OPINIONS, 4/29/25: the first 100 days of Trumpocracy

Note:  Your Head Trucker may not agree with everything 

these folks say, but I like the way they say it.

Trae Crowder on the Tyrant's first 100 days:

 

Robert Reich gives the Tyrant a report card:

 

Former House Republican Adam Kinzinger critiques the sissified Tyrant:

 

Rachel Maddow blasts the Loser: 

 

And Bernie Sanders tells what must be done now to save democracy in America:

 

Bonus:  Mark Carney, fresh from his election victory, has a word for the Tyrant:  R-E-S-P-E-C-T!  Find out what it means to me . . . 

 Gotta love what one commenter on the above video wrote:

So which country got the better deal leader wise?
CANADA picked a Winner in MR. MARK CARNEY!

AMERICA picked a Weiner in Donald "THE FELON" Trump. 

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Millions Protest Trumpocracy Nationwide

I'm a little late posting this, but here's Rachel Maddow with scenes from across the country of the "Hands Off" protests that occurred on Saturday.  She adds some encouraging words at the end of the report.

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"Shame! Shame!" Rep. Larson Blasts Musk and Complicit Legislators

Rachel Maddow reports:  Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) last week loudly called out Republicans in Congress who are enabling the Trump-Musk attack on Social Security.  Finally, someone in Congress got hot and bothered!

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Kamala's Closing Argument Speech on the Ellipse

The Vice President delivered this speech in Washington, D. C., last night against the backdrop of the floodlit White House, essentially repeating what she has said in every speech of this 100-day campaign.  But her remarks last night were very well-written and well-spoken, and this could be considered the definitive version of her appeal to the nation.  Rachel Maddow afterward called it a "damn good speech," and so it was, in the best constitutional tradition of our republic.

 \

Fellas, we might wish she had said more about this or that; but the plain truth is she's all we've got, and it's Kamala or the devil. So I'm backing her 100% and I hope you are too. She's a fine person, a good woman, and a true patriot, and thank God for all that. Don't sweat the details; it will all get sorted out as we go along.  The alternative is unthinkable.

 

And today the Morning Joe panel discussed Harris's speech, in contrast to Trump's recent pronouncements:

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History Is Calling!

 

The presidential horserace is rounding the curve into the final stretch now.  For the record, here are some video snapshots of what it's all about. There's no good reason for anyone of sound mind to be confused or unsure of what's at stake now: democracy with all its messes and successes, or a dictatorship of fools, frauds, and fanatics. 

The choice is yours, my fellow Americans.  But be careful, very careful, what you wish for.

[I sent the above video to M.P. overnight.  His reply was, "What a vile vulgar swine of a creature it is." and further unprintable remarks.]

 

Rachel says it's now or never to claim your place in history: 

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Trae Crowder: It's a Wild World

The Liberal Redneck recaps last night's VP debate between Walz and Vance.

CBS provides highlights from the hour-and-a-half debate:

 

Rachel Maddow and other political commentators react:

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Why Trump Doesn't Want Votes

What if your vote never gets counted?  Rachel explains how that could happen.

It is entirely plausible that a party bent on achieving permanent and absolute power would not sit idly by, waiting for the whims of the electorate to decide their fate.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid. 

Honk to Reluctant Rebel

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Biden Addresses the Nation

Does character in pulic life still matter?

In a speech to the nation from the Oval Office tonight, President Biden explained his decision to bow out of the presidential race and his vision for the country's future.

Rachel Maddow comments on what she calls "a timeless speech about a very specific moment":

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Uganda's New Anti-Gay Law: "Where Are We Supposed to Go?"

On Monday, Uganda's president signed into law a new anti-gay bill, a modified version of a bill that was passed in 2014 but struck down by the country's Supreme Court on a technicality.  NBC News reports: 

 

Last month, Rachel Maddow reported on the U. S. evangelists who have for years been encouraging anti-gay legislation in various African states:

 

The way things are going just now in states like Texas, Arizona, and Florida, who knows whether such a law might be attempted over here one day. If so, I hope I don't live to see it.

