Visual source: Newseum
Clinton era Assistant Defense Secretary Joseph Nye is no fan of Julian Assange, but he's unpersuaded by the U.S. approach regarding him:
One-third of the world’s population is now online. As we are seeing in the Middle East, this fact is changing global politics. An information revolution is shifting power away from states. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has called for “a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us” in such a world. She says she backs the “freedom to connect” for people everywhere, and calls on others in the Middle East and Asia to follow. But if she believes this, why is the US trying to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange? …
Instead, we should learn from more advanced approaches, in banks and other companies, to develop systems that classify less and protect data better. Better procedures should also be developed for dealing with things that are likely to be leaked, and how in turn this relates to our laws and to principles we are trying to establish for the internet.
Amy Davidson takes some gentle pokes at Rep. Peter King, when she should have kicked his ass.
Eugene Robinson does kick his ass, starting with this paragraph, and then cranking it up:
"There is nothing radical or un-American in holding these hearings," Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) claimed Thursday as he launched his McCarthyite probe of American Muslims. He could not have been more wrong. If King is looking for threats to our freedoms and values, a mirror would be the place to start
And Mike Littwin mopped up the Irish Republican Army supporter:
King told The Times that he understood "why people who are misinformed might see a parallel" between the IRA and al-Qaeda. "The fact is," he said, "the IRA never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States."
But a piece in Salon recalls the 1983 Christmas-season Harrods bombing, in which six people were killed, including an American, Kenneth Salvesan, 28, a business consultant from Chicago. Eighty-four were wounded that day. And King, it's fair to say, didn't go to help find the killers.
Personal experience tells Dave Weigel that, federal dollars or no, NPR will continue to be a Republican punching bag forever even if it becomes National Private Radio:
NPR is eternally apologizing for its liberal image, and it does so because it gets government funding. But would that change if the source of NPR's funding changed? No matter how NPR survives (and it's going to, even if [Sen. Jim] DeMint takes power in a coup tomorrow), it will owe some donor something. Its donors will be subject to public pressure. There will be critics who will attempt—and succeed—to discredit what it reports because of who funds it.
One of the best things about Paul Krugman is that he's a liberal who, unlike too many of the breed, isn't afraid to piss people off on his own side of the spectrum:
Health care is only one of the large and difficult problems America needs to deal with, ranging from infrastructure to climate change, all of which demand that we engage in a lot of hard thinking. Yet what we have instead is a political culture in which one side sneers at knowledge and exalts ignorance, while the other side hunkers down and pretends to halfway agree.
A Los Angeles Times Editorial calls Secure Communities, which was designed to track and deport violent criminals who aren't citizens, a major flop that has diverted state and local police from what they should be doing. Sixty percent of the 87,534 immigrants deported were guilty of minor or no crimes.
William Rivers Pitt:
On this day, it behooves us to remember the words of Martin Niemoller.
"First they came for the communists," he wrote, "and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."
I am a trade unionist, and yesterday in Wisconsin, they came for me. They came for you. They came for every working person in America, and their intent could not be more clear. Governor Scott Walker, along with the Koch Brothers and the right-wing radicals of the Republican Party, moved in darkness and with shameless deceit to gut the ability of dedicated laborers to bargain on an equal footing for the right to earn a living wage and to have access to decent health care.
Leonard C. Goodman says it's time American Jews who are Israel's true friends to stop supporting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee:
AIPAC is a victim of its own success. Its army of lobbyists, op-ed writers and big-money campaign donors have been rated above the National Rifle Association in effectiveness. It can get both Congress and the executive branch to blindly support Israel and shut down any debate that might expose the folly of that policy. The consequence is that the hardliners in Israel have been given the green light to colonize the West Bank and East Jerusalem, foreclosing the possibility of a settlement with the Palestinians, while the U.S. continues to talk about a “peace process” and a “two-state solution” but no one listens anymore to what we say.
Susan Nielsen argues unpersuasively that getting rid of the statute of limitations for all child sex abuse crimes—as some have proposed in Oregon (and elsewhere)—may do more harm than good.