Falling just shy of the 2013 outing, Nielsen returns put President Obama's Tuesday address as the least watched since 2000.

With final ratings in for the State of the Union address, Nielsen Media puts the grand total just shy of last year's for a 14-year low.

The gross average audience of 13 networks airing PresidentBarack Obama's speech puts viewership at 33,299,172. That's down from the 33.5 million that tuned in for the 2013 speech for its lowest showing since 2000. (President Bill Clinton's final address in office averaged 31,478,000.)

Among the networks carrying the address live were CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, Azteca, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Al Jazeera America, Galavision and Mun2.

In the cable news race, Fox News Channel came out on top as the only network to grow its State of the Union audience year over year.

Nielsen, in its first State of the Union also measuring Twitter, gives 2.1 million tweets and an audience of 8.8 million users to the speech's social footprint.

Russia just made Edward Snowden's life a lot easier. The fugitive doesn't want to return to the U.S., and now it looks like he won't have to anytime soon, as a senior Russian official opened the door to Snowden staying there indefinitely.

Russia will extend Snowden's one-year asylum and will not send him back to his home country, said Alexy Pushkov, the head of the country's Foreign Affairs Committee in its lower house, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, according to CNN. The country previously granted Snowden asylum as a "temporary refugee" in August.

Snowden's whereabouts and globe-trotting hunt for safe harbor from U.S. authorities has captivated much of the world since his leaks began last June. He fled from Hong Kong to Russia and had hoped to make it to Cuba before the U.S. froze his passport, leaving him trapped in a Moscow airport in a sort of legal purgatory. Russia provided Snowden with the one-year asylum request, a decision that further strained the country's relations with the U.S.

Russia's announcement comes a day after Snowden responded to questions posted on Twitter and said, among other things, that his return to the U.S. was "not possible" under current espionage law, specifically the Whistleblower Protection Act. Snowden added that he believed he had "no chance" of earning a fair trial.

Attorney General Eric Holder couldn't explain the constitutional basis for executive orders such as President Obama's delay of the employer mandate because he hasn't read the legal analysis -- or at least, hasn't seen it in a long time.

"I'll be honest with you, I have not seen -- I don't remember looking at or having seen the analysis in some time, so I'm not sure where along the spectrum that would come," Holder replied when Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked him to explain the nature of Obama's constitutional power to delay the mandate.

Lee had based his question on a standard legal test, first described by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who said the president's authority to issue executive orders is strongest when he does so with the backing of Congress (category one), more dubious when he issues an order pertaining to a topic on which Congress has not passed a law (category two), and weakest when the executive order is "incompatible with a congressional command" (category three), to use Lee's paraphrase.

Holder assured Lee that Obama's team accounts for Jackson's three-part analysis, but said he couldn't use that test to explain in any detail what kind of authority the president wielded when he delayed the employer mandate.

If you only watch the mainstream media coverage, or read major newspapers, you'd think that what is happening in the Ukraine right now is some kind of organic, grassroots political reform movement. It's nothing of the sort.

At the height of hypocrisy, we can witness US officials and western media pundits all chastising Ukrainian authorities for cracking down on violent protesters. As if the governments of the US or the UK wouldn't do exactly the same if street gangs set fire to government buildings in Washington or London.

Beyond all the freedom and democracy rhetoric pouring out of the western media and neoliberal government orifices, what we are essentially looking at is an attempted coup d'état in the Ukraine, orchestrated by a cadre of western NGO's and multilateral institutions - in concert, trying to unleash a more sophisticated version of the Arab Spring on Europe's doorstep.

The situation on the street is extremely dangerous right now. As Voltaire Net's Andrew Korybko points out, the west have nudged the Ukrainian government into an almost impossible situation. Korybko states:

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden helped The New York Times "keep the public informed on what I consider to be very important matters," says Jill Abramson, the woman who has the final say on what constitutes "all the news that's fit to print." As executive editor of the Times - the first woman to hold what has been one of the most influential positions in American journalism - Abramson sets the agenda. We talk to her about what she calls the "most secretive White House" she has covered as well as the newspaper's "seriously flawed" coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War, which happened during her watch as Washington bureau chief. John Seigenthaler also asks Abramson about the future of print newspapers and about accusations that the Times is too far left.

John Seigenthaler: Let me dive right into the news and a little bit about the NSA and Edward Snowden. Daniel Ellsberg was quoted recently as saying that Edward Snowden was his hero. Do you see Snowden as a hero or a traitor?

