The Vote's The Thing

The always awesome Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog recaps Monday's Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, where in a 7-2 decision, the Supremes declared that federal election law does indeed trump state law when it comes to the mechanics of voting.  But Lyle points out the larger issue in the decision:  when it comes to who is allowed to vote using those federal rules, states get to determine eligibility.

There is a customary rule that courts are to operate on the basic premise that, when Congress and the states act in the same field, state laws won’t be displaced unless Congress explicitly says they must yield.  That “presumption against preemption,” in technical terms, does not even apply to the joint enterprise of Congress and the states in regulating elections, according to the new decision.   Thus, in this one field, states do not get the benefit of the doubt when they pass election laws that appear to be, or are, different from what Congress has mandated.

If a reader of the Scalia opinion stopped at the top of page 13, the impression would be very clear that Congress had won hands down in the field of regulating federal elections.   But from that point on, there is abundant encouragement for what is essentially a states’ rights argument: that is, that the states have very wide authority to define who gets to vote, in both state and federal elections.

On the particular point at issue in this case — Arizona’s requirement of proof of citizenship before one may register to vote or actually vote — the Scalia opinion said that a state was free to ask the federal government for permission to add that requirement.   And, Scalia said, if that doesn’t work — either because the federal agency that would deal with such a request is either not functioning or says no — then a state would be free to go to court and make an argument that it has a constitutional right to insist on proof of citizenship as an absolute qualification for voting, in all elections.

The opinion seemed to leave little doubt that, if Arizona or another state went to court to try to establish such a constitutional power, it might well get a very sympathetic hearing, because that part of the Scalia opinion laid a very heavy stress on the power of states under the Constitution to decide who gets to vote.   Indeed, that part of the opinion said that the Constitution simply does not give Congress the power to decide who can qualify, but only how federal elections are run procedurally.

In other words, Wario Scalia has just opened the door to serious court challenges to federal election laws.  It's a decision that means the only reason Arizona can't force proof of citizenship in order to vote is because that has to be a national requirement, and that Arizona really, really should sue the federal government in order to make it so.

It also means that states are free to disqualify people from voting for various reasons, mostly through voter ID requirements.

If all of this gives you a headache, it's supposed to.  It's an argument that when it comes to federal elections, the how and when is done by the feds, but the question of who is up to the states and the states alone, and that Congress has no power to interfere in who a state allows to vote.

That bodes very, very badly for the days and weeks ahead in the other big voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, that will determine the power Congress has in the Voting Rights Act.  I'm more convinced than ever that Section 5 of the VRA will be toast, and that GOP-controlled states will do everything they can to disenfranchise millions in future elections.

Immigration Disintegration

Once again:  anyone who thinks what the Senate "Gang of 8" is doing on immigration isn't paying attention to the near 100% certainty that House Republicans will never let a real immigration bill pass.  First of all, if Orange Julius even considers the Senate bill, he's facing revolution.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) warned Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) would face a conference revolt that could threaten his Speakership if he allows a House vote on the immigration bill presently being debated in the Senate.

Conservatives have been pressuring Boehner to adhere to the unwritten “Hastert Rule” — named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) — that says no bill should come to the House floor unless it has the backing of a majority of a chamber's majority party.

Rohrabacher said if Boehner moves forward with a vote on immigration reform without a Republican majority, it would be a “betrayal” of his party.

Second, Boehner has already caved on Rohrabacher's threat.

House Speaker John Boehner is not going to bring a comprehensive immigration-reform plan to the floor if a majority of Republicans don't support it, sources familiar with his plans said.

"No way in hell," is how several described the chances of the speaker acting on such a proposal without a majority of his majority behind him.

Boehner, R-Ohio, does not view immigration in the same vein as the fiscal cliff last December, when he backed a bill that protected most Americans from a tax increase even though less than half of the GOP lawmakers were with him, said multiple sources, who spoke anonymously to allow greater candor.

Starting to get the picture?  Only an "immigration bill" awful enough to pass a majority of the House will even get a vote.  The Senate bill the Gang of 8 is trying to pass?  It will never get a vote.  Republicans will make sure immigration reform dies.

