Republicans and Democrats have been sniping about the USA Patriot Act ever since Congress passed the law in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to try to forestall another such disaster. But now, it’s the Democrats who are sniping among themselves about it.
U.S. Rep. John Kline knows his buttons. As a Marine, he stayed at the side of Presidents Reagan and Carter, carrying the satchel known as the “nuclear football” that holds the how-to kit for pressing the most…
After yesterday’s Star Tribune piece on Rep. Keith Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca late last year, the 5th District Democrat is firing back, asking the paper for a correction in a letter to the editor today.…
A Democratic opposition-research firm has taken up the challenge of answering the 2010 U.S. Census questions that Rep. Michele Bachmann has vowed to leave blank: everything except the number of people living at her house. Third Coast Research…
Iran has proven the headline prescient, even if the terminology needed tweaking: “The revolution will be Twittered.” That was the title of Tom Elko’s Sept. 9, 2008, Minnesota Independent post…
The Minnesota Independent contacted four outspoken critics of America’s torture policies and practices — Dr. Steven Miles, Douglas Johnson, Coleen Rowley and Kirk Anderson — for reaction to recent revelations about Bush-era treatment of prisoners. None of them said, “I told you so.” But the truth is … they told us so.
The Bush “torture memos” that Obama released yesterday owe a heavy literary debt to George Orwell’s novel “1984.” The most blatant rip-off is the government’s now-famous plan to sic insects on captive Abu Zubaydah:
A bike tour of sites that had been raided by police in the days before the Republican National Convention (RNC) attracted the interest of…police. That’s apparent from a video of the tour, which took place on Saturday.
Members of peace groups and labor unions expressed fear this morning over a proposed bill, sponsored by Rep. John Lesch (DFL-St. Paul), that would make it easier for law enforcement to secretly keep and and share information about citizens.
Federal law leads the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director to believe that neither the IT consultant who found Norm Coleman’s donor database online nor the Web site that leaked it did anything illegal. Fodder for the argument: a similar case in California where authorities decided not to pursue charges when controversial conversations by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s were downloaded by political opponents.
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