Tag: Politics

New York State has had a moratorium on hydrolic fracturing (fracking) since 2008. Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that he won’t make a decision on lifting the temporary ban until the state’s Health Department finishes its study that was started in 2012. Some up state towns, concerned about the outcome of that study and the possibility that corporate friendly Gov. Cuomo would lift the ban, passed zoning ordinances banning fracking. This week New York State’s highest court upheld those ordinances:

The New York Court of Appeals upheld the ruling of a lower court that local governments have the authority to decide how land is used, which includes deciding whether or not fracking and drilling should be allowed on that land. The Court of Appeals heard arguments on two cases challenging local bans on fracking in June. The plaintiffs in those lawsuits argued that New York’s oil, gas and mining law takes precedence over local zoning laws, but in rulings both by a lower court and now the Court of Appeals, that claim was overturned.

Two New York towns – Middlefield and Dryden – that previously banned fracking were the focus of the lawsuits, but the ruling means that now other municipalities in New York can pass laws that ban fracking and drilling. So far, activists say, 170 towns and cities in New York have passed fracking bans or moratoria. [..]

The battle over the two towns’ fracking bans began in 2011, when an oil-and-gas company first challenged Dreyden’s ban on fracking. Not long after, landowner Cooperstown Holstein Corp challenged Middlefield’s ban.

The New York State Assembly had voted to extend the ban for another 3 years but the Republican controlled Senate adjourned without taking up the bill.

Municipalities around the country are taking up similar bans over concerns about contamination of vital water supplies and ground contamination by the chemicals used to release the oil and natural gases. This ruling could have an impact on those ordinances, as well:

Municipal bans are a growing phenomenon nationwide as localities target hydraulic fracturing, in which water and chemicals are pumped underground to break shale rock and release the oil and natural gas inside. Such cities and towns are often in conflict with state governments that want the revenue and the employment associated with the drilling technique that’s spurred an American oil and natural gas boom.

The battle is especially fierce in Colorado, where the governor and oil and gas companies have filed lawsuits seeking to overturn bans passed by local voters.

Pennsylvania tried to prevent its local governments from prohibiting fracking, but it lost in court. The Ohio Supreme Court is considering whether cities and towns have the right to ban the practice.

Attorneys from the environmental law firm Earthjustice helped the town of Dryden with the New York case, and they said Monday’s ruling “has sent a firm message to the oil and gas industry.”

New York State Petroleum Council Executive Director Karen Moreau said the ruling would pose a problem for natural gas development in her state.

In it’s 5 – 2 ruling, the court stated that its ruling was not about whether fracking was safe or not, but about the balance of power between state and local government.

This is a win for New Yorkers and the environment.

Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against blacks and women, including racial segregation. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public (“public accommodations”). Powers given to enforce the act were initially weak, but were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment and its duty to protect voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment.

This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, also known as the Mississippi Project, a campaign to register as many African-American voters as possible, especially in the state of Mississippi. That campaign was marked with violence by the locals directed against the outsiders. During the course of the 12 week campaign:

• four civil rights workers were killed (one in a head-on collision)
• at least three Mississippi blacks were murdered because of their support for the civil rights movement
• our people were critically wounded
• 80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten
• 1,062 people were arrested (out-of-state volunteers and locals)
• 37 churches were bombed or burned
• 30 Black homes or businesses were bombed or burned

The worst of the violence was the murder of three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, by members of the Klu Klux Klan.

When the men went missing, SNCC and COFO workers began phoning the FBI asking for an investigation. FBI agents refused, saying it was a local matter. Finally, after some 36 hours, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered an investigation. FBI agents began swarming around Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had been arrested. For the next seven weeks, FBI agents and sailors from a nearby naval airbase searched for the bodies, wading into swamps, and hacking through underbrush. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went to Mississippi on July 10 to open the first FBI branch office there.

