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Anti-Surveillance Activist Is at Center of New Leak. Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers. On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years. “The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Being at the center of a debate is a comfortable place for Mr. “I approach my journalism as a litigator,” he said. Mr. While Mr. The leak, he said, came from “a reader of mine” who was comfortable working with him.

Mr. Mr. Mr. By the time Mr.

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FinCENLeaks. David Frum on the GOP’s Lost Sense of Reality. It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. It’s possible that my friends are right. I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. Fair question. Generation gap: Seniors, Millennials at sharp odds in 2012 election. YORK, Penn. – At age 74, Jack Ireton-Hewitt is volunteering in his first campaign, walking door to door and manning an information booth at a county fair to help elect Republican Mitt Romney president.

But the retired manufacturing executive has failed to persuade two targets close to home: His granddaughters, ages 19 and 21. The first-time voters back President Obama. That much-debated gender gap? The generation gap is wider. In a national USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, most 65-and-older seniors support Romney while young adults under 30 back Obama by almost 2-1. INTERACTIVE: Play USA TODAY's Candidate Match Game The enthusiasm of the Millennial Generation for Obama, who is now 50, fueled his election victory four years ago. Ireton-Hewitt, for one, finds his granddaughters' point of view exasperating. "Their big thing is Obama is going to lower the interest rates on their college loans," he says, noting that he worked his way through college and graduate school without borrowing a dime. Tougher Voter ID Laws Set Off Court Battles.

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Business Insider. IT'S OFFICIAL: Keynes Was Right by Henry Blodget on Dec 17, 2011, 10:20 AM Advertisement After the experience of the past five years, it certainly seems like John Maynard Keynes was right, doesn't it? It seems hard to conclude anything else. I'm not an economist, and I'm not born of a particular economic school that I've bet my life's work on, so I have observed the global economic events of the past five years with a fairly open mind. I've listened to Keynesians like Paul Krugman argue that the way to fix the mess is to open the government spending spigot and invest like crazy. And I've listened to Austerians like Niall Ferguson argue that the way to fix the mess is to cut spending radically, balance government budgets, and unleash the private sector.

And I've also looked back at history--namely, Reinhart and Rogoff's analysis of prior financial crises, the Great Depression, Japan, Germany after Weimar, and so forth. Or, rather, if not the "best way," at least the least-worst way. Seriously.

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WhoShotJR comments on Obama signs NDAA as-is, he loses my vote. Yrugay comments on Obama signs NDAA as-is, he loses my vote. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (9780415180153): Cris Shore. Jihad vs. McWorld - Magazine. The two axial principles of our age—tribalism and globalism—clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without.

THE MARKET IMPERATIVE. Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-first Century (Globalization) (9780742555877): Manfred B. Steger. Thanks to the 99 Percent Movement, Media Finally Covering Jobs Crisis and Marginalizing Deficit Hysteria. Part of the reason economic policymakers have failed to properly address the poor economy is because the nation’s news media has not properly covered the unemployment crisis.

For example, at the beginning of August, when Washington, DC was debating the debt ceiling crisis, the national debt dominated the airwaves. While it was appropriate for the media then to be covering the deficit due to the debt ceiling debate at the time, there was a stunning lack of coverage of the jobs crisis. A ThinkProgress review of the media coverage of the last week of July found that the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and “unemployed” was only mentioned 75 times: Yet now, things have changed. When Occupy Wall Street started last month, a wide variety of news outlets complained that the protesters would not accomplish anything or that they did not have clear goals.

Debtor's Revolution: Are Debt Strikes Another Possible Tactic in the Fight Against the Big Banks? November 3, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. In the gorgeous, purple-and-green-lit Lower East Side headquarters of the Angel Orensanz Foundation, nearly 300 techies, activists and thinkers gathered, shouting out ideas for social justice-minded Web projects that they would break into small groups to attempt to hash out in a day. A man in a plaid shirt stood up and told the moderator and the crowd, “I want to create a tool for organizing debt strikes.” The man was Thomas Gokey, an artist and adjunct professor at Syracuse University, and his idea wound up one of the four “winners” at ContactCon, a conference hosted by Douglas Rushkoff that urged people to think of solutions to the problem of the corporate-controlled Internet—and by extension, the world.

“I wanted to do this project because I kept having the same basic conversation with everyone at Zuccotti and everywhere else,” Gokey told me. Republic of Debtors. Income Inequality Is Hobbling the Middle Class. Income inequality in the U.S. has been rising for the last several decades, and with it concern about the consequences. For example, to what extent does the large flow of income into the hands of financial executives give them the power to influence Congress through campaign donations?

How does this have an impact on the willingness of legislators to impose regulations that would stabilize the financial system but inhibit the ability of the financial industry to make the huge profits that fund political campaigns? If economic mobility increased along with the increase in inequality, then this would at least partially offset the worries associated with the rising concentration of income. To see how, suppose there are two types of jobs in society.

One type is desirable and well paying; the other is hard, miserable work with little compensation. What has happened to mobility in the U.S.? There is another aspect of mobility that needs to be addressed. There is one final factor to consider. Flat Taxes and Angry Voters. By wide margins, Americans are now telling pollsters they want a tax system that raises more money and is more fair by asking the rich to pay more. They are connecting the dots between the lavish high-end tax cuts of the past decade and today’s serious problems — including widening inequality and mounting deficits — and demanding change. The Republican presidential candidates aren’t listening. Take the flat tax plan of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. For all his talk about how it would make filing easier — that is dubious — what it would really do is give high-income Americans a big tax break, while almost everyone else could expect relatively modest tax savings or none at all. In his plan, taxpayers could choose to stick with the current system or use the flat tax, under which wages and salary would be taxed at 20 percent, versus a current top rate of 35 percent for the affluent.

In a recent interview with The Times and CNBC, Mr. Mr. Of course, Mr.

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Enriching Lives. PlainSite ( is the non-profit hypothetical web site that was just described on Reddit five hours ago for crowdsourcing problems and solutions : politics. Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works. Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works Dec 19, 2011 Clay Johnson This weekend I read a post titled "Dear Congress: It Is No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works. " The author, Joshua Kopstein, is right: it's not ok to not know about something before legislating or regulating it. The confessions by members of Congress that they are "not nerds" is frustrating at best because these guys, the guys that are regulating the Internet can't tell a server from a waiter. And so a post is born, sympathetically climbing the charts at Reddit and HackerNews, telling Congress to get a clue.

But the problem is that that post won't do any good. Few if any members of Congress will read it, and those that might certainly won't read it and decide that it's time for them to brush up on understanding how the Internet works as well as a professional that works on the Internet. The fact is, Congress isn't the only group in this equation that needs to get a clue. ARHAE.jpg (750×3293)

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