Month: July 2013

Edward Snowden Asks Russia for Asylum

Buck Banks

Below is Wikileaks’ transcript of the statement Edward Snowden gave at 5 p.m. Moscow time Friday, July 12, 2013. The statement has been edited by Wikileaks.

Photo: Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch

Hello. My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone’s communications at any time. That is the power to change people’s fates.

It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. While the US Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings, which the world is not permitted to see, somehow legitimize an illegal affair. These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done. The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.

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McCrory Says Moral Monday Protests are Not Very Moral

Buck Banks

I go out in the crowd all of the time. Frankly, yesterday I went out and talked to several of them and they were not very respectful. They did not represent the majority of those who call themselves moral by cussing me out. But that’s the way things go some times.

— North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R), quoted by the Wilson Times, on the “Moral Monday” protests at the state capitol every week.

Voters: Democrats are Bad, but Republicans are Worse

Buck Banks

51%

Of Americans say Republicans are responsible for gridlock in Washington, D.C., while 35% percent say President Obama “lacks the skills to convince leaders of Congress to work together,” a new Quinnipiac poll finds. Asked another way, 53% say Obama is doing “too little” to compromise with congressional Republicans, but 68% of voters say congressional Republicans are doing “too little.” Said pollster Peter Brown: “Voters think the Democrats and Obama aren’t playing nice, but they think the Republicans are worse.”

GOP Is Out to Create a Black Democratic Party in the South

Buck Banks

In private discussions, Republicans in the South talk explicitly about their goal of turning the Democratic Party into a black party, and in many Southern states they have succeeded. African-American legislators make up the majority of state House and Senate Democratic caucuses in most of the Southern states.

— Thomas Edsall, writing in the New York Times Opinionator Blog.

Republican Lawmakers Apparently Have Come to Hate Lawmaking

Buck Banks

One of the novel developments in conservative thought during the Obama years is a burgeoning hatred not merely for government but for lawmaking. Before the Obama era, the ends of crafting laws divided the parties, but the means did not. The process of corralling votes, placating hold-outs, and hammering out compromises was not something either side especially loved — you’ve heard the classic line about watching the sausage get made — but also not something that one side disliked more than the other. But a hatred for lawmaking has emerged in the Obama years, first as a Republican tactic, and then as an apparently genuine belief system.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.