End of the Free Ride: 19 Questions the Mainstream Media Should Have Been Asking Donald Trump

by Nomad

Donald Trump's celebrity status has allowed him to say just about anything he wants without much scrutiny by the word-bite-hungry news corporations. Isn't it time- past time- that the free ride stop? After all, this isn't a reality TV audition. 

The news media has come under a lot of fire for journalistic malpractice when it came to Donald Trump. In March, Nick Kristof, a New York Times columnist wrote a piece on that subject called “My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump.” He accused the mainstream media of giving Trump undeserved free coverage while somehow skipping over the candidate's obvious shortcomings. 

Our first big failing was that television in particular handed Trump the microphone without adequately fact-checking him or rigorously examining his background, in a craven symbiosis that boosted audiences for both.

The truth is, the media has needed Trump like a crack addict needs a hit.”

It was in some ways a double standard too. During the primaries, other candidates were held to a much higher standard, meaning they were obligated to be sane and provide sensible replied to often difficult questions.
For Trump, it was a completely different story from the moment he first stepped onto the stage. No claim was too outrageous for the news media to treat as rational. Trump was allowed to talk about what he wanted to talk about, the way he wanted to talk about it. And news reporters appeared to be happy to allow him to mutter whatever nonsense that popped into his head.

This trend didn't start with Trump.

Before PRISM: The Curious History of the US World-Wide Surveillance Network- Part One

by Nomad
Recently many people seemed altogether mortified, shocked and angry when whistle-blower Edward Snowden, former contract employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) supplied both the Washington Post and The Guardian details about two top- secret surveillance operations.

The Snowden evidence describes one operation which was an effort to collect data from Verizon about millions of phone calls. The other operation was called PRISM. In that operation, metadata was harvested from millions of Internet sites. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple were all apparently involved in the PRISM operation. 

Although both programs seem to have been overseen by Congress and a top-secret court, the extent of the operations came as a shock to a lot of people. 

One source describes PRISM like this:

“Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy.”

What PRISM does is to allow the NSA and the FBI to tap directly “into the central servers of nine leading U.S.Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

Who, the reporters and public asked, could have imagined that the United States government- for whatever reason- would engage in such violations of personal privacy? Conservative voters feel as though their worst fears about Big Government and about Barack Obama have been confirmed. Many stunned liberals are asking:Why would President Obama launch such an attack on our freedoms?

Perhaps the only truly shocking aspect of the recent whistle-blowing revelations is the fact that anybody should be shocked at all. People who have been paying attention should have known the extent of this type of surveillance.

Perhaps the only truly shocking aspect of the recent whistle-blowing revelations is the fact that anybody should be shocked at all. Everybody -those who were not sleeping-  should have known the extent of this type of surveillance. 

Much- but naturally not all- of the information about these operations had been made public a long ago. The American people (at those who were awake) were warned and chose to ignore the challenge to their civil liberties.. until now. 

The present anger – much of it unfairly directed at the Obama administration- comes a little late in the day. The evidence of these (and even more extensive and intrusive) electronic spying operations has been right under everybody's noses for over a decade. As we shall see in this report it is especially disingenuous for Republicans to bluster now.

The problem of the government’s covert spying on its own citizens began long before Obama, before Bush, Reagan or even before Nixon.

Michele Bachmann's Constitutional Classes: Spring Training for the Minor Leagues?

by Nomad

Normally when a Republic as great as the United States elects a citizen to a high office, the public expects that person to be politically "fully-developed." Naturally we don't expect to have to give classes to teach them what they should already be familiar with, such as, for example, the laws of the land or the basic principles upon which that republic was founded, namely the Constitution. And we certainly don't expect the American taxpayers to foot the bill for these remedial classes. 
Yet, apparently Rep. Michele Bachmann thinks that new members of Congress - read, Tea Party members - need some indoctrination into the the extreme far right's world view.