The plan is for the House to scare Senate Republicans into a bill that will never pass the Senate so they can blame the Democrats.  There are any number of poison pill amendments waiting to pass for just such a reason, like this one from Rand Paul:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) will introduce a series of amendments to the Senate immigration reform bill that would position him for a potential Republican presidential primary bid, The Hill reported Tuesday.

Paul's most prominent measure would eliminate a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants while lifting a cap on guest workers, Senate aides familiar with the proposals told The Hill. Under that amendment, to be introduced this week, employers who demonstrate need would be provided with immigrant workers while the workers themselves would have to apply for permanent residency and citizenship according to the policies of their native countries.

The only question is how the Village will frame it, and how the people will accept it.

StupidiNews!

• The FBI is pursuing "credible" evidence that the remains of former Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa may be buried on a Michigan farm near Detroit.
• New Hampshire's state supreme court has struck down a law creating tax credits for private schools, ruling that the law effectively funneled public money to religious schools.
• Americans toss some 90 billion pounds of food a year, costing the average family of four around $1,800 annually.
• California home prices have made their biggest jump in a third of a century, with home prices in San Francisco breaking 2007 housing bubble records.
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed into law a bill that prevents state and local law enforcement from reading e-mails without a warrant.

Last Call For A True Motive

Do we finally understand the true motive behind Edward Snowden, folks?

NSA leaker Edward Snowden on Monday criticized President Barack Obama for empty promises in a wide-ranging online interview, saying that the president’s alleged failings influenced his decision to release the secret information on government surveillance.

“Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge,” Snowden said in a response to a question from a commenter on The Guardian’s website.

Snowden was responding to this question: “Why did you wait to release the documents if you said you wanted to tell the world about the NSA programs since before Obama became president?”

All Obama's fault.  Got it?  Patriot Act, NSA warrantless wiretapping, STELLARWIND, all of the stuff under Bush?  It didn't matter until Obama was President, see.  All this bad stuff started on January 20, 2009, remember?

Do we finally understand "Why now?" and "Who benefited from the timing?"

Even if you agree with Snowden's basic message that we need far more checks on power like this (which I do) he's done so much damage to his own message with this loopy Obama Derangement Syndrome garbage that he's setting the message back by light-years.

So congrats, folks.  Your civil liberties spokesman is Jason Stackhouse.

He Still Can't Stop Lying About Obamacare

Despite getting his clock cleaned by a number of health care policy wonks two weeks ago and then moving the goalposts and declaring victory while getting crushed again, it seems Forbes.com paid anti-Obamacare hack Avik Roy is at it again with yet another inflammatory if not outright false claim about how much Obamacare will raise premiums on people in California, this time stating that Obamacare will cause health insurance premiums to double for women.

While premiums will go up equally for men and women in California, women should benefit more from Obamacare’s subsidies. That’s because 40-year-old women have lower average incomes than men do. According to the Census, in 2011 the median income for 35-to-44 year olds was $36,724; however, for men it was $43,967, and for women it was $29,095.

That’s great news for women whose wages are below the national average, or whose households that are larger than the national average. But it’s terrible news for those with above-average incomes, along with those who are unmarried or childless. And it’s also bad news for the men who today pay for the disproportionate share of Obamacare’s subsidies. (Over time, the gender-based income gap is likely to narrow; for more than a decade, women have outnumbered men in American colleges, and educational status is highly correlated to income.)

So now, Roy's narrow, narrow group is "single childless women who make more than the national average but don't have any health insurance."  He predicts those women will get "hammered" and he bases this conclusion on the same debunked math that got him into trouble two weeks ago.  In other words, not only does Roy not correct his math, he then uses that same faulty math to create more awful assumptions about Obamacare.

Second, how many people fall into the category of women who make more than the national average, but somehow work for a company that doesn't offer health insurance?  Existing California law makes that whole "not offering health insurance" part difficult, if not impossible.  In fact, the entire premise of Roy's idiotic assumption that Obamacare is a "war against women" is because California requires equal rates for both sexes, and that being a woman is not a more expensive "pre-existing condition".

