With a President who vociferously defends his use of Twitter to circumvent political norms, evade his ostensible “handlers,” and to stoke racial and xenophobic tensions, Twitter has become an important free-speach frontier. But Twitter is a private company and has chosen to silence accounts it deems abusive or dangerous. Not Donald Trump’s support for armed…
Peter van Buren Protocols exist allowing the president to select American citizens, without a whit of due process, for drone killing. Only overseas, Obama says, but you can almost see the fingers crossed behind his back. Wouldn’t an awful lot of well-meaning Americans have supported an aerial drone killing in San Bernardino, or at the…
by Peter van Buren. This article originally appeared, with a different title, on Peter’s blog, We Meant Well. Did the CIA meet with some of the 9/11 hijackers ahead of the attacks on New York? Did the Saudi government help finance those hijackers? Someone knows the answers, and soon, you might know as well. This…
Peter Van Buren has exposed another authoritarian assault by the Administration on our freedom of expression. This time the victims are not adult whistleblowers who have been sent to prison more than all previous presidencies combined, but our children. Peter has found that they are now trying to enlist teachers in identifying speech by their…
Peter Van Buren Intro by b. traven: In the army we used to say someone was “Whistling in Dixie” when they were oblivious to the truth. When Obama in one of his high flying rhetorical promises in his run for the presidency promised “transparency” in government it appears he was “whistling in Dixie.” Under his…
W.J. Astore When I was a kid, I was a stamp collector. My dad, in contrast, saved old coins. He was not a collector; he didn’t file them away in special folders. He just tossed old silver coins into a cigar box. My favorite coin of his was also the oldest one he had: a…
Intro by Stuart Lyle It is not hard to spot creeping authoritarianism in the US. The Snowden document cache makes clear that the government has a voracious appetite for data, our data: the digital traces we leave whenever we are online. It is no longer an unsubstantiated suspicion. The UN has documented and ranked the…
The Contrary Perspective 