Snowden's Hawaii-based dancer-girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, repeatedly refers to herself as a "super hero" on her blog, which is full of weird, spy-related postings that have yet to receive much if any attention. On March 4, she wrote: "When I was a child most of my friends would play dress up and fantasize about being a princess, super man or pickle rancher ... I would imagine being a spy." Three days earlier, under the heading "Super Spy," she promoted a dance show in which she performs as a spy, writing, "Here's hoping time and the Russians don't catch up with me!"
After four years as an NSA contractor, Snowden apparently realized that he was better suited to other things, like running into the arms of the Chinese or another regime willing to display a suitable antagonism toward America on behalf of his reluctant-hero self.
Behavioral contradictions are a pattern for Snowden, who started high school, then dropped out. He then joined the army, training to serve in the Special Forces, only to make the apparent shocking discovery that it may involve "killing Arabs." After briefly serving as a security guard for the NSA, Snowden joined the Central Intelligence Agency as a tech maintenance guy, but while hanging around the CIA station in Geneva he decided that he found the intelligence game distasteful. Not that it stopped him from further pursuing a career in spying. As a Booz Allen Hamilton employee contracting with the NSA, Snowden swore to maintain national security secrecy before deciding it didn't suit his agenda.
Now, Snowden says he understands that there are consequences for his actions, but he nonetheless is going to keep running away from them. He says he doesn't want attention, yet he's gone about communicating a grievance the way an attention junkie would. Snowden claims to be a pro-transparency advocate, yet he claims to be deeply concerned about your privacy.
And all this for what, exactly?
So far, Snowden's great contribution to collective "freedom" is that we now know the U.S. government is involved in the passive collection of phone records and Internet data -- in case you had been living in a closet and didn't already assume this. In other words, the government could feasibly know about your life, if it ever cared enough to dig through data belonging to hundreds of millions of people to find out. We're not talking about wiretapping or active intrusion, but mere collection.
What's truly tiresome is this growing culture of conspiracy whereby everything that the government does is an evil plot against average Americans. Personally, I have only benefited from government data-monitoring and collection. When my mobile phone was stolen in France, GPS tracking information sent from the service provider to the authorities enabled it to be located along with the perpetrators. Closed-circuit cameras enabled the logging of the suspects' faces. At various times in my media career, passive data collection has facilitated the identification and location of people intent on causing me grief under the convenient guise of anonymity.
So why is it that when cybersecurity is evoked, some people's minds go directly to the thoroughly unrealized negative potential for such things? Democracies have so many safeguards in place in the event that such fears ever do attempt to manifest. Why are we always looking out for the imaginary Adolf Hitler whom conspiracy cranks believe to be lurking in the soul of every elected authority?
Who, exactly, has the NSA victimized thus far? Until that question is answered, it's silly to accuse the system of pre-crime. Nor am I willing to attribute the term "whistleblower" to anyone whose behavior to date appears no different from that of any predecessors in the realm of intelligence leaks.
When the FBI's Robert Hanssen was imprisoned for leaking intelligence to the Russians, his lawyer, Plato Cacheris, attributed it largely to ego. Harold Philby of the Cambridge Five spy ring, which relayed American and British secrets to the Soviet Union, nicknamed himself "Kim" after a spy figure in a Rudyard Kipling story and was described by espionage researcher Rupert Allason as an egomaniac with a superiority complex.
The law will have to ultimately decide whether Snowden is a whistleblower or just another traitor.
Web: rachelmarsden.com
]]>Another week, another controversy in official Washington.
At the moment, 35 percent of voters consider recently exposed National Security Agency surveillance efforts as the most serious. The Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservatives is No. 2 on the list, followed by concerns about the Obama administration's handling of the incident in Benghazi last fall in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya was murdered. The Justice Department's secret probe of reporters' phone and email records is seen as the top concern by only 9 percent.
Competing for attention with the controversies are ongoing policy disputes over immigration, gun control and full implementation of the national health care law.
While each of these stories has its own cast of characters and internal dynamics, it is now possible to identify a unifying theme.
President Obama, whose deeply held faith in government is unwavering, unintentionally provided that moment of clarity last week. In attempting to dismiss concerns about the NSA disclosures, he said, "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."
We have a problem.
Just 30 percent of voters nationwide have that much trust in government officials when it comes to these surveillance efforts.
Only 24 percent now are confident that the federal government does the right thing most of the time.
This popular distrust of government is the theme that ties all the recent news stories together. It's driving all the current policy debates.
On immigration, there is broad popular support for comprehensive immigration reform. Most Americans believe legal immigration is good for the country, but most do not trust the government to enforce any provisions in the new law that would improve border security and reduce illegal immigration. Only 7 percent believe that enforcement is "very likely" to happen.
This is not just Republicans grumbling about Barack Obama in the White House. The same skepticism was there when George W. Bush was president. Unless the government does something to address the border problem, it will be there for the next president, as well. Because of that distrust, prospects for passing serious immigration reform this year are slim indeed.
Similarly with gun control, Americans overwhelmingly like the idea of requiring background checks for those who want to purchase a gun, but they are very suspicious of where the president and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg want to go from there. If voters were convinced their plan was for background checks and nothing more, it would have enjoyed broad popular support.