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Rachel Maddow: Worst-Case Scenario

First, today's headline from the New York Daily News:

Cf. Trump's statement, January 23, 2016:
I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody 
and I wouldn’t lose voters.

Last night, Rachel Maddow, in typical melodramatic style, explored the damning implications of Saturday's indictment of Russian agent Maria Butina, in a segment worth watching:

This Week in Trumpocracy, 3/4/17

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1.  Rachel Maddow shows the chilling reality of Putin's autocracy in this segment of last night's show - most enlightening for those of us who until now haven't really known what Putin was all about - and its as blood-curdling as any Cold War thriller, if not more so:




2.  In a must-read article, Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine spells out the lies and the treason at the heart of the Trump regime in no uncertain terms - excerpt:

[The unfolding Russia scandal] is spinning off in multiple directions, but at bottom it suggests a betrayal of American sovereignty by Trump that is unprecedented in the history of the republic. For a still-unclear combination of reasons — greed for power, greed for money, vulnerability to blackmail, or motivations unknown — the incoming administration cooperated with the undermining of American democracy by a hostile foreign power.

This is already known. On July 4, Franklin Foer wrote in Slate the first major story in the American media identifying a Russian plan to influence the presidential election. He pieced together such evidence as Trump’s extensive financial ties to Russia; Vladimir Putin’s pattern of intervening in elections in the West in order to support his preferred candidates; Russia’s hacking of Democrats’ emails; and the fact that a number of Trump advisers had been paid by sources loyal to the Kremlin, including Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who had carried out a similar strategy on behalf of a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine that he seemed to be doing in the United States.

In the months that have followed, more reporting on this strange and sinister axis has emerged, mostly in the form of reports that have burst onto the scene as bombshells, only to be quickly displaced by other stories in the disorienting, surreal news environment that is Trump’s Washington. The New York Times has found that “phone records and intercepted calls” reveal that Trump associates had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” and that U.S. allies had uncovered meetings in European cities between Russian officials and Trump associates.

It is not illegal to meet with Russian agents or spies. However, Trump and his advisers have repeatedly lied or contradicted themselves about these meetings. Former national-security adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about his discussions with Russia following the election. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who told a Senate committee during his confirmation hearings “I did not have communications with the Russians,” in fact met twice during the campaign with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Only after the Washington Post reported on the meetings did Sessions agree to recuse himself from his own department’s investigation into the matter.

Trump’s statements on his relations with Russia have oscillated wildly. Asked in 2013 if he had a relationship with Putin, Trump said, “I do have a relationship, and I can tell you he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today.” In 2014, he recounted, “Putin even sent me a present, beautiful present with a beautiful note, I spoke to all of his people,” and that he “spoke indirectly and directly” with Putin. In 2015, he boasted, “I got to know [Putin] very well.” Last year, he insisted, “I have no relationship with Putin” and that “I don’t know Putin … I never met Putin.” . . .

On March 2, House Speaker Paul Ryan asserted that he had seen “no evidence that anybody on the Trump campaign or an American was involved in colluding with the Russians.” What evidence would he like? A Trump adviser coyly revealing his advance knowledge of stolen email dumps, then admitting he has a “back-channel communication with Assange”? Because that exists. Maybe video of Trump asking Putin to hack his opponents’ email? Because that exists, too. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump announced at a press conference last summer. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” (Trump later claimed he was joking.) Even if Trump had nothing to do with encouraging the Russian hacking, aggressively exploiting it was a ­conscious choice. Other Republicans, like Marco Rubio — in one of his periodic outbreaks of conscience — asserted that the GOP should renounce the use of information from WikiLeaks rather than reward foreign interference in American elections. Trump made the opposite decision.

