Category: Politics

The Associated Press:

Apple is pledging $100 million in iPads, computers and other tools. AT&T and Sprint are contributing free Internet service through their wireless networks. Verizon is pitching in up to $100 million in cash and in-kind contributions. And Microsoft is making Windows available at discounted prices and offering 12 million free copies of Microsoft Office software.

Obama was to announce the commitments Tuesday at a middle school in the Maryland suburbs near Washington. Also in the pipeline: an addition $2 billion that the Federal Communications Commission is setting aside from service fees over two years to connect another 20 million students to high-speed Internet.

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Nilay Patel is angry, and we should be, too.

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In 2012, my brother and a small team flew halfway across the globe to document the genocide taking place in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan.

His new short film — Land of the Hungry — shows that over a year later, through the combined use of bombings and starvation, Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir continues his work of systematically killing these refugees. All of this despite an arrest warrant for him being issued by the International Criminal Court in March 2009.

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A letter addressed to the President and Congress:

We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.

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Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge:

More than 55 companies worked on Healthcare.gov and its state counterparts. It’s difficult to tell exactly who worked on what, but the contractors that worked on technical aspects of the site are Beltway regulars.

Noticeably missing from the list are companies with a reputation for excellence in technology.

Without a doubt, the rollout of Healthcare.gov was a clusterfuck.

I work for a web shop. I know websites can be difficult to build — feature scope can creep, designs can go sideways and clients can get grumpy. That said, I think any one of the many Internet giants that call America home — Amazon, Facebook or Google to name a few — could have done a much better job than the jumble of contractors who were awarded the work.

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When I saw this headline, I thought “Oh, cool, McCain thinks the NSA has over-stepped its bounds” and was excited. Then I read this:

The senator for Arizona, a former Republican presidential candidate, said [head of the NSA Keith] Alexander should be held accountable for the leaks of thousands of documents by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed NSA surveillance and spying on a massive scale. McCain said Snowden, who worked for the NSA as a contractor, should never have had access to classified information.

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Timothy Egan:

Sarah Palin finally got her death panels — a direct blow from the Republican House. In shutting down the government, leaving 800,000 people without a paycheck and draining the economy of $300 million a day, the Party of Madness also took away last-chance cancer trials for children at the National Institutes of Health.

And now that the pain that was dismissed as a trifle on Monday, a “slimdown” according to the chuckleheads at Fox News, is revealed as tragic by mid-week, the very radicals who caused the havoc are trying to say it’s not their fault.

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Jonathan Weisman:

House Republicans muscled through a stopgap bill Friday that would fund the government only if all spending for President Obama’s health care law is eliminated. Senate Democrats and President Obama quickly made it clear they had no intention of going along, putting the government on a course toward a shutdown unless one side relents.

The 230-to-189 party-line vote in a bitterly divided House set in motion a fiscal confrontation with significant implications — politically and economically — but with an uncertain ending. Without a resolution, large parts of the government could shut down Oct. 1, and a first-ever default on federal debt could follow weeks later.

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Silly America.

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Amazing.

via @viticci

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Dana Liebelson:

Last month, a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata — which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content —belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines.

Who needs the NSA when you have federal courts?

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Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times:

It is now 10 years since the Darfur genocide began, and we in the news media have mostly tired of the issue. It’s no longer news that the Sudanese government is slaughtering its people.

Yet our silence empowers Sudan’s leaders to pick up where they left off in Darfur. Indeed, survivors say that one of the leaders in this year’s attacks was Ali Kushayb, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Darfur a decade ago.

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