The president's health care law is facing the same challenge. New mandates will soon force people to buy more expensive insurance plans. Advocates say they're not really more expensive because they provide more coverage. But most Americans are uncomfortable with trusting the government to decide an appropriate level of coverage. They're also suspicious of all government cost estimates.
Many in Washington are frustrated by the public distrust. They dream of public relations programs to overcome it. What is needed, though, is for the government to change its behavior, so that it can earn the trust of the people it serves.
Web: rasmussenreports.com
]]>Conservative Republicans in our nation's capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011. They've basically shut down Congress. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.
It's as if an entire branch of the federal government -- the branch that's supposed to deal directly with the nation's problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law -- has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called "sequester" that's cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation's poor, and national defense.
The window of opportunity for the president to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame-duck status.
But the nation's work doesn't stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which are far less gridlocked than Washington. Last November's elections resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor's offices in all but 13 states -- the most single-party dominance in decades.
This means many blue states are moving further left, while red states are heading rightward. It's as if we're seceding from each other without going through all the trouble of a civil war.
Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for example, now controls both legislative chambers and the governor's office for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative session that recently ended resulted in a tax hike on top earners, to be used for early-childhood education and state universities. Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and expanded the power of trade unions to organize.
On the other hand, Kansas is about to shift taxes away from the wealthy and onto the middle class and poor by reducing the state's income tax and substituting a higher sales tax. And North Carolina millionaires are on the verge of saving at least $12,500 a year from a pending income-tax cut even as sales taxes are raised on services that lower-income residents depend on.
Gay marriages are now recognized in 12 states and the District of Columbia. Colorado and Washington state permit the sale of marijuana. California is expanding a pilot program to allow nurse practitioners to perform abortions. Guns are harder to buy in New York and Connecticut.
But other states are heading in the opposite direction. They're enacting laws restricting access to abortions so tightly as to arguably violate the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Alabama, the mandated waiting period for an abortion is longer than it is for buying a gun. Meanwhile, some states are expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act while others are refusing to.
The states are even diverging on immigration, filling the void left by Washington's inaction. If you're an undocumented young person, you're eligible for in-state tuition at public universities in 14 states. But you might want to avoid even driving through Arizona, where state police are allowed to investigate the immigration status of anyone they suspect is here illegally.
Federalism is as old as the Republic, but not since the real Civil War have we witnessed such a clear divide between the states on such central issues affecting Americans.
Some might say this is a good thing. It allows more of us to live under governments and laws we approve of. And it encourages experimentation: Better to learn that a policy doesn't work at the state level than after it's harmed the entire nation. As the jurist Louis Brandeis once said, our states are laboratories of democracy.
But the trend raises three troubling issues.
First, it leads to a race to the bottom. Over time, middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy can become disproportionately burdened as the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to reverse course. If the idea of "one nation" means anything, it stands for us widely sharing the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship.
Second, it doesn't take account of spillovers. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without background checks in one state can easily find their way to another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the citizens of one state is likely to move to another state where job opportunities are better. We are interdependent. No single state can easily contain or limit the benefits or problems it creates for other states.
Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century, "states rights" has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally, devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of modern-day white supremacists.
A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national government. The tea partiers and other government-haters who have caused Washington to all but close because they refuse to compromise are threatening all that we aspire to be together.
Web: robertreich.org
]]>Hillary Clinton is now on Twitter.
This woman looks for trouble, I swear.
As has been widely reported with the breathless rush of an alien sighting, Clinton's Twitter profile reads, "Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD..."
Funny and coy. God help her.
Pundits are parsing every word. Not everyone is thrilled with Hillary Clinton.
In other breaking news, my dog, Franklin, is wagging his tail. Again.
Slate's John Dickerson thinks Clinton's timing may be off. "If redefining the role of elder-stateswoman is not her intent and that 'TBD ...' (to be determined) was a flirtation with speculation about her presidential hopes, perhaps she should step away from the keyboard," he wrote. "It's too early."
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted that BuzzFeed listed six -- count 'em, six -- changes Clinton made to her Twitter profile in the first hours after she activated her account. For example, Clinton switched the order of wife and mother, hence nipping in the bud once and for all the nonexistent rumor that she was once an unwed mother. She also added the word "glass" before "ceiling" to distinguish her from Superman, who can plow through concrete.
Tweaking her Twitter? Clear evidence that Clinton is calculating and obsessed, to paraphrase Dowd.
Or she's just like the rest of us, to quote all of my friends. "You try summing up your life in 160 characters," said those of us who never have been secretary of state (SET ITAL) and first lady.
Back to the glass ceiling. The Washington Post's Emily Heil used this same metaphor to report that a construction crew has been called in to expand the women's restroom off the U.S. Senate floor. They're doing this to make room for the historic number of female senators.
Think about that. One-fifth of the Senate, where Clinton once served, is now women. I have no idea how many of them tweet, but I'm sure some male blogger is all over that one. Thank goodness, too. This whole woman thing is out of control.
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith dismissed Clinton's Twitter debut as a dated and desperate attempt to telegraph, "I'm not old."
