Category: News

I always found myself giggling during the Democratic debates when Hillary would ask Bernie how he was going to pay for things like healthcare or college tuition, and then Bernie stammering to find an answer.

They both knew the secret but neither would say it – there’s plenty of money, we just don’t want to spend it on Americans.

We think of that as freeloading, unearned stuff. Go get a job, moocher. But then move the same question overseas and everything changes. There is always plenty of money, and the people getting free stuff from that money aren’t moochers. They’re allies.

Continue reading “US Awards $1.7 Billion Contract To Buy Radios for Afghan Army”

As many neocons shift over to support Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, there are appearing a few bumps in the road. Last night at the convention, for example, former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta found himself drowned out by chants of “no more war!” as he touted Hillary’s hawkishness. There are insurgent antiwar factions in both major parties but the establishment is trying to minimize their power and influence. How long can the center hold? More today in the Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

The bones of our democracy – the core elements that separate that way of life from others – lie in the First Amendment to the Constitution, specifically the rights to free speech and a free press.

Without the ability to speak freely, and to have things about our government reported equally freely to us, most of the rest of the concept of what was laid out on July 4, 1776 and later falls away. Thomas Jefferson himself stated that an “informed citizenry” was the key to everything.

So it is with more than a little anxiety that we learned secret rules allow the FBI to spy on journalists with such ease that the restraints are really nothing more than a bit of paperwork. As always, the ostensible justifications for another deep step into Post Constitutional America are terrorism, security, protecting the homeland. And, as always, the outcome seems to be much more about stomping out whistleblowers than anything else.

Continue reading “The Secret Rules That Allow the FBI To Spy on Journalists”

If you want to understand the context in which the US demonization of Russia and Vladimir Putin is occurring, read Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson’s excellent piece in the Los Angeles Times, “Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise.”

In summary, US presidents, Democratic and Republican, broke a 1990 promise to Russia not to extend NATO eastward to the Russian border, a promise made in return for Russia’s pledge not to interfere with the reunification of Germany and its membership in NATO. (We may well ask why NATO continued after the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union disappeared.) The US promise was broken when the members of the defunct Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states were incorporated into NATO, and two former Soviet Republics, Georgia and Ukraine, were widely discussed as future NATO members. (This has not happened yet, but the US government has intervened in both countries to keep them from being too close to Russia. In Ukraine this took the form of a coup, ousting an elected president, however objectionable he was.)

Continue reading “Sheldon Richman on NATO’s Broken Promise”

This summer, we have all witnessed the heavy hand of government intervening in the freedom of speech, as the behavior of the Secret Service at both the Republican convention in Cleveland and the Democratic convention in Philadelphia was troubling and unconstitutional.

Though the First Amendment was originally written only to restrain Congress ("Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech"), it is now uniformly interpreted to restrict all government in America from abridging the freedom of speech.

The reason this freedom is referred to as "the" freedom of speech is to reflect the belief of the Framers that the right to speak freely is pre-political. Stated differently, the freedom of speech is an integral aspect of our humanity. The government does not grant the freedom of speech; it is prohibited from interfering with it.

Continue reading “Free Speech and Political Conventions”

Short answer: nobody knows, but the media is treating it as a fact based primarily on a single technical source employed by the Democratic National Committee. I read the source’s publicly available explanation. Here’s what I found.

A Quick Taste of Media Conclusions

Despite a line in paragraph five saying “Proving the source of a cyberattack is notoriously difficult,” the New York Times offers the following statements.

• “researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies;”
• “Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects;”
• “Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.”
• “It is unclear how WikiLeaks obtained the email trove. But the presumption is that the intelligence agencies turned it over, either directly or through an intermediary. Moreover, the timing of the release, between the end of the Republican convention and the beginning of the Democratic one, seems too well planned to be coincidental.”

There’s more, but you get the picture. The article also quotes Clinton staffers citing unnamed experts and researchers.

Continue reading “Did Russian Intelligence Hack the DNC Servers?”