Trevor Timm, The Guardian

A poll on Friday by Public Policy Polling perfectly encapsulates the Republican presidential race so far: “30% of Republican primary voters nationally say they support bombing Agrabah.” That would be the fictional country in Aladdin.

Just as the Obama administration is finally about to release its long awaited plan to “close” the scourge on our country known as the Guantánamo detention facility this week, Congress has cowardly voted to bar the transfer of any of its inmates to the United States. But don’t just blame Congress for this impasse – the Obama administration is just as guilty for keeping one of the world’s most effective terrorist recruiting tools open more than six years after vowing to close it.

Do you want to live in a country where Internet Service Providers can slow down and censor your internet traffic at will, where the NSA has vastly more power than it does today and where end-to-end encryption may be illegal? Then Jeb Bush is the Republican presidential contender for you: he has positioned himself as the anti-internet candidate in an election where internet rights have never mattered more.

The controversy over the CIA’s secret drone program has gone from bad to worse this week. We now know that many of those running it are the same people who headed the CIA’s torture program, the spy agency can bomb people unilaterally without the president’s explicit approval and that the government is keeping the entire program classified explicitly to prevent a federal court from ruling it illegal. And worst of all, Congress is perfectly fine with it .

Is there any way that sending arms to the Ukrainian military doesn’t escalate regional hostilities? Who cares! It makes warmongers ‘feel better’