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DDoS attacks on various websites have been routinely launched by hackers within China

Hackers like these launching attacks from inside China? No longer can we just blindly accept that "launched by hackers within China" actually means that the hacker is or works for the Chinese...

You're right. A government group would NEVER work against another part of the government, not in the USA, not in CHINA, not anywhere else in the world. I'm taking the fox news approach to my defense, as well : Anything contradicting this statement is an anecdote and an anomoly.

DDoS attacks on various websites have been routinely launched by hackers within China

Hackers like these launching attacks from inside China? No longer can we just blindly accept that "launched by hackers within China" actually means that the hacker is or works for the Chinese...

If I was the state department I would be furious about this.

Short of a direct attack on a diplomat I don't think there is a worse breach of international custom and law.

Snooping on citizens is bad enough, but this is playing with fire.

*Smirk*.
US diplomats were encouraged to skim anything from email addresses and passwords to DNA samples and fingerprints off of UN diplomats in a directive signed by no less a person than the head of the US State department, Hilary Clinton.
From Leaked cables

Seriously, why is this article even news? The NSA's passive snooping (figuratively speaking) seem positively saint-like in comparison.

Gosh, then convince your co-religionists to act like civilized people and stop blowing themselves up. Simple as that.

I.e., convince his co-religionists not to do things such as this?

(Of course you weren't just assuming what his religion was, right, given that he stated what it was in TFA, right?)

(Oh, and speaking of uncivilized people blowing things up for religious reasons....)

Those prisoners in that island "prison" know that if they screw up they can get shipped back to a less idyllic prison: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people
They were transferred from a maximum security prison to that island. If they continue behaving well they stay and eventually get out. And by the time they've served their time there's a better chance they'd continue to behave well than if they were released from some hellhole of a prison.

Looks like I called it about it being a false flag operation.

The article cites Snowden's files as their source, but Snowden and Greenwald have both explicitly denied that, and even go further to assert that neither of them have provided any information whatsoever to the Independent:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

That means somebody is lying, and that is extremely important and worth your careful consideration, no matter who you think it is.

I'm disappointed that this development hasn't already been modded up in the comments here; a lot of folks are jumping to conclusions by taking the Independent at their word about who leaked this particular information.

I've suggested previously, even before the post-Snowden cloud/privacy concerns, that Microsoft could be in a very strong position if they swam across the current a little and promoted private clouds.

That is not a significant strength for Microsoft. There is no philosophical advantage to closed-source infrastructure compared to freedom-respecting software. Microsoft might win a bunch of sales because of their tight integration and simplified controls, but if you're worried about privacy, then Microsoft is not the way to go.

If you're doing a cloud deployment and you're worried about privacy, then the only real solution is to go to some open-source cloud system.

Yeah, I just recently saw that. And the Guardian has now partnered with The New York Times to get some protection under the U.S. First Amendment.

This is just going to get more and more interesting.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/23/guardian-news-york-times-partnership

Snowden gave the trove of files to The Guardian at least. The specific leaks, after the initial ones, are decided by Glenn Greenwald and not Snowden.

Whether Greenwald gave some stuff to the Independent or Snowden did that earlier is unknown.

No, it is known, straight from both Snowden and Greenwald themselves: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

They deny giving any information to the Independent. Since they are not the source, as the Independent claims, they further surmise that the timing and nature of this particular leak make it plausible that the UK intelligence agency did it intentionally, in order to justify even harsher "anti-terrorism" and "anti-leaker" laws and powers.

Both Greenwald and Snowden have publicly denied giving any documents to the Independent.

I wonder what large secretive organizations might have an interest in making Snowden and Greenwald look like dangerous leakers to people who haven't previously been abusing their power to spy on the innocent and lying to the public about it?

Regardless of your imaginings about Greenwald, this latest release is nothing to with him or the Guardian, but comes from another newspaper the Independent. Snowden and the Guardian strongly dispute that Snowden's materials are the source of the Independent's story, and claim that the UK government itself must be the source of this particular material.