He also suggested two young men as bright, shiny alternatives to Clinton: Cory Booker and Marco Rubio.
Booker is the mayor of Newark, N.J., and has yet to prove he can win a Senate primary.
Marco Rubio is a U.S. senator. He's also an anti-choice Republican. Boy, will he woo the Hillary crowd.
Smith is 36. "Two years younger than my son," I said when I called him. I realize I sounded like a reprimanding mom in pointing that out, but he took it in stride. After talking to him, I have no reason to think Smith will make a habit of attacking Clinton for her age rather than for her ideas, but his post triggered some bad memories.
I'm in no mood for another round of small-minded men with big forums who make a sport of bashing the broad. We went through that during the Democratic primary in 2008, as was masterfully chronicled by Rebecca Traister in her book, "Big Girls Don't Cry." If these guys think Clinton's Twitter account is news, wait'll they see how women -- including those of us old enough to be their mothers -- use social media to call out sexism this time around if she runs for president.
There is plenty of fair criticism of Clinton, but attacking her for her age is not a winning strategy. With age comes experience. She is still the only woman to come close to winning the Democratic primary for president. She also is different from the Hillary Clinton who ran in 2008, in ways we don't yet know. Logging 956,733 miles traveling the circumference of the world 38 times to visit a record 112 countries as America's chief diplomat changes a person, regardless of age or gender.
Contrasting her to President Barack Obama is not a winning argument, either. There are millions of Americans -- particularly women -- who are willing to vote for Obama and for Clinton. We don't see them as opposing forces, as the old vs. the new. Their life stories contribute to the same exhilarating narrative of hope and change.
The majority of American voters were thrilled to elect the first African-American president.
The question looms: How many of them want to make history again?
TBD...
Email: con.schultz@yahoo.com
]]>The New York Times is pleased with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 438-page, $20 billion plan to protect New York from the effects of future hurricanes. It notes benignly that the cost is probably an underestimate but agrees with the mayor, "Whether you believe climate change is real or not is beside the point; the bottom line is we can't run the risk."
Really? Imagine the argument: "Whether you believe zombies are real or not is beside the point. ... We can't run the risk." Clearly one's willingness to undertake these sorts of preparations depends completely on whether the perceived danger is real.
Is it? I don't know. I've pored over some of the research but can't hazard a guess as to whether the alarmists or the skeptics are right. Weather is incredibly complicated and multifactorial, and as a non-scientist, I find it difficult to understand. Both sides of this heated debate (couldn't resist) believe their opponents are acting in bad faith. The warmists cast everyone on the other side as paid shills for energy companies, and the skeptics charge that warmists are chasing grant money. A little charity in both directions would go a long way.
Like other undecideds, I am often repelled by the hysteria of the climate change zealots -- and by their evident hypocrisy. Surely, if you believe that Earth might be going the way of Venus, you'd support the widespread use of nuclear power? Still, I'm willing to grant that there might be something to worry about -- maybe a lot. A majority of climatologists believe this. They may be wrong, but surely it would be prudent to take steps that make sense on other grounds and might also address climate change.
In this spirit, it's refreshing to see proposals, like Bloomberg's, that focus on adjusting to rising temperatures rather than vain attempts to halt the world's use of fossil fuels. Rapidly industrializing countries like China (the world's chief emitter of greenhouse gases) and India (the fourth largest contributor) are not going to sacrifice development on the altar of environmentalism.
We ought to celebrate new technologies like fracking. An environmentalist was asked why he supported fracking. His answer was one word: coal. Fracking provides abundant, inexpensive, domestic energy to Americans while also reducing carbon emissions. America's greenhouse gas emissions have dropped more than any other nation's in the past five years as we've reducing our reliance on coal in favor of natural gas. And our technological leaps won't be kept from the rest of the world, they'll be shared.
If we're reforming, we might start with government's contribution to the problem. You're heard those worrying reports about the increasing economic damage hurricanes do? Well, the costs are not due to any spike in the number or intensity of storms, explains the NOAA, but rather the result of "greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines."
How did that "infrastructure" -- including huge, opulent houses right on the beach -- come to be located in areas prone to hurricanes? You've paid for it. Private companies declined to offer flood insurance for such properties, for obvious reasons. But since 1968, the federal government has provided subsidized flood insurance. The result has been a huge liability for taxpayers (the program was $18 billion in the red before Hurricane Sandy), and increasing vulnerability to future storms. Even if the planet stops warming forever, there will be bad weather -- and the properties for whose loss American taxpayers will pay are multiplying.
It's expensive for taxpayers and also environmentally unsound to build so heavily along the coastline. Natural dunes and wetlands protect against storm surges. In fact, some of Bloomberg's proposals for New York include expanding such natural defenses.
It gets worse. As James DeLong noted in a piece for Reason magazine, "People are now becoming so used to the idea that the federal government will pay for disasters that they are not bothering to buy even the subsidized flood insurance. In most places, less than 30 percent of the properties located in designated flood plains are covered." True to form, the federal government shelled out $60 billion for relief after Sandy. Those who objected that the bill contained $10 million for FBI salaries and $2 billion for road construction in areas untouched by the hurricane, among other goodies, were accused of heartlessness.
