Crap You Should Read

Just months after many U.S. senators opposed tougher background checks for gun buyers on the grounds that they would tread on Americans' liberties, many of them are standing behind the far more intrusive intelligence-gathering programs of the National Security Agency.

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If privacy is dead, Big Government isn't the killer--Big Business is. Many Americans are outraged by disclosures showing the government has been collecting info on a massive scale.

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sought to clarify his claim that the National Security Agency does not collect information on millions of Americans, telling NBC News' Andrea Mitchell that he gave the "least untruthful" answer possible on the agency's surveillance program.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked the intelligence czar if the NSA gathers "any type of data at all on millions of Americans.”

"No, sir," Clapper responded. "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."

Clapper's response appears to contradict recent revelations about the agency's large scale phone records collection program, first reported on by the Guardian last week. However, during the NBC interview, Clapper said Wyden's question did not have a straightforward answer.

"I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked -- 'When are you going to start -- stop beating your wife' kind of question, which is meaning not -- answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no," Clapper said in the interview, which aired Sunday. "So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying 'no'."

Clapper said his remarks also reflected his definition of "collection," which he said has a specific meaning in an intelligence context....

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Big banks have had a rough several years. They, you know, participated wholeheartedly in the near-vaporization of the global economy. They have to make up those losses somehow. Fees are the answer to everything! Do you know how much your bank is charging you, for nothing?

A new report out from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today takes a look at bank fees, and how they are, by and large, ridiculous examples of extortion. (Banks know that you know this, which is why their fees have been getting everstealthier.) Since consumer outrage killed the whole "debit card fee" idea a couple of years ago, banks are now turning to overdraft fees to fill their hungry coffers. And naturally, big banks are screwing their customers much worse than smaller banks.

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WASHINGTON -- Obama administration officials held 22 separate briefings or meetings for members of Congress on the law that has been used to justify the National Security Agency's controversial email monitoring program, according to data provided...

After last week's revelations extensive National Security Agency surveillance of phone and internet communications, President Barack Obama made it a point to assure Americans that, not to worry, there is plenty of oversight of his administration's snooping programs. "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight," he said Friday, referring in part to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which was created in 1979 to oversee Department of Justice requests for surveillance warrants against foreign agents suspected of espionage or terrorism in the United States. But the FISC has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. That's a rate of .03 percent, which raises questions about just how much judicial oversight is actually being provided.  

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I’ve been in this economics business for a while. In fact, I’ve been in it so long I still remember what people considered normal in those long-ago days before the financial crisis. Normal, back then, meant an economy adding a million or more jobs each year, enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population. Normal meant an unemployment rate not much above 5 percent, except for brief recessions. And while there was always some unemployment, normal meant very few people out of work for extended periods.

So how, in those long-ago days, would we have reacted to Friday’s news that the number of Americans with jobs is still down two million from six years ago, that 7.6 percent of the work force is unemployed (with many more underemployed or forced to take low-paying jobs), and that more than four million of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months? Well, we know how most political insiders reacted: they called it a pretty good jobs report. In fact, some are even celebrating the report as “proof” that the budget sequester isn’t doing any harm.

In other words, our policy discourse is still a long way from where it ought to be.

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More than a decade ago, CIA Director Michael Hayden began enlisting the private sector to build the NSA's data ops. Today Silicon Valley's a lot more involved than you might think.

ut me in the camp that finds the outcry over this week's revelations of NSA snooping a touch overwrought. The declamations are of course particularly rich coming from the right, given both the post-9/11 security state's roots in the Bush administration, and the readiness of many Republicans to blame President Barack Obama for any plots that have been allowed to slip through our defenses. Yes, several high-profile conservative standard bearersare defending the National Security Agency's surveillance, but other Republicans have not been able to resist scoring points off the moment. Some of the outcry on the left has been equally tedious, suffering from the sort of grandiose abstraction that one normally associates with late-night college-dorm bull sessions: “Dude, they might be watching us right now!...” Based on what we know so far of the NSA surveillance, I can’t help but incline toward the contextualization in today’s Wall Street Journal editorial: “The critics … say the NSA program is a violation of privacy, or illegal, or unconstitutional, or all of the above. But nobody’s civil liberties are violated by tech companies or banks that constantly run the same kinds of data analysis. We bow to no one in our desire to limit government power, but data-mining is less intrusive on individuals than routine airport security.”

