If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
This past weekend, The White House hosted Pixar's filmmakers for a Father's Day screening of Monster's University. The White House movie theater has been the cinema-in-chief to Presidents for the last 70 years. If those walls could talk.
Let's return to the democratic values our country was founded on and stop penalizing the Dixie Chicks for preserving their belief, however unpopular at the time, that the Iraq War and the violence it caused was un-American.
As a progressive, anti-Patriot Act, ACLU supporter, I still find myself among the majority of Americans who are not outraged by the latest revelations of NSA surveillance. It's not for lack of trying.
As he rides through his 1,500-acre ranch, with some of the men he ordered into combat, does he feel responsible for their injuries? Does he second-guess the decisions that led to the war in Iraq?
The editors of the New York Times appear to have forgotten an important principle: The First Amendment is for all of us, and does not grant any special privileges to the institutional press.
Of course, just because something is legal doesn't make it right. But it matters that President Obama followed the law and President Bush did not.
The National Security Agency's data mining and domestic spying program that the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has exposed should concern anyone who cares about our Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
After weeks of declining ratings, leading to the least viewed episode since 2009 the Sunday before last, Mad Men finally rose in the ratings again last week. Will Sunday night's episode drive things upward again?
Do you believe none of them would ever sell your data for personal profit ever? In fact, the NSA is already sharing your data with, at minimum, British intelligence. That's a foreign government that your American government is informing on you to, FYI.
We can, and should, be angry to learn that all of our communications and movements have been secretly monitored for years. But we can't escape our own responsibility by claiming to be surprised.
The government is not above the people, but below it. "We the people" created this government; when it encroaches on our freedoms, it is our constitutional right and duty to encroach on its freedoms.
The claim from the right is that President Obama is attempting to use these appointments to advance his policy agenda. This gets it exactly backwards. It is conservatives who have, successfully, used appointments to the D.C. Circuit to advance their policy agenda in recent years.
Seriously, do you have any idea how frustrating it is to have your boss ask you to get reporters to write about something he can't tell you about? I did it for years and let's just say, it stretches you as a communicator.
It's tough when even some Republicans are making more sense on an issue than the president. This is a losing battle for Obama, because the harder he fights it the more he's fighting against his own stated views on science and politics.
Almost no one aspires to become lieutenant governor, outside of the fact that it is a launching pad to higher office. Future President Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge both got their cards punched as lieutenant governor on their journey to the White House.
No, not that George Bush, but it's the same family. George P. Bush is the son of the former president's brother, Jeb. And he seems to be handling his potential career in a very smart manner.
