Glenn Greenwald writes: This, to me, has always been the most uniquely pernicious aspect of the War on Terror civil liberties assaults of the last decade: they will not end when the “war” does because the “war” will have no end. Each new power is embedded permanently into the political framework, incrementally transforming the political [...]

[Updated on 8 November.] Mano Singham writes: Dana Millbank reports on what he saw during the debates. He said that the reporters were not in the auditorium but were in a separate room in which the debate was shown on a large screen. But the reporters were also glued to their laptop screens reading other [...]

Matt Taibbi writes: In the abstract, most Americans want a smaller and less intrusive government. In reality, what Americans really want is a government that spends less money on other people. Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Robert Reich writes: It’s time for a final summary of the worldview of Mitt Romney. Despite its contradictions and ellipses, Romneyism, as this creed might be called, has an internal coherence. Here are its ten core principles: 1. Corporations are the basic units of society. Corporations are people, and the overriding purpose of an economy [...]

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Tim Russo writes: I used to get mocked by my friends for having any faith at all in the American electorate. Most of my political colleagues over my 24 year history in Ohio and international politics think the American voter, and particularly the independent undecided American voter, is just a total moron. I’d always argue [...]

Tom Peters writes: If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism — the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity. In a chaotic world, your strategy must be chaotic enough (sufficiently failure-strewn) to up the odds of keeping pace with the [...]

Matt Stroller writes: So why oppose Obama? Simply, it is the shape of the society Obama is crafting that I oppose, and I intend to hold him responsible, such as I can, for his actions in creating it. Many Democrats are disappointed in Obama. Some feel he’s a good president with a bad Congress. Some [...]

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Sidney Smith and I agree: I live in a purple part of the country (Virginia) and move in academic circles, so of course I know many, many people who will be voting for Obama. It is impossible to know, but if I sodomized the Easter Bunny in front of their children the look on my [...]

Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

You have a choice… Take the green pill…

Republican congressman and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan demonstrated what kind of vice president (and, gawd forbid, president) he might be when he saw an opportunity and took it with total disregard for how his actions might cause real injury to caring people and the least of our citizens. Connie Schultz writes: Last weekend, Ryan [...]

[Update @ 1304: Supreme Court won't block early voting in Ohio.] In his piece written for Slate, Richard Hansen writes that: Ohio’s cutback of early voting could have a negative effect at the polls and was done for no good reason. Indeed, the Ohio legislature probably eliminated the last weekend of early voting for purely [...]

Once again, comedians are the ones telling the truth. Elect Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala…

Matt Taibbi writes: Well, it’s over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it’s not [...]

No, I haven’t started watching political ads, but this critique by David Dayen (via Glenn Greenwald) is important because it highlights yet another reason that, while I’ll agree that four more years of Barack Hussein Obama in the White House would be better than four years of Willard Mitt Romney, the difference between the two [...]

Mano Singham writes: But really, should we be surprised? When Bush was president and waging wars and torturing with abandon, at least some Democrats were up in arms, warning of the grave violations to the constitution and human rights that those actions represented. As soon as Barack Obama took office, he halted torture practices such [...]

Paul Krugman writes: Meanwhile, the household survey produces estimates of both the number of Americans employed and the number unemployed, defined as people who are seeking work but don’t currently have a job. The eye-popping number from Friday’s report was a sudden drop in the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, but as [...]