"Right now we have the Executive Branch making the claim that it has the right to kill anyone anywhere on Earth at anytime for secret reasons based on secret evidence in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials."
Orwellian political language - "imminent" and "civilian" don't mean what they mean... Incompetence - "US officials don't always know how many or who they're killing."
"We use drones all the time... by one estimate during the Obama administration we've launched 8X the number of drone strikes than we did under his predecessor... drone strikes will be as much of a characteristic of the Obama administration as ObamaCare or receiving racist email forwards from distant relatives..."
Kevin Smith Reveals Clerks III Now Has Financing Due To Tusk | Comicbook.com: "A year and change ago I was trying to ****ing desperately get Clerks III made for the 20th anniversary. And that desperation, I must have reeked of it, because I couldn’t ****ing find money and s***. But it was Tusk, it was people going ‘Holy F***! What else do you have?’ And I was like, ‘Clerks III’, done. So everybody that’s like, ‘He failed, he failed,’ thank you I failed into Clerks III. So, never trust anybody when they tell you how your story goes, man. You know your story. You write your own story.”"
The Latest War Will Not Be Free - Reason.com: "Young people may find it hard to believe, but going to war used to be a big deal. When the United States started bombing Iraq in January 1991, Americans somberly watched President George H.W. Bush address the nation, followed by live video of Baghdad being bombed. The Bush address drew the biggest audience TV had ever had.
This past week, by contrast, life went on normally as U.S. warplanes and Tomahawk missiles destroyed targets in Syria and Iraq in a new war, which has no clear goal or time limit. As our leaders took us into a conflict fraught with peril, most people yawned. We're at war again? Oh, right—and rain is still wet. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been at war two out of every three years. Remember Somalia? Bosnia? Kosovo? It's hard to decide whether this is our third war in Iraq or a continuation of our second...
Our fight in Afghanistan has been going on for 13 years, five years longer than the Vietnam War. This one, Secretary of State John Kerry said, could last two or three years. He doesn't appear to worry that the American people's patience will run out before the administration leaves office. Though they occasionally get weary of particular conflicts, they rarely evince strong resistance to new ones...
Members of Congress show no sign of weighing the benefits of this operation against the outlay. Nor do voters, because they have no reason to. It's a free lunch. It hasn't always been that way. During World War I, Congress raised taxes twice to pay for sending an army to France. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the biggest tax increase the nation had ever seen. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau didn't sugarcoat it: "The new taxes will be severe, and their impact will be felt in every American home." During Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson pushed through a surcharge of 10 percent on all personal and corporate income taxes. He justified it as a way to "finance responsibly the needs of our men in Vietnam." Our government may provide for the needs of those fighting this war, but not in a fiscally responsible way. George W. Bush launched two invasions while cutting taxes, not raising them. Barack Obama is happy to let Americans assume the funding for this war will come off the money tree in the Rose Garden."
No accountability - The Washington Post: "So we have police officers who beat an innocent college student, then lied about it. We have a police camera that should have recorded the incident, but for some reason was aimed elsewhere, and footage that went missing but, we’re told, only because the officer who oversees the video system — who happens to be married to one of the accused officers — recused herself. We’re told we can believe this story because it has been verified by investigators who also happen to be police officers. We then have a judge, who was once married to a police officer who was once convicted of brutality, overriding a jury conviction, thus erasing the only accountability to befall any of the state officials implicated. This came after a trial in which the judge failed to disclose her prior marriage, and witnesses say she was openly hostile to the innocent college student who was beaten.
One last point: Were it not for the cellphone videos shot by bystanders, McKenna would likely have been convicted for assaulting the cops and resisting arrest, based on lies told by the officers who beat him. How did Maryland police and prosecutors respond to this? After the incident made headlines, some Maryland public officials responded by harassing and arresting citizens caught recording police with their cellphones and, in some cases, charging them with felonies. Those arrests and harassments have continued, despite assertions from the Maryland attorney general, the U.S. Department of Justice, a Maryland state judge and at least two federal appeals courts (though not the one that covers Maryland) that citizens have a First Amendment right to record on-duty police officers in public spaces.
McKenna will at least be compensated for his injuries in the form of a $2 million settlement from the county. That settlement will be paid by taxpayers. "
Excellent.
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