Throughout the search, Mississippi newspapers and word of mouth perpetuated the common belief that the disappearance was “a hoax” designed to draw publicity. The search of rivers and swamps turned up the bodies of eight other black men. Herbert Oarsby, a 14-year old youth, was found wearing a CORE T-shirt. Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore had been expelled from Alcorn A&M for participating in civil rights protests. The other five men were never identified. On August 4, 1964, the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were found buried beneath an earthen dam.

Now five decades later, there is a concerted effort by the right wing, most white Republican, faction to end all that was achieved for equality that summer. At Esquire’s Politics Blog, Charles Pierce summarized why now more than ever we must get out the vote:

Over the weekend, I watched the PBS documentary on Freedom Summer, the effort 50 years ago to register African Americans to vote in the state of Mississippi, the effort that cost so many people so dearly, especially the families of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, who were beaten and shot to death, and buried in a dam, because the state of Mississippi had local police forces shot through with the Ku Klux Klan.  Now, five decades later, with a Republican House far gone into nihilistic vandalism, and with the Senate hanging in the balance, and a Supreme Court one septuagenarian’s heartbeat away from a return to the golden days of the last Gilded Age, and a Democratic president in the White House on whom those responsible for the previous three phenomena have painted a bullseye, we keep hearing about how hard it is going to be for the Democratic party to turn out its voters this fall to take advantage of the opportunities for which Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner gave their lives, and did so in my lifetime, not in a distant antebellum episode in some backwater.

Racism is not dead in America. It is very much alive. In a detailed article at Huffington Post, Braden Goyette and and Alissa Scheller prove that racism is a live and well and we, as Americans, are a long way from being post racial.

In his 2007 majority opinion limiting the use race to desegregate schools, Chief Justice John Roberts said “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  Seven years later, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent taking Roberts to the woodshed over the court’s upholding the affirmative action ban (pdf) adopted by Michigan’s voters. Calling Robers “out of touch with reality, she read her dissent aloud:

In my colleagues’ view, examining the racial impact of legislation only perpetuates racial discrimination. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.

We need to push all our representatives in local city and town councils, state legislatures and Congress to remember what so many gave their blood, sweat, tears and lives to win, Freedom for All.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Alexis Goldberg: Why is Washington still protecting the secret political power of corporations?

Regulators at the SEC could illuminate the future of campaign donations. But they aren’t interested in disclosing the truth – even though voters are

In post-Citizens United America, there is growing concern that the ability for corporations to anonymously funnel money into politics – with no need to disclose these donations to voters, election officials or their own shareholders – will corrupt the political process. Democrats have previously tried and failed to pass the Disclose Act, which would require greater disclosure of donors – but with a divided Congress, many in Washington see bringing meaningful transparency to campaign finance an utterly impossible task.

Still, there is another way to achieve the disclosure of corporate political donations that doesn’t require Congress at all: the administration could simply propose new regulations under its existing authority. Unfortunately, despite having a Democratic chair – Mary Jo White – the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could mandate such disclosures, is either too intimidated (or too captured) to act. [..]

House Republicans, of course, have stepped in, which gives the agency a convenient excuse for their inaction. [..]

Last May, Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee warned White not to pursue the political disclosure rule. During the hearing, Rep Scott Garrett (R-NJ) went so far as to ask her to formally commit to removing the political disclosure rule from their regulatory agenda.

It would appear White – despite claims she is “apolitical” – heard him loud and clear. No proposed rule materialized, and seven months after Rep Scott Garrett requested it, the rule was removed from the agency’s 2014 agenda. [..]

White’s decision to keep political disclosure rule off the 2014 agenda isn’t a matter of a too-full regulatory plate, Republican appropriations tricks or a lack of popular support. It is a problem of political will.

Ana Marie Cox: The GOP wants the ladies to love them (just not enough to need birth control)

Don Draper’s psyche is nothing to base a political strategy on

So, the announcement that Republicans had formed yet another political action committee targeting female voters – a lady-centric Super Pac named the Unlocking Potential Project – came just as America was digesting the supreme court’s decision to allow certain corporations to deny women birth control coverage based on religious objections. Did Republicans think this was genius counter-programming, or what?

