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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The NSA Loses in Court, but the Police State Rolls On

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Ted Rall
Edward Snowden has been vindicated. This week marks the first time that a court – a real court, not a sick joke of a kangaroo tribunal like the FISA court, which approves every government request and never hears from opponents – has ruled on the legality of one of the NSA’s spying programs against the American people. Verdict: privacy 1, police state 0. Yet the police state goes on. Which is what happens in, you know, a police state. The pigs always win. A unanimous three-judge ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, states unequivocally that the Obama Administration’s interpretation of the USA Patriot Act is fatally flawed. Specifically, it says, Congress never intended for Section 215 to authorize the bulk interception and storage of telephony metadata of domestic phone calls: the calling number, the number called, the length of the call, the locations of both parties, and so on. In fact, the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Baltimore Riots Were Caused by Capitalism and Cops, Not Poverty

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Ted Rall
The race riots that followed the recent murders of unarmed black men by police in places like Ferguson and Baltimore have liberal commentators and politicians placing the blame on poverty, specifically among inner-city African-Americans. This is an American tradition: progressives wrote similar editorials calling for antipoverty programs, and politicians issued (empty) promises to enact them, after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles provoked rioting in the South Central neighborhood in the early 1990s, and following the even bigger urban conflagrations of 1968 in Detroit, Newark and Watts. I grew up poor, and I have struggled financially. I hate poverty; I’m all for any government program that tries to mitigate the pain of not knowing whether one will be able eat, keep the electricity on, or avoid homelessness. Still, the poverty-causes-race-riots tautology is weird. What about the cops? Baltimore was in trouble long before six police officers arrested Freddie Gray without cause, snapped his spine, gave him a so-called “rough…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Two Stories the Same Day Show That the U.S. is Rotten to the Core

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Ted Rall
Still think the United States is governed by decent people? That the system isn’t totally corrupt and obscenely unfair? Two stories that broke April 23rd ought to wake you up. Story 1: President Obama admitted that one of his Predator drones killed two aid workers, an American and an Italian, who were being held hostage by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. As The Guardian reports, “The lack of specificity [about the targets] suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring ‘near certainty that the terrorist target is present,’ the U.S. continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a ‘signature strike.'” “Lack of specificity” is putting it mildly. According to a report by the group Reprieve, the U.S. targeted 41 “terrorists” — actually, enemies of the corrupt Yemeni and Pakistani regimes — with…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hillary Clinton Runs First, Thinks Last

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Ted Rall
The revealing headline: “Hillary Clinton Will Run; She Still Has to Explain Why.” The money quote from the story beneath that headline: “For months, Mrs. Clinton has lamented the stagnant wages holding back lower-income people and the concentration of wealth among a sliver of the wealthiest, a sentiment echoed in her first public remarks as a 2016 candidate.” Linger on that sentence’s introductory phrase: “For months.” Months? ! What? Hillary has been a political animal for decades. She’s been a possible future presidential candidate since at least 1996 — the year she last drove a car. She’s just getting around to figuring out what her politics are? (By the way and speaking of which, someone in Hillaryworld needs to clue in She-Who-Must-Be-Driven to basic automotive vernacular. When one is a passenger, one does not say, as Secretary Clinton did yesterday, “when I was driving here.” Driving is something one does, not something that is done to you. Unless you are…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Rand Paul Proves That the American Political System is Broken

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Ted Rall
I have been arguing for years that the American political system is broken. Not in the way that everyone else says it is – the Democrats and Republicans unable to compromise or get anything done. Given what happens when the two major parties cooperate – “free trade” agreements that send American jobs overseas and cut wages for those that remain, wars we have no chance of winning, and tax “reform” that only benefits the extremely wealthy and the corporations they control – we could use a lot more Washington gridlock. The best indication that the United States government is no longer a viable entity, and so beyond reform that we need to start from scratch, is the fact that the best and the brightest no longer aspire to a career in politics or governmental inspiration. It’s not just anecdotal; polls and studies show that the millennial generation, like the generation Xers before them, care deeply about the nation’s and the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Germanwings Mass Murder-Suicide Caused by Punitive Rules, Coldhearted Capitalism