Jill Abramson: I see him as a very good source. We have published many of the NSA and GCHQ (British intelligence) documents that came from Snowden. And so I view him, as I did Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, as a very good source of extremely newsworthy information.

Proposals to require labels for foods containing genetically modified ingredients so far have a spotty record at the ballot box. Another defeat arrived Tuesday in St. Louis, this time at the annual shareholder meeting of Monsanto Co.

Investors in the GMO seed maker overwhelmingly rejected a shareholder proposal that would have pushed Monsanto to get behind labeling efforts itself - after it spent millions lobbying against such measures at the state level. Only about 4% of Monsanto shares were voted in support of the effort.

The shoot-the-moon proposal did, however, bring Monsanto Chief Executive Hugh Grant to personally debate some fierce critics of his company's business practices - something he acknowledged Monsanto hasn't done much of in the past.

The 'progressive' Western political elites and the establishment journalists who act as PR agents for them would like us to think that they are unequivocally opposed to neo-Nazism, homophobia, racism and far-right political extremism.

But how genuine is their opposition? The current disturbances in Ukraine and the western response to them, suggests that it's highly selective to say the least.

Let's imagine for a moment that there were violent demonstrations led by ultranationalists and neo-Nazis in a Western European country, and that those demonstrators held up posters of figures who had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. That they had shouted neo-Nazi slogans and their leaders had made anti-Jewish and homophobic statements. That these same protesters had used violence to try and topple the democratically elected government - and that they had seized government buildings. We can expect the western elites and establishment journalists to fiercely denounce the protesters, who would definitely be labeled "rioters," that they would call for "law and order" to swiftly be restored and for the leaders of the demonstrators to be arrested, and for them to be prosecuted under hate speech legislation.

Yet this is exactly what has been happening in Ukraine, and far from condemning the far-right protesters, the Western elites have been enthusiastically supporting their cause.

Before Christmas, Senator John McCain, the US's leading neocon politician, flew to Kiev and dined with opposition leaders, including Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the extreme far-right Svoboda party. Later, McCain stood alongside Tyahnybok at an anti-government rally. In 1999 a report from Tel Aviv University, cited by Britain's Channel 4 News, called Svoboda "an extremist, right-wing, nationalist organization which emphasizes its identification with the ideology of German National Socialism." In 2004, Tyahynbok claimed that Ukraine was run by a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia." Although the party has tried to clean up its image since then, the far-right extremism and ugly ultranationalist rhetoric remains - but that doesn't seem to trouble too much the western elite figures cheering on street protests, in which Svoboda and other ultranationalist groups have played such a leading role.

The same hypocrisy is shown in relation to the issue of gay rights.

The resolution calls on on Republican members of Congress to enact amendments to the Section 215 law that currently allows the spy agency to collect records of almost every domestic telephone call

In the latest indication of a growing libertarian wing of the GOP, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution Friday calling for an investigation into the "gross infringement" of Americans' rights by National Security Agency programs that were revealed by Edward Snowden.

The resolution also calls on on Republican members of Congress to enact amendments to the Section 215 law that currently allows the spy agency to collect records of almost every domestic telephone call. The amendment should make clear that "blanket surveillance of the Internet activity, phone records and correspondence - electronic, physical, and otherwise - of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court," the resolution reads.

The measure, the "Resolution to Renounce the National Security Agency's Surveillance Program," passed by an "overwhelming majority" by voice vote, along with resolutions calling for the repeal of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and reaffirming the party's pro-life stance, according to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman.

The Pentagon has discovered a gap in the defenses of Washington, D.C., and it's about to test a solution.

But depending on your point of view, the solution is either vital for national security or a threat to American privacy.

Starting this fall, two blimps will float at 10,000 feet over the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in an attempt to develop a defense for the nation's capital against cruise missiles fired from ships offshore.

Two blimps will float over the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Russia already has a large arsenal of cruise missiles - essentially low-flying unmanned aircraft - and other countries like Iran are developing them.

"As it stands today, we have practically zero capability to detect it, much less defend against it," one military officer said of the cruise missile threat.

The blimps carry radars that can search for hundreds of miles to detect the launch of a cruise missile and relay the data to interceptor missiles which have been positioned around Washington since Sept. 11, 2001.

Naomi Klien's book The Shock Doctrine explains the origins and objectives of 'disaster capitalism'. This documentary, directed by Jonas Cuarón, is an investigation of disaster capitalism, based on Naomi Klein's proposition that 'neo-liberal capitalism' feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.


'Neo-liberalist capitalism', of course, is merely the ideological veneer masking pure naked greed - psychopathology writ large.