The Department of Justice announced Monday evening that it was charging federal contractor Reality Leigh Winner, 25, for removing and mailing classified documents about Russian intelligence launching a cyberattack on a U.S. voting software company to the Intercept.
Winner is being charged with “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” per the DOJ.
On Monday afternoon, the Intercept published a report about a top-secret NSA document in which NSA intelligence concluded found that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack more than 100 local election officials, and that it had carried out a cyberattack on a voting software company. Read more (6/5/17)
Despite the latest details on Russian hacking (above), Trump is calling for improved relations with Russia.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters in New Zealand that Trump has instructed him to boost ties with the country — regardless of news back in the United States.
Tillerson said Trump told him to “stabilize that relationship, so it does not deteriorate further.” Read more (6/6/17)
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says that the Russian intervention in the election was even worse than what was revealed in the NSA documents.
“The extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far,” Warner told USA Today on Tuesday.
Despite that claim, the senator was careful to note that he doesn’t believe the Russians actually interfered with voting outcomes, while suggesting that the attacks may be ongoing. “None of these actions from the Russians stopped on Election Day.” Read more (6/6/17)
President Donald Trump
may have pulled the U.S. out of the historic Paris climate agreement,
but that doesn’t mean America is done working with international allies
to fight climate change.
On
Tuesday, during a trip to China, California Governor Jerry Brown signed
an agreement with China’s Science and Technology Minister, Wan Gang,
vowing to work together to develop green technologies and reduce
emissions, the Associated Press reported. Read more (6/6/17)
as in, stop quoting the fucking daily caller, for the love of god. we are all gross liberals/progressives/socialists here, so if you see any political post on your dash that uses any news outlet in the first list as its source, then there is like an 80% chance you’re about to reblog hyperbolic conservative propaganda with very little basis in reality. don’t do it, guys. don’t do it. check sources. save a life.
Hot Air: doesn’t vote the straight conservative opinion ticket, some columnists have more liberal social views, but still. on the top 10 list of popular conservative blogs. don’t do it.
National Review: tbh if you gotta cite a conservative news source, go with TNR. the print magazine and policy institute especially do some high quality pieces, but like as a rule, you’re probably not gonna like the conclusions they come up with. online-only content can be a bit more opinionated. maybe do it.
Wall Street Journal: so center-right the right has actually started to disown it. you’re not gonna like their economics, but they’re not scandal-mongering drivel like some of the blogs on this list. maybe do it.
The Washington Examiner: very good local D.C. reporting, actually, but like, the opinions section is still not gonna be anything you wanna read. maybe do it.
The New York Post: conservative AND a tabloid, do not look to for unbiased reporting or anything except like vile exploitation of tragedy. don’t do it.
Special Mention:The Daily Mail: do not cite the Daily Mail for any goddamn reason, i will come to your house and rub your nose into your keyboard like an untrained dog.
GOOD HEARTY LIBERAL STOCK:
The New York Times (plus Magazine): american paper of record and probably deserves it. will surely be too white elite new york liberal center-left for most of your commie asses, but still excellent.
New Yorker: i mean it’s not breaking news and it’s frequently so pretentious you get sucked up your own ass turning the page, but they do know their investigative journalism.
The Washington Post: on average, best political/policy reporting of any paper in the country. their wonkblog, even after Ezra Klien &co’s mass exodus, does excellent daily roundups of domestic political news.
The LA Times (and most other city papers): LA’s great, p much everything is center-left, some of them are gonna be better at covering national issues than others (looks pointedly at SF Gate). good for local, double-check for national.
Huffington Post: PROCEED W/ CAUTION, their news reporting is fine enough but the sheer number of bloggers attached to the site means there’s not always so much quality control. double-check that shit.
BuzzFeed: PROCEED W/ SLIGHTLY LESS CAUTION: be on the watch for bloggers here too, but tbh their staff reporting is some real good shit. they have a white house correspondent now and everything.
Mother Jones: some good liberal shit. older than you.
The Guardian: actually does some great US reporting, had reporters in Ferguson last summer.
Al Jazeera: also has an american bureau, good stuff, and, of course, international coverage unlike almost anything in the US.
BBC: doesn’t care as much about the US, but more foreign policy coverage worth reading.
Vox: where Ezra Klien and his crew all ran off to. unfortunate tendency for clickbait headlines, but their explainer cards do an excellent job of breaking complex news stories into easily digestible parts. i’m biased, but i love them.
SORTA INBETWEEN, THIS IS A SLIDING SCALE AFTER ALL (look, a graph):
The Economist: technically has a majority center-left readership, but you’re not gonna like their economics. they love themselves some free markets.
AP/Reuters: about as neutral as it possibly gets. all facts, no opinion. (pronounced roi-terz btw, impress your friends)
USA Today: well i guess making every hotel guest in the country step over it on their way to breakfast qualifies it as the most popular print paper in the country.
CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.: all technically left of center (by maybe a milimeter), but watch out for sensationalism. they are 24-hour networks after all.
The Daily News: i have no opinion on the daily news and i doubt any of you do either.
TIME magazine: i mean like, not objectively unreliable, but you could be making better choices.
I’m so glad there’s a link to that Jon Stewart tears into Crossfire video my soul needed that
A note on the BBC: they bust their asses trying to be neutral. If you need a source with little bias, the BBC is usually a good place to go, especially if you’re a UK person. I usually use it as a barometer of ‘this is story actually a thing’.
Reblogging mostly for the comment on the Daily Mail, but also to suggest ProPublica as another good liberal source, primarily for long form reporting.
The Democratic candidate running against anti-immigrant Republican Congressman Steve King (IA) announced Saturday that she is dropping out of the race for her own safety.
Hey so
Part of Fascisms early roots was using violence to scare away potential candidates against their power.
how naive do u have to be if u really think american citizens get to vote on how the cia operates
For a detailed explanation of how and to what extent the CIA, NSA and other national security agencies are not accountable to the American public AT ALL I recommend the book National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon. It’s not partisan, the author doesn’t hold any apparent fringe beliefs, and it’s impeccably sourced.
the new york times and the washington post both waited until air force one took off, then each published separate Really Big stories with not a ton of overlap, almost like they’d made a backroom deal to decide which paper got which story and that they should both wait until the president was out of the country to drop them
It’s not a “loophole” it’s explicit within the text of the amendment
“Loophole” lmfao like it’s a fucking accident, like it wasn’t purposefully structured to reclaim and expand a source of free labor
We never outlawed slavery in America. We simply transferred ownership of slaves from individual landowners to the government and large corporations.
Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:
-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.
–Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”
-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?
-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include:
IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument,
Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies,
3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre
Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.
-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.
-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.
-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.
-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.
-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.
-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.
-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.
Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.
Last night, black-ish brought us into the middle of the tough conversations black families have been forced to have more and more recently. It did so with the utmost thought and humor, all the while giving nuanced, important depth to the issues of police brutality — including the characterization of police.
Steel Phoenix Studios 