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Ted Rall
  Investigators are still putting together the pieces, but from what we know so far, it’s likely that 27-year-old German co-pilot Andreas Lubitz committed mass murder-suicide when he flew a Germanwings passenger jet carrying 149 passengers and fellow crewmen into the French Alps. Authorities say they haven’t found a suicide note, but it’s a safe bet that Lubitz’s final act was prompted by depression (they found the meds), diminished vision, a deteriorating romantic relationship and his worry that the Lufthansa subsidiary would ground him if they found out about his problems, crashing a career he loved and blowing up his livelihood. Though rare, pilot suicide isn’t unheard of. As long as the current system remains in place, it will happen again. By “system,” I’m referring both to specific rules issued by the FAA and other countries’ aviation authorities to regulate pilots, and to that most coldhearted of socioeconomic systems, you’re-on-your-own capitalism. “Before they are licensed, pilots must undergo a medical…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: John Kasich’s Ohio Fantasy

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Ted Rall
  There’s denial. There’s self-delusion. There’s hallucination. Then there’s John Kasich. It’s just another political horse-race story about another white guy running for president, but “Kasich Looks to Republican Primaries, ‘Ohio Story’ in Hand” in the March 19th New York Times would have made me fall out of my seat had I not been confined by a seatbelt and squished in by a pair of chubby fellow airplane passengers. John Kasich is the other Scott Walker, another Republican governor of a Midwestern state contemplating a run for president next year. Kasich runs Ohio. Ohio is my home state. Says the Times, Kasich is touting his “Ohio story” to make his case for moving into the Oval Office: “On his watch, Ohio’s $8 billion budget shortfall has turned into a $1.5 billion surplus. He has increased funding for mental health services and takes credit for 352,000 new private sector jobs.” (Note the qualifier “takes credit for.”) To be fair, the paper…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Goofus Hillary vs. Gallant Hillary

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Ted Rall
I’m calling bullshit on Hillary. Not on Hillary herself. On the media’s portrayal of her. “The private Hillary is as warm and charming a woman as anyone could conjure up. The public Hillary sometimes seems brittle, with the judgment of a raging rhinoceros,” writes fellow syndicated columnist Ann McFeatters. I don’t mean to pick on McFeatters. Everyone (in the media) says the same thing: Hillary Clinton is so awesome one-on-one or maybe one-on-six, in private. For example, Mark Leibovich says she’s “quite human and funny” in private. She’s been a high-profile national politician for more than 20 years. Why hasn’t she figured out how to charm the American public on TV? These repeated accounts of Hillarity are less than reliable, issued as they are by the kind of people in a position to have met Hillary Clinton, which pretty much guarantees that they’re boring and bland and not very smart — the kind of people who think Obama means well…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Her Bad! Again, Hillary Reveals Her Terrible Judgement

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Ted Rall
  Hillary Clinton’s political setbacks and scandals come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common: they highlight a personality with questionable judgment. The question before the media, and American voters, is whether a person with such bad judgment should be trusted with nuclear launch codes at 3 AM. The former Secretary of State during Obama’s first term acquitted herself fairly well during yesterday’s news conference (though I wonder why none of her advisers told her to lose that pinched I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-put-up-with-this-crap look on her face), though she did commit two rookie errors (I’ll get to those below). To Hillary’s credit, she admitted she made a bad call in 2009, when she decided to exclusively use a private email account – whose server is kept at her private home in Chappaqua, New York – rather than an official .gov one issued by the State Department. “Looking back, it would have been better for me to use…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Joining ISIS is Stupid. But Why Should It Be Illegal?

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Ted Rall
“American Taliban” John Walker Lindh stripped nude and tortured after his capture.   There have been several high-profile arrests of wannabe jihadis who allegedly intended to fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, including three New York City residents last week, charged with providing “material support and resources…to a foreign terrorist organization.” They each face up to 15 years in prison. Over the last year the United States has intercepted and arrested at least 15 young Muslims for wanting to join ISIS. If I went to Syria to join ISIS, I could be arrested and charged with felonies that carry long prison sentences. Why? As citizens of a supposedly free country, Americans ought to be able to travel anywhere on the planet, and fight for any army we please, as long as that force is not at war against the United States. This, by the way, has been American law for the last 120 years. Neither ISIS nor…
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