Category: Government, Policy, & Politics

‘We’re Going to Have a Crisis’: David Stockman’s Stark Warning for America – The Atlantic

The onetime Reagan budget chief has gone from supply-side guru to prophet of doom — and his new book predicts stormy times ahead for the U.S.

The things that the base of each party believes are fundamentally untrue. Pat Moynihan taught me a phrase — “everybody is entitled to his own opinion, but nobody is entitled to his own facts.” What the Democrats and Republicans believe about the fiscal issue is so detached from the facts that there’s no basis for governance.

Source: ‘We’re Going to Have a Crisis’: David Stockman’s Stark Warning for America – The Atlantic

Attorney General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans | WIRED

In a secret government agreement granted without approval from lawmakers, the U.S. attorney general recently granted the National Counterterrorism Center sweeping new powers to store dossiers on U.S. citizens, even if they are not suspected of a crime.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder granted the center the ability to copy entire government databases holding information on flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and other data, and to store it for up to five years, even without suspicion that someone in the database has committed a crime, according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story.

Whereas previously the law prohibited the center from storing data compilations on U.S. citizens unless they were suspected of terrorist activity or were relevant to an ongoing terrorism investigation, the new powers give the center the ability to not only collect and store vast databases of information but also to trawl through and analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior in order to uncover activity that could launch an investigation.

Source: Attorney General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans | WIRED

Why I Refuse to Vote for Mitt Romney – The Atlantic

He supports policies that are an affront to the Constitution, can’t possibly make good on his domestic agenda, and has terrible foreign-policy judgment.

Each of these men would have you believe that it is imprudent to trust the other. Yet if their opponent wins, each is on record affirming that he is empowered to spy, detain and kill in secret, and wage war without Congress. Given their willingness to confer those extreme powers, how deep can their mistrust really be?

Source: Why I Refuse to Vote for Mitt Romney – The Atlantic