Roy's final assumption is that this is yet another "massive" group of people who will "drop out" of Obamacare altogether and pay the fine instead of buying insurance, raising rates on the rest of us.  but since we know his base assumptions previous to this point are all hogwash, why would this be true at all?

The answer of course is that it's not, unless you think that single, upper-class childless women who don't get their health insurance through work are a huge segment of the population.

Immigration Versus Obliteration

The Republican Party is about to be split on immigration for good.  The Lindsey Graham/Marco Rubio/Chris Christie corporate wing of the party believes that without immigration reform, the combination of Latinos, African-Americans, and LGBTQ voters will put victory for the GOP permanently out of reach.  The problem is, the Louie Gohmert/Steve King/Michele Bachmann God-botherers believe that passing immigration will amount to the same thing.

Both of them can't be right.  Both of them believe the other will destroy the party forever.

Long knives are out, people.

“If we don’t pass immigration reform , if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016,” Graham warned during on appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet The Press. “We’re in a demographic death spiral as a party, and the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic community, in my view, is pass comprehensive immigration reform. If you don’t do that, it really doesn’t matter who will run, in my view.”

"Demographic death spiral" is right.  The party of old, rich, white privilege is dying.  Unfortunately, it looks like they are going to go down burning instead of trying to fix the error of their ways, and if the last six weeks are any indication, they're going to try to take out the rest of America along with them.  If they can't run the country, then we won't have a country left to run.

StupidiNews!

• As this year's G8 Summit opens in Belfast, Northern Ireland today, President Obama moves to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to drop support for the Assad regime in Syria.
• Police in Rio used tear gas on thousands of protestors angry over the country spending billions to host the upcoming 2014 World Cup rather than on education and health care.
• Iran has elected centrist Hasan Rowhani to replace outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prompting a hopeful response from Western powers.
• The continuing British probe of bank manipulation of the world's benchmark LIBOR rate is leading to other countries investigating rate-rigging globally.
• A new BBC documentary and study finds cats left to their own devices will raid each other's homes for food and stay relatively close to home.

Last Call For Science Lite

The nutjobs on the right don't believe in climate change or evolution, but when the latest pop psychology theory shows up to explain the "mental illness of liberalism" suddenly they're all about the white lab coats and rigorous scientific methods.  James Taranto thinks he has us all sussed out with a paper from Oakland University's Professor Barbara Oakley's theory of "pathological altruism":

Oakley defines pathological altruism as "altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm." A crucial qualification is that while the altruistic actor fails to anticipate the harm, "an external observer would conclude [that it] was reasonably foreseeable." Thus, she explains, if you offer to help a friend move, then accidentally break an expensive item, your altruism probably isn't pathological; whereas if your brother is addicted to painkillers and you help him obtain them, it is.

As the latter example suggests, the idea of "codependency" is a subset of pathological altruism. "Feelings of empathic caring . . . appear to lie at the core of . . . codependent behavior," Oakley notes. People in codependent relationships genuinely care for each other, but that empathy leads them to do destructive things.

Yet according to Oakley, "the vital topic of codependency has received almost no hard-science research focus, leaving 'research' to those with limited or no scientific research qualifications." That is to say, it is largely the domain of pop psychology. "It is reasonable to wonder if the lack of scientific research involving codependency may relate to the fact that there is a strong academic bias against studying possible negative outcomes of empathy."

In other words, not only is the road to Hell paved with good intentions, it's enabled by evil liberals who are too twisted to see what they are doing (or too emotionally cauterized to care) whereas brave, noble conservatives believe in personal choice and FREEDOM and stuff.

In other words, the theory becomes an awesome justification for Randian selfishness by allowing the less fortunate to crash and burn in their attempts to better themselves.  Even worse, helping people is actively evil, enabling them to fail and waste your time and resources.

Pretty cynical worldview, even for wingers.

Pathological altruism is at the root of the liberal left's crisis of authority, which we discussed in our May 20 column. The left derives its sense of moral authority from the supposition that its intentions are altruistic and its opponents' are selfish. That sense of moral superiority makes it easy to justify immoral behavior, like slandering critics of President Obama as racist--or using the power of the Internal Revenue Service to suppress them. It seems entirely plausible that the Internal Revenue Service officials who targeted and harassed conservative groups thought they were doing their patriotic duty. If so, what a perfect example of pathological altruism. 