Forget the obvious irony that limiting access to birth control is the definition of denying women their full potential: could launching a women’s outreach program the day we’re reminded of just where the GOP stands on women’s issues – on top of them, stomping down, mostly – ever be genius, or is it just run-of-the-mill tone-deafness? [..]

That reproductive rights are an economic issue is a stubborn truth that will keep the GOP stumbling for as long as they choose to ignore it.

I’ll give you one hint about the problem with believing that your female compatriots are either lusty libertarian-leaning pixies or Xanax-seeking helpmeets: it starts with “virgin” ends with “complex” and has a “whore” in the middle.

Don Draper’s psyche is not anything upon which to base a political strategy – and if you require Pac upon strategic plan upon public statement to affirmatively appeal to women, you’re confirming the fact that your policies alone no longer do. Maybe work on that.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Adam Winkler: Corporations Are People, And They Have More Rights Than You

Ever since Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision allowing unlimited corporate and union spending on political issues, Americans have been debating whether, as Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend.” Occupy Wall Street protestors decried the idea, late night comedians mocked it, and reform groups proposed amending the Constitution to eliminate it. Today, however, the Supreme Court endorsed corporate personhood — holding that business firms have rights to religious freedom under federal law. Not only do corporations have rights, their rights are stronger than yours. [..]

Protecting women’s rights, according to the Court, isn’t a good enough reason for the government to force a business corporation, at least a privately held one like chain craft store Hobby Lobby, to include birth control in its insurance contrary to the business owner’s wishes. At least that’s what the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, held in Hobby Lobby. Federal statutes guaranteeing religious freedom to “persons” apply equally to closely held business corporations, and those corporations’ religious liberty is “substantially burdened” by having to provide their employees with contraception. So the rights of employees have to give way to the rights of the corporation.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: 5 Signs the US Is Failing to Protect Women’s Rights in the Workplace

The Prime Minister of Morocco recently compared women to “lanterns” or “chandeliers,” saying that “when women went to work outside, the light went out of their homes.” His remarks, which ran counter to Morocco’s constitutionally-guaranteed rights for women, promptly provoked both street demonstrations and an “I’m not a chandelier” Twitter hashtag.

But before we celebrate our culture’s moral superiority over a Middle Eastern nation – which sometimes seems to be a reflexive instinct in this country – perhaps we should stop and consider the fact that the prime minister’s remarks would not have been out of place in many of our own nation’s political and media conversations.

What’s more, our country’s bias against women in the workplace isn’t just cultural. As is true elsewhere, evidence for it can be found in both policy choices and economic data.

What’s a glass ceiling, after all, if not another place to hang a chandelier?

Here are five signs that much more needs to be done to ensure equal workplace rights for women in the United States.

I lived in Florida for five years. Because I donated to and volunteered for Democrats in Florida, I find myself on about a billion different fundraising “activist” email lists. So it was no surprise to me that every Democrat running for something in Florida contacted me today to let me know that if I would just chip in $5 or $10 to help candidate X win election Y, they will “fight” to overturn today’s SCOTUS verdicts.

Considering it has sided with corporations in so many of its rulings over the last few years, the out come of the last two rulings by the US Supreme Court for this session were predictable down to the vote.

As in its decision in Citizens United, in a five to four vote, the court rules that just like people, corporations, too, have religious beliefs.

Supreme Court Rejects Contraceptives Mandate for Some Corporationsby Adam Liptak, New York Times

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom.

The 5-to-4 decision, which applied to two companies owned by Christian families, opened the door to challenges from other corporations to many laws that may be said to violate their religious liberty.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the court’s five more conservative justices, said a federal religious-freedom law applied to for-profit corporations controlled by religious families. He added that the requirement that the companies provide contraception coverage imposed a substantial burden on the companies’ religious liberty. He said the government could provide the coverage in other ways.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court’s four-member liberal wing, said the contraception coverage requirement was vital to women’s health and reproductive freedom. Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined almost all of the dissent, but they said there was no need to take a position on whether corporations may bring claims under the religious liberty law.

