socialuprooting:

Democratic Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts has asked the nation’s largest cell phone carriers to provide information on how they have aided police surveillance. In a letter this week to eight companies, Markey, the co-chair of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, said he is “deeply concerned” that routine police tracking of cell phone calls “may violate the privacy rights of Americans.”

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Glad to live in Massachusetts, again. 

Massachusetts is seriously the best place to live if you’re a liberal of some form or another. Kudos for Rep. Ed Markey.

(via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)

In his State of the Union address two years ago, President Obama argued there were a few things the U.S. needed to do in order to recover from the economic recession. One of them was to export more of our goods around the world.

“The more products we make and sell to other countries, the more jobs we support right here in America,” Obama said.

That night, the president unveiled a new goal: to double U.S. exports over the next five years. It would be an increase that the president said would “support two million jobs in America.”

Most economists dismissed the pledge at the time as somewhat quixotic, but two years later, the U.S. is on pace to meet that goal. American exports are up 34 percent since the president gave that speech, and the number continues to rise.

paxamericana:

paxamericana:

I’m posting this mostly for myself so I can have a handy link whenever I (foolishly) decide to debate Ron Paul supporters.

The Newsletters:

How Ron Paul used racist newsletters to wipe out debts, get rich

• [1] …

An interesting article that I stol from foreverliberal, that describes massive differences between boyscouts and girlscouts. I can’t help but think that this has something to do with a growing number of progressive women in America.

Not surprisingly, Monday’s debut of Supreme Court argument over so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a “fee” or a “tax.”

Behind all this is the brute fact that if the Court decides the individual mandate is an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, the entire law starts unraveling.

But with a bit of political jujitsu, the president could turn any such defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system –Medicare for all. Here’s how.