in the heart of the Obama majority, the rising American electorate of millennials, people of color and single women that have fared the worst in this economy. The organized base of the Democratic Party, from unions to community and civil rights groups, women and environmentalists, are pushing an agenda far bolder and broader than that now before the public.
Democrats in the Senate have now moved to a “fair shot” agenda, calling for raising the minimum wage, pay equity, paid family leave, and lowering student loan interest rates paid for by taxing millionaires. A Forbes Magazine columnist warns the GOP that they can’t ignore the new “populist wave.” Sen. Rand Paul argues that Republicans can’t simply be the party of “fat cats, rich people and Wall Street.” It might be too late for that.
The Challenge
Washington is gridlocked by Republican obstruction, so people are driving reforms from the bottom up. The minimum wage is being hiked from Hawaii to Maryland to Seattle, where it is headed to $15 an hour. Californians voted to tax the rich to invest in schools. Cleveland uses government procurement to support locally based, worker-owned cooperatives. Over a hundred cities have joined the call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
Pundits suggest that Republicans have the advantage in the low-turnout 2014 elections, with the Democratic base discouraged by the lousy economy. Elites in both parties warn against a new populism, as if the old politics held any answers for people.
But this isn’t about one election or one leader. The pressure for change is only beginning. People are waking up to the fact that the game is rigged. They won’t tolerate it for long. It will take muckraking, organizing, teaching, protests and demonstrations, new ideas and new allies. It will face fierce resistance. The wealthy and entrenched interests will spend lavishly to defend their privileges. Our system is designed to clog change, not facilitate it.
But when the people speak, politicians listen. And this new populist movement has only just begun. The stakes are fundamental – whether the democracy can in fact check the power of great wealth and entrenched interests. This is the challenge facing our democracy and for each one of us privileged to be its citizens.
And here’s Elizabeth Warren:
A heartbeat away
by digby
I know, it’s a cheap OMG. But … this person was on a presidential ticket:
Ok, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh… this hard. I know this isn’t a victimless crime, what this white chick perpetrated. But it’s a most crystal clear picture of so many screwed up things we’ve let society adopt as the norm. Namely, the practice nowadays of judging someone not based on character, but on skin color. Our original civil rights freedom fighters are rolling in their graves over the backward steps we’ve taken lately. It’s politically incorrect to call out Elizabeth Warren for falsely claiming she’s American Indian, or dinging Obama for just making up his former multi-ethnic girlfriend, and I guarantee I’ll be branded a racist for laughing at this Rachel Dolezal story. Whatever. Dolezal is an unsatisfied lily white leftist who believes the only thing less politically correct than being a white girl is to be a white guy today. Can’t help but be preemptively amused as I post this and invite Dolzel’s defenders wrath to aim and miss at we who won’t put up with political correctness destroying truth in America.
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About that spy thing
by digby
So a Rupert Murdoch rag claims that Edward Snowden gave the Russians his whole archive which endangered a bunch of MI6 agents. Yeah, I know. And Barack Obama was really born in Kenya.
Anyway, the story is obviously crap but that hasn’t stopped people from breathlessly commenting on it. Here’s Greenwald with the facts. After first relating the endless historical examples of the government lying about such things even including newspaper clippings showing the government and the press repeatedly shrieking that Daniel Ellsberg had given the Pentagon papers to the commies. So, this is SOP.
The government accusers behind this story have a big obstacle to overcome: namely, Snowden has said unequivocally that when he left Hong Kong, he took no files with him, having given them to the journalists with whom he worked, and then destroying his copy precisely so that it wouldn’t be vulnerable as he traveled. How, then, could Russia have obtained Snowden’s files as the story claims – “his documents were encrypted but they weren’t completely secure ” – if he did not even have physical possession of them?
The only way this smear works is if they claim Snowden lied, and that he did in fact have files with him after he left Hong Kong. The Sunday Times journalists thus include a paragraph that is designed to prove Snowden lied about this, that he did possess these files while living in Moscow:
It is not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden’s data, or whether he voluntarily handed over his secret documents in order to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.
David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 “highly classified” intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.
What’s the problem with that Sunday Times passage? It’s an utter lie. David did not visit Snowden in Moscow before being detained. As of the time he was detained in Heathrow, David had never been to Moscow and had never met Snowden. The only city David visited on that trip before being detained was Berlin, where he stayed in the apartment of Laura Poitras.