Whoever turns out to be right about climate change, certain reforms are worth doing. One is to stop subsidizing disaster.
Web:
One of the strangest artifacts of American culture is the spiked heel as a symbol of female
power. Many waitresses at America's casinos feel otherwise.
From Las Vegas to Atlantic City to the Connecticut woods, women balancing trays of drink have been forced to walk miles a day in high heels. Such labor practices, had they occurred in some far-away impoverished country, would have evoked international censure.
Waitresses negotiating their first union contract at Foxwoods Resort Casino, in Ledyard, Conn., have made the heels an issue. They are painful and, over time, foot-deforming. Some regard the requirement as a sneaky effort to get rid of older employees.
Dr. Eric Levine is a podiatrist in Norwich, a few miles from Foxwoods. He's seen the feet.
He shows high heel patients a cartoon of an elephant, standing with all four feet on a thumbtack. "It equals the pressure when you wear a 4-inch heel over an extended period of time," he told me. Or, to use another image, "It's like driving your car all on one wheel."
In fairness, the Indian-owned Foxwoods demanded only a 2-inch heel and in recent negotiations dropped even that rule.
"A 2-inch heel is biomechanically and structurally wonderful compared to a 4-inch heel," Levine said. Still, heels take their toll, especially as women age. (A high heel at a party now and then is OK, according to Levine.)
Some foot doctors refuse to do bunion surgery unless the patient agrees not to wear high heels afterward. But some women won't give them up, and for compelling reasons.
Levine: "I'll never forget when I heard a patient say, 'No matter how much my feet hurt, the higher the heel, the higher the tip.'"
Which brings us to another issue for women in the hospitality business: sex. Night spots, however shabby, often try to sell themselves as sexy venues. Some want cleavage bared, in addition to spindly high heels.
One theory goes that high heels are sexy because they suggest bondage. A woman in high heels is unable to run. That is an ironclad law, no matter how many James Bond movies you've seen.
Not surprisingly, waitresses at Foxwoods talk dolefully of the day a consultant arrived, demanding a certain kind of "look." You know what that means.
But we must be open-minded. Employers generally do have a right to insist on a uniform as a term of employment. In the entertainment sector, the look is often extraordinary. Should we shutter Playboy Clubs for requiring their waitresses to wear those silly little satin corsets? If a bunny thinks she's getting too old for this, perhaps it is time to find other employment. (Age sidelines baseball and tennis players all the time.)
Let me reassure the sisterhood that I hold establishments obliging female servers to flaunt their sexuality in low regard. And there are certain cases -- flight attendants comes to mind -- where the campaign to reform the "look" and age limits for women brought a victory for female dignity.
But again, there are businesses profiting off carnal instincts, and they contribute to our economy. And many young women -- Dr. Levine's foot patient, for one -- strut their stuff to enhance their paltry wages with generous tips from admiring-to-lecherous males. Who am I to stop the dance?
There is a difference, though, when it comes to high heels. Showing cleavage does not create a condition demanding surgery. Tottering on heels week after week after month can.
Heck, there's a movement to make offices provide ergonomic chairs to protect workers' backs. Shouldn't there be one to free female servers from walking all day on tacks?
Email: fharrop@gmail.com
Let's get this straight: Edward J. Snowden surrenders his well-paid job as a government contractor and, quite possibly, his freedom by publicly confirming how aggressively the National Security Agency, without obtaining any court warrants, collects the phone and Internet records of tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of Americans.
To the resulting public uproar, President Barack Obama curiously, and unconvincingly, responded, "I welcome this debate, and I think it's healthy for our democracy. " But no one could match the response of Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who while insisting the NSA program Snowden gave up his livelihood to publicly disclose had been operating outside public view for seven years, offered this gem: "To my knowledge, we had not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information."
As far as we know, Snowden did not sell any secret information to any unfriendly nations or entities. The names of no U.S. agents were revealed. No American projects or programs were disclosed or compromised. He may well, as some critics have charged, have a martyr complex. But the last time I checked, that is not a felony. As of this writing, there is a lot about this story we do not know.
What we do know is that Edward Snowden has been relentlessly attacked by Washington pundits and politicians for one, unforgivable offense: He did not graduate from high school. The normally sensible Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, fairly thundered: "I'm just stunned that an individual who did not even have a high-school diploma, who did not successfully complete his military service and who is only 29 had access to some of the most classified information in our government."
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., emphasized Snowden's transcript: "I hope that our national security interests are not going to be determined by a high-school dropout." Liberals and Democrats echoed the same knock against Snowden.
This line of attack is as stupid as it is snobbish. Consider these high-school dropouts: Founding father and genius inventor Benjamin Franklin. Founding Father and First President George Washington. The founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. American aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The first lady of civil rights, Rosa Parks, who refused a Montgomery Alabama bus driver's order to give up her seat to a white passenger. The man who gave the world its most popular chocolate bar, Milton Hershey. Before he would become America's most beloved author, Mark Twain left school at the age of 12 to become a printer's apprentice. The great man who saved the Union, Abraham Lincoln.
