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Meanwhile, today in Russia Vladimir Putin hauled Edward Snowden out of whatever dingy state apartment he’s been living in, for a high profile propaganda show that was utterly laughable.

Snowden, who has been given temporary asylum in Russia, connected via video link and asked Putin: “Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?”

Putin began his response by telling Snowden that “you are a former agent, a spy. I used to work for an intelligence service [the KGB]. We are going to talk one professional language.”

Then the Russian president, who in recent weeks has claimed he did not send troops into Crimea only to now admit that he did and insists there are no Russian military personnel in eastern Ukraine even though reporters have heard at least one man there introduce himself as a Russian officer, made the case that:

“You have to get court permission to stalk a particular person. We don’t have a mass system of such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist.”

Also see:
SORM

Although Biden is doing what every white guy on Instagram does: The “hey, look! I have a black friend” pic pic.twitter.com/f2FgA08HuJ

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) April 17, 2014

Screen Shot

Road sign via Shutterstock

Meanwhile in Louisiana, Republican lawmakers are getting set to make the official state book the Bible.

Which would, of course, be unquestionably unconstitutional, and would face legal challenges and be inevitably struck down, wasting who knows how much state money in the process. The party of fiscal responsibility!

Legislation that would make the Holy Bible the official state book of Louisiana cleared the House Committee on Municipal, Parochial and Cultural Affairs with a vote of 8-5 Thursday afternoon. It will now head to the full House of Representatives for consideration.

Rep. Thomas Carmody, R-Shreveport, originally filed a bill to declare a specific copy of the Bible, found in the Louisiana State Museum system, the official state book. But by the time he presented the proposal to the committee, he changed language in his legislation to make the generic King James version of the Bible, a text used worldwide, the official state book.

Carmody said his intention was not to mingle religion with government functions. “This is not about establishing an official religion,” he said.

It’s been almost a week since I wrote anything about the Mighty Glenn Greenwald, but it seems the Mighty G has been thinking of me, despite the wonderful awards he’s been receiving, because today he tweeted a link to the blog run by the extreme right wing Muslim-hating weirdos who’ve been stalking me online for more than seven years.

The giveaway that Greenwald’s tweet was aimed at me is pretty clear — all you have to do is read that blog. It’s entirely dedicated to non-stop hatred of yours truly, with all kinds of genocide-advocating hate speech and violent rhetoric everywhere. The people who hang out there are the absolute bottom of the Internet barrel; many of them were banned from LGF for doing exactly what you see them doing at their new home. And they have been relentlessly stalking and harassing not just me, but anyone who posts at LGF or communicates with me on Twitter, for years.

When my friend George Duke died, they went to websites with articles about George and posted disgusting comments pretending to be me. These are the people Greenwald is linking to.

This is also the blog that conspired with another Greenwaldian hero, Barrett Brown, to out my private emails, along with anti-Muslim hate group leader Pamela Geller. After Brown decided to start hating me, he hung out extensively at this website.

And it’s the blog that has posted numerous videos and articles denying the genocide committed by Serbians against Muslims, and once posted a video praising the infamous racist book The Turner Diaries that inspired terrorist Timothy McVeigh.

And the graphic Greenwald wants you to look at is a fake — an altered version of a Think Progress graphic showing Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik’s citations of right wing writers and organizations in his “manifesto.” The altered graphic, to which they added my name in a very deceptive manner, with a bright green bar to make sure you didn’t miss it:

And the actual graphic that appeared at Think Progress, which does not have my name in it, of course:

Notice the difference? Here they are side by side. Maybe that “StinkProgress” logo should have been a red flag?

If you actually read Breivik’s sick manifesto, you’ll discover that he hated me and considered me a “traitor” to his deranged “cause,” and included numerous articles from anti-Muslim bloggers attacking and vilifying me.

To really drive home the point about the kinds of sources this Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” believes are credible, here are some past LGF posts about the “Diary of Daedalus” stalking site; I usually ignore them, but this case is so egregious it had to be answered.

Rodan Exposed: The Shocking Audio
‘Diary of Daedalus’ Stalker Blog Links to Pro-Turner Diaries Video
Andrew Breitbart and ‘The Turner Diaries’

And just to follow up, the Mighty Greenwald has now admitted he did read that post and knew exactly what kind of site he was linking to:

@davebabler What? The whole point of that graph was to correct the TP graph. It said that ***explicitly. So obvious. And it was accurate.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 17, 2014

Also see:
The Daily Banter: Pulitzer Winner Glenn Greenwald Tweets Link to Hate-Site and Faked Graphic

Tell me again about how much we need to fear our elected government: Google Knew About Heartbleed and Didn’t Tell the Government.

Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn’t alert anyone in the government.

Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered “Heartbleed”—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7.

The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going public. The security firm CloudFlare, for example, said it fixed the flaw on March 31.

But the White House said Friday that no one in the federal government knew about the problem until April. The administration made the statement to deny an earlier Bloomberg report that the National Security Agency had been exploiting Heartbleed for years.