And Trump’s party has mostly decided likewise. All of it is fine — the nondisclosure of tax returns, the unprecedented self-enrichment, the fantastic lies and authoritarian lingo. Republicans in Washington see Trump as a useful vehicle for their policy objectives. Indeed, at least for the time being, Trump’s nationalist ravings have utility for special interests from the Kremlin to Wall Street, all of whom look upon the American president with smugness and satisfaction at a deal well struck. In Trump’s short tenure as president, his demagogic claim that elites have betrayed the American people out of solicitousness to foreign powers has finally become true.​

3. "Donald Trump just can't quit Barack Obama." - Politico reports on Trump's obsession with the former President, which culminated today in a bizarre Twitter attack at dawn. Excerpt:

From entering politics as the chief promoter of the birtherism conspiracy—complete with claims of mysterious calls coming in to him with new information to detectives he claimed he sent to Hawaii but were never heard from again—to waking up Saturday morning tweeting, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones,” Obama’s always there.

There’s a political advantage to it—Obama is just as infuriating a figure as he was six weeks ago to the Republican base and the pro-Trump media that powered the president’s campaign.

And there’s a diversionary advantage to churning up a new controversy that this time takes away airtime and mindshare from the questions of just how many top administration officials had just how many undisclosed meetings with Russian officials. But there also seems to be a true sense in Trump’s mind that Obama is practically sitting beneath the floorboards of the West Wing, chipping away at his presidency. . . .

White House press secretary Sean Spicer did not respond Saturday morning to questions about whether he knows of a reason why Obama is on the president’s mind so much, or whether Trump still thinks he has a good relationship with Obama. Obama’s current spokespeople also declined to respond about the current status of the relationship, or whether they’ve continued to talk on the phone as they were doing with some frequency during the transition.

Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, aggressively pushed back against Trump's accusations. "A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice," Lewis said in a statement. "As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."

The Obama circle continues to be frustrated that Trump’s comments are taken seriously, in the same way they were when Trump was taking potshots from the sidelines while Obama was in the White House.

“No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you,” tweeted Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser who’s working for Obama in his new office.

Responding to Trump’s tweet that “I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!” Rhodes tweeted, “No. They couldn't. Only a liar could do that.”

Exasperated and annoyed, Obama aides try to cast their problem with Trump continually pulling their old boss into the conversation as about more than politics.

“My concern about Trump isn’t his day-to-day nonsense, it’s the notion that he could be governed by conspiracy theories and paranoia in a time of actual crisis,” said Bill Burton, former deputy White House press secretary for Obama. “All the rest of this is just the mutterings of a man deeply in over his head.”

4. For the record, and lest we forget - here is Trump last July, openly and deliberately inviting Russia to interfere with the election:




5. In recent weeks, so-called town hall meetings held by Republican congresspeeps have been full of angry, shouting constituents giving their elected representatives hell, and plenty of it. Today, pro-Trump demonstrators marched and fought with anti-Trump counter-demonstrators all across the country. Ah me, plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose.  Brings back memories of the firey days of 1816, as Joshua Zeitz recalls in Politico Magazine - excerpt:

In the summer of 1816, Americans turned on Congress. Citizens from Massachusetts to South Carolina staged raucous public meetings where “several hundred persons of both political parties,” according to one contemporary, gathered to draft denunciatory resolutions, deliver angry speeches and, in some cases, stage mock court proceedings against their local House members. With a stridency heretofore unmatched in American politics, they condemned “high-handed and arbitrary” lawmakers—politicians who forced a “wanton sacrifice of our interest to their own private emolument,” perpetrators of “wrong,” “unjustifiable” and “reprehensible” actions.

The event that precipitated this resounding censure—the “daring and profligate trespass against … the morals of the Republic”—was Congress’ passage of the Compensation Act earlier that spring. With bipartisan support from Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, Congress had increased its pay from $6 per diem to a flat annual salary of $1,500 (approximately $25,000 in current dollars). Some members derided the action as an exercise in extravagance, but a majority argued that since congressional stipends had remained flat since 1789, and the cost of living approximately doubled, it was time for a raise.

