Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
Justice and Injustice Amanda Terkel describes how the state-level budget cuts are putting courts and justice out of the reach of Americans. Dahlia Lithwick transcribes highlights of the remarkable panel she moderated over the weekend. The Whistleblower–the trailer for which is above–opens on Friday. Nick Schwellenbach provides background on the story it tells–how DOD Contractor […]
As I noted this morning, Obama plans to “pivot to jobs” by creating them in Korea. (This video came from his statement today after the deficit ceiling bill got through.) But his call on Congress to pass trade deals with Korea, Panama, and Colombia just got even more cynical. First, because he says these deals […]
The headline news about Mitt Romney’s new advisory committee of 63 lawyers is that Robert Bork is co-chairing it. But even more troubling is that he has named two of the lawyers that okayed torture–Steven Bradbury and Tim Flanigan–to it. Bradbury, of course, wrote the Combined Torture memo, which found, in part, that waterboarding someone […]
A number of liberals are sitting around today puzzling through the deal that just happened yesterday. And one thing they’re asking is, “how will Obama pivot to jobs?” One of the many lame excuses the White House has offered for the urgency of this deal, after all, is that by clearing it off the table, […]
In the middle of the debt ceiling debate yesterday, Naomi Klein tweeted a link to this article, describing how the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is eroding democratic and labor rights. The economic, and democratic, crisis in Europe raises questions. Why were policies that were bound to fail adopted and applied with exceptional ferocity in […]
Our dying economy Hendrik Hertzberg catches Louie Gohmert stealing Leon Trotsky’s dustbin. HSBC is closing a bunch of branches in the US, apparently having decided the US is not longer the land of opportunity for profit. Yves Smith argues that Liz Warren would be better of primarying Obama than running for Senate. I think her […]
The propaganda the Administration has put out to spin the debt capitulation as a win–“victory!” “bipartisan!” “compromise!”–would be amusing if the deal weren’t so dangerous. In addition to all the language claiming that cutting expenditures during a Depression–described here as “remov[ing] the cloud of uncertainty– will help the economy, there are these two bullets: Establishes […]
The WaPo notes with some curiosity that the business community did almost nothing to get the debt ceiling passed. It’s a remarkable story: perhaps unintentionally noting that while our banana republic status was being confirmed, the Chamber of Commerce was lobbying not to prevent that, but to get a Panama trade deal; describing a betrayed […]
My biggest complain about this statement from Raúl Grijalva is that he doesn’t say who threw Democrats and the people they champion under the bus: President Obama. That said, his comments about the crossroads facing the Democratic Party are spot on. This deal trades peoples’ livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals, […]
Kudos to Ezra for admitting he was dead wrong last year when imagining the Republicans might allow a deal that would let Bush tax cuts lapse. A year ago, I was less concerned about the Bush tax cuts. I assumed, as did many in Washington, that the Republicans’ antipathy to taxes was a negotiating stance. […]