Is Barack Obama like Richard Nixon?
Until recently that pairing seemed odd. Obama and Nixon are leaders from different generations, leading different parties with distinctly different styles.
Tom Wheeler, the White House’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, was for years a well-heeled lobbyist for cable and wireless companies. He also served the president’s 2008 and 2012 election campaigns as a top “bundler,” raising more than $700,000 from undisclosed donors in support of Obama.
Watching conventional wisdom form in Washington can be appalling. The emerging consensus on surveillance this past week has D.C.’s pundit class saying that privacy violations are a small price to pay for keeping Americans safe.
But conventional wisdom is wrong.
Whether you think spying is OK or not depends on your relationship to the information being collected.
If you’re on the gathering end, the invasion of someone else’s privacy doesn’t seem like a big deal. But if you’re the one whose private life is being pried into, this kind of surveillance seems like a very big deal indeed.
If you thought the Koch brothers’ interest in buying the eight Tribune Company newspapers was business as usual, think again. And today, protesters are turning out nationwide to oppose a Koch bid.
Opposition to the Koch brothers’ reported plan to take over the eight Tribune Company newspapers has spread from activist groups, unions, lawmakers and journalism advocates to the readers of these papers.
What do you get two billionaire brothers who already have everything?
Over the years, Charles and David Koch have financed a vast organizing network, including Americans for Prosperity, that amplifies their extreme anti-environment, anti-labor and anti-democracy views.
The movement to connect more people to high-speed Internet services scored a win in Georgia last Thursday. It’s a victory that should resonate in every U.S. community that is struggling to give people better Internet access.
The numbers are in and they add up to a big problem for our democracy.
Local television stations raked in nearly $3 billion in revenues from political ads in 2012, according to data released by the Television Bureau of Advertising.
In other words, American TV viewers had to sit through more than three million political ads during the election cycle.
