McKay Coppins reports on Paul Ryan’s willingness to hew to the party line:
But those who expected Ryan’s ideological conviction to compel an audacious war against his own party’s presidential nominee misunderstood him. He has not gotten to where he is by making trouble. He is, at his core, a good soldier.
by Ron Paul
For many of us concerned with liberty, the letters “NDAA” have come to symbolize Washington’s ongoing effort to undermine the US Constitution in the pursuit of constant war overseas. It was the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012 that introduced into law the idea that American citizens could be indefinitely detained without warrant or charge if a government bureaucrat decides they had assisted al-Qaeda or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States.” No charges, no trial, just disappeared Americans.
Authored by Noam Chomsky, originally posted at TomDispatch.com,
[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).]
When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.
Before he was quietly advised last year by his superior that the time to "quit" has finally come after a career filled with gaffe after gaffe, former US Attorney General Eric Holder was best known for not prosecuting big banks due to his concern they were "Too Big To Prosecute", clearly ignoring the optics (and reality) that this would also makes it seem that when it comes to breaking the law, banks are more powerful than the United States itself.
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
When a reporter for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command interviewed Frank Zappa for the commands news syndicate, the story was held by a superior who demanded that Zappa – who had been rather hard on the army – answer one more question: just who does he think will defend the country without the army?