And if formal education and advanced degrees are the key to wisdom, please explain how the United States was so misled into the tragedy of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by such well-credentialed academics as doctoral student Dick ("I had other priorities in the '60s than military service") Cheney, Defense Department hawks, including University of Chicago Ph.D. Paul Wolfowitz, Harvard (magna cum laude) grad Douglas Feith, and London School of Economics and Princeton advanced degree holder Richard Perle, as well as Yale magna cum laude graduate and Vice President Chief of Staff -- who would be found guilty of two counts of perjury and obstruction of justice -- Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
And remember this: Even though, because of physical injuries he sustained, he was forced to leave the Army after just four months, Edward Snowden still served longer in uniform than all those Ivy League-Bush-Cheney war hawks put together. Like a lot of other guys who didn't sit it out in Cambridge or New Haven.
Web: creators.com/liberal/mark-shields.html
Like most people who live in democratic countries, Americans believe elections matter. But elections alone don't define democracy. Elections are simply the mechanism by which free people choose the leaders who will uphold the rule of law and protect basic human rights, including the rights of those who did not vote for them.
This week's Iranian elections are a case in point. Despite comments to the contrary by Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Iran does not have an "elected" government, regardless of what happens on June 14th when Iranians go to the polls.
Four years ago, fraud riddled the sham election process that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the president's seat for another term. But the stuffed ballot boxes that produced a predetermined outcome were only a manifestation of the real problem.
Iran is a theocratic, totalitarian state ruled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a council of mullahs who dictate everything that goes on within Iran. They decide which candidates are allowed to run for office, what the rules of the election process are and what the eventual outcome will be. To pretend otherwise is to legitimize a regime that deserves no legitimization.
Nonetheless, there is reason for hope. A vibrant dissident movement opposed to the Khamenei regime exists both inside Iran and abroad. On June 22, tens of thousands of these Iranian dissidents will gather in Paris to voice their opposition to the tyranny within their home country. Happily, this year these dissidents will gather without the suspicion hanging over their heads that they are anti-democratic terrorists.
The gathering of the National Council of Resistance of Iran drew some 100,000 participants to Paris last year, including more than 100 international dignitaries and parliamentarians, despite the designation by the U.S. of one of its constituent organizations, the People's Mujahedin of Iran, as a terrorist group. After a long legal battle, the state department finally lifted the PMOI's terrorist designation, which was never supported by evidence of threat or hostility to the U.S. in the 15 years the group was on the list.
But despite the delisting, if precedent is prologue, most Americans will hear little about the upcoming gathering of the NCRI. That's too bad, because as one who was there last year and will be again this year, I believe the NCRI promotes true democracy in Iran.
The president-elect of the NCRI, Maryam Rajavi, has put forth a 10-point plan that includes the following: universal access to the ballot box; separation of religion and state; freedom of association, assembly and the press; equal rights for women and minorities; support for the rule of law and an independent judiciary and judicial system based on the presumption of innocence of the accused and the right to be tried in a public court; the rights of private property and investment in a market economy; and, most importantly for the world, a nuclear-free Iran.
The Obama administration continues to deal with Iran as if the regime can be pressured to change its ways through economic sanctions. But the mullahs who rule Iran could not care less about the suffering of their people, which has been the result of the near collapse of the country's economy. Khamenei is interested only in his own power and that of his mullahs. As long as these tyrants rule Iran, the Iranian people will not be free and the world will not be safe.
Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons. The regime exports terrorism and has sent weapons and fighters to suppress the aspirations of those who want freedom in Syria and in other places in the Middle East. And the regime would like nothing better than to wipe off the map the only true democracy in the Middle East: Israel.
No matter who is "elected" president of Iran on June 14, none of this will change. It's time for the freedom-loving world to wake up to the fact that phony elections cannot bring about the regime change that is necessary in Iran. But perhaps those tens of thousands of people who will gather in Paris on June 22 can show the world a better alternative -- if only they can be seen and heard.
Web: creators.com/conservative/linda-chavez.html
]]>With Father's Day on Sunday, there is good news and bad news. First the negative: Single mothers head up almost 9 percent of American households. The good news? Fathers who care are making a huge difference in this country.
How do I know? It is estimated that close to 40 percent of all those incarcerated in the USA did not have a father in their childhood home. So doing the math, a responsible father seems to be a strong force for promoting righteous conduct.
It was never easy being a father. Did you know that American icon Davy Crockett abandoned his children? And many other famous men did, as well. Shameful. You can't be a real man if you don't look out for your kids. They need you.
There are plenty of books by dads explaining the dilemma of contemporary fatherhood, and it is true that dad-ism in today's high-tech world is not easy. My father firmly embraced the Ralph Kramden philosophy: He was king of his Levittown castle. He worked hard, and his family deferred to his wishes. Except me. I did not defer and was disciplined accordingly.
But today most fathers don't rule as my father did. In general, modern dads are more enlightened. We bring diplomacy to the home rather than the "my way or the highway" post-World War II paternal strategy. But looking back, I clearly understand that witnessing a "chain of command" approach in my house was a positive thing for me. My father provided a strong point of view on life and was a leader. Boys, especially, need that.