Oakley concludes by noting that "during the twentieth century, tens of millions [of] individuals were killed under despotic regimes that rose to power through appeals to altruism." An understanding that altruism can produce great evil as well as good is crucial to the defense of human freedom and dignity.

And with such a binary worldview, you can't lose.  Just dismiss your critics as despotic murderers whose good intentions are really genocidal fascism, and you can't lose.  Of course this applies to Obama and his supporters, and it hits all the lizard-brain pleasure centers of the right.  They'll love this, it's the new Bell Curve or Liberal Fascism of the decade: altruism is really the most evil force on Earth.

Ayn Rand beat all these fools to the punch decades ago, but who's counting?

Living Up To Both Your Father's Expectations

This Father's Day, it's important to remember just how much we were shaped by our dad.  Or in the case of Kal-El, dads.



Man of Steel brings us Christopher Nolan's take helming DC Comics' other franchise (after three Batman films, Nolan hands over the directing work to Zack Snyder of 300 fame and produces the film) and the film definitely revolves around fathers.  Specifically, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), the fathers who raised Kal-El (a brilliantly cast Henry Cavill, as perfect a choice as Robert Downey Jr. was as Tony Stark in Iron Man.)

We get the full origin story here, as young Kal-El is launched into space as a newborn, the last hope of dying planet Krypton, as the planet's highest military leader General Zod (Michael Shannon) attempts a coup over the planet's high council.  Zod, furious that Kal-El has sent the child and the repository of Krypton's 100,000-year civilization, the Codex, into space, kills Jor-El and is finally caught and sentenced to a very long term in the extra-dimensional Phantom Zone.  Freed once Krypton finally implodes, he searches for his rival's son.

And that brings us to Clark Kent, seen at various stages in his life realizing that he has Powers And Abilities Far Beyond Those Of Mortal Men.  His father Jonathan and mother Martha (Diane Lane) want nothing more than for Clark to remain safe.  Jonathan knows that humanity is not ready for Clark's powers, the opposite advice Clark eventually receives from his other father, whose downloaded consciousness wants him to be a beacon of hope for all of Earth.

The struggle between the expectations of his fathers keeps Clark helping people whenever he can, and then doing everything to cover his tracks as he drifts across the planet.  His story eventually comes to the attention of Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams, easily the best Lois Lane since Margot Kidder) who attempts to uncover his story in the present day.

All of that gets complicated very quickly when Zod and his crew show up looking for the Codex, and Clark has to decide what kind of man he is, and how to heed the advice of both of his fathers.  Not an easy task for anyone, but if there's someone who can do it...well.

Like Clark himself, the movie has the imprints of both fathers, Nolan and Snyder, upon it.  Nolan's smart writing along with partner David S. Goyer is a sharp contrast to director Zack Snyder's kinetic, unapologetic, and brutal action in the final third of the film, but it does leave enough room for humor and Lois Lane's intelligence moving the film along.

This is definitely a popcorn flick of the highest order, and you should do yourself a favor and catch it.  And it's Father's Day.  Go call your dad.

Let It All Burn

Have a Republican Congressman?  Thinking about calling them up for information on how Obamacare works?  Save your breath, they don't care.

Republican lawmakers say they anticipate a flood of questions in the coming months from constituents on the implementation of ObamaCare, which will pose a dilemma for the GOP.

People regularly call their representatives for help with Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Yet, Republicans believe healthcare reform spells doom for the federal budget, private businesses and the U.S. healthcare system. They're also enormously frustrated that the law has persevered through two elections and a Supreme Court challenge and believe a botched implementation could help build momentum for the repeal movement.

Some Republicans indicated to The Hill they will not assist constituents in navigating the law and obtaining benefits. Others said they would tell people to call the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

"Given that we come from Kansas, it's much easier to say, 'Call your former governor,'" said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R), referring to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

"You say, 'She's the one. She's responsible. She was your governor, elected twice, and now you reelected the president, but he picked her.'" Huelskamp said.

