Journalism: Come Get Some!

Now that everybody is a journalist (and, mind you, I have no problem with the parameters being set to "a pulse, a blog and a POV" as long as we all understand that means everyone from Jeff Gannon to the Weekly World News to Jennifer Rubin to Ann Coulter is now in the club) here is some Big Time Journalism that I'm sure your Crazy Uncle Liberty is all cranked up over but that you, being a dirty Liberal who does not love America, might have missed.

Insider: Obama Openly Weeping: 'They're Going To Impeach Me'

A White House insider claims that Barack Obama has confided to friends, "They're going to impeach me."

That's the revelation coming from the Globe which also claims that a distressed Obama "can't eat or sleep" and "has been walking the White House's halls at night, bizarrely staring at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln for inspiration."

According to the tabloid, an "inside source" claims; "Numerous times his aides and friends have seen him openly weeping" and Obama "is petrified that he will have to resign in disgrace or be thrown out of office in disgrace."

Of course, talk of impeachment is not confined to the tabloids. Andrew B Wilson recently opened an article, "Impeach Obama?" for the American Spectator by posing the question: "Don’t even think it, Rush says. But let’s think it anyway."...

It has everything:  an "inside source", quotes from real, live, dead-tree newspaper,  a link to a high-traffic Conservative site that you might have heard of, an out-of-context link to a dirty Hippie just to show that the journalist is reasonable and balanced

On the liberal side of the world, Michael Tomasky, writing for the Daily Beastrecently spoke at length on the subject in an article titled "The Coming Attempt to Impeach Obama:"

"[T]he double-barrel revelations that the White House hasn’t quite been telling the whole story on Benghazi and that some mid-level IRS people targeted some Tea Party groups for scrutiny are guaranteed to ramp up the crazy [on impeachment]... and the people in the White House damn well better fear the same..."

Tomasky attempted to redeem himself to his liberal audience by saying the idea of impeaching Obama is "industrial-strength insane," but he still conceded that it's well within the realm of possibility...

and even a poll in which people are asked stuff -- 

A poll conducted by Wenzel Strategies last month indicated that 48% of Americans wanted to see Obama impeached over the IRS scandal. 

The most shocking aspect of the poll however was that one in four Democrats wanted to see Obama impeached over the IRS Scandal.

The same poll indicated that "50.1% of those polled said that Obama’s conduct with regard to Benghazi alone justified impeachment, with 27.6% of those responders self-identifying as Democrats."

Fritz Wenzel went so far as to say, "the American public is building a serious appetite for it."

-- by an polling outfit that has business cards and everything.

World News Daily, aka WND is reporting the surprising results of a poll conducted on its behalf by Wenzel Strategies.

Like it or not, in our brave new world of Truthinews, the job of fact-checking, source-vetting and the basic editorial function of bullshit-testing has been outsourced to you the reader.

So on the plus side, congratulations on your promotion!

On the minus side, your new job duties do not come with a raise, a parking space or dental coverage.

A Shocking Revelation

Government propagandist shown here attempting to convince Americans to assist federal agents in tracking their location!

According to documents recently uncovered by this blogger, it can now be incontrovertibly confirmed that every day, agents of the federal government personally sift through over 600 million pieces of our private correspondence.

With an annual budget of over 70 billions dollars, over half a million of agents in virtually every city and town in all 50 states and its own federalized police force, this innocuously named "Postal Service" stands on the brink of annihilating all liberty and privacy in the United States at the merest whim of the executive branch.

In a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Court noted: "Each day, according to the Government's submissions here, the United States Postal Service delivers some 660 million pieces of mail to as many as 142 million delivery points."[32] As of 2011, the USPS operates 31,000 post offices and locations in the U.S., and delivers 177 billion pieces of mail annually.[5]

"It's true," said a highly placed insider who spoke to me on condition of anonymity.  "In fact 'Linda' [the names of specific federal agents involved in this crime against Liberty are being withheld pending confirmation] is headin' to the back right now to sort out a whole bag of oddball junk."

Nine

Paragraphs 

Later

Of course without a properly executed court order it is still illegal for anyone but you (or, let's face it, your spouse) to open your mail, and any US postal service personnel caught opening your mail would be subject to immediate termination, fines and imprisonment, but since it is theoretically possible that the government could spontaneously decide to secretly do the opposite, we should all be terrified.

Professional Left Podcast #186

"Never think you've seen the last of anything."