The important story here is not that there's more secret surveillance, it's that the Independent claims that the story is based on materials from Snowden, and he and the Guardian flat-out deny that. The obvious implication is that the UK government itself "leaked" the material to the Independent, to create an appearance of potential danger to people arising from "the Snowden disclosures", a type of release that Snowden and the Guardian have strenuously avoided.

You know what is confusing about the Verizon order (confusing if you take government organizations at face value)?

The ONLY phone call information Verizon is NOT required to turn over to the NSA, are calls that start and end outside the US. If the call is wholly inside the US (including local calls), ends in the US, or starts in the US, Verizon must turn it over to the NSA. Interesting order from the FOREIGN Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Page 2, starting at line 5
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order

And I should add: huge kudos to the Independent for having the balls to stand up and keep reporting in the face of what appears to be a War on Journalism.

Bwahahaha. It seems the "Independent" got its information from the UK government in an attempt to smear Snowden and Greenwald.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base

Planted information to discredit Snowden or using Snowden's name to cover for another leaker?

"Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself" Wow, UK government are _really_ getting desperate scattering like cockroaches when the light gets turned on them...

Why the intelligence agencies are in the press is over:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/22/david-miranda-court-victory-data-police
Using laws formed around the time of the Irish peace talks and turning it onto the UK press is not so smart.
The UK press is rather smart and knows the next step might be closed material procedures.
ie UK lawyers may never get to see much real evidence anymore, question, only a security-cleared lawyer or ‘special advocate’ might.
Welcome to a next gen Franz Kafka like trial.
So the UK press know they might be on a collective list and want to get out in front of the debate rather than face closed courts for just doing their jobs.

From your link: "None of the windows at Halden have bars"

That's not a remotely typical prison.

The prisoners make their own meals. In a typical prison, that would result in 125 dead of stab wounds.

It's not that different from most Norwegian prisons - it just happens to be the newest one. Norway puts a huge effort into rehabilitation, and as a result the recidivism rate is 20-30% - less than half of what it is in the UK, to give one example.

While one part of me doesn't want prison to be to comfortable and cushy, intellectually I prefer this as it makes most ex-cons a valuable part of society afterwards and they don't go back to prison.

"Only" two. Why is it that the US claims to be the best country in the world, but it comfortable sharing a list mainly populated by other shining examples of leading countries, such as North Korea, Thailand and Rwanda?

You're joking, right? Some random person makes up a list based on unknown data, criteria, and extremely dubious fairness, and the US as a nation should feel humiliated by it? In one of those prisons people were claimed to be engaging in cannibalism. The North Korean prison system is a study in atrocity. US prisons are nothing like that. I'm reasonably certain that an honest list would have quite a few more prisons on it before getting to US prisons.

But to help clarify things, let's try a thought experiment:

A thought experiment list of the worst people that ever lived:
Stalin
Pol Pot
Mao
SleazyRidr

Should you feel humiliated? Ashamed? No? Of course you shouldn't! Why? Are you a mass murderer responsible for the death of millions? No. So you don't really fit on that list, do you? Well guess what? Including the US prisons on that list is equal nonsense.

Awwww that's so cute that you read part of the actual leaked cable.
And yes, that's a quote from the first part of the cable. That's not the blackmail part though. It's kind of referencing it, so I understand your confusion, but keep scrolling down. Or, here you go:

5. (C) In follow up to the April 2 meeting, EconDep met with Pfizer Country Manager Enrico Liggeri in Lagos on April 9. (Note: Liggeri has years of experience in Nigeria because his family operated a business in Lagos from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. He spent most of his childhood in Lagos. End Note.) Liggeri said Pfizer was not happy settling the case, but had come to the conclusion that the $75 million figure was reasonable because the suits had been ongoing for many years costing Pfizer more than $15 million a year in legal and investigative fees. According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to Federal Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer's investigators were passing this information to local media, XXXXXXXXXXXX. A series of damaging articles detailing Aondoakaa's "alleged" corruption ties were published in February and March. Liggeri contended that Pfizer had much more damaging information on Aondoakaa and that Aondoakaa's cronies were pressuring him to drop the suit for fear of further negative articles.

