Living in a democracy means not always getting what you want

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Monday July 08, 2013 · 10:14 AM PDT

2013/07/08 · 10:14

I oppose the military coup in Egypt, and here's why: It doesn't matter if Mohamed Morsi lied, it doesn't matter if he did the opposite of what he promised to do, it doesn't matter if he committed crimes, and it doesn't matter how many voters wanted him gone.

None of that is a justification for the military overthrowing a democratically elected government. And this is a lesson that Americans really still haven't learned -- voters are ultimately responsible for everything that the President does. Electing a poor leader and then having to endure poor leadership for many years is the price that voters should have to pay for making poor choices.

pwtenny

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Monday July 01, 2013 · 11:00 AM PDT

2013/07/01 · 11:00

no image description available — The National Security Agency's new data center in Bluffdale, Utah.

An aerial view of the NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah, Thursday, June 6, 2013. The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect such records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The National Security Agency's new data center in Bluffdale, Utah.

Is it possible for the National Security Agency to store the content of one billion phone calls per day? Are some of the world's largest information providers like Amazon even capable of that?

Using publicly available information about the storage capabilities of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and rumors about the capabilities of the NSA's new Utah data center due to come online later this year, I take a hard look at what's possible and what's reasonable for intelligence agencies and private companies to be able to store incredible numbers of telephone calls in the era of Big Data.

pwtenny

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Friday June 28, 2013 · 8:20 PM PDT

2013/06/28 · 20:20

If you didn't watch the live stream of the 2013 Socialism Conference in Chicago tonight, you missed out on something very special.

Greenwald spoke at the conference tonight via Skype, and he gave a quick preview of some upcoming stories he's working on at The Guardian concerning the National Security Agency.

pwtenny

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Thursday July 12, 2012 · 2:11 PM PDT

2012/07/12 · 14:11

That's not the point of the legislation, but that'd be the legal precedent set if it were passed and then upheld by the courts.

The Stolen Valor Act of 2005 was a truly heinous piece of legislation that sought to criminalize lying about military service and achievements, that received wide support from both major political parties and passed the Senate by unanimous consent, before being signed into law by George W. Bush in 2006. No vote in the Senate was required because only a single audible objection would have prevented its passage.

There wasn't one.

Out of the 100 elected representatives that swore to defend and uphold the Constitution, not one single person voiced an objection to the federal criminalization of lying. As has often become the case with Congress, the worst acts it commits against its citizens and the Constitution are those which enjoy strong bipartisan agreement. Leaders of both parties, in rare acts of cooperation, streamline the process to pass legislation without public hearings or meaningful debate of any kind.

pwtenny

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Thursday July 21, 2011 · 2:26 PM PDT

2011/07/21 · 14:26

MSNBC re-establishes its credentials as an upstanding member of the sycophantic, rotten and corrupt media

MSNBC's de facto firing of Cenk Uygur yesterday should serve as a reminder that the most pervasive myth in American politics -- that of the liberal media – is utterly and demonstrably absurd. Despite every major media outlet being owned by powerful corporations, which are typically owned or run by economic conservatives, there exists this wild idea that newsrooms are entirely independent of their corporate masters run by liberals bent on influencing American policy through bias.

That's pure fantasy.

The "paper of record", the New York Times, supposedly the most liberal paper in the country, uncritically repeated questionable Bush administration claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and allowed those officials to anonymously smear critics of the war without any accountability. Despite breaking the story of Bush's illegal domestic wiretapping program, the Times held it back for over a year, until Bush had safely won reelection. That same paper today quotes anonymous Obama administration officials in precisely the same way, continually serving what has become the primary function of the American media: securing access to powerful politicians and administration officials so they can faithfully repeat and amplify anything said as willing state-run propagandists and stenographers.

pwtenny

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Friday July 08, 2011 · 2:51 PM PDT

2011/07/08 · 14:51

Hypocrisy isn't a unique trait to conservatives/Republicans, but exists in especially high quantities in conservative politicians and the Republican Party generally. You can count on them aggressively pursuing today anything and practically everything they criticized yesterday. The "nanny state" rhetoric is a favorite of many GOP hacks to decry invasions of personal liberty by government, and especially interference in private markets. Wikipedia defines it in modern American terms as "where the state is perceived as being excessive in its desire to protect, govern or control particular aspects of society."

For example:

No normally functioning mind should be capable of making statements like that, only to do things like this:

Or this:

pwtenny

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Wednesday July 06, 2011 · 11:02 AM PDT

2011/07/06 · 11:02

The Michele Bachmann's of the world are created and enabled by the right's Middle Eastern'esque radicalization of politics

After finally getting around to reading more of Matt Taibbi's fantastic profile of Michelle Bachmann, I wanted to take a moment to repeat something I've written about once before.