-- Eudora Welty

Links:

• Fellow podcaster Matt Filipowicz got robbed on his way back from NN. 
• Bob and Chez podcast.
• Matt Taibbi on advocacy journalism.

Da' money goes here:

David Brooks Tries To Write Science Fiction Again -- UPDATE

Oh boy!

In the past, America's Most Famous Conservative Public Intellectual's dabblings in speculative literature have been largely confined to leaden exercises in Whig fan fiction alternate history: stories in which the slate of Modern Conservatism is wiped entirely clean of the presence of Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay and Lee Atwater and George Bush and Jerry Falwell and Rick Santorum and Phyllis Schlafly and on and on and on.  Or, as one wag put it, 

 ...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

Pulling this ridiculous exercise off is tricky, requiring that the Conservative Mr. Brooks abruptly pivot in the middle of his career, wrap himself aggressively around the leg of Fake Centrism and violently hump this shit out of it come what may.  Because as that same obscure wag said on a different occasion:

These stories are not about the world as it actually exists, but the world as Mr. Brooks wishes it to be.  And since he is not a very good fiction writer, there are many, many points where the gears of the real world and his fake Whig World grind and howl, forcing Mr. Brooks to apply gallons of fictive lubricant to keep the keening noise of the real world ripping Whig World off its hinges from drowning out the tepid drone of his writing.

When Mr. Brooks needs an imaginary moral high ground of Centrism on which to stand, he conjures an imaginary army of Dirty Fucking Hippies on the Left that exactly counterpoises the very real mob of Pig People on the Right. 
...

Sure, if he had to fend for a living in the real world where you and I live, Mr. Brooks would starve to death under a bridge within minutes.  But Mr. Brooks does not live in the real world.  He lives in an alternate universe of wealth and privilege where his friends and financial backers continue to completely insulate him from the brutal professional consequences that would normally accompany getting caught in public over and over and over again piling such ridiculous bullshit so very high and deep.

...

And ironically it is here -- in Mr. Brooks' obsessive contempt for the real world as it really is and in his pathological denialism about his own past -- that Mr. Brooks is at his most deeply Conservative.  Like Michelle Malkin (who Mr. Brooks dismisses as "a loon") the more Mr. Brooks lies about the real world as it really is to please his audience, the more he prospers.  And the clearer it becomes that his prosperity is directly tied to his lies, the more operatic those lies become -- such as his complete revision of the entire history of Conservatism to infuse it with a genteel, communitarian spirit that never was and to omit all the inconveniently icky stuff that actually turned it into a cultural and electoral force to be reckoned with...

But history runs in two directions, and so having already conquered the past and scrubbed it of any reference of the actual, ugly Conservatism that shaped so much of recent American history and gave David Brooks a career, today Mr. Brooks turned his attention to America's bright, multicultural future where, apparently, the entire Republican Party has wandered off into the woods and been eaten by bears.

Let’s make some educated guesses about what the New America will look like. It will almost certainly be economically dynamic. Immigration boosts economic dynamism, and more immigration would boost it more. There would also be a lot of upward striving. Immigrant groups tend to work harder than native groups. They save more. They start business at higher rates than natives.

Sweet!

Soon there will be no dominant block, just complex networks of fluid streams — Vietnamese, Bengalis, Kazakhs. It’s a bit like the end of the cold war when bipolar thinking had to give way to a radically multipolar mind-set.

Awesome!  Devon Avenue from sea to shining sea! 

This won’t lead to a bland mélange America but probably a move to ethnic re-orthodoxy. As Alvaro Vargas Llosa points out in his book, “Global Crossings,” the typical pattern is that the more third-generation people assimilate, the more they also value their ethnic roots. We could soon see people with completely unaccented English joining Chinese-American Federations and Honduran-American Support Networks.

Sadly, like every other crap amateur SF short story I have ever edited and handed back festooned with red ink, while the future Mr. Brooks' describes in his rejected submission to 20/20 Vision sounds very nice, it suffers from a plot hole through which you can drive an entire Vogon Constructor Fleet.

Where did all the Republicans go, Mr. Brooks?

Since no GOP-eating bears ever actually manifested themselves in your story, readers will want to know  -- will demand to know -- whatever became of all of those wingnut friends of yours in your happy future?  That massive, electorally powerful clown posse who, 150 years after Gettysburg, still aren't over it?  Who now have a complete stranglehold on the Party of Lincoln?  Who have made it perfectly clear they are willing to use America's second largest political party to grind the business of the federal government to a halt?  Who are bulldozing the states they control as far back into the Dark Ages as fast they can manage, while selling off the air and land and water and future of tomorrow's striving immigrants to today's transnational corporations.