The Sunday Times “journalists” printed an outright fabrication in order to support their key point: that Snowden had files with him in Moscow. This is the only “fact” included in their story that suggests Snowden had files with him when he left Hong Kong, and it’s completely, demonstrably false (and just by the way: it’s 2015, not 1971, so referring to gay men in a 10-year spousal relationship with the belittling term “boyfriends” is just gross).
Then there’s the Sunday Times claim that “Snowden, a former contractor at the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), downloaded 1.7m secret documents from western intelligence agencies in 2013.” Even the NSA admits this claim is a lie. The NSA has repeatedly said that it has no idea how many documents Snowden downloaded and has no way to find out. As the NSA itself admits, the 1.7 million number is not the number the NSA claims Snowden downloaded – they admit they don’t and can’t know that number – but merely the amount of documents he interacted with in his years of working at NSA. Here’s then-NSA chief Keith Alexander explaining exactly that in a 2014 interview with the Australian Financial Review:
AFR: Can you now quantify the number of documents [Snowden] stole?
Gen. Alexander: Well, I don’t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we don’t have an accurate way of counting. What we do have an accurate way of counting is what he touched, what he may have downloaded, and that was more than a million documents.
Let’s repeat that: “I don’t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we don’t have an accurate way of counting.” Yet someone whispered to the Sunday Times reporters that Snowden downloaded 1.7 million documents, so like the liars and propagandists that they are, they mindlessly printed it as fact. That’s what this whole article is.
Then there’s the claim that the Russian and Chinese governments learned the names of covert agents by cracking the Snowden file, “forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries.” This appears quite clearly to be a fabrication by the Sunday Times for purposes of sensationalism, because if you read the actual anonymous quotes they include, not even the anonymous officials claim that Russia and China hacked the entire archive, instead offering only vague assertions that Russian and China “have information.”
Beyond that, how could these hidden British officials possibly know that China and Russia learned things from the Snowden files as opposed to all the other hacking and spying those countries do? Moreover, as pointed out last night by my colleague Ryan Gallagher – who has worked for well over a year with the full Snowden archive – “I’ve reviewed the Snowden documents and I’ve never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents.” He also said: “I’ve seen nothing in the region of 1m documents in the Snowden archive, so I don’t know where that number has come from.”
Finally, none of what’s in the Sunday Times is remotely new. US and UK government officials and their favorite journalists have tried for two years to smear Snowden with these same claims. In June, 2013, the New York Times gave anonymity to “two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies” who “said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.” The NYT‘s Public Editor chided the paper for printing that garbage, and as I reported in my book, then-editor-in-chief Jill Abramson told the Guardian‘s Janine Gibson that they should not have printed that, calling it “irresponsible.” (And that’s to say nothing of the woefully ignorant notion that Snowden – or anyone else these days – stores massive amounts of data on “four laptops” as opposed to tiny thumb drives).
The GOP’s right-wing extremist Congressman Mike Rogers constantly did the same thing. He once announced with no evidence that “Snowden is working with Russia” – a claim even former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell denies – and also argued that Snowden should “be charged with murder” for causing unknown deaths. My personal favorite example of this genre of reckless, desperate smears is the Op-Ed which the Wall Street Journal published in May, 2014, by neocon Edward Jay Epstein, which had this still-hilarious paragraph:
A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.
It must be one of those, an anonymous official told me! It must be! Either Russia did it. Or China did it. Or they did it together! That is American journalism.
It’s entirely possible that some kind of breach happened that revealed the names of some British agents. As Greenwald says, there’s been a whole lot of hacking going on. And I suppose its predictable that they would blame any breaches on Snowden but the fact that they got important facts wrong is a sign that they’re just throwing this out there and the press isn’t bothering to check the facts they have at hand. One would have at least thought they’d question why the Russians waited for two years before checking Snowden’s invisible laptop. But that’s just how they roll.
The British have turned into monsters when it comes to this surveillance and spying stuff. It brings into sharp focus why the Americans decided to write down a Bill of Rights when their revolution succeeded. They knew better than to leave anything to “trust”. Even themselves.
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