Don't like a lawsuit coming against you? Keep digging up dirt about the lawyers until they stop whining about all those dead children. Because hey, clinical trials are expensive and Nigirian children are cheap. Right?

And as for the smuggling one.... yeah....
" The PM claimed that Chevron had told him that it had already raised the issue of a cross-border development with Tehran as well. "
There you go. Chevron isn't allowed to deal with Iran. Because we have sanctions against them. Doing so is illegal. This leaks shows that Chevron is negotiating a deal that would break those sanctions. If that deal goes through, it's smuggling.

Oh, wait. I see what you're saying. Since the PM (Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki) said that he will of course not go through with the deal if violates US law, then of course nothing bad happened and Chevron is in the clear.... Dude, Nouri al-Maliki is the PM of IRAQ, not IRAN, you slack-jawed fucking nitwit. He let slip that Chevron told him they were dealing with IRAN. Which if ILLEGAL.

On prostitution: And yet no one is in jail, and this is recurring behaviour with Dyncorp, and they still get US contracts...

On spaying: It doesn't matter if it's not new, it's still ILLEGAL.

You're desperate attempt at deflecting the accusations with blatant misinformation and casual acceptance of illegal activity has me terrified. Who the fuck are you?

Apparently it was a "key part of the defence" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/22/bradley-manning-woman-chelsea-gender-reassignment

CTU showed this technology like two years ago. Even works on vending machine reflections.

Yes it is old inconsequential news but that is a feature not a bug. The Times really really really needed a security surveillance state "story" to try and keep itself semi relevant in the eyes of their readers but at the same time not bite the hand that feeds them (i.e. more than a cosy relationship with the goverment).

China is heavily investing to reduce carbon output, as its technocratic leadership understands the issue. When they reduce their output to less than that of the US, the US will have to come up with some new avoidance excuse.

They talk a good game, but you're apparently willing to ignore the over 350 new large coal-fired power plants they're building over the next few years. China will reign supreme in CO2 generation (per-capita means nothing to the environment BTW) from here on out. India also plans to build over 450 new coal-fired plants.

As to a new "US avoidance excuse", US CO2 production is down to 1994 levels due to fracking and therefore increased use of natural gas, among other factors. Now all we need is a sane nuclear power policy, with nuclear plants replacing almost all coal-fired plants here, and CO2 production would be way down without harm to the economy. In fact, by exporting high-tech thorium generators, the US could make a ton of money.

On my MacBook, 10 screws to get the bottom shell off then two more to get the drive out. Regardless, your point is irrelevant. The government officials had the Guardian reps take the computer apart, presumably using screwdrivers. The circuit boards were removed and then an angle grinder was used to grind off the chips. You can see pictures of the end result here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

Taking out the circuit boards from a laptop takes a lot longer than taking out a hard drive-- even in a MacBook. Can you come up with a _rational_ explanation why they would need to grind down the circuit boards? Secret information on the firmware EEPROM? Hand written notes under the chips? Any way you slice it, their actions seem petty and irrational.

Geebus, the factual errors on these summaries are becoming eye-watering!

The Guardian destroyed the laptop and the hard drive rather than turn them over. Shit, the title of the article has that in it:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

I consider it a brave act of defiance on the part of the Guardian, good for them. It won't affect the fact that there's probably stashed copies of this stuff everywhere but the British Authorities wanted the actual hardware, so rather than give it to them they used an angle grinder themselves.

Does it matter who held the hammer over the drives? So the police held the hammer over the head of the guy who took the hammer to the drives. How's that really any different than if the government smashed the drives themselves? The error is more that of semantics than facts.

The act of defiance would have been to make the data available to the public as soon as the police tried to strong arm them. Smashing the drives was an act of compliance, not defiance.

