US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law".

We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.

Laws can’t fix this problem. The branches check each other but citizens are supposed to check the branches. “Can’t fix a non-engineering problem with engineering.”

But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).

That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.

Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.

The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.

The founding fathers lived in a world where the average citizen would have no idea what was going on in Washington. They just didn't expect it to be exploited quite so brazenly