Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander made their umpteenth appearance in front of Congress yesterday to do damage control in the aftermath of Edward Snowden's leaks. As always, they insisted NSA surveillance programs are...
Lindsey Graham’s Approval Rating Drops Among Conservative Voters
POLITICO gives us a good news bad news report (at least from my perspective) on Lindsey Graham. The article cites two new polls that show support for Graham in his home state of South Carolina is dropping overall. That's the good news. The bad news is that his...
Despite Iranian Concessions, War Hawks Spread Fear of Deceptive Quest for Nukes
It's been really hard for Iran hawks these days. With a reformist Iranian president initiating unprecedented diplomacy with the U.S. and offering major concessions on its nuclear program, the best they've been able to come up with is that it's all a sham. Rouhani is...
Glenn Greenwald on Dick Cheney’s Edward Snowden Hate
Glenn Greenwald went on CNN last night to respond to Dick Cheney's accusation of Edward Snowden as a traitor and to yesterday's testimony from Clapper and Keith Alexander on NSA spying.
The Surveillance State Is ‘A Gigantic Beast’ That Values Self-Preservation, Not National Security
Jay Stanley over at the ACLU blog posts an illustrative table that gets to the heart of the NSA controversies these days. As he makes note, when defenders of the NSA's surveillance state are confronted with allegations of unlawfulness, overreach, or scandal as a...
One Area the NSA And I Can Agree: Obama Is A Cowardly, If Shrewd, Politician
The actual details of the NSA's expansive surveillance programs are infuriating enough on their own. Civil libertarians and ordinary Americans are and should be angry at the NSA's disrespect for the law, the Fourth Amendment, and privacy rights in general. It's...
Cheney’s Delusional Answer to ‘What Did We Get Out of Iraq?’
The U.S. benefit from the war in Iraq was that we eliminated the potential for al-Qaeda to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, according to Dick Cheney...weapons he did not have to begin with. "...That was the threat after 9/11 and when...
That’s Embarrassing…America, Her Allies, and Global Executions
In U.S. foreign policy, there are bogeymen and allies. Bogeymen are evil tyrants who oppose freedom. Allies are stable international partners. What one realizes (once they stop watching cable news) is that whether the U.S. considers you a bogeyman or an ally is...
Nice Try, But Ron Paul’s Foreign Policy Views Haven’t Changed
David Adesnik over at the hawkish conservative think tank AEI asks, "why has the isolationism of Ron Paul and his admirers taken such a sharp turn toward amoral realism?" I cannot, for the life of me, yet again explain to a right wing hawk the difference between...
NSA Chief is Frustrated By Journalism
NSA chief General Keith Alexander's comments last week that he wants to "make it stop," where "it" is the journalism resulting from Edward Snowden's leaks, were widely reported and commented on. Here is the actual video clip of him saying it. Alexander is very...


