I'm subbing this morning on APR. However, the New York Times has a guest columnist today who might be slightly more important.
Edward Snowden says that the world has changed, but warns that the job isn't over.
Two years ago today, three journalists and I worked nervously in a Hong Kong hotel room, waiting to see how the world would react to the revelation that the National Security Agency had been making records of nearly every phone call in the United States. In the days that followed, those journalists and others published documents revealing that democratic governments had been monitoring the private activities of ordinary citizens who had done nothing wrong.
Within days, the United States government responded by bringing charges against me under World War I-era espionage laws. The journalists were advised by lawyers that they risked arrest or subpoena if they returned to the United States. Politicians raced to condemn our efforts as un-American, even treasonous. ...
Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated.
You know, there's still time. Presidential pardon. Nice televised apology. Maybe polish up a medal or two? Too bad there's no opposing article from McTurtle. One more quote from Snowden.
At the turning of the millennium, few imagined that citizens of developed democracies would soon be required to defend the concept of an open society against their own leaders.
9/11 changed everything. Mostly what it changed was the meaning of the term "bravery," It was redefined to meaning "doing anything, no matter how despicable, in the name of not getting hurt." Which, oddly enough, used to be the definition of cowardice.
Come on it, get the pundits while they're still fresh-ish.
Paul Krugman looks at the conservative economic experiment in Texas.
Remember the Texas economic miracle? In 2012, it was one of the three main arguments from then-Gov. Rick Perry about why he should be president, along with his strong support from the religious right and something else I can’t remember (sorry, couldn’t help myself). More broadly, conservatives have long held Texas up as a supposed demonstration that low taxes on the rich and harsh treatment of the poor are the keys to prosperity.
So it’s interesting to note that Texas is looking a lot less miraculous lately than it used to. ...
Texas wasn’t supposed to be like other states. It was supposed to be the shining exemplar of the economic payoff to reverse Robin-Hood economics. So its recent disappointments hit the right-wing cause hard — especially coming on the heels of the Kansas debacle.
What's the matter with Kansas, and Texas, and lots of other states? Errr... Republican economic policies based on theories that didn't work, don't work, and never will work.
Caitlin Grill welcomes her new namesake.
Hello, Caitlyn! It is my pleasure indeed to #callyouCaitlyn, as everyone #callsmeCaitlin. Yes, I, too, am a Caitli(y)n, and I’m so pleased to welcome you to the sisterhood. You’re in excellent company! ...
... we actually have more in common than just a name. At six-foot-one, I am just shy of your height. I am just over half your age, but with my complete lack of fitness and your past as the World’s Greatest Athlete, I think we close that gap. For example, I can hear both of us saying, “Gee, I feel 50 today!” We are also both entertainers. You, at the peak of celebrity with your reality television fame and upcoming E! documentary series, and me, a stand-up comic who was in that commercial for Credit Karma.
Caitlin has served me very well as a name, I hope it does the same for you. It’s a beautiful name, and it’s fun to say excitedly. CAITlyn! It just pops! Shout it from the rooftops! Or to your millions of followers on the fastest-growing Twitter account ever created!
Hiya, Cat.
Kathleen Parker on the people not welcoming Caitlyn Jenner.
Barring a terror strike or an Ebola outbreak to distract us, the 2016 presidential election seems headed for a gender identity showdown.
Within days of the release of Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover photo, Republican presidential candidates were being asked to comment, while conservative pundits were warning of a political apocalypse.
Leading the charge was Rush Limbaugh, who has advised the GOP to reject Caitlyn Jenner, even if she is a Republican. Big Tent Sign: Transgender People Not Welcome Here.
Parker starts off sounding like she might be reasonable, but then goes into the "single sex toilets" argument that the GOP has hauled out for every even tangentially gender related issue since the ERA and marries it to a "big liberal media is forcing us to move too fast" theme. Parker thinks Jenner's photo-shoot looks like something out of the 50's. So do some of Parker's comments.
Timothy Eagan reminds us of what's worth worrying about.
Some time ago, a friend of mine was hit by a bus in New York, one of almost 5,000 pedestrians killed in traffic every year. I also lost a nephew to gun violence — one of more than 11,000 Americans slain by firearms in this country. And I fell out of a tree that I was trying to prune in my backyard. I was O.K. But the guy next to me in the trauma ward was paralyzed from his fall. He was taking down his Christmas lights.
So it goes. Life is full of risk. Every day brings a minor calculation with the possibility of mortality: cross the street on red, get on a plane, jog in the heat.
It was encouraging, then, to watch the congressional debate this week over the Patriot Act, and realize that we are learning how to be afraid. At least, we’re starting to put the infinitesimal risk of being killed by a terrorist in perspective.
Who knows? Maybe we'll actually implement sensible policy in other areas, and stop locking people away for decades on nonviolent offenses. Or even start locking people away when their crime involves stealing tens of millions instead of just tens. We can dream
The New York Times on how voting rights play into 2016.
A basic fact often gets lost in the propaganda that swirls around voting laws in this country: between one-quarter and one-third of all eligible voters — more than 50 million Americans — are not registered.
That alarming statistic is the backdrop to efforts by Republicans in recent years to pass state laws that restrict ballot access, a recent Democratic campaign to push back against those laws, and a bold set of proposals that Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out Thursday afternoon ...
Most significantly, Mrs. Clinton called for universal and automatic voter registration, which would register every American citizen at 18. This would be a transformative step toward modernizing the nation’s archaic, error-filled approach to registering voters.
It's hard to think of how Republicans will mount a reasonable argument against the idea that every adult citizen should be automatically registered to vote, but don't worry. Reasonable has never been a requirement for Republican arguments.
Bill McKibben in the Washington Post. Excites me about as much as seeing the Snowden column in the NYT.
If historians someday need to explain how mankind managed to blow the fight against climate change, they need only point to last month’s shareholder meeting at Exxon Mobil headquarters in Dallas.
The meeting came two days after Texas smashed old rainfall records — almost doubled them, in some cases — and as authorities were still searching for families swept away after rivers crested many feet beyond their previous records. As Exxon Mobil’s Rex Tillerson — the highest-paid chief executive of the richest fossil fuel firm on the planet — gave his talk, the death toll from India’s heat wave mounted and pictures circulated on the Internet of Delhi’s pavement literally melting. Meanwhile, satellite images showed Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf on the edge of disintegration.
And how did Tillerson react? By downplaying climate change and mocking renewable energy. To be specific, he said that “inclement weather” and sea level rise “may or may not be induced by climate change,” but in any event technology could be developed to cope with any trouble. “Mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity and those solutions will present themselves as those challenges become clear,” he said.
An enormous capacity to do anything that doesn't affect Exxon's bottom line, of course.
Science Daily has an image of the newly discovered Regaliceratops, a horned dinosaur with a difference.
The new dinosaur's most distinctive feature is that frill, including what Brown describes as a halo of large, pentagonal plates radiating outward, as well as a central spike. "The combined result looks like a crown," he says.
I guess they could have slipped a
rex into the name, but... it's been done.