The more people who don't know how Obamacare works or who are in possession of false information, the more the GOP can turn people against the plan.  Because why should Americans get affordable health care?

A Fraction Of His Credibility Left

Glenn Greenwald's PRISM story is rapidly crumbling on all fronts.  Now we find out that his claim that the NSA has "direct access" to the servers of America's major social media and tech companies is not only bogus, what access they do have is narrow in scope and specific in having to be requested.  These companies are coming clean on numbers that Greenwald and others screamed that America needed to know.  The truth shall set you free.

Microsoft:

Earlier this week, along with others in the industry, we called for greater transparency about the volume and scope of the national security orders, including FISA orders, which require the disclosure of some customer content. We believe this would help the community understand and debate these important issues. Since then, we have worked with the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice to try and secure permission to do this.

This afternoon, the FBI and DOJ have given us permission to publish some additional data, and we are publishing it straight away. However, we continue to believe that what we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help the community understand and debate these issues.

Here is what the data shows: For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities (including local, state and federal). This only impacts a tiny fraction of Microsoft’s global customer base.

And Facebook:

For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.

With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months.

Several thousand accounts out of billions.   That's not anywhere near the level that Greenwald purported.  Nor is the information anything new:  the NSA has been picking up a firehose of data from the main internet backbones of America for years, at least when Bush was in charge.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a key hub for fiber optic cables.

In other words, just because you forgot this was happening doesn't mean it wasn't happening.  This has been public knowledge for eight years now.

So how is this Obama's fault again?  And how is Greenwald's story a "revelation" again?

StupidiNews, Father's Day Weekend Edition!

• One person is dead and another eight are injured from a chemical plant explosion Friday night in Donaldsonville, Louisiana.
• Norway will become the first European country to extend peacetime military conscription to include women for the country's mandatory one-year minimum military service.
• Six months after the Newtown massacre left 26 dead, families and activists launched a bus tour covering 25 states urging lawmakers to pass comprehensive gun control.
• Facebook has a new product on the way for June 20, rumored to be a new news reader to replace the recently decommissioned Google Reader.
• Europeans beat rampant leprosy in the 15th century through public health improvements and genetic evolution selecting for those resistant to the bacteria that causes the disease, new findings show.

Last Call For Early Christmas In Texas

GOP Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is getting an early start on the holiday victim card season.

Buttressing his already formidable reputation as a purveyor of cheap demagoguery, Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed a so-called “Merry Christmas bill” before jetting off to Washington to speak at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. The legislation aims at protecting the Lone Star State’s poor persecuted Christians from any lawsuits keeping them from offering specially religious holiday greetings on public property. 

So what does the bill actually do?

It removes legal risks of saying "Merry Christmas" in schools while also protecting traditional holiday symbols, such as a menorah or nativity scene, as long as more than one religion and a secular symbol are also reflected.

"I realize it's only June. But it's a good June and the holidays are coming early this year," Perry said. "It's a shame that a bill like this one I'm signing today is even required, but I'm glad that we're standing up for religious freedom in this state. Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion."

But it does mean more special legal protections by the state for religious organizations.  There's a word for that, you know.  It describes the government of places like Iran.

The bill's sponsor, Republican Rep. Dwayne Bohac of Houston, said he drafted it after discovering that his son's school erected a "holiday tree" in December because any mention of Christmas could spark litigation.

"We hope that this is a fire that will take off and become laws in the other 49 states," said Bohac.

The Founding Fathers had some very choice words about religion, the state, and freedom.  Rick Perry and Republicans have no use for them.

Heavy Snowden Fall

The fragmentation of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's story is now picking up substantial speed.  As he has been since the story started, The Daily Banter's Bob Cesca has continued to document the downfall of Snowden and Glenn Greenwald's account of "facts" coming apart.

It’s now been more than a week since Glenn Greenwald reported that the National Security Agency attained “direct access” to servers owned by the various tech giants, Google, Facebook, Apple and so forth. And it’s been almost a week since other sites, now including Mother Jones, The Nation and Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, began to notice significant issues with his reporting about PRISM.

