A Gallup poll shows former President Bush’s ratings have improved. 
Category: politics
NSA and metadata
Where to start? It seems like new developments about domestic spying are coming every hour. Before we get ahead of ourselves, here’s a good AP piece which will give you some background about how we got to this point. Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian broke the story and revealed the identity of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden while Barton Gellman & Laura Poitrus of The Washington Post had the breaking story of the metadata mining program, “PRISM”. Here’s the link to my take on metadata gathering.
You’re being followed
The NSA is collecting millions of Americans’ phone records and following their Internet behavior. The Obama Administration and some members of Congress are defending this latest civil rights intrusion as legal and essential in keeping us safe. I’m beginning to think Obama is Dick Cheney’s love child…
Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary
For almost 2 months in 1989 tens of thousands of protesters led by university students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The protests were triggered by the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party General Secretary who was forced to resign for his positions on reforming the party . The students were also demonstrating against corruption in the government, for workers’ rights, and for freedom of speech and the press. On June 3, 1989 the Chinese government ordered martial law and cracked down on the protesters in Tiananmen Square, killing an unknown amount (estimates range from the hundreds to thousands). Here’s an article about some survivors from yesterday’s Washington Post.
At the time I was living and working in Los Angeles. I can still remember sitting at my drawing desk at home when the news started broadcasting those horrifying images from Beijing. 
Associated Press
Big month for SCOTUS
June is going to be a busy month for the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices will be issuing decisions on affirmative action, same-sex marriage, voting rights, and gene patents over the next few weeks. Be sure to regularly check SCOTUSblog; they’ll be live-blogging this morning on the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.
*I’ll be doing live sketches for the Washington Post the week of the same-sex marriage decisions.
Veterans and suicide
According to a report by the Department of Veterans Affairs, 22 veterans commit suicide every day. In this article from the Huffington Post, more active-duty U.S. soldiers have died from suicide than from combat in 2012. Researchers at the National Center for Veterans Studies in Salt Lake City report that Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) might be the cause of the increased suicide rates.
I remember back in the early days of the Iraq War how some members of the Bush Administration were positive the war would cost under 50 billion. Of course everyone knows we’ve exceeded that estimate but what we don’t know yet is how much needs to be spent on veterans and their injuries, especially from the unprecedented numbers of traumatic brain injuries during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. 