Here's a pet peeve: Through eight years of the two George W. Bush administrations, I linked hundreds of times to White House and Department of State documents, plus less frequently to other U.S. government departments and agencies. I made efforts to link to original documents (and not news articles, much less blogs) because, having earned a Ph.D. in history, I value primary sources.
I assumed during those years that the documents, being part of the U.S. government's permanent record, would remain available so long as the government and the internet were functioning – in other words, a long time.
I assumed wrong. On coming to office, the Obama administration in an instant removed thousands (millions?) of pages, abruptly making dead and useless all those links to the prior administration's work. Latterly I learned that the Bush administration pulled this same trick against its Clinton predecessor.
This appalls me both as a historian and as someone who writes on the internet. How could they do this? The government surely has copies of those files and pages (indeed, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ appears to contain the complete contents of the Bush White House years); it should promptly reinstate them immediataely to their original URLs. (June 25, 2010)
Monday, July 05, 2010
Daniel Pipes: Stop Erasing History from the Internet!
From DanielPipes.org:
Washington Examiner: Red-State Democrats Should Oppose Kagan
Here's why the Examiner says conserviate Democrats should oppose the Supreme Court nominee:
...she failed to dispel concerns on three constitutional issues that will doubtless come before the Court many times, on which Kagan is on the wrong side of the American people.
First, the scope of government power. Regarding the limits of federal power to regulate interstate commerce, Kagan refused to say whether a law requiring every American to eat three servings of vegetables a day would be unconstitutional.
That’s a shocking answer, given that any conservative (or even moderate) lawyer worth his salt (no pun intended) could quickly explain how such a law is beyond anything ever upheld by the High Court. This means she would vote to uphold the Obamacare individual mandate when it reaches the Court.
Her government-power views extend to free speech. Kagan essentially said she was just following orders when she argued last fall in the Citizens United case that the feds should be able to throw into prison for five years people from any group distributing pamphlets criticizing federal candidates within 60 days of an election.
So on one hand, government has unlimited power to tell you how to live your life. On the other, government can make it a felony for you to criticize its leaders during elections. Together, these make a mockery of the concept of limited government.
Second, national security. Kagan never explained away why she said it was “unfortunate” that a particular law would block foreign terrorists held by our military in places like Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base from petitioning a civilian U.S. federal judge from ordering their release. That betrays an invasive view of judicial power to override national-security decisions and micromanage our military’s wartime efforts.
And third, Kagan opposes the Second Amendment right to own a gun. As I’ve previously written, she said she’s “not sympathetic” to those who argue that they have a right to a gun in their home for self-defense, she was immersed in Bill Clinton’s gun-control efforts, and she declined to file a brief supporting the Second Amendment in this year’s historic gun-rights case, McDonald v. Chicago.
Social Media is Good for You!
According to Clay Shirky, in a Guardian (UK) interview about his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
(ht Charles Crawford):
(ht Charles Crawford):His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.
"Everyone's waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it's the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don't think the numbers add up." But then, interestingly, he goes on, "Here's what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they're critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn't want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times."
This criticism echoes the sentiment of