I should underscore once again how consequential the “direct access” line happens to be. The implication of “direct access” is clearly that, unbeknownst to the public, the NSA and, apparently, low level IT subcontractors, enjoyed back door access to proprietary server data, horked it at will and, according to Greenwald, did so potentially without a warrant. Rick Perlstein, in a post for The Nation, quoted Mark Jaquith of WordPress who observed that the “direct access” line is “the difference between a bombshell and a yawn of a story.” (I’m sure Perlstein and Jaquith have been inundated with “Obamabot apologist!” accusations for daring to aim an incredulous post in Greenwald’s direction.)

And as I've said before, the "direct access" issue is where the largest discrepancy is...but it's far from the only one.  There may be a much bigger problem with Snowden handing over top secret information to the Chinese and the scramble by Greenwald and company to justify that.

He handed over documents about American cyber warfare against China — to China. Specifically, Snowden gave the documents to a Hong Kong publication. Perhaps he was emboldened by all of the attention, hero worship and deification he received here. Who knows. Whatever drove him to do it, it was phenomenally irresponsible on a couple of fronts. Not only could he have exacerbated an already dubious international relationship, considering how there appears to be an escalating hacking war between the United States and China, but he also managed to turn numerous Americans against him — Americans who believe he crossed the line from whistleblower to traitor.

But this cuts more deeply than any healthy skepticism some of us might possess. Greenwald’s stubbornness and Snowden’s foolishness are actually self-destructive to what they’re attempting to achieve. As I’ve written from day one, credibility will make or break not only this story, but anyone who chooses to blindly latch their own credibility to it. If Greenwald was truly interested in the endurance of this story, he would’ve stowed his ego and done whatever was necessary to preserve its integrity as well as his own reputation; because as long as “direct access” continues to disintegrate, so goes the believability of everything else he’s reported. Instead, the widening holes in this story could indicate Peak Greenwald.

That credibility is rapidly disappearing.  Now we find out from Reuters (via Bob Cesca) that Snowden may have misrepresented his education to his employers:

According to the sources, Snowden told employers he took computer classes at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, earned a certificate from the University of Maryland’s campus in Tokyo, and expected in 2013 to earn a master’s degree in computer security from the University of Liverpool in England.

A Johns Hopkins spokeswoman said she could not find a record of Snowden’s attendance but he may have taken correspondence courses for which records are not kept. A Maryland official confirmed Snowden attended at least one summer class. A Liverpool spokeswoman said Snowden registered for an online master’s degree in computer security in 2011, but did not complete it.

Oops.

It's all starting to come apart now, a crackup at breakneck speeds and of epic proportions.  Greenwald's ego and Snowden's delusions of being a master spy are blowing up in their respective faces, and if this keeps up, they're going to take down a lot of people who should have known better with them.

And So It Begins

It looks like we're getting into another Libya, folks...only Syria ain't Libya.  We're about to find that out the hard way.  The Obama administration has decided that the Asaad regime has used chemical weapons, and it's time for them to go.  Brian Jones at Business Insider:

For the last two years, the bloody conflict in Syria has careened toward a tipping point.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we may be there.

The timing of this is a little bit crazy:

• A deputy national security advisor has announced that the White House believes the Bashar al-Assad regime used chemical weapons against the rebels in Syria.
• The Pentagon has proposed a plan that would arm and train the rebels, as well as instill a limited no-fly zone over Syria.
• And 4,500 U.S. forces are a stone throw away, in Jordan, conducting a training exercise with Jordanian forces.

President Obama said last year that if Syrian president Bashar al Assad used chemical weapons, it would be a “red line” that would precipitate direct U.S. intervention in the conflict.  

“That would change my calculus,” Obama said. “That would change my equation.”

Presumably the situation in Syria now meets the criteria for U.S. military intervention. 

And so we may be about to commit a horrific mistake.   Even I have to believe that given all the GOP-created scandals, the Obama administration is trying to change the subject in a massive way.  $50 million a day for a no-fly zone over Syria, Jordan being our base of operations, and Russia, Iran and Israel as wild cards.

What could go wrong?