While I find a lot of Bachmann's history and character to be disturbing and dangerous – the going to get us all killed type in a literal sense – I'm drawn more to what the existence of the Bachmann's of the world says about the people who make their rise to power and celebrity possible.

This passage from the profile perfectly illustrates my point:

Bachmann won a fairly independent district by an eight point margin. In her runs for Congress, Bachmann discovered — or perhaps it is more accurate to say we all discovered — that a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality are no longer hindrances to higher office.

The end of that should be rewritten so that it more accurately says "...a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality is no barrier to getting votes from most Republicans, and some supposed independents."

While one could debate the reasons why Democrats don't vote for Bachmann, it ultimately serves no purpose because it doesn't speak to why Republicans are willing – excited even – to vote for a serial liar who has never actually accomplished a single stated goal in her entire professional political career.

pwtenny

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Friday July 01, 2011 · 12:21 PM PDT

2011/07/01 · 12:21

Matt Taibbi's profile of Michele Bachmann in Rolling Stone should be required reading for anyone who intends to vote in the 2012 GOP primary and then general election, if she wins the Republican nomination. Such profiles by skilled journalists should be mandatory for every presidential candidate in every election, for that matter. The things you can learn – even if you're just short of a closed minded fanatic – should change your views of a candidate considerably, whether you're a fanboy or a hater. These profiles are some of the most illustrative guides to the decisions a candidate will make once they are freed from the brief and superficial accountability constraints of an election, because they look at the events that shaped the person and their way of thinking.

In the case of Bachmann, what you'll learn from Taibbi's profile ought to keep you up at night, wondering who might really be running this country during a potential Bachmann administration. I haven't finished reading the story myself, but I felt strongly compelled to stop and think long and hard about the consequences of electing a Christian fundamentalist to the White House.

pwtenny

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Saturday January 08, 2011 · 4:50 PM PST

2011/01/08 · 16:50

I received an email from the Associated Press at 2:42pm, EST, saying that Representative Gabrielle Giffords was dead. Killed by an unnamed gunman "at a public event" in Arizona earlier today, according to "law enforcement officials" who told NPR and CNN.

How exciting that must have been. Who got the scoop? Who will get credit for reporting the death? Which of you other bastards in the media didn't put your logo on your air?

Forty-six minutes later, another email from the AP came in: Representative Giffords was alive, and in critical condition.

She had been shot in the head, which they didn't know before.

MSNBC.com's front page said five people were dead including a federal judge, but they didn't know who.

You don't know who is dead, but it includes a federal judge?

pwtenny

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Wednesday May 05, 2010 · 6:19 PM PDT

2010/05/05 · 18:19

This is a follow-up to the story I wrote yesterday, adding more statements by the Republican party in their war on the Constitution and their eagerness to destroy our democracy and replace it with a fascist tyranny.

Do you think that's irresponsible hyperbole, or rhetoric?

Not when GOP Senator Lindsey Graham and twice-former GOP presidential candidate and Senator John McCain, Representative Peter King, and soon-to-be-jobless Joe Lieberman all agree that our government should strip U.S. citizenship of people who have merely been accused of a crime.

It's bad enough that these Congressmen – sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution – badly want us to ignore the constitutional rights of American citizens merely because of what they are accused of having done, with no evidence, no trial, and no finding of guilt by a jury in a court of law. All required by the Constitution, all critical and irreplaceable cornerstones of any democracy and the hallmark of a civilized society.

pwtenny

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Wednesday June 10, 2009 · 3:40 PM PDT

2009/06/10 · 15:40

The incident at the D.C. Holocaust Museum just happened a little over an hour ago and it will undoubtedly dominate the news for at least the next couple of days, but it's really not that hard or unreasonable to draw some preliminary conclusions.

First and foremost, early reports have the shooter -- a spry 89 years old -- linked to "anti-government" and "white supremacist" groups.

In other words, he's probably a Republican.

pwtenny

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Thursday May 28, 2009 · 7:48 AM PDT

2009/05/28 · 07:48

"who hasn’t lived that life" seems pretty innocuous and certainly doesn't sound like game changing language, but as they say, context is everything.

It started a little over three weeks ago when Jeffery Rosen was taken out behind a shed and shot by Glenn Greenwald for a character assassination hit piece on appellate judge Sonia Sotomayor, who at the time was on the short list but not actually at the top of said list. William Kristol, who can be said to reliably represent the current thinking of the hard right, had settled on Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, apparently because President Obama said the word "practical" seven times in a single interview.

That's roughly representative of conservative intellectualism in America now. What explanation is there for the current GOP obsession over what Sotomayor eats and how that makes her unfit to be a Supreme Court justice, other than sheer stupidity?

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