Even though I am now a 1 percenter economically, I rarely waste money. Every time I am tempted to buy some dopey thing, I hear my late father's voice: "Do you really need that?" He was big on saving money and buying as much security as possible. He also encouraged charitable giving. So I am responsible with currency.
Also, I go to church every Sunday because my family always went to church. It didn't matter if the priest was speaking Flemish from the pulpit -- we went. It was an obligation. Now, I fulfill my obligations. All of them.
My father also taught us to respect our country. He was a naval officer. So there was no slacking on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Veterans Day. We knew what they meant. Today, a flag flies daily in front of my house.
Finally, I was never really tempted by drugs and alcohol. My father thought addicts were weak and intoxication was stupid. I never saw him high. He had a beer or two but never lost control of himself. By osmosis, I have adopted the sober attitude. It really has served me well.
As a teenager, I called my dad "the monster" to his face. He laughed. He even referred to himself as "the monster" when doling out orders to his offspring. There were many times when I resented my tough dad and wanted Ozzie Nelson to replace him.
But now I'm a father, and I realize that status is the most important thing in my life. There's no question who provided that perspective. So on Father's Day 2013, I remember my dad and the indelible gifts he gave me.
Web: billoreilly.com
The unfolding story of the Obama administration monitoring not just telephone records but Internet usage has drawn media coverage with adjectives like "astonishing." No doubt about it, even the pro-Obama press acknowledges it is a scandal. Still, it is laughable that the media would label him a "dictator" or discuss the "I word."
That's not what greeted George W. Bush at the end of 2005. Just eight years ago, journalists openly discussed tyranny and the possibility of impeachment.
On Newsweek's website on December 19, 2005, Jonathan Alter went ballistic: "We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. ... If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974."
On CNN the next day, crusty commentator Jack Cafferty echoed: "If you listen carefully, you can hear the word 'impeachment.' Two congressional Democrats are using it, and they're not the only ones."
On CBS on Dec. 21, morning show host Russ Mitchell asked law professor Jonathan Turley about Bush. "Do you see this leading to impeachment proceedings against the President?" Turley agreed. "Well, Russ, what I can tell you is that I do believe this is a federal crime and it would constitute an impeachable offense."
Months later, on April 23, 2006, ABC's Sam Donaldson declared it a sacred duty to disobey the Bush administration when a leaker exposed secret CIA prisons for terrorist suspects. "Remember the great American saying, 'Disobedience to tyranny is obedience to God,'" he lectured. "In this case, it was something that clearly, I think, most Americans would agree is not what we want to do, secret prisons. ... Exposing something like that does not hurt us. It helps us."
On July 17, 2006, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift denounced Bush the tyrant on "The McLaughlin Group." She said Russia's Vladimir Putin is "the only one of those leaders who goes in there with a commanding popularity among his own people, because he is perceived to be an effective dictator. What we have in this country is a dictator who's ineffective." When someone protested, she backtracked to Bush being an "authoritarian president who's ineffective."
Despite all this, major media polls in 2006 showed most Americans favored investigating terrorist threats over preventing intrusions on their privacy. The same is true today, especially after the Boston Marathon bombing.
The people may be consistent. Journalists are not.
Eleanor Clift has scrapped the "dictator" talk now. On "The McLaughlin Group" on June 7, she decried how "There's a lot of alarmist rhetoric on both the left and the right. But, in fact, this has been going on for the last several years. It began in the Bush administration." He was a "dictator" then, but now everything is perfectly sound.
Alter was just as partisan. He told WBUR on June 10 that Obama sees very scary intelligence briefings every day, and "his first job is to protect the United States, and that's his oath. But as we saw in his speech last week, he's very conscious of balancing national security with civil liberties. He might not have done it right in this particular program, but at least he's making the effort to strike that balance, which the Republicans generally do not."
On CNN, impeachment now comes up only as a preposterous notion. On May 29, Piers Morgan was trying to press libertarian author Wayne Allan Root on the weird notion of impeaching Obama over the IRS scandal: "However, to get talking approximate impeachment, you've really got to nail President Obama's fingerprints to any of these things, and I don't see any of that. I don't see that there is any chain that leads to Obama."
It's so outrageous that Republicans will surely suffer, we are now told on CNN. On June 2, Candy Crowley pushed the "Republican overreach" line on her Sunday show "State of the Union." Crowley asserted, "In 1998, they lost because they overplayed their impeachment hand."
The same happened on CBS. On May 30, "CBS This Morning" host Charlie Rose asked pollster Frank Luntz: "Do you think they're overplaying it, the Republicans?" Luntz replied, "No, at this point I`m actually impressed. One or two have used the I-word, impeachment, which no American would support for something like this."
This Obama scandal is yet the latest example of a dramatic pro-Obama bias. Journalists screamed "dictator" over Bush programs, and then when Obama continued them without interruption, he was just wisely keeping the country safe. As the Obama scandals continue to multiply, it's the media's credibility that should take the hardest hit.
]]>In a recent ad, our attorney general's wife tells us that he has spent his career standing up for the "vulnerable and those in need." I'll bet the cash-strapped landowners in Virginia's coal fields would be surprised to learn that.
Seems our Attorney General's Office has been assisting the big coal companies in a lawsuit filed by those landowners that attempts to get the big coal companies, EQT Production Co. and CNX Gas Co. (which is owned by Consol Energy Inc.), to pay for what they have taken from them.
Seems EQT and CNX have not paid the landowners for the methane gas that they have extracted from the landowners.
According to news reports, U.S. Magistrate Pamela Meade Sargent has found that our Attorney General's Office has been helping EQT and CNX defend themselves from this suit. Seems that when confronted with this finding, the Attorney General's Office says it was merely trying to help uphold the constitutionality of The Virginia Gas and Oil Act, without which, according to that office, the landowners would not be entitled to any royalties.
The judge thought differently when she viewed emails between the Attorney General's Office, which represents the Virginia Oil and Gas Board, and the attorneys for EQT and CNX when she wrote in an opinion, "Shockingly, these emails show that the board, or at least [Assistant Attorney General Sharon] Pigeon, has been actively involved in assisting EQT and CNX with the defense of these cases, including offering advice on and providing information for use on the motions before the court."
Seems our Attorney General's office was advising the company's lawyers on what to do in response to the landowners petitioning the court for a class action lawsuit. One can only wonder what such has to do with standing up for the vulnerable and those in need. But then maybe it is the oil companies who are vulnerable. Seems CNX has given our attorney general somewhere in excess of $80,000 for his bid to be our governor. I, for one, would hope our next governor would not sell us out so cheaply.
Michael Cash, Fort Valley
]]>Tuesday was Primary Election Day in Virginia, and voters who care went to the polls to do their duty. But there's always something new.
Today we found fancy little printed signs lying on the pavement. If you managed to read one, (because evidently no consideration was given to designing them so that they would not blow over) you learned that there was to be no electioneering beyond that point.
Nothing new about that, except that fancy worthless signs equal fancy worthless new ways to spend taxpayers' money.
The next obstacle was completely new -- a very in-your-face "greeter" interfering with clear access to the door of the polling place, demanding to know if one was carrying identification, and if one was aware that this was a two-party election.
Excuse me? Who was this person? Was she an election official? Not one that I was expecting. Was she paid? By whom? Was she a member of some special political class that has not yet been outed, collecting information?
I am prepared to believe that the election officials, in their arrogant condescension, thought they were helping those voters who did not know why they were at the polls. However, those with thin skin might call it intimidation, or might actually be intimidated.
Personally, if I go to the polls without the necessary accoutrements, then let me be chastised inside by the election officials, and let me crawl home mortified to rectify the error.
Greeters are great at Walmart. At the polls, I'd prefer to be alone with my thoughts after I pass the no-electioneering barrier.
Ann Hunter, Fort Valley
]]>Kudos to Bob Lowerre for his excellent response to Fred Hughes' right wing propaganda.
I would just add one bit of advice to Mr. Hughes. Thanks in part to your inflammatory rhetoric we elected Barak Obama to the presidency of this great country not once but twice. Keep up the good work!
Gene Rigelon, Front Royal
]]>"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." That's what Secretary of State Henry Stimson said to explain why he shut down the government's cryptanalysis operations in 1929.
Edward Snowden, who leaked National Security Agency surveillance projects to Britain's Guardian, evidently feels the same way.
"I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government," he explained, less succinctly than Stimson, "to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."
Some questions about this episode remain. How did a 29-year-old high school dropout get a $122,000 job with an NSA contractor? How did his job give him access to material including, he says, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Agency Court documents?
And why did he flee to China's Special Autonomous Region of Hong Kong and make his revelations just before the Sunnylands summit, where Barack Obama was preparing to complain to Xi Jinping about China's cyberwarfare attacks?
Oh, and now that he has checked out of his Hong Kong hotel, where has he gone?
All tantalizing questions. But some other questions that many are asking have clear answers.
Is the NRA surveillance of telephone records illegal? No, it has been authorized by the FISA Court under the FISA Act provisions passed by (a Democratic) Congress in 2008.
The NSA is not entitled to listen to the contents of specific phone calls. It has to go back to the FISA Court for permission to do that.
Under the Supreme Court's 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision, the government can collect evidence of phone numbers called, just as the government can read the addresses on the outside of an envelope.
Snowden presented no evidence that the NSA is abusing its powers by accessing the private information of those with obnoxious opinions. There is, so far anyway, no evidence of the kind of political targeting committed by the Internal Revenue Service.
Instead the NSA is looking for patterns of unusual behavior that might indicate calls to and from terrorists. This data mining relies on the use of algorithms sifting through Big Data, much like the data mining of Google and the Obama campaign.
Snowden also exposed the NSA's Prism program, which does surveil the contents of messages -- but only of those of suspected terrorists in foreign countries.
During George W. Bush's administration, many journalists and Democrats assailed this as "domestic wiretapping." But the only time people here are surveiled is when they are in contact with terrorism suspects in foreign countries.
The right of the government to invade people's privacy outside the United States is, or should not be, in question.
You might think, as Henry Stimson did in 1929, that it's ungentlemanly. But as secretary of war between 1940 and 1946, Stimson was grateful for the code-breaking programs that enabled the United States and Britain to decrypt secret Japanese and German messages.
That code-breaking, as historians have recounted, though not until long after the war, undoubtedly saved the lives of tens of thousands of Allied service members.
"The Constitution and U.S. laws," as former Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "are not a treaty with the universe; they protect U.S. citizens."
It is an interesting development that Barack Obama has continued and, Snowden asserts, strengthened programs at least some of which he denounced as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate.
As George W. Bush expected, Obama's views were evidently changed by the harrowing contents of the intelligence reports he receives each morning. There are people out there determined to harm us, and not just because they can't bear Bush's Texas drawl.
The Pew Research/Washington Post poll conducted June 7 to 9 found that by a 56 to 41 percent margin Americans found it "acceptable" that the "NSA has been getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism."
That's similar to the margin in a 2006 Pew poll on NSA "secretly listening in on phone calls and reading emails without court approval."
Those numbers are in line with changes in opinion over the last two decades.
With increased computer use, technology is seen as empowering individuals rather than Big Brother. And with an increased threat of terrorist attack, government surveillance is seen as protecting individuals.
In these circumstances most Americans seem willing to accept NSA surveillance programs that, if ungentlemanly, are not illegal.
Web: creators.com/conservative/michael-barone.html
When President Richard Nixon collided with the Watergate scandal, he was a very unpopular man. The nation at the time was suffering one of the worst recessions in history and one of the highest inflation rates, too. So Watergate sunk Dick Nixon, but for good measure, the economy sunk him even more.
Roughly 25 years later, Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. But despite his personal transgressions, he never really lost his popularity. Why? The economy was roaring.
So you might say scandals are less scandalous during prosperity and more scandalous during recession.
As for the current president, he finds himself with a precariously thin margin. As yet, there is no clear and direct link between President Obama and a trove of political scandals. Not yet. And while he doesn't have a recession on his hands, not even the president's strongest supporter believes we're in some kind of Reagan-Clinton economic boom.
The failure to get to the bottom of Benghazi is a scandal. The issue of secret subpoenas of reporters is close to scandalous. The IRS targeting of conservative groups is most definitely a scandal. And most recently, the NSA's secret data-collection efforts smell of scandal. (One wonders if Obama shouldn't at least appoint a scandal czar to keep track of these front-page miscues.)
Meanwhile, it's a 2 percent economy with relatively high unemployment rates, such as today's 7.6 percent rate for May. And a broader unemployment rate -- including discouraged worker dropouts and underemployed labor -- stands at 13.8 percent. Not good. Four years ago, the president's $1 trillion stimulus package was supposed to generate a 5.1 percent jobless rate. So much for Keynesian pump-priming.
Now, jobs are rising. That's a good thing for America. Inside the May employment report, nonfarm payrolls increased by 175,000. But over the last three months, payrolls have slowed to an average of 155,000, which is significantly slower than the 208,000 new-job average of the prior three months.
Looked at in the same way, 1.6 percent growth in hours worked for May is much below the 3.3 percent growth rate of the prior three months. And when you put wages and hours worked together as a proxy for middle-class labor income, the past three months generated only 2.8 percent growth, compared to 5.1 percent in the earlier period.
In other words, though jobs are rising -- a good thing -- there are slowdown signs throughout the latest employment report.
Many economists have been talking about a second-half rebound in economic growth. But when you look at soft ISM reports and poor factory orders, you have to wonder where this rebound is coming from.
Housing is the best part of the picture. But that's a small fraction of gross domestic product. The real story is that businesses flush with cash still don't want to invest in this economy. They have no confidence.
Why? Obamacare's tax, regulatory and mandate burdens are on the way. The minimum wage is going up. And prospects for full-fledged tax reform don't look good.
All of which leads me to monetary policy, and the idea that the Fed is going to wind down its money-creating bond purchases.
Though I have never approved of the Fed's attempt to fix interest rates and bloat its balance sheet, the U.S. money supply -- M2 -- is nonetheless growing at a very slow 5 percent pace over the past six months. That's even while all those reserves the Fed is printing are not circulating through the economy. So the velocity of money is falling at 3 percent.
In round numbers, you have a scant 1 percent inflation rate and a 2 percent real GDP rate, which comes to an unacceptably low 3 percent increase in total spending, or nominal GDP. The Fed can't let that happen. It should be closer to 5 percent. Stocks don't want 3 percent to happen. But a fall in gold and a stronger King Dollar are signaling it could happen.
So even though the Fed's bond-buying policy has not worked well, as people hoard cash and avoid risk, the only thing left for better economic growth is a Fed that keeps on trying. Perhaps if the budget-cutting sequester lasts, and some miraculous pro-growth tax reform occurs, the Fed can taper down. But fiscal growth incentives are still pretty shaky, which is why Ben Bernanke & Co. is the only growth lever left. This is no time to tighten policy.
Of course, with more of the same from Bernanke & Co., we're still looking at subpar jobs and economic growth. It's nothing to write home about. And it's nothing that's going to bail out President Obama if he's directly fingered in one of these brewing scandals.
It's closer to a Nixon scenario than a Clinton one.
Web: kudlow.com