Here's the article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

"Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general."

Gestapo-mentality at work -- it's sickening.

Glenn published yet another piece 15 minutes ago, including a very pretty heatmap displaying the quantity of intelligence gathered in every nation.

Should I be proud to see my country put into the same category as Saudi frickin' Arabia? Probably not...

From the blog of David Simon (creator of the Wire)

07
JUN
Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.
–
Because the national eruption over the rather inevitable and understandable collection of all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans would suggest that much of our political commentariat, many of our news gatherers and a lot of average folk are entirely without a clue.

You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame.

Nope. Nothing of the kind. Though apparently, the U.K.’s Guardian, which broke this faux-scandal, is unrelenting in its desire to scale the heights of self-congratulatory hyperbole. Consider this from Glenn Greenwald, the author of the piece: “What this court order does that makes it so striking is that it’s not directed at any individual…it’s collecting the phone records of every single customer of Verizon business and finding out every single call they’ve made…it’s indiscriminate and it’s sweeping.”

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

It's all BS, check this Guardian article out. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/04/irs-tax-scandal-new-evidence

Big money is trying to intimidate the IRS so they can flood the 2014 elections with corporate cash.

Most (many?) people who call it gif do know this, and just don't care what the creator thought. Since the G from Graphics was hard, they were always going to be pushing uphill to change it in the acronym, as as far as I can tell from here they have failed rather comprehensively.

See this LA Times poll for example (roughly one third jif, two thirds gif) - http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/15/business/la-fi-tn-gif-jiff-25th-birthday-20120615

Uploaded on Jun 11, 2008 & a fake viral clever commercial it seems.

The Hobbit - Misty Mountains - Violin/A Cappella Cover has been added as a related post - related requested by deathcow on that post.

The Hobbit - Misty Mountains - Violin/A Cappella Cover has been added as a related post - related requested by deathcow on that post.

The Hobbit - Misty Mountains - Violin/A Cappella Cover has been added as a related post - related requested by deathcow on that post.

The Hobbit - Misty Mountains - Violin/A Cappella Cover has been added as a related post - related requested by Lilithia on that post.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by TheSluiceGate.

That was great! If everyone in the US thought like that it would be no.1 in everything. God knows it has the rescources to be and then some.

Tolstoy said 'Anyone who says things are worse now than they were before is a fool.'

But it has to be said that right wing mercenaries knocking over democracies and looting their countries used to be done in the dark, not in broad daylight. And when the much vaunted new LIBERAL president is sending killer robots to blow up funerals without feeling he has to explain himself it's difficult to say nothing has changed..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/25/jimmy-carter-drone-strikes

>> ^criticalthud:

uggg. everything was not GREAT in the past. utter bullshit. we are just repeating the same mistake today.
this generation is a direct product of the past generations.

@heropsycho, I wasn't saying the Bush Tax Cuts alone would do it, I was saying just letting existing law play out would:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/22/a-do-nothing-congress-could-solve-deficit-woes-cbo/

That includes spending cuts, and more taxes going up than just the Bush tax cuts disappearing.

None of that is pretty, but it's just one more layer of things I'm annoyed about with this whole debt ceiling hullabaloo. The budget isn't really unbalanced.

People struck "grand bargains" in the past that would raise taxes, cut spending, and balanced the budget. Why hasn't that happened? Because future Congresses kept passing laws to delay or reverse those elements of the balanced budget agreements of the past each year.

That's why I think all this BS about "shared sacrifice" is going nowhere. They didn't do entitlement cuts in the past because they're political suicide. They still are today. The reason they haven't raised taxes is because wealthy people grease an awful lot of palms in Washington, not because raising taxes on millionaires is unpopular, even amongst Republican voters. You'd have to permanently change those things for a mix of entitlement cuts and tax increases to be the way we balance the budget over the long haul.

Health care reform is the real solution, and like I mentioned before, we already did that.