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Sixty Senators Vote to Cut Off Debate on Giving Trump More Surveillance Powers
“Whether it is because you use a VPN or Tor, communicate about a target of surveillance, or have your communications collected ‘incidentally’ in some other manner, once this law is passed, the FBI will be able to search communications without a warrant before they have even begun an investigation. Under this law, if Attorney General Jeff Sessions unilaterally decides that Black Lives Matter is a national security threat, the activists affected will not have any Fourth Amendment protections for the information collected under this authority.”
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Trump and Right “Hijacking” Religious Freedom
“When we hear politicians and religious or interest-group leaders go on about how religious freedom is a ‘cherished; or ‘treasured’ value, let’s ask them to get real. Religious freedom is not a lovely antique, a family heirloom, or a relic of a bygone era. It is a dynamic, progressive value that underlies every other constitutional freedom we have — and it is under siege.”
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Putting Trump’s “Shithole” Comments in Context
“Haiti is an international crime scene. … [In 2003] a whole bunch of white people, you know, we have to emphasize that it was white people who met, and they had titles as diplomats. And they decided that the President of Haiti needs to be overthrown, Haiti needs to be put under UN tutelage and then they would reinstate the brutal army in Haiti. A year later, they conducted the coup. White soldiers, which we don’t have in Haiti, entered the residence of the President, kidnapped him and his wife, and he spent several years in South Africa. In fact,…
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The Post
“But the Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place. No amount of rave reviews or Oscar nominations for ‘The Post’ will change that awful truth.”
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Left-Right Uniting Against More Government Surveillance
” S.139 is not reform. It risks codifying illegal practices that have been used to collect purely domestic communications and fails to meaningfully restrict the use of Section 702 to spy on Americans without a warrant.”
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U.S.-Backed Saudi Attack on Yemen: * Media Blackout * Public Opposition
“Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.”
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200,000 Salvadorans
“The roots of El Salvador’s high murder rate, for example — it is one of the most dangerous countries in the world — lie in U.S. support for its right-wing government and the grossly unjust political-economic order it defended during the 1980s.”
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“Fire and Fury” — New Reports Thicken Trump-Israel Plot
“This possibly illegal effort to undermine the policy of the sitting administration was done at the direction of Kushner and at the request of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet mainstream pundits have shown little concern, just as they have shown little interest in any further revelations about what we might well call Israelgate coming out of the Wolff book.”
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Schools without Heat: Symptom of “Destructive Inequalities”
“Baltimore City children attending decrepit school facilities without functioning heat and drinkable water is a tragedy that the state of Maryland created over decades of underfunding. They have repeatedly neglected their own definition of adequacy by $3 billion over the past two decades alone, much of which would’ve prevented these circumstances before they happened. It’s the state’s constitutional obligation to correct this outrageous failure, starting this coming legislative session.”
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“Russiagate” as Religion
“It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction. …”
Blog
“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn