Author Archives: Stuart Richards

Apparently CNN’s Christiane Amanpour may have been investigated by the National Security Agency.

Granted, the NSA has adamantly denied doing anything of the sort, but why, then, did NBC so quickly edit its chat transcript that made reference to it?

In an interview with James Risen, a reporter for the New York Times, the following was deleted from the record shortly after being put on their site:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don’t. It’s not clear to me. That’s one of the questions we’ll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don’t know the answer to that

Mitchell: You don’t have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn’t heard that.

The blogosphere has exploded all over this story-a testament to the difficulty of keeping official secrets in the age of the internet. However, so far all we have is one interviewer’s specific mention of her name. Granted, the NSA is no reliable source, but we don’t have much to go on. Does Andrea Mitchell know something she’s not telling us? Does the NSA? Hopefully we’ll find out more soon.

Thanks to Stephen VanDyke and all the others for giving me a spot on this excellent blog.

As Chris Bennett introduced himself, so shall I. I’m 21 and a Christian Libertarian. While I’ve had libertarian urges all my life, I supported the Republicans until about 2000, simply because they were the supposed party of small government. I’m ashamed to admit that I cheered when it was announced that Bush won the election in 2000-but then again, in my mind I was cheering a small-government conservative who was against nation-building and who promised to privatize Social Security. Not long afterwards, I heard about the Libertarian Party and, browsing their website, I found I agreed with them. I met Michael Badnarik in Omaha while he was campaigning and from there joined his website, where I found Tim West and eventually got on his blog. From there I eventually found the bulk of the libertarian blogosphere.

Sometimes libertarians deride my Christianity, and sometimes Christians deride my libertarianism. But the way I see it, when God placed the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden in Genesis (whether it’s literal truth or not doesn’t matter to me), he placed free will in man’s reach. Man was not bound to obey God, but had a way out-that way, his worship would be more sincere. In my mind, free will is the gift of God-and he who takes away that free will is guilty of idolatry, for he thinks himself wiser than God. Therefore, the philosophy of liberty comes naturally to me. Like it says in my bio, I wish to undo the damage done by my co-religionists. And honestly, I’m more of a liberal Christian anyway so I don’t even think gay marriage or drug use is necessarily wrong… but even if I did, it’s for God and not me to judge humanity.

At any rate, I look forward to blogging here and I promise I’ll have a picture up soon.