Because, Mr. Brooks, without some minimally plausible explanation of how the hell we got from our present to your future that will pass muster with the averagely bright 12-year-old (A wingnut-specific plague?  Benevolent alien intervention?) neither F&SF nor Asimov's nor any other respectable publication is going to touch your fairy tale of America's Shiny Whig Tomorrow with a barge pole.

UPDATE:

Then again, with the right circle of friends who needs the respect of respectable publications anyway?

Talking about redefining success, on four-legged stools, with @nytdavidbrooks @huffpostlive pic.twitter.com/qgh4dCWR5o
— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) June 28, 2013

The Diamond Dogs Are Poachers And They Hide Behind Trees

Once again, Senator Dronehero Q. Goldstandard (R, Galt's Gulch) is forced to make absolutely clear to all of his "A=A", Objectivist fanboys that the Santorum that geysered out of his face-hole yesterday was sorta, kinda the opposite of what really meant to say.

Rand Paul Walks Back Suggestion That Gay Marriage Will Lead to Interspecies Marriage 

By Dan Amira

Rand Paul confident that humans will continue marrying other humans.

Rand Paul, heroic champion of limited government, told Glenn Beck this morning that he's worried gay marriage will lead to marriages between humans and nonhumans — literally the world's most insulting, ignorant, and nonsensical argument against gay marriage. "It is difficult because if we have no laws on this people take it to one extension further," Paul said. "Does it have to be humans?"

Perhaps realizing how bad such backward drivel would sound to his legions of young, libertarian supporters, Paul called backsies on the comments later in the day. "I don’t think it will be with multiple humans, and I think it will be human and human," Paul clarified on Fox News.

...

At this point, the answer that leaps immediately to the Conservative mind regarding pretty much any question on pretty much any issue is either "Tax Cuts!", "Welfare Queens!", "Vaginae Terrify Me!" or "Butt Sex with Farm Animals!"

Not that it harms them in any way, because fer sure somewhere out there some Hippie is probably planning something nefarious, so, y'know, worst case is you get "Both Sides Do It" probation, which means performing nine seconds of nominal community service in the form of issuing the Perfunctory Republican Non-Apology in full knowledge that the meatsticks on the Right will already have heard your dog whistle loud and clear.

Schrodinger's Mo’s: Now More Than Ever

In honor of the United States Supreme Court finding that gay and lesbian Americans have the same civil rights as me, I am reposting this shamelessly TLDR piece of mine from 2006:

Schrodinger's Mo’s

No, you get in the fucking box.

Let’s lead off with this bit of Constitutional Horseshit hacky-sack from the Dear Leader via the NYT:

June 5, 2006

Gay Marriage Ban Is Short of Votes in Senate

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush rallied support Monday for a ban on gay marriage as the Senate opened a volatile, election-year debate on a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex weddings.

''Changing the definition of marriage would undermine the structure of the family,'' said Bush, who raised the issue's profile with an event at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Bush criticized judges who have overturned state laws similar in intent to the proposed legislation. ''Marriage is the most fundamental institution of civilization, and it should not be redefined by activist judges,'' he said.

Traditional marriage, Bush said, is the cornerstone of a healthy society and the issue should be put ''back where it belongs: in the hands of the American people.''

There was little chance of that in the near future. Neither chamber is likely to pass the amendment by the two-thirds majority required to send it to the states -- three quarters of which would then have to approve it.

...

''A vote for this amendment is a vote for bigotry pure and simple,'' said Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, where the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriages in 2003.

...

''The reason for this debate is to divide our society, to pit one against another,'' [Senate Democratic Leader Harry] Reid said in remarks prepared for delivery on the Senate floor. ''This is another one of the presidents efforts to frighten, to distort, to distract, and to confuse America. It is this administration's way of avoiding the tough, real problems that American citizens are confronted with each and every day.''

Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, which in 2004 began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, on Monday denounced Bush's move as predictable and ''stale rhetoric'' aimed at rallying conservatives for this year's midterm elections.

''It's politics. It's pandering and it's placating a core constituency, the evangelicals,'' Newsom said on ABC's ''Good Morning America.''

...

I have neighbors I do not know and who in no way affect me except if their garbage piles up too high, or they play that devil’s music too loud on a Sunday morning when I’m trying to listen to “Lords of Acid” at 120 decibels in peace.

They do not disturb some invisible, trembling pellucid neighborhood ether with their peccadilloes.