I find it amazing that nuclear shills can still cling to these tired old "coal is more radioactive than nulcear" fairy stories. That report was written by people who work for the nuclear industry. Of coarse they will find that nuclear is better, much like a Microsoft sponsered survey will find that Windows is better than Linux.
Like all nuclear spin stories, it assumes that no nuclear accidents happen. Count in chernobyl and Fukusima and you get a different story, especially considering Fukusima is still leaking: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2013/aug/20/fukushima-still-leaking-toxic-water-video

But they have taken legal action.

Letter from Miranda's attorneys

Even if you don't agree with Miranda's position, the letter is still worth reading, as it lays out the facts in meticulous detail.

Geebus, the factual errors on these summaries are becoming eye-watering!

The Guardian destroyed the laptop and the hard drive rather than turn them over. Shit, the title of the article has that in it:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

I consider it a brave act of defiance on the part of the Guardian, good for them. It won't affect the fact that there's probably stashed copies of this stuff everywhere but the British Authorities wanted the actual hardware, so rather than give it to them they used an angle grinder themselves.

Confirmed with pics: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london
Government agents watched as they "supervised" Guardian employees to destroy the laptop motherboard, etc using an angle grinder and a drill. Is that real world enough?

E-mail has never been secure or private? Which court decided that? Oh wait, it was never decided.

...rambling about privacy of communication...

This is why many technologists have libertarian leanings. The law doesn't matter. It's the technology.

Email has never been secure or private because it was never designed to be secure or private. It's just not a part of the technology. Everybody who has worked with email servers knows this. A little bit of privacy was bolted on using SSL, but that is far from bulletproof. The fundamental problem is that the server that you use to receive the email has to have access to important parts of the message, and it usually reads all of the message. Possession is nine tenths of the law, so it's a small step from receiving the email to handing the email to the NSA.

Email is easier to copy than other communications. Pre-digital phone lines, you had to find the specific line and add a physical device to tap it. Snail mail, you need lots of labor to steam open letters and close them again without damage. Paper hospital records needed already overworked people to bring them to a copy machine.

Only postcards came close, because passersby can read postcards accidentally just by being near them. These days, the post office digitally scans the post card as part of the sorting process. That's why the PGP community has used post cards to describe conventional email, and enveloped letters to describe email with PGP. The first problem is that PGP and S/MIME are not mandatory parts of email, so they are very little used, and they are extremely inconvenient in mobile devices. The other problem is that PGP and S/MIME cannot encrypt the headers, so they cannot prevent important information from being read.

The only solution is to abandon the SMTP model of email. Phil Zimmermann of PGP recommends his Silent Circle secure texting and video/phone service, but it costs $120/year with a 1-year subscription. It will be challenging for a secure message service to gain the critical mass to be widely adopted. Email was successful because it was widely used (and free of charge) before the Internet was even invented. Skype used to be secure-ish, but Microsoft bought it and wiped out that part of it. If you want secure communications now, you have to work at it and put up with fragmented communities. It's not fun.

Except that secret vampire attacks don't happen, whereas FISA-authorized data center tapping does.

Was that rather pointless and incompetent theater supposed to impress someone? I doubt the Guardian has been cowed by destruction of at most a few thousand dollars of equipment. And it shows that the UK is in bed with the US with this sort of spying.

Usually incompetent theater like this is a distraction to try and draw attention from something else that is going on. I don't know what - perhaps the fact that tensions over the Falkland Islands are flaring up again, and the UK might be going back to war. The Guardian seemed to be the only paper reporting on that - every other paper in the UK is back to back royal baby photos right now.

They know that the majority of people in the UK don't really care about this spying stuff and accept it as the cost of added security from terrorists, if they've thought about it at all. And freedom of the press is somewhat on the nose after all that phone tapping scandal stuff.

So they can do something pointless like this, knowing it will distract the Guardian, and knowing the UK populace won't care.

sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.

There was a severe shortage of toilet paper in the Socialist Worker's Paradise of Venezuela recently:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/23/venezuela-toilet-paper-shortage

Venezuela has 88.13 billion in oil revenue. It should be fabulously wealthy and have no shortages. But it does. Why? because strongly socialist systems always have endemic corruption and mis-allocation of resources. The crazy thing is after a century of repeated failure people still think socialist systems can work. In the short term they can, until they run out of stored money to spend, and then they fail. Always. Furthermore, socialist systems have greater and greater surveillance and suppression of dissenting thought (eg. the Marxist Political Correctness now infesting the 'Free World') as a result of the Cultural Marxism (look it up, please) that dominates global culture (you can't see it, because you're inside the Matrix; but once you are aware of Cultural Marxism you will see the invisible bars that are intended as a prison for your mind).

ps. I'm in New Zealand and haven't noticed any wide scale protests or wide scale awareness of the issue yet. Hopefully the awareness of the authoritarian nature of all governments (capitalist and socialist) will come. The true solution is in the populace demanding charters of limited government - just like the US Constitution (which is a fantastic document, but ignored by US Governments and most of the population - despite the Tea Party trying to raise awareness of the need for the restoration of Constitutional principles in government and law).

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/aug/19/glenn-greenwald-partner-detained-live-reaction

Anyway, chips, magnetic strips, what is the difference when ordering stuff via internet?

You could cryptographically sign the transaction, although at present this isn't done (as far as I know).

It's used for online banking (e.g. http://www.lloydstsbbusiness.com/internetbanking/cardreader.asp ).

(The vulnerability in this proprietary encryption system isn't so much mathematical, but social. The readers validate the PIN, which means criminals can demand someone's PIN -- and then verify it! Two students from my university were killed, possibly because they first a false PIN http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jun/04/french-students-murder-guilty-verdict )

If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further.

Sounds like a pretty accurate interpretation of his statement to me.

You seem think the terrorists are winning regardless of what happens. It is simple to see that they haven't won since the US hasn't converted to Islam and implemented Sharia as Bin Laden demanded. The terrorists are still losing.

It's Glenn's own word! I'm in a civil union with my "partner" and I don't particularly mind this term. Although I agree it can be confusing, most of the time people get what you mean by context. When I marry him this November, i'll call him my "husband" but not before then. You can blame the homophobes for creating this dual tier of unions but it does exist and I might as well use the proper confusing term as much as possible to emphasize just how idiotic it was that until just recently I couldn't get married.

For now they stick to harassing the people involved. Still holding up a front of respectability.

That depends on which country. The UK, for instance, didn't legalize personal FM transmitters until the end of 2006.

And they didn't give out low-power licenses for a reduced cost, either? Typical. Guess that's what you get with a Monarchy.

Related: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201105/diet-and-violence

Might be food additives like artificial color or flavor more than the sugar itself? As well as displacing healthy foods.

"For a man whose singular vision alienated many – a point illustrated by Kutcher's straight-talking, temper-riddled reading of Jobs – those closest to him are barely given time to voice their concerns, let along develop as characters. Jobs's Apple co-founder, self-taught software whizz Steve "Woz" Wozniak (Josh Gad), already a vocal critic of the film, is presented as a mere backdrop. We learn little about Woz: where he came from, how he met Jobs, or what happened after he quit Apple, dissatisfied with the direction in which the company was heading."
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/28/sundance-festival-jobs-first-look-review

Heres a link to info about the film itself: Jobs (film).

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Numerous Irish women are doing it now because the constitution of the country has been amended to make it legal.

Was this supposed to be a counter-argument?..

There's always freedom of movement - and an authoritarian government is far more likely to deny it.

There is nothing "authoritarian" about Romney in general nor in his views on abortion in particular. Though I don't share this opinion myself, various cultures world-wide believe, life begins at conception — heck, the entire China counts people's age from that point (however approximate).

you with your libertarian views will join the gays, the openly atheist and other "subversives" in the camps.

What camps? Michael Moore is still alive, free, and enjoying his substantial wealth made by criticizing and mocking the government... No one raised an eyebrow over calls to kill Bush, but simply mocking the President now may lead to the offender's losing his livelihood. NSA's surveillance blossoms, as does TSA's abuse of travelers (spilling already from airports to train stations). IRS is used — with Obama's knowledge if not outright direction — to suppress opposition. Are you sure, it is the Republicans, who are the "authoritarian" ones?

As for armed/disarmed, if you're not willing to use the guns to protect your liberties - and you here are explicitly arguing that you'd be willing to trade off a lot of them for lower taxes, more or less - then what use are they?

There may be a point, in a not-so-distant future, when the government is not quite yet able to openly use officers to kill, beat-up, and otherwise suppress opposition, but is already able to send pro-government "enforcers" to do the job, while the officers are ordered to look the other way. It happened in Côte d’Ivoire, it happened in Zimbabwe, it happened in Chicago, and in Philadelphia. Being able to resist that kind of threat is why citizens should be able to arm themselves without much ado.

"Socialist" countries with more personal liberties - like Western Europe - are doing far better than authoritarian countries with more economic liberties, in terms of how well off their citizens actually are.

Citation needed.

Oh I have no problem with managers per-se, - I just believe they should have some experience working on the factory floor so they know what they're actually asking of people

There is a good reason, most of the military officers have never been enlisted men. Being a good worker and a good manager are completely different things...

I just don't trust someone who has never in their life experienced even a hint of poverty to run a country with consideration for a population where roughly 1 in 4 people is unemployed or underemployed.

Trust? If anything, I'd trust a politician like Romney or Bloomberg — who became independently wealthy before entering politics — than the guys like Obama, who became rich as a result of being politicians. Do you honestly and sincerely believe, Michelle Obama would've obtained the position with $273k annual salary in Chicago hospitals-system, if her husband weren't a US Senator by then?

Just what makes you trust Obama? He never worked on a factory floor either, nor successfully managed anything of note, nor ever created anything other people were willing to pay their own money for.

His governing for four years was a nightmare — or should've been, if you were paying attention. He turned Bush's detentions of alleged terrorists into killings of the same people. TSA's abuse of travelers blossomed, as did NSA's surveillance. IRS is used to suppress oppostion — under Obama's direction. You may not consider Obamacare to be bad, but it is poised to fail — was designed to fail — which is very likely to lead to a renewed push for "single-payer" setup giving the government complete and utter control of our health. Whereas calls to kill Bush were brushed off as an exercise of free speech (though such calls are felonies, strictly speaking), mere mocking of the President today can cost a person their career and livelihood. Foreigners still dislike us, while the unemployment figures remain far above, what Democrats themselves condemned as "jobless recovery" only a few years earlier.

And you willingly ignored all of that because of Romney's personal views (which he was not even promising his supporters to turn into policy) on a freaking abortion? Wow...

Romney is modern nobility through and through

I bet, you supported Al Gore despite these reasons... I have no problems with nobility rising from the merchant and industrialist class. Their ancestors made their wealth be creating and selling things, that other people wanted to buy — not through warfare or even politics. I'll take that nobility over a fatherless child of an ignoble philanderer, who traveled around the world "marrying" local comfort women and siring children with them only to divorce them a few years later without bothering about the kids' welfare or upbringing.

As for abortions - that's great for your daughter. But a massive slice of the population is struggling just to get by

And that is exactly my point. Personal wealth — which Romney's government would've be

Oh I have no problem with managers per-se, - I just believe they should have some experience working on the factory floor so they know what they're actually asking of people

There is a good reason, most of the military officers have never been enlisted men. Being a good worker and a good manager are completely different things...

I just don't trust someone who has never in their life experienced even a hint of poverty to run a country with consideration for a population where roughly 1 in 4 people is unemployed or underemployed.

Trust? If anything, I'd trust a politician like Romney or Bloomberg — who became independently wealthy before entering politics — than the guys like Obama, who became rich as a result of being politicians. Do you honestly and sincerely believe, Michelle Obama would've obtained the position with $273k annual salary in Chicago hospitals-system, if her husband weren't a US Senator by then?

Just what makes you trust Obama? He never worked on a factory floor either, nor successfully managed anything of note, nor ever created anything other people were willing to pay their own money for.

His governing for four years was a nightmare — or should've been, if you were paying attention. He turned Bush's detentions of alleged terrorists into killings of the same people. TSA's abuse of travelers blossomed, as did NSA's surveillance. IRS is used to suppress oppostion — under Obama's direction. You may not consider Obamacare to be bad, but it is poised to fail — was designed to fail — which is very likely to lead to a renewed push for "single-payer" setup giving the government complete and utter control of our health. Whereas calls to kill Bush were brushed off as an exercise of free speech (though such calls are felonies, strictly speaking), mere mocking of the President today can cost a person their career and livelihood. Foreigners still dislike us, while the unemployment figures remain far above, what Democrats themselves condemned as "jobless recovery" only a few years earlier.

And you willingly ignored all of that because of Romney's personal views (which he was not even promising his supporters to turn into policy) on a freaking abortion? Wow...

Romney is modern nobility through and through

I bet, you supported Al Gore despite these reasons... I have no problems with nobility rising from the merchant and industrialist class. Their ancestors made their wealth be creating and selling things, that other people wanted to buy — not through warfare or even politics. I'll take that nobility over a fatherless child of an ignoble philanderer, who traveled around the world "marrying" local comfort women and siring children with them only to divorce them a few years later without bothering about the kids' welfare or upbringing.

As for abortions - that's great for your daughter. But a massive slice of the population is struggling just to get by

And that is exactly my point. Personal wealth — which Romney's government would've be

Of course, there are things that don't apply too. ... Big Brother ... had perfect propaganda in place. I am very skeptical such a thing does or could exist today.

Maybe you are not a US citizen. If so, have you ever heard of Fox News? and how their messages are aligned with their print and radio distribution channels?

... nor can they rewrite history.

Maybe you are not paying attention http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57559324/group-says-it-found-child-workers-at-samsung-supplier-factory/
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/apr/25/samsung-tin-mines-indonesia-child-labour
http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/news/new-448.html - Samsung’s Audits Ineffective, More Child Workers Uncovered
http://www.change.org/petitions/samsung-stop-exploiting-child-laborers

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/nov/13/children-porn-starbucks "Filtering doesn't work. It also puts power into censorware firms which help cover up human rights abuse"

And then there is of course the whole matter of allegations vs something that might hold up a court of law (whether you're going to use one or not), and terrorism vs resistance.

You are absolutely right. Which brings us right back to where I pointed out, that the only two alternatives to detaining such alleged terrorists, are to either shoot them on the spot, or release them. And Obama — the Nobel Peace Prize winner — has picked the former option years ago.

If you were honest with yourself, you would've written a personal apology letter to George W. Bush by now...

American is propaganda. Merely reinforcement of official statement:

Two weeks ago, Schieffer spewed a vicious, one-sided attack on Edward Snowden, accusing him of "putting the nation's security at risk and running away." Echoing Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani, Schieffer added:

I know eleven people who died or lost a member of their family on 9/11. My younger daughter lived in Manhattan then. It was six hours before we knew she was safe. I'm not interested in going through that again. I don't know yet if the government has over-reached since 9/11 to reinforce our defenses, and we need to find out. What I do know, though, is that these procedures were put in place and are being overseen by officials we elected and we should hold them accountable.

"I think what we have in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us. I don't know what he is beyond that, but he is no hero. If he has a valid point -- and I'm not even sure he does -- he would greatly help his cause by voluntarily coming home to face the consequences."

How come you're allowed to have that opinion and be an "objective journalist"? How come none of the people so very upset that those who are reporting on the NSA stories have opinions are objecting to any of that or calling the TV host an "activist"? The answer is clear: "objectivity" in Washington journalism does not mean being free of opinions; it means the opposite: dutifully echoing the official opinions and subjective mindset of those in political power. In the eyes of official Washington and its media mavens, spouting opinions is not a sin. The sin is spouting opinions that deviate from the ones expressed by and which serve the interests of those in power.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/michael-hayden-nsa-media-reverence