Ari Melber

here we go

Appeals Court Rejects CIA Argument on Drone Secrecy

A big and unexpected partial victory for the ACLU’s case against the CIA on drone secrecy. The Court ruled:

In this case, the CIA asked the courts to stretch [a secrecy] doctrine too far — to give their imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible. “There comes a point where … Court[s] should not be ignorant as judges of what [they] know as men” and women… We are at that point with respect to the question of whether the CIA has  any documents regarding the subject of drone strikes.

The case is now headed back to the lower court.

The DC Circuit opinion is here:

http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/6471FF102FC611A685257B2F004DEA2A/$file/11-5320-1425559.pdf

Now over 12,000 news articles about the sequester cite the cancellation of White House tours, while less than 1,000 cite the cuts to housing assistance for the poor.

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And reporters were all over the ‘tour’ story in today’s White House press briefing.

[Ari Melber via Google News.]

Some protest that “privileged minorities” are benefiting from affirmative action - a complaint that misunderstands a vital part of equal opportunity policies. Affirmative action is a tool for advancing racial diversity, which ideally includes diversity *within* the minority population as well. Not every black person who benefits from affirmative action should automatically be poor, or from a single-family home, or descended from American slaves. That would be a crabbed conception of diversity-as-reparations – a cartoonish image in the mind of the program’s critics, not its saviors.

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From my new article on affirmative action, which the Supreme Court may invalidate this term.

http://thegrio.com/2013/03/12/what-the-new-york-times-gets-wrong-about-affirmative-action/

Context for the debate on Medicare and the deficit.

New letter from the Attorney General to Sen. Paul.

New letter from the Attorney General to Sen. Paul.

Public interest in the sequester is crashing, at least as measured by Google searches.

Public interest in the sequester is crashing, at least as measured by Google searches.