In an Illinois case with another 5 – 4 ruling, the justices ruled that in-home healthcare workers who are paid by the state cannot be compelled to pay union dues.

Supreme Court Ruling Allows Some Public Workers to Opt Out of Union Fees by Steven Greenhouse, New York Times

The Supreme Court ruled narrowly on Monday that some government employees did not have to pay any fees to labor unions representing them, but the court decision declined to strike down a decades-old precedent that required many public-sector workers to pay union fees.

Writing the majority 5-4 opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. concluded that there was a category of government employee – a partial public employee – who can opt out of joining a union and not be required to contribute dues to that labor group.

Justice Alito wrote that home-care aides who are typically employed by an ill or disabled person with Medicaid’s paying their wages would be classified as partial public employees, which would not be the same as public-school teachers or police officers who work directly for the government.

Because states often set wages for partial public employees like home-care aides and because unions often do not conduct collective bargaining for them, these aides cannot be required to pay union fees, Justice Alito wrote. He wrote that requiring these home-care aides to pay would be a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Burwell v Hobby Lobby can be read here and Harris Et Al. v. Quinn, Governor of Illinois, Et Al can be read here

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Inequality Is Not Inevitable

AN insidious trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War II began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the fissures that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this “shining city on a hill” become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality?

One stream of the extraordinary discussion set in motion by Thomas Piketty’s timely, important book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has settled on the idea that violent extremes of wealth and income are inherent to capitalism. In this scheme, we should view the decades after World War II – a period of rapidly falling inequality – as an aberration.

This is actually a superficial reading of Mr. Piketty’s work, which provides an institutional context for understanding the deepening of inequality over time. Unfortunately, that part of his analysis received somewhat less attention than the more fatalistic-seeming aspects.

Trevor Timm: Is this the start of the end of the age of warrantless government spying?

From phone tracking to NSA snooping and beyond, here’s a look at the domino effect.

The US supreme court’s unanimous 9-0 opinion this week requiring police to get a warrant before searching your cellphone is arguably the most important legal privacy decision of the digital age. Its immediate impact will be felt by the more than 12m people who are arrested in America each year (many for minor, innocuous crimes), but the surprisingly tech-savvy opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts may also lead to far more protection than that.

Roberts’s analysis of the current state of the digital world in his Riley v Wurie opinion is was so thorough, and so sweeping, that I’d be willing to bet you won’t find many privacy and technology cases going forward that don’t cite this one.

From phone tracking to NSA snooping and beyond, here’s a look at the domino effect.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on SundY’S “This Week” are: Pres. Barack Obama; Rep. Peter King (R-NY); and  documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson.

At the roundtable are: Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd; Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; editor and publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel; ABC News’ Terry Moran; Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick; and the Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV); Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY); former US ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey; CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan and TIME Magazine‘s Michael Crowley.

His panel guests are Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal; Michael Gerson of The Washington Post; former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers; and Todd Purdum of Politico.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: The guests on MTP are: Former President Bill Clinton; and Reince Priebus, Chair, Republican National Committee.

The roundtable guests are: Kathy Ruemmler, former White House Counsel; Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI); Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent; and Nia-Malika Henderson, National Political Reporter, The Washington Post.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darell Issa (R-CA); Lois Lerner’s attorney William Taylor; and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI).

Her panel guests are attorney Stephanie Cutter, Neera Tanden, Liz Mair, and Mattie Duppler.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: What We Can Learn From Lawrence of Arabia

As fears grow of a widening war across the Middle East, fed by reports that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) envisions a region-wide, all controlling theocracy, we found ourselves talking about another war. The Great War – or World War I, as it would come to be called – was triggered one hundred years ago this month when an assassin shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Through a series of tangled alliances and a cascade of misunderstandings and blunders, that single act of violence brought on a bloody catastrophe. More than 37 million people were killed or wounded. [..]

