Hero or traitor? Should Edward Snowden be honored for exposing a government that for a decade had been secretly collecting privileged data from all Americans, or should he be imprisoned for revealing to the world the spying our government
conducts around the globe in the cause of national security?

With four months left in President Obama's term, the Internet suddenly abounds in e-mail that asks you to join petitions to Obama to add Snowden to the list of persons a departing president traditionally exonerates as a final act of office. The ACLU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have banded together to run at least one full-page ad in The New York Times asking for contributions at pardonsnowden.org. There's even a movie: It's no coincidence that Oliver Stone chose this moment to release "Snowden" (in theaters, but he'd have had a bigger audience on television). As if to undercut it, the House intelligence committee released a summary of its report on the Snowden affair the day before the movie's release.

Snowden wants to come home. And the administration would apparently like to put an end to the problem. The counsel to national intelligence chief James… Read More »

Donald Trump has hit upon a powerful campaign strategy no one else thought of. In his inconsistencies, his contradictory pronouncements, his saying one
If we double the debt, we can just print money, like some countries.
thing one moment and denying it the next, people can fasten on whatever strikes a chord in them and discard the rest. "That's the real Donald Trump", they seem to say when they hear something that resonates in their life. "He doesn't really mean the other thing he said".

How else to explain their voting for a candidate who last fall said, "Our wages are too high", that they need to be lowered to compete with other countries, and then denied that he said it. And doesn't he intend to use tariffs to eliminate competition anyway?

And why else would his followers pay no attention to a tax plan that would raise the lowest tax rate rate of 10% to 12%? That's a 20% increase that his lowest-income adherents certainly can't afford.

And why cheer a candidate who said said in a Bloomberg interview a year ago , “I want to lower taxes for people that are making a lot of money that need… Read More »

The anger of the less-educated white males that Donald Trump has mined like a coal seam and brought to the surface is attributed mostly to jobs lost to immigrants or shipped overseas. But it also results from years of public disgust
Clockwise from top left: Cook, Ellison, Zaslav,
Schwarzman
over income inequality made so apparent by the multi-million dollar paychecks of corporate chieftains reported in the media. Those paychecks and the lavish bonuses paid to Wall Street "fat cats" are an in-the-face reminder that the system is rigged.

They see Tim Cook in 2011, in just his first year as Apple's CEO, handed $376 million in stock and options. In 2012 Larry Ellison of Oracle was almost modest in comparison, taking top honors as highest paid with $96 million. He repeated in 2013 with $78.4 million (that's $37,692 an hour). David Zaslav of Discovery Communications received total compensation worth $156 million 2014. Blackstone Group co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman collected $799.2 million in 2015, up from about $689.3 million in 2014. It didn't matter that the firm's stock was battered last year.

And by the way, Cook just got another $135 million in stock.

Currently in the news, 93-year-old Sumner Redstone and his daughter finally wrested control of Viacom Inc. from CEO Philippe Daumon after… Read More »