As people near retirement age, they enter the twilight years. Sometimes, they rebel against retirement. They want to keep working. They’re not interested in shuffling out of their office never to return. And if they’re in fact the owner of the workplace, conflicts...
Patriot Act Sponsor James Sensenbrenner — Progressive Champion?
You remember James Sensenbrenner, don’t you? A Republican from Wisconsin, he introduced the Patriot Act in the House of Representatives 42 days after 9/11. Among his other “accomplishments” was authoring the Real ID Act in 2005 and acting as a general thorn in the...
Peter Buffett: Corporate Rich Use Philanthropy to Paper Over Wounds They Inflict
“Conscience laundering” is what Peter Buffett (son of Warren) calls “feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.” He provides perspective from inside the world of...
Indonesian Mass Killings Should Have Shortened Vietnam War
In a lengthy piece for Slate, Errol Morris, the author and filmmaker, writes about a controversial new movie for which he served as an executive producer. Directed by Josh Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing is an examination of an atrocity, in this case, the 500,000 to a...
Lindsey Graham Ready to Play the “Last Card” on Iran
Lindsey Graham is no longer just rattling his saber at Iran -- it now looks like he’s en garde and ready to face off against the Islamic Republic. At ThinkProgress, Ben Armbruster reports that, on Tuesday (July 23), the Republican senator from South Carolina said “If...
All That Missile Defense Tests Prove Is That It’s a Lose-Lose Proposition
You’d think that after the dismal failures of previous tests, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) would wait to run another public test until it was more confident that it could be more successful. Perhaps in tacit acknowledgment that day would never come, on July 5 the...
Cyberwar and Nuclear War: the Most Dangerous of All Conflations
Former counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, famous for criticizing the Bush administration’s lax stance toward terrorism before 9/11, and former Clinton administration National Security Council official Steve Andreasen addressed the wisdom of responding to a...
The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020
The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a...
No Immigration Reform at All
The Border Security Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, created by a bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators, recently passed the U.S. Senate and will soon be deliberated in the House of Representatives, where anti-immigrant legislators are likely to give...
Emphasis Added: the Week in Pieces (7/5)
From Edward Snowden to Taliban drug dealing to Stratfor’s ruined credibility.