From his retirement, former President Thomas Jefferson observed, “there has never been an instant before of so much unanimous an opinion of the people, and that through every State in the Union.” Jefferson predicted that “almost the entire” Congress “will go out, not only those who supported the law or voted for it, or skulked from the vote, but those who voted against the law or opposed it, if they took the money.”

He was more or less right. Roughly 70 percent of Congress was defeated in the fall election, including a full three-quarters of the New York delegation. As Jefferson foretold, it really didn’t matter how members voted. “I have been dismissed for voting for the bill,” one ex-congressman marveled, “one of my colleagues for voting against it, and another one for not voting at all on either side.”

Over the past several weeks, commentators have drawn comparisons between recent town hall meetings—some staged by GOP congressmen; others organized by angry constituents whose Republican congressmen have dodged the voters—and similar events, driven by the rise of the Tea Party, that bedeviled Democratic lawmakers in 2010. Inspired by increasingly strong support for the Affordable Care Act, the meetings have “flipped the script” on Republicans who just seven years ago profited mightily from such popular indignation. Marco Rubio spoke for other members of his party when he explained his refusal to meet with constituents: He doesn’t want to be put in a position where people will “heckle and scream” at him.

Time will tell whether today’s town hall confrontations augur poorly for Republican members of Congress in 2018. But the example of 1816 is instructive. On its surface, the Compensation Act was the spark that lit the fire. But the real drivers of the political uprising were changes in how the public viewed politics, politicians and elite actors—changes that took the nation’s governing leaders by surprise. In 1816, many Jeffersonian Republicans who had for years encouraged a democratization of politics and expertise suddenly found themselves the focus of populist rage. Similarly, today, GOP congressmen who recently benefited from public indignation now find themselves its target.

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Epic Fail: America 16, Republicans 0

Your Head Trucker is enormously proud of President Obama for having the balls to stand up unflinchingly to the wretched Republican terrorists who were bent on bringing down the government of the United States in flames.  Rachel summarizes the outcome of the 16-day slow-motion coup attempt by the Stupid Party - a must-watch:

Update, 7:15 p.m.: Okay, so the Maddow Show has a new website which must have been designed by the same birdbrains who came up with the Obamacare roll-out. I can't get the video to embed and display properly, but go watch it here.

Also worthy of note: Conservative writer Rod Dreher, via Andrew Sullivan:

Can the Tea Partiers’ beliefs be falsified? I don’t think they can be. I mean, is there any evidence that could convince them that the fault here lies with themselves, in the way they conceive politics, and in the way they behaved? It sure doesn’t look like it. In that sense, they think of politics as a kind of religion. It’s not for nothing that the hardcore House members stood together and sang “Amazing Grace” as the impossibility of their position became ever clearer. They really do bring a religious zealotry to politics.

Let me hasten to say that I’m not endorsing the “Christianist” meme, which I find far too reductive, among other things. Besides, many of the Tea Partiers and fellow travelers are not motivated by religious faith, but by a religious-like zeal for their political ideology. It was like this on the Right before the advent of the Tea Party. There has long been a sense on the Right that the movement must be vigilant against the backsliders and compromisers, who will Betray True Conservatism if you give them the chance. Again, the religious mindset: politics as a purity test. In this worldview, a politician who compromises sells out the True Faith — and faith, by definition, does not depend on empirical observation to justify itself.

The $200 Million Conspiracy to Shut Down the U.S. Government

Lucidly explained by Rachel and well worth your time, if you can stand the sheer horror of it:

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Update, 2:20 p.m.: Andrew Sullivan, via Joe.My.God.:

There is effectively no Republican party any more. There is a radical movement to destroy the modern American state and eviscerate its institutions in favor of restoring a mythical, elysian, majority-white, nineteenth-century past. This crisis is proving that more powerfully than even watching Fox. We need to see what is in front of our nose: a cold civil war has broken out between those properly called conservatives, defending the credit of the government, empirical reality, and adjustments to modern life and those properly called radical reactionaries declaring our current elected president and Senate as illegitimate actors, bent on the destruction of America, and therefore necessitating total political warfare, even to the point of threatening to destroy the global economy.