They probably self-selected themselves into the area based on some combination of criteria that probably includes a degree of tolerance for people who are not like them, but frankly if they compulsively vacuum in nothing but pearls and heels, or nickname their pet potbelly pig “Mor-ton” and re-enact old episodes of the McLaughlin Group for kicks, what the fuck do I care?

I also have family I see once every few years at reunions.

They are a boisterous bunch, shot through with a lot of hardcore Rightwing Evangelicals. For a couple of days we tell marvelous, funny, poignant stories about relatives long gone, visit the old cemetery, and auction off family knick-knacks and heirlooms to defray the cost of meals and soda. Their bizarre cult beliefs roll off of me like water off a heathen duck’s ass, and I’m sure my vile humanist ravings never so much as raise a welt on their dense, Blood-O’-Christ ablative shielding.

I also have friends and family a few miles away and a half a continent away I can visit or call and talk to when I’m broken and sad: Those are my intimacies of choice.

And while I disagree with Rick Blaine [Casablanca] when he say's “The problems of the world are not in my department”, (yes, he eventually comes around) I profoundly agree with the idea that the personal choices and habits of the rest of the world are absolutely none of my god damned business so long as they keep their garbage off my lawn and don’t frighten the horses in the street.

Which is comical, because I am apparently soooo old that I actually remember sepia-toned days of $0.40/gallon gasoline, commercial-free public teevee and when keeping one’s snout the fuck out of other people’s business used to be touted as a granite pillar of the Conservative movement.

But that was before they sold their souls to Jerry Falwell in exchange for millions of obedient Christopath voters.

So this one is for my new physics pals from the Shakespeare’s Sister meet-up, wherein the estimable Mrs. Shakes consented to rope-and-ride a buncha Liberals to a movie (“An Inconvenient Truth” -- massively recommended) and dinner.

(“Trying to herd cats,” she opined.

Nah.

Herding fireflies with a firehose is more like it. I should know; I’m one of the worst of the bunch.)

So let us imagine there’s a box in, oh, say, Massachusetts or Oregon or Iowa.

A big box, and in that box are the following items:

1. A Bible.

2. A preacher.

3. A gay couple.

4. A straight friend.

5. Enough consumables and comforts to last a lifetime.

Sort of a Biosphere II, but with vastly better feng shui.

And you’re living la vida no-neck in some high-toned, melanin-poor gated exurb, or in some scruffier digs where the “gate” is a gaunt, three-legged pit-bull named Bobby Lee tied the rusted hulk of an El Camino up on ancient blocks.

Now at some point over the course of years, the gay couple may ask the preacher to pick up the bible and, with their straight friend standing witness, get hitched.

Or they may not.

In fact, they exist only in a cloud of quantum connubial possibilities until you bust the box open and demand to know just what in the fuck they’re doing in there. And how can they have amassed such a formidable stockpile of really spiffy antiques without ever having left the box!

It is only when you kick the door down and intrude on their private business that the haze of potential outcomes collapses into a single, nuptial certainty.

So the question is, when exactly -- over the course of, say, forty years of leaving the box intact and letting them be -- did their status inside the box destroy your marriage outside the box?

When was it -- precisely -- during those four decades that this single detail of the lives of strangers who live so immensely far away from you in every meaningful way managed to intrude into your life so violently that it ruined your relationship with your spouse and debased the value of the love and mutual commitment you share?

So much so that the only possible solution is to amend the foundational documents of our democracy?

Because if you cannot identify the specific, quantifiable harm that such a union would have on you and yours, then shut your fucking hole.

And if the only rationale you can conjure is the oldest and most despicable of the “pellucid ether” arguments -- that it would be an affront to God [or his Divine Beard, “Traditional Values”] by asserting, as the Dear Leader just did, that “Marriage is the most fundamental institution of civilization, and it should not be redefined by activist judges” -- then I commend to your attention the opening lines of the June 12, 1967, Loving v. Virginia decision, which gets referred to a lot in Left Bloggylvania, but not cited verbatim nearly often enough for my tastes, because here is how it begins (Emphasis added):

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

The law in Virginia as it read provided...

"Punishment for marriage. -- If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."

And the penalty for leaving the State to evade the law was...

...If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage."

What more needs be said?

When the cultural Gladys Kravitzes on the Right stomp into the public square dragging Gay Marriage along behind them, this is what’s really on the menu: Their insatiable appetite to impose their witchbag of hate, squeamishness and childish idiocy on everyone else in the Universe for no reason other than they are hateful, squeamish, childish idiots.

