I Hope The Revolution Accepts Discover Card

If you've never donated money to WikiLeaks, now would be the perfect time - if you can do so without using Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal or Western Union.

According to reports this morning, all of the above companies have decided to boycott and/or place an embargo on WikiLeaks after they leaked a batch of diplomatic cables. Julian Assange, the flaxen-haired space elf who edits everyone's favorite secret information clearinghouse, says the blockade has destroyed 95% of their revenue. Quoth NPR:

Saying that "an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade...has destroyed 95% of our revenue," WikiLeaks has suspended publishing operations and founder Julian Assange says it may have to shut down permanently by year's end.

As I was reading the news about Assange and his current predicament, something bothered me. I kept flipping back and forth between Assange's remarks as reproduced at NPR's off-putting "Two Way" blog and as replicated by CNN. Finally, it hit me. What are those ellipses at NPR trying to sweep under the rug?

Below are summaries of Assange's remarks via NPR (first) and CNN (second):

An arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade...has destroyed 95% of our revenue

***

Our scarce resources must now focus entirely on fighting this unlawful banking blockade. If this financial attack stands unchallenged, a dangerous, oppressive and undemocratic precedent will have been set, the implications of which go far beyond WikiLeaks and its work.

In both articles, the government's side of the story - that WikiLeaks is unlawful and dangerous - is well-represented. However, while CNN represents Assange's stance ("we are legal / this is an attack by the banking establishment"), NPR does not.

Is that because NPR thinks that Assange lacks credibility, or that it should be evident based on the facts alone that the government is in the right? If so, we have to guess, because NPR has decided to pre-edit their story to tell us what is acceptable and what is not. I would ordinarily have given NPR the benefit of the doubt on this question, but their recent behavior has strongly suggested to me that they no longer deserve this benefit.

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Apparently, Liberals Are The Illuminati

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posted on 8/12/2015 by the Salt City Sinner I moved from Utah to the American South as a teenager, and pretty quickly learned that if you hail from the Beehive State, there are a series of extremely dumb questions you will be asked when people first meet you that would not be asked of someone from, say, South Dakota or Maine. “Are you Mormon?” is obviously the first one – and a pretty reasonable question, all things considered. That is usually followed up with some sort of question about polygamy, however, which is lazy and ignorant and gets old remarkably quickly. Sometimes I would be asked if one can buy alcohol in Utah. This is, again, a not entirely unreasonable thing to ask, especially since many of these interactions took place back in the days of private clubs and membership cards – but it did strike me as a little silly given that I was often asked about Utah and booze while going to college in Conway, Arkansas, which is a town located in a dry county where sales ...

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