Update, 8:30 p.m.: Obama says he's "not paying a ransom" to Republicans who are "out of touch with reality":

Obama Rips Republicans for Attitude Problem

"I don't get no respect!"

Republicans are playing the Rodney Dangerfield card, and acting just like a bunch of whiny, sullen teenagers while holding the nation hostage to their demented anti-everybody agenda. Here's the quote that the President refers to, and here's the video of Obama speaking in Maryland yesterday:




And here's House Speaker John Boehner, getting a mite testy over a quote in the Wall Street Journal:



So which one seems like the grown-up in the room?  I ask you.

And as Rachel reminds us vividly (isn't videotape wonderful?), this is not the first time that Boehner and others of his tribe have tried to subvert the government and ruin millions of people's lives in a goddamned cry-baby tantrum fit.

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The Rape of America

Your Head Trucker will make no comments here, leaving it up to you fellas to draw your own conclusions from these six items.

I. "Remember This Date," from the Senate Democrats Twitter account:

II.  Andrew Sullivan, "The Nullification Party," via David Mixner:

I’ve been trying to think of something original to say about the absurdity now transpiring in Washington, DC. I’ve said roughly what I think in short; and I defer to Fallows for an important dose of reality against the predictably moronic coverage of the Washington Post.

But there is something more here. How does one party that has lost two presidential elections and a Supreme Court case – as well as two Senate elections - think it has the right to shut down the entire government and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury to get its way on universal healthcare now? I see no quid pro quo even. Just pure blackmail, resting on understandable and predictable public concern whenever a major reform is enacted. But what has to be resisted is any idea that this is government or politics as usual. It is an attack on the governance and the constitutional order of the United States.

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work. But I fear this nullification of the last two elections is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the American system of government as we have known it cannot work. It cannot, must not work, in the mindset of these radicals, because they simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right. You saw it in birtherism; in the Southern GOP’s constant outrageous claims of Obama’s alleged treason and alliance with Islamist enemies; in providing zero votes for a stimulus that was the only thing that prevented a global depression of far worse proportions; in the endless race-baiting from Fox News and the talk radio right. And in this racially-charged atmosphere, providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.

Even though the law is almost identical to that of their last presidential nominee’s in Massachusetts, the GOP is prepared to destroy both the American government and the global economy to stop it. They see it, it seems to me, as both some kind of profound attack on the Constitution (something even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts viewed as a step too far) and, in some inchoate way, as a racial hand-out, however preposterous that is. And that is at the core of the recklessness behind this attack on the US – or at least my best attempt to understand something that has long since gone beyond reason. This is the point of no return – a black president doing something for black citizens (even though the vast majority of beneficiaries of Obamacare will be non-black).

I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime. Those who keep talking as if there are two sides to this, when there are not, are as much a part of the vandalism as Ted Cruz. Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied.

The president must therefore hold absolutely firm. This time, there can be no compromise because the GOP isn’t offering any. They’re offering the kind of constitutional surrender that would effectively end any routine operation of the American government. If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They’re vandals.

This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come.

III. David Weigel, Slate, "Why Republicans Have No Problem Taking Us to the Brink":

The gerrymanders of 2011 added to their natural geographic advantage over urban/suburban Democrats and gave them a House they simply don’t think they can lose. In 2012 they proved it, winning 1.36 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates but keeping a 33-seat majority. According to the Cook Political Report, 205 of 435 House districts are solidly Republican, basically impossible to lose without an unexpected bribery or sexting scandal. Only 163 districts are solidly Democratic. If Democrats swept the table and won all the districts currently rated as tossups or “leaning” Republican, they’d win 213 seats, five short of a majority.

That was always the long-term Republican plan. In 2010, when voter anger was already guaranteeing a fantastic party comeback, groups like the Redistricting Majority Project (nicknamed REDMAP) told donors that “the party controlling that effort controls the drawing of the maps—shaping the political landscape for the next 10 years.”