In America, if we reflect on the First World War at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of Europe and tend to forget another front in that war – against the Ottoman Empire of the Turks that dominated the Middle East. A British Army officer named T.E. Lawrence became a hero in the Arab world when he led nomadic Bedouin tribes in battle against Turkish rule. Peter O’Toole immortalized him in the epic movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.” [..]

But then and now, Lawrence’s understanding of the ancient and potent jealousies of the people among whom he had lived and fought generally was ignored. In 1920, he wrote for the Times of London an unsettling and prophetic article about Iraq – then under the thumb of the British. He decried the money spent, the number of troops and loss of life, and warned that his countrymen had been led “into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It… may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Not for the last time in the Middle East would disaster come from the blundering ignorance and blinding arrogance of foreign intruders convinced by magical thinking of their own omnipotence and righteousness. How soon we forget. How often we repeat.

Joshua Holland: The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies

Polls suggest that Americans tend to differentiate between our “good war” in Iraq – “Operation Desert Storm,” launched by George HW Bush in 1990 – and the “mistake” his son made in 2003.

Across the ideological spectrum, there’s broad agreement that the first Gulf War was “worth fighting.” The opposite is true of the 2003 invasion, and a big reason for those divergent views was captured in a 2013 CNN poll that found that “a majority of Americans (54%) say that prior to the start of the war the administration of George W. Bush deliberately misled the U.S. public about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.”

But as the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to urge the US to once again commit troops to Iraq, it’s important to recall that the first Gulf War was sold to the public on a pack of lies that were just as egregious as those told by the second Bush administration 12 years later.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Jessica Valenti: The US supreme court’s abortion buffer zone ruling protects a gauntlet of horror

Abortion clinics are not safe places – anti-choicers have ensured that – and if women are going to be free from harassment, the fight must go on

Imagine trying to walk into a building, trying to get a medical treatment – and someone screams at you. Someone is two inches from your face – two feet from the front door – and that someone is videotaping you, calling you a whore. There’s ketchup poured in the snowbanks around you, made to look like spurted blood. You try to take a step forward, but people block your way, yelling that you’re going to be “mother to a dead baby”. They hold signs in your faces, whisper “murderer” in your ear as you pass. Maybe they shove you.

Don’t believe portrayals to the contrary – from anti-choice activists and the news media – that these kinds of protestors outside abortion clinics are not grandmas praying, or kindly “counselors” who just want to talk reasonably to women. These people wait outside clinics to shame and to harass; they are there to scare.

Despite the horrifying experiences of women across the country trying to obtain abortions, the US supreme court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a Massachusetts law providing a 35-foot buffer zone outside of clinics is unconstitutional, and violates protesters’ first amendment right to engage in “personal, caring, consensual conversations” with women seeking abortions.

Personal, caring and consensual?

Peter van Buren: Shredding the Fourth Amendment in Post-Constitutional America

Four ways It no longer applies

Here’s a bit of history from another America: the Bill of Rights was designed to protect the people from their government. If the First Amendment’s right to speak out publicly was the people’s wall of security, then the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy was its buttress. It was once thought that the government should neither be able to stop citizens from speaking nor peer into their lives. Think of that as the essence of the Constitutional era that ended when those towers came down on September 11, 2001. Consider how privacy worked before 9/11 and how it works now in Post-Constitutional America. [..]

In Post-Constitutional America, the old words that once defined our democracy are twisted in new ways, not discarded. Previously unreasonable searches become reasonable ones under new government interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. Traditional tools of law, like subpoenas and warrants, continue to exist even as they morph into monstrous new forms.

Americans are told (and often believe) that they retain rights they no longer have. Wait for the rhetoric that goes with the celebrations of our freedoms this July 4th. You won’t hear a lot about the NSA then, but you should. In pre-constitutional America the colonists knew that they were under the king’s thumb. In totalitarian states of the last century like the Soviet Union, people dealt with their lack of rights and privacy with grim humor and subtle protest. However, in America, ever exceptional, citizens passively watch their rights disappear in the service of dark ends, largely without protest and often while still celebrating a land that no longer exists.