Pelosi says health care law a political plus for Democrats
WASHINGTON — A defiant House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared firmly Thursday that the health care law looms as a political winner for her party this fall, despite ceaseless Republican attacks and palpable nervousness among some of her rank and file who fear their re-election may be in jeopardy because of it.
“We just couldn’t be prouder” of the legislation, Pelosi told a news conference where she said the law already has resulted in “better coverage, more affordable, better quality” insurance for nearly 12 million people.
The California Democrat’s appearance was timed for the fourth anniversary of the bill’s signing by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010, an occurrence that few other congressional Democrats seem inclined to herald at a time when party strategists seek a strategy to blunt criticism from Republicans and their allies.
The first test of their strategy ended inauspiciously for Democrats in Florida recently, where Republicans won a special election for a House seat after a costly campaign in which the health care law played a heavy role in television advertising.
Pelosi has said the defeat was due more to the make-up of a district long in Republican hands. Other Democrats speaking privately concede the health care law played a role.
Google enhances encryption for email, making it harder for NSA to intercept
WASHINGTON — Google has enhanced the encryption technology for its flagship email service in ways that will make it harder for the National Security Agency to intercept messages moving among the company’s worldwide data centers.
Among the most extraordinary disclosures in documents leaked by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden were reports that the NSA had secretly tapped into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.
Google, whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in November that he was outraged over the practice, didn’t mention the NSA in Thursday’s announcement, except in a veiled reference to “last summer’s revelations.” The change affects more than 425 million users of Google’s Gmail service.
Yahoo has promised similar steps for its email service by this spring.
Google and other technology companies have been outspoken about the U.S. government’s spy programs. The companies are worried more people will reduce their online activities if they believe almost everything they do is being monitored by the government.
With virulent anti-gay protests, Phelps tested boundaries of free speech, decency
TOPEKA, Kan. — Fred Phelps did not care what you thought of his Westboro Baptist Church, nor did he care if you heard its message that society’s tolerance for gay people is the root of all earthly evil.
By the time you saw one of his outrageous and hate-filled signs — “You’re Going to Hell” was among the more benign — you were already doomed.
Tall, thin and increasingly spectral as he aged, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the Westboro Baptist Church, a small congregation made up almost entirely of his extended family, tested the boundaries of the free speech guarantees by violating accepted societal standards for decency in their unapologetic assault on gays and lesbians. In the process, some believe he even helped the cause of gay rights by serving as such a provocative symbol of intolerance.
All of that was irrelevant to Phelps, who died late Wednesday. He was 84.
God is love? Heresy, he preached, and derisively insisted the Lord had nothing but anger and bile for the moral miscreants of his creation. In Phelps’ reading of the Bible, God determined your fate at the moment of your creation.
By wire sources