IV. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) blasts Republicans "who cannot cope with the reality of our democracy":



V.  Robinson Jeffers, "Shine, Perishing Republic," circa 1935:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,  

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.    

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.    

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.    

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked on earth.

VI.  Rachel Maddow: "GOP Came to Power Seeking Government Shutdown."

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Millions Flee Obamacare

As everyone knows, Obamacare starts open enrollment today, and House Assholes Republicans were unable to force its postponement in last-minute voting overnight. Consequently, the Interstates are jammed all across America today as tearful, angry, bewildered Tea Partiers desperately seek an escape route. Staff humorist Andy Borowitz reports on the wild scenes playing out across the country in the New Yorker - a must read:

Millions Flee Obamacare

Meanwhile, all you liberal sheeple, as we are so graciously known by the demented lemmings on the Right, can go enroll in a low-cost health care plan at HealthCare.gov right now - no matter where you live in the country. Even if your state has officially rejected Obamacare and all that goes with it, you can still get coverage. Even if, like me, you live in Bumfuck, Texas.

Horrifying, isn't it?

Related news: In his inimitable way, Jon Stuart skewers and roasts the intransigent Republicans who have now forced the federal government to shut down, with about a million employees out of work immediately, with no pay, and at a cost to the economy of billions of dollars in suspended government services.

I can't get the episode to embed properly, but go watch it here.

I say kudos to the President and the Democratic leadership for having the balls to stand up to the sorry bastards. We saw in the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011 that playing Mr. Nice Guy just doesn't work with these thugs. The one-year Obamacare delay is just a ruse - they will keep postponing every year from now till Kingdom Come if they get away with it this time.

Oh but don't worry - all your Congresspeeps continue to get paid their $174,000 annual salaries right on schedule, of course. And enjoy full coverage of their platinum-plated government-sponsored health care plans - totally free of charge.

What's wrong with this fucking picture?

Oh, Just Go Away

I. Supreme Court Justice Denies Bid to Stop California Gay Marriages

II.  Rachel and friends on Meet the Press this morning:

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III.

 

Reactions to the Marriage Rulings: Rachel

The full import of yesterday's rulings by the Supreme Court in the DOMA and Prop 8 cases is still settling in with your Head Trucker.  Here's Rachel's inimitable, insightful take on things, and this clip should lead you through several segments of her show last night, dealing with various facets of the marriage news.

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Traitor or Patriot?

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things. . . . I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under. . . . I don't see myself as a hero, because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. --Edward Snowden

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. --Fourth Amendment, United States Constitution

An interview filmed a couple of days ago with the 29-year-old whistleblower who spilled the beans to the Guardian and the Washington Post about the National Security Agency's vast data-mining operations, thereby rocking the United States Government to its core:



Snowden was in Hong Kong when the interview was filmed, and quickly running out of funds. As of Sunday evening, Texas time, he had checked out of his hotel room, and the press says his whereabouts are "unknown."

He strikes your Head Trucker as a sensible, conscientious person, not a bug-eyed radical; and while he may or may not have been mistaken in his conclusions, my gut tells me his motives were good, and selfless, and for that I think he deserves our attention and respect. Of course, his days at liberty are likely to be numbered - if he is still alive, and not already kidnapped and flung into a hellhole "black prison" somewhere. But he seems to have known the enormous risks he was taking, and took them anyway. God help him.

Rachel further explores the limits of secrecy and freedom with the latest on the unfolding PRISM scandal, including a talk with one of the prime investigative journalists who broke the story - about 20 minutes of stuff here, but well worth your time:

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Letterman Gets It: The Gays Are Human!

Your Head Trucker has never cared anything for David Letterman, but this clip of him talking about his "aha" moment regarding gay marriage is one I hope a lot of people heard:

Humans have rights, and they get to do what humans get to do. Case closed, goodnight.