Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reveals that an FBI agent told one of last year's Garland shooters to "tear up Texas." As Mr. Hussain reminds us, "testing the willingness of suspects to take certain steps in a conspiracy is one thing; actively encouraging them to commit a violent, criminal act is another." And you certainly don't want law enforcement actively enabling terrorist attacks (or, God forbid, causing false flag attacks) to justify their continued relevance or their thirst for more power. At the risk of piling on, civilized people don't "plant the idea to actually conduct an attack in the mind of a suggestible or unstable person," but actively discourage such folks from having such ideas.
U.S. Copyright Office apparently agrees with big telecom corporations that the FCC's plan to promote set-top box competition would violate copyright laws. Think about it for a minute and you'll see that's a desperate argument, but let's go right to paragraph 7 anyway: "Once a copyright holder has released their work to paying customers, like cable subscribers, those customers have their own set of rights: to view TV programs at home or on the go, to skip around within the programs as they wish, to search for and organize the programs and other content they’re entitled to see, and to choose tools that enable them to do these things." As always, corporations love to pit their "freedoms" against your freedoms.
Eli Lake at Bloomberg thinks he knows why disgruntled Republicans aren't flocking to that Libertarian ticket with the two successful two-term Republican Governors on it. To sum, he thinks it's because the Libertarians "still act() like a fringy nerd fest" and because Gary Johnson is a "gangly ball of nerves who exudes the charisma of Don Knotts from his 'Three's Company' years." At the risk of sounding like a fringy nerd, that analysis is all glibness. And anyway, the real future Libertarians aren't on the right -- they're young and currently on the left because the Republicans have so thoroughly alienated them with all their Jesus-hates-gays-women-and-dark-skinned-people malarkey. Libertarians would do well to get to these youngsters before they suffer a few setbacks in life, or before they get wind of Thomas Piketty.
Just as I suspected, some professional liberals are getting a little antsy that so many right-wingers have endorsed Hillary Clinton lately. The Clinton campaign's attempt to reach out to Henry Kissinger was certainly a bridge too far for some -- as Greg Grandin writes, Mr. Kissinger "stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s feared recklessness and immorality but as his progenitor." Hey, just like the entire Republican establishment from around 2002 forward. I agree with professional liberals on this, of course; Mark Cuban and Brent Scowcroft don't endorse you just so you'll save them from an Emperor Trump.
Finally, Donald Trump wonders what could possibly be wrong with calling President Obama "the founder of ISIS." I can think of one thing wrong with it off the top of my head: insofar as we can call any American President the "founder of ISIS," that President would be George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. I mean, the actual founders of ISIS certainly chose their path, but Mr. Bush was the one who put them all together in Iraqi detention camps. But then maybe Mr. Trump has actually decided, at this point, not to poke the hornet's nest that is The Folks Who Blindly Supported Bush Back in the Day, lest we all learn that this nest also holds all of Mr. Trump's most ardent votaries.
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