All that said, I welcome the uproar. It is a sign that we are moving, belatedly, beyond a permanent-war mindset that for a while now has been neither justified by global reality nor healthy for the country....

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It’s the height of hypocrisy: They call for repeal of the law but plead for its dollars on behalf of constituents.

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As President Obama continues his “Middle Class Jobs and Opportunities Tour" in Mooresville, N.C., on Thursday, middle-class Americans continue to experience historic losses of jobs and opportunities. The recession eliminated many mid-wage jobs, leaving moderately educated workers to take low-wage jobs if they can find work at all.

While the Obama administration has trumpeted job growth in recent months, the middle class is taking home a shrinking portion of the country's income. Deep job losses in occupations such as construction, information technology, manufacturing and insurance are not likely to recover. Middle-class families alsosaw nearly 30 percent of their wealth disappear over the past decade, while the cost of goods and services they rely upon steadily climbed.

The swift contraction of the middle class has left most Americans fearful they may be unable to maintain their standard of living.

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If Congress will lift the National Rifle Association (NRA)-funded ban on federal funding for gun research, there’s a clear research agenda for answering life-and-death questions about gun violence in the United States, according to a...

WASHINGTON -- In a rebuke to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) has released the full transcript of a key interview with an IRS employee at the heart of the agency's scandal.

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In an interview with a Hong Kong paper, Edward Snowden asserts the U.S. has mounted hacking operations against hundreds of Chinese targets since 2009.

Despite Republican strategists’ efforts to keep GOP politicians from making insensitive comments about rape victims, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) channeled former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) infamous “legitimate rape”comment during a committee hearing on Wednesday. Defending his proposal to ban all abortions after 20 weeks with no exceptions for rape and incest, Franksclaimed, “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.”

As the Washington Post reports, Franks went on to nonsensically argue, “But when you make that exception [allowing rape victims to get abortions], there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that’s impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that’s what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment.”

Franks is the latest male Republican lawmaker to opine on the validity of rape victims’ needs. In 2012, several GOP candidates lost the election after letting slip their ignorant and offensive beliefs about rape victims and what rights they deserve. Akin set off a media firestorm when he claimed that a woman could not get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because her body “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Soon after, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock told rape victims to embrace pregnancy as “a gift from God.”

These claims quickly collapse under cursory scientific scrutiny. By claiming rape-related pregnancies are “rare,” Franks is dismissing an estimated 32,101 women who get pregnant from rape per year. One study found that about 32.4 percent of victims did not find out they were pregnant until their second trimester — beyond the strict 20 week limit Franks is seeking to impose on American women seeking abortions. Half of those victims chose to undergo an abortion rather than keep the fetus or put it up for adoption. Some research suggests that rape victims are actually more likely to get pregnant, putting the number of women who became pregnant from rape in one year around 83,000.

Police arrested nearly 60 protesters, many of them clergy members, Monday at a rally in North Carolina's Republican-led General Assembly, the Charlotte Observer reported.

The rally in Raleigh was the latest in a string of "Moral Monday" demonstrations held since April to protest the state GOP's cuts to Medicaid and policies on voter ID and women's rights, among other issues.

Religious leaders led the rally, according to the Observer. One of the newspaper's own reporters was also detained while interviewing demonstrators.

“Many of us have previously attempted to reach out to Assembly leaders for dialogue, and we have been ignored,” seven local rabbis said in a written statement, as quoted by the Observer. “We therefore endorse the use of nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to the reckless and heartless policies currently passing into law in Raleigh. ... We recognize the need for solidarity at this time in North Carolina."

Just look at the polls: everyone loves Big Brother when he’s got the right party affiliation.

Tim Tebow’s NFL career is not over.

The New England Patriots will sign Tebow and have him at their minicamp that begins on Tuesday, according to Ed Werder of ESPN.

Although the connection between Patriots coach Bill Belichick and Tebow’s old Florida coach Urban Meyer has led to talk in the past that the Patriots could be interested in giving Tebow a shot, the news still comes as a major surprise. In recent weeks most of the talk surrounding Tebow in the NFL has centered on the idea that Tebow was totally done in the NFL.

There’s still much we don’t know, including whether Tebow will have a shot to compete for the No. 2 quarterback job behind Tom Brady (it should go without saying that Tebow has no chance to start in New England), or whether the Patriots are more interested in taking a look at him at another position and as an occasional wildcat quarterback.

But we do know that Tebow has an NFL home. And the NFL media is about to descend on the Patriots’ minicamp.

Fox News is playing editing clips of Rep. Elijah Cummings, and refusing to tell their viewers that a Republican was behind the IRS targeting of tea party groups.

On America’s Newsroom, Bill Hemmer played the last part of Rep. Cummings interview on CNN where he expresses his opinion that the case is solved without showing their viewers why he feels that way. Earlier in the interview, Rep. Cummings said, “Listen up now. He was a 21-year veteran of the IRS. And he was — he described himself in the interviews in response to a Republican attorney’s question as a conservative Republican. Very significant. He is a conservative Republican working for the IRS. I think this interview and these statements go a long way to what’s showing that the White House was not involved in this. We knew that — and this is the guy by the way, this conservative 21-year veteran of IRS is the same one who sent the initial case, the Tea Party case, up to the Washington technical office....

What is really pathetic is the obvious spin that Fox News is trying to put on this. Fox News has played the edited Cummings clip repeatedly, but they won’t tell their audience that the person who made this statements that Rep. Cummings is referring to is a Republican. That little piece of information is critical to the story. Since it was a Republican who first raised the red flag and started the targeting process, the right wing claim that this was a partisan operation run from the White House is completely discredited.

If this is just “one person’s account,” why won’t Fox News give their viewers the specifics of the conservative IRS employee’s claims?

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  If you don't believe that the entire Republican party is now just one big lie-telling, self-serving, bullshit-manufacturing machine, then here are 24 policies the GOP supported before they suddenly and vehemently opposed them once the black guy became president...

he Steubenville rape case, in which two high school football players were convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl at a party, helped spark a national conversation about consent, victim-blaming, and rape culture. The case gained national attention after the “hacktivist” group Anonymous leaked significant social media evidence implicating the assailants — including tweets, Instagram photos, and a 12-minute video of Steubenville high schoolersjoking about the rape. But it turns out that working to expose those rapists may land one Anonymous hacker more time in prison than the rapists themselves will serve.

As Mother Jones reports, 26-year-old Deric Lostutter — who has been known as “KYAnonymous” throughout his role in the Steubenville rape case — could face up to 10 years of jail time if he’s convicted of hacking-related crimes. The FBI raided Losuetter’s home in April. The internet hacker told Mother Jones that he believes the FBI investigation was motivated by Stebenville officials who want to send Lostutter a clear message: You shouldn’t have gotten involved.

“They want to make an example of me, saying, ‘You don’t fucking come after us. Don’t question us,’ ” Lostutter explained. Those type of power dynamics played out over the course of the sexual assault trial in the tiny Ohio town, where many leaders in the community — like the high school football coach — played some role in covering up the rapists’ crimes because that was easier than disrupting the status quo.

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it’s not an exaggeration to say Republicans have bet their future on the disaster they expect from Obamacare. “The implementation of the law over the next year is going to reveal a lot of kinks, a lot of red tape, a lot of taxes, a lot of price increases,” RNC spokesman Brad Dayspring told The New York Times last month. “It’s going to be an issue that’s front and center [in 2014].” GOP intellectuals see Obamacare as the centerpiece of the party’s strategy even well beyond then. “Republicans are likely to seize on every sad [implementation] story as justification for dramatic changes—and in 2016, mount campaigns designed to replace the system in whole or in part with plenty of material to use in their cause,” the conservative wonk Ben Domenech wrote approvingly in March. 

And, of course, the party’s base is completely, unremittingly, obsessed with the issue. The mere anticipation of an implementation quagmire is “reinvigorating the movement," Jenny Beth Martin, a national Tea Party official, told The Hill in early May. "We're doing street rallies and protests over the next month to three months, initially. We're working to recruit candidates that can talk about this."

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During his pre-finals media availability, James told reporters he believes Duncan, not Bryant, has been the most dominant player of the past 15 years (via ASAP Sports):

If I just look at the last 15 years, he's probably been the most consistent, most dominant player that we've had as far as 15 years all together.  He's won four titles, multiple All Stars, MVP, and so on and so on. 

I think He doesn't get a lot of recognition because he's not flashy like a lot of guys are.  He's not jumping over people and high‑flying and doing the things that attracts people to the game.  But I think true basketball, true IQ people, players know how great he is.  What else can you say? "

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