And since there is absolutely no quantifiable harm they can point to (In Loving, the “harm” cited was found in the language of Naim v. Naim which “concluded that the State's legitimate purposes were "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride”…), time and again -- from slavery, through Jim Crow, through “Loving” and now with Gay Marriage -- you see the same democracy-loathing Red Statists thumping the same Bible, from the same pulpit, to the same squealing mob of culturally malnourished knuckleheads.

Generation after debased generation the disease is passed on, because regardless of where this moral cancer has geographically metastasized over the years, the continuous line of divinely-sanctioned White Male Christian Supremacy that runs from “God, Nooses and Negroes” to “God, Guns and Gays” comes straight out of the spiritual heart of the old Confederacy.

And because there are no tangible, measurable negative consequences, when you take it upon yourself to tell two consenting adults who and how they may marry you will always end up playing the “Almighty God”-card. Either explicitly, or by cowering behind such hollow, bigot-coded and patently ridiculous threats as, "Changing the definition of marriage would undermine the structure of the family."

On this issue -- however icky you might personally find the whole idea of boys kissing boys or girls canoodling with girls -- you can either be a Good Republican or a Good American, but you cannot be both.

Because when you insist that your perverse view of the Bible gives you the right to smash open Schrodinger's box and dictate who and how two consenting adults may marry, you will always end up standing on the gibbet, slipping the “Loving” rope around Liberty’s throat.

Always.

And that is no place that any decent American would ever want to be.

Seven years later, Charles Pierce reminds us that there is still plenty of stupid to go around, even deep within the limpid, Libertarian pools of Senator Rand Paul's dead, doll eyes:

Rand Paul, Liberal Lion, Thinks You'll Marry A Squid
By Charles P. Pierce
at 4:55pm

Brogressives who fell madly for Senator Aqua Buddha who, as we know, stood bravely alone against the forces of a president bent on droning us all into small piles of ashes, are going to have to have a long chat with the fellow now that he's unlimbered himself on the topic of marriage equality.

"I think this is the conundrum and gets back to what you were saying in the opening -- whether or not churches should decide this. But it is difficult because if we have no laws on this people take it to one extension further. Does it have to be humans?

I dunno, Rand. Is there a comely ruminant that's caught your eye?

Is That You, John Wayne? Is This Me?

This seems like one of those "Is there anything in your past that could be used to discredit you or cast doubts on your credibility?" thingies about which a reporter would want to ask his source during the vetting process and, should that reporter decide to move forward, maybe front-load into the story to control the narrative and immunized that source against it spilling out all over the pages of the Washington Post and making that source look, oh, what's the word I'm looking for...?

From The Washington Post:

Four years ago, Ed Snowden thought leakers should be ‘shot’

By Timothy B. Lee, Published: June 26, 2013 at 1:54 pm

...

“Those people should be shot in the balls,” [Edward] Snowden apparently said of leakers in a January 2009 chat. Snowden had logged into an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server associated with Ars Technica. While Ars itself didn’t log the conversations, multiple participants in the discussions kept logs of the chats and provided them to the technology site.

At this point, Snowden’s evolution into a fierce critic of the national security establishment was in its early stages. Snowden was incensed at the New York Times, which had described secret negotiations between the United States and Israel over how best to deal with Iran’s suspected nuclear program.

“Are they TRYING to start a war? Jesus christ. They’re like wikileaks.” Snowden wrote. “You don’t put that s— in the NEWSPAPER.”

“They have a HISTORY of this s—,” he continued, making liberal use of capital letters and profanity. “These are the same people who blew the whole ‘we could listen to osama’s cell phone’ thing. The same people who screwed us on wiretapping. Over and over and over again.”

He said he enjoyed “ethical reporting.” But “VIOLATING NATIONAL SECURITY? no. That s— is classified for a reason. It’s not because ‘oh we hope our citizens don’t find out.’ It’s because ‘this s— won’t work if iran knows what we’re doing.’” “I am so angry right now. This is completely unbelievable.”

The comments were posted by a user named TheTrueHOOHA. While IRC doesn’t have a formal mechanism for authenticating users, impersonation is rare, and Snowden is known to have used the same username in comments on the Ars Web site. Moreover, TheTrueHOOHA mentions biographical details, like his work in Switzerland, that closely match Snowden’s biography.

