Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 79

The journalistic mind

Few media behaviors are more pitiful than the intense fixation over the "Veepstakes": a word that is at once nauseatingly vapid and yet incomparably valuable as a symbol of our nation's pointless, juvenile political media. Time's Mark Halperin, needless to say, has a columntoday all about the "Veepstakes," which begins by his proud announcement that he's "covered all of these since 1992." Tapping into his deep well of Veepstakes wisdom, he shares 10 "fundamentals" about this process (keep you...

Unintended causation

The alleged shooter of the Sikh temple in Wisconsin,Wade Michael Page,served in the U.S. Army from 1992 to 1998, first at a base in Texas and then at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. An article in The Guardiantoday examines Page's time in the military and includes this passage:

Page did well enough after joining in 1992 to be assigned to a psychological operations unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The unit is regarded in theUS militaryas exclusive.

But at the time Fort Bragg was also a recruitin...

Unrestrained savagery

(updated below)

Every American national security official will tell you that the most dangerous and savage Al Qaeda branch is the one in Yemen, and that group certainly supplied evidence for this claim with this heinous actover the weekend:

The death toll froma suicide bombingin southern Yemen rose to 45 on Sunday, officials said, in the latest attack against militias allied with the army.

The bomber, suspected of being a member ofAl Qaeda, struck late Saturday during a funeral service attended...

David Plouffe’s speaking fees

The Washington Postthis morning has what it clearly believes is a serious scoop and scandal: David Plouffe, President Obama's 2008 campaign manager and current senior adviser ("a key member of Obama’s inner circle, a confidant whose desk is just steps from the Oval Office"), was paid $100,000 in speaking fees "from an affiliate of a company doingbusinesswith Iran’s government." In 2010, a month before he began his expanded advisory role at the White House (and a month after his new job was an...

Obama the Pioneer

(updated below)

Earlier this week, The New Yorker's Steve Coll wrote an excellent columnon President Obama's kill list and assassination powers. Regarding the lawsuit brought by the ACLU and CCR on behalf of three American victims of Obama's assassinations -- a legal challenge whichCBS News' Andrew Cohen called"the most important lawsuit filed so far this year" and "the most important lawsuit filed in the war on terror since President Barack Obama took office" --Coll argued that it "is to the...

Chris Hayes on elite failure

The Nation's Editor-at-Large and MSNBC's weekend host, Chris Hayes, recently published a book documenting the fundamental failure of America's elite institutions and exploring the causes and solutions: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. What makes this book genuinely outstanding, and so rare, is that it is actually difficult to decide whether one agrees with many of its arguments. That's because, as is typical of Hayes, he is more interested in grappling with complex questions...

Extremism normalized

(updated below - Update II)

Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers? Yet now, the Patriot Act is quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite substantial evidence of serious abuse), and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That's how e...

Free speech and donations

As I noted the other daywhen writing about the Chick-fil-A controversy, I was happy to see that almost every liberal commentator condemned the actions by city officials in Boston and Chicago to punish that business due to the distasteful views on homosexuality expressed by its President (see, for instance,Mother Jones'Kevin DrumandAdam Serwer, The American Prospect'sScott Lemieux,Digby,The Nation'sRichard Kim,John Cole, Amanda Marcotte, andAtrios). Today, though, The Nation's Lee Fang became...

New low for Politico

When Politicofirst began spewing its pollution back in 2007, I wrote a series of posts examining its ownership and management, its heavy reliance on Drudge links, its biases, and its tawdry methods, and had a lengthy exchange with its Editor, John Harris, about those critiques.I long ago stopped doing that: aside from the handful of genuinely good reporters they have, it is widely recognized that Politico is little more than a glorified gossip rag, the belly of the media beast, the embodiment...

The curative powers of the Internet

Late last night, shortly before going to sleep, I saw links on Twitter to what purported to be -- and what certainly looked and read like -- a new Op-Ed regarding WikiLeaks in The New York Timesby former Executive Editor and current columnist Bill Keller (it turned out that the column is a fake: more on that in a moment). I skimmed the column last night, made a mental note to return to it in the morning, and when I read it carefully this morning, I found that it contained some extraordinary c...