i wish people actually cared about this

GOP and Feinstein join to fulfill Obama's demand for renewed warrantless eavesdropping

This article zeroes in on what I said before Mr. Obama's first election: that all his promises and rhetoric on civil liberties were lies, and you knew that before the election.

The 'war on terror' - by design - can never end

I don't know why anybody even contests this. Mr. Bush's secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said this outright. It wasn't supposed to end, and if and when it eventually did in some many decades, the public would never know.

Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy

Active integration with banks to crack down on anti-bank dissent under the name 'Domestic Security Alliance Council.'

Petraeus Investigation: When and How the FBI Can Access Email Accounts

ABC explains the many ways the Feds can legally - if you ignore the constitution, as is normal - ransack your email for any or no reason.

Beaten and sodomized: European human rights court finds CIA guilty of torture

Meanwhile, well, what do you expect?

Military judge bans the release of CIA torture techniques used against 9/11 suspects

...but you don't get to know about it. This whole spies-everywhere regime doesn't mean you get to know.

It's endemic, of course

Secret and Lies of the Bailout

All of this – the willingness to call dying banks healthy, the sham stress tests, the failure to enforce bonus rules, the seeming indifference to public disclosure, not to mention the shocking­ lack of criminal investigations into fraud committed by bailout recipients before the crash – comprised the largest and most valuable bailout of all. Brick by brick, statement by reassuring statement, bailout officials have spent years building the government's great Implicit Guarantee to the biggest companies on Wall Street: We will be there for you, always, no matter how much you screw up. We will lie for you and let you get away with just about anything. We will make this ongoing bailout a pervasive and permanent part of the financial system. And most important of all, we will publicly commit to this policy, being so obvious about it that the markets will be able to put an exact price tag on the value of our preferential treatment.

...

So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.

Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.

an important piece of analysis

I don’t know who “she” is, but I like her.

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