(Actually the whole Ars Technica article is worth a read if only to flesh out Mr. Snowden's social views on assault weapons (Pro!), Ron Paul ("dreamy") and his rustic, Randite perspective on Social Security -- 

< TheTrueHOOHA>	save money? cut this social security bullshit
< User11>	hahahayes
< User18>	Yeah! Fuck old people!
< User11>	social security is bullshit
< User11>	let's just toss old people out in the street
< User18>	Old people could move in with [User11].
< User11>	NOOO
< User11>	they smell funny
< TheTrueHOOHA>	Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine
< TheTrueHOOHA>	you fucking retards
< TheTrueHOOHA>	Magically the world changed after the new deal, and old people became made of glass
< TheTrueHOOHA>	yeah, that makes sense
< User11>	wow
< User11>	you are just so fucking stupid
< TheTrueHOOHA>	yeah, [User11]. and you're quite a gem
< User19>	TheTrueHOOHA: and magically, life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years.funny how that works.
< TheTrueHOOHA>	[User19], you don't think modern medicine has something to do with that? no? it's social security? wow. I guess I missed that.
< User11>	hurr wait a second, life expectancy has shot up in recent times along with the dissolution of the communal family unit in exchange for the nuclear family
< User11>	gee i guess we might need to create a safety net for the sudden glut of helpless elderly????
< TheTrueHOOHA>	they wouldn't be fucking helpless if you weren't sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day

 ...says every cosseted young princeling of the digital age I have ever met.

Assuming this is true, well, there's no law against anyone changing their mind or evolving their thinking (unless, of course, you're a Liberal whose change/evolution does not adhere 100% to current Libertarian thinking, in which case you are obviously an authoritarian monster) and it does not surprise me that a person in their twenties would flip their entire worldview around, maybe even more than once.

I know I did.

In fact, the normal, twenty-something process of radically revising one's belief system can only have been made easier when the twenty-something in question is a very smart, privileged, insulated, white guy making six-figures, living in paradise and steeping in all the head-rushing power that godlike access to the instrumentalities of the American surveillance system entails.

No, the real, shocking story here is that Mr. Snowden circa 2010 or 2011 apparently got ahold of the NSA's prototype time machine...traveled back in time right past the "Mr. Snowden circa 2009" who made the "shot in the balls" comments above...and landed in the Year of Our Lord 2008, where he persuaded that still-earlier iteration of Edward Snowden to drop his whole "That s— is classified for a reason" thinking a year before he even said it and instead become this guy:

Q: When did you decide to leak the documents?

A: “You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process.

“A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama’s promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor.”

Which means:

1. The whole spacetime continuum may now be completely banjaxed 
2. Someone somewhere owes the estate of Robert Heinlein a lot of money.

It also means that someone, somewhere should really ask Mr, Snowden to clarify in simple, clear language how exactly he reconciles the remarks of Mr. "Shot in the balls"-guy in 2009 with Mr. "I was going to disclose it"-guy in 2008.

Because sometimes the things we said and did in the past can and should affect the way people think about what we are saying and doing now.

On the other hand, dredging around in someone's past for details about ancient, irrelevant business deals or student loan glitches is just bullshit:

The personal side of taking on the NSA: emerging smears

Distractions about my past and personal life have emerged – an inevitable side effect for those who challenge the US government.

Glenn Greenwald

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 June 2013 16.21 EDT

...So I've been fully expecting those kinds of attacks since I began my work on these NSA leaks. The recent journalist-led "debate" about whether I should be prosecuted for my reporting on these stories was precisely the sort of thing I knew was coming.

As a result, I was not particularly surprised when I received an email last night from a reporter at the New York Daily News informing me that he had been "reviewing some old lawsuits" in which I was involved – "old" as in: more than a decade ago – and that "the paper wants to do a story on this for tomorrow". He asked that I call him right away to discuss this, apologizing for the very small window he gave me to comment.

...

Just today, a New York Times reporter emailed me to ask about the IRS back payments. And the reporter from the Daily News sent another email asking about a student loan judgment which was in default over a decade ago and is now covered by a payment plan agreement.

...

Should the fact that David Gregory's wife was one of "the four top executives in Fannie Mae who resigned as the federal government took it into receivership in 2008" have been disclosed when he was doing stories on Fannie Mae and Newt Gingrich?

Certainly.

Should the fact that Clarence Thomas' teabagger, drunk-dialing wife was also a paid, anti-health care lobbyist affect how we think about Clarence Thomas' capacity to act impartially on health care-related matters that come up before the Supreme Court?

Damn betcha.

But neither Mr. Greenwald's student loans nor his long-ago business deals have any bearing on the NSA leak story whatsoever.

None. At. All.

Today In "Not a Dime's Worth of Difference" News, Ctd.

Today, by two, narrow 5-4 decisions, the Supreme Court told gay and lesbian Americans that they have the same federal civil rights that I have.  Of course, if you live in any of the 37 states where same sex marriage is illegal, that same Supreme Court just told you that you're on your own by virtually guaranteeing that no federal cavalry will ever show up to take your side against the Randite Theocrat Philistines who run your state.

So a deeply flawed outcome, but a big improvement over the status quo.

And speaking of Randite Theocrat Philistines, Tony Scalia takes up his acid pen to share with us the state-of-the-art in Conservative thinking on the subject:

To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act. But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” ”injure,” “degrade,” ”demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence—indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

Fresh from this latest defeat in the Culture War, Republican members of Congress are expected to salve their wounds in the traditional fashion: cracking open a case of wildly ignorant, inappropriate rape comments, comparing school kids in LA to Hitler Youth (Glenn Beck, today), staging a dozen more symbolic votes telling women and people who need health care to go piss up a rope, after which Charles Darwin will be burned in effigy.

At the state-level, the Court has once again reaffirmed its commitment to let Republicans continue dispensing with any fig-leaf of subtlety and sanity whatsoever and just let their Handmaid's Tale freak flags fly.

I include myself in the group that sees today's Court ruling as an important if flawed and imperfect step forward in advancing the civil rights of a traditionally despised and discriminated against minority which, in turn, I hope will make the civil rights all Americans that much more secure.

I also found the reaction from the world's most famous Libertarian by turns fascinating, amazingly clueless, hopeful and deeply human.


Consider that, like a depressingly large number of relatively privileged Libertarians,  Mr. Greenwald is always willing to lecture others on the abstract merits of making the Perfect the enemy of the Less Awful -- to exhort "liberals and progressives" to sacrifice some nonspecific "short term political interests" and even get "a few more Republicans to be elected than otherwise might be elected" -- in the noble cause of crashing the system, and busting up the two parties so that some ideal, third or fourth of fifth party alternatives can rise to power:

And that’s the position that so many liberals and progressives have been in. Which is, you know, really finding Democratic policies to be repellent and yet at the same time, at the end of the day saying, well you’ve convinced me that they’re just a tiny, little bit worse. And the only way to break that is to say well, even though I know that by abstaining or supporting a third party, I’m going to be sacrificing some of my short term political interests; I’m going to be causing a few more Republicans to be elected than otherwise might be elected; on balance, I’m willing to sacrifice my short term interests in order to do something to subvert the stranglehold that these two parties have on the political process because electing more Democrats, even though it’s a little less scary, accomplishes nothing good.

To ever do anything less -- to compromise in the slightest by giving one side your support "because you’ve scared me that the other alternative is just a little bit worse" -- is an act of abject cowardice and capitulation which will only "guarant[ee] that you’ll always be ignored."

This is Mr. Greenwald's simple and clear Law of Political Purity which applies unbendingly to all times to all people and to all issues...

...except, of course, when the issue at hand actually affects Mr. Greenwald personally, in which case:

@peaceak If you were barred from living with your spouse in your own country because of this inequality, you'd probably see it differently
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 26, 2013

Ponder on that for a second.

Fascinating and hilariously clueless, certainly, but also hopeful and deeply human because it holds open the possibility that someday it may just dawn on Mr. Greenwald that other people are not abstract game pieces to be shoved around on his ideological Stratego board but are, in fact, every bit as real and complex and contradictory and rationalizing and humane and selfish and heroic and flawed and glorious as he is.

That someday the Compassion Fairy may leave enough empathy under Mr. Greenwald's  pillow to cause him to notice that, while there are real villains in the world, there are also lots of people who are not Mr. Greenwald -- people of color, poor people, sick people, old people, frail people, undocumented worker people, uninsured people, frightened middle class people, female people -- who make choices with which Mr. Greenwald does not agree in the abstract because the consequences of those choices affect them personally in the same way the same-sex marriage decision affects Mr. Greenwald personally.  

That someday something will pry open Mr. Greenwald's human awareness far enough to encompass the idea that there are real people in the real world who do not have the luxury of buying an adjoining condo in Mr. Greenwald's ivory tower and who sometimes make choices and compromises with which Mr. Greenwald does not agree not because they are Obots or cultists or authoritarian monsters but because they live and struggle and die in the real world under circumstances where the alternative to that imperfect choice really is much worse.  

I am very glad that the center/slightly-left wing of the Supreme Court was able to twice lure one vote away from the Batshit Wingnut wing of the Supreme Court in order to secure two, flawed rulings which will allow Mr. Greenwald the choice of living with his husband as a married couple in either the United States or Brazil.  

I also hope that, in addition to giving him some imperfect but improved alternatives from which to choose, it also blesses Mr. Greenwald with a slightly different perspective on the motives of people who are not Mr. Greenwald and who also believe that choosing between flawed alternatives is sometimes a better choice than going on strike until perfection arrives.

I Would Say I Am Exactly Like a Ship...

...carrying a cargo that will never reach any port. And as long as I'm alive, that ship will always be at sea, so to speak."

-- Mitch McDeere, 'The Firm'

From The Daily Beast:

...

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian Newspaper journalist Snowden first contacted in February, told the Daily Beast Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”

Given Mr. Snowden's situation, I can't say I blame him for taking out a little insurance.

However it's one thing to quietly inform the owners of your stolen secrets that if they start dicking with you, your friends will run their panties up the flag pole -- a survival necessity perhaps, but, as Kaspar Gutman notes in The Maltese Falcon, a situation that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides.

'Cause as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.

But the world is also full of people who would be delighted to see that ship come in to port, so to speak.  Thrilled to death to see this situation to go wildly tits up, which is why it is an altogether different and jaw-droppingly stupid thing to loudly announce via the world press that if any country or faction or war lord or cartel kingpin or terrorist organization or highly-motivated anti-gummint nutjob on Earth wants to see the United States humiliated and its most intimate secrets splashed all over the media, all they have to do is kill one guy.

It's why they call it Dead Man's Switch, cowboy, so for the love of Mike, please shut the fuck up long enough to build yourself a fortress of lawyers and stop letting Mr. Greenwald filter whatever it is you are trying say through the swamp of his grudges and agendas and gargantuan ego.  

Today In "Not a Dime's Worth of Difference" News

The five Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents just told minority voters in  the South to go piss up a rope.

The mostly nakedly self-loathing of the Republican Majority explained his reasoning this way:

Finally, while the University admits that racial discrimination in admissions is not ideal, it asserts that it is a temporary necessity because of the enduring race consciousness of our society. Yet again, the University echoes the hollow justifications advanced by the segregationists...The University's arguments today are no more persuasive than they were 60 years ago. ... There is no principled distinction between the University's assertion that diversity yields educational benefits and the segregationists' assertion that segregation yielded those same benefits...It is also noteworthy that, in our desegregation cases, we rejected arguments that are virtually identical to those advanced by the University today. The University asserts, for instance, that the diversity obtained through its discriminatory admissions program prepares its students to become leaders in a diverse society. ... The segregationists likewise defended segregation on the ground that it provided more leadership opportunities for blacks. ... Indeed, no court today would accept the suggestion that segregation is permissible because historically black colleges produced Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prominent leaders. Likewise, the University's racial discrimination cannot be justified on the ground that it will produce better leaders.

Fresh from this latest victory in the Culture War, Republican members of Congress are expected to celebrate in the traditional fashion: cracking open a case of wildly ignorant, inappropriate rape comments, comparing school kids in LA to Hitler Youth (Glenn Beck, today), staging a dozen more symbolic votes telling women and people who need health care to go piss up a rope, after which Charles Darwin will be burned in effigy.

At the state-level, of course, wherever Republican are in control they are now dispensing  with any fig-leaf of subtlety and sanity whatsoever and just let their Handmaid's Tale freak flags fly: 

Gov. Rick Perry really wants to end safe, legal abortion in the state of Texas. So much so, in fact, that he’s called a special session of the legislature to get that done. Sure, there were other legitimate reasons to call the special session, which Ross Ramsey of The Texas Tribune calls “the emergency rooms of legislation” that really should only be used for emergencies. There are transportation and redistricting issues. But apparently Perry and Texas Republicans believe that killing off most safe, legal abortions in the state—the kind that have been going on for 40 years, since the Texas-based Roe v. Wade case was decided—is suddenly an emergency that must be handled during the special session. The time to get that massive black market for abortion up and running in Texas apparently has to happen right this minute.

UPDATE:

Some people may see these ruthless rollbacks of the Enlightenment at the hands of bellicose Randite Christopaths as a disaster for women, minorities, the poor, the elderly, the frail, the sick, the middle class, etc.

On the other hand, those of a more Libertarian persuasion who are unaffected by such trifles may well see the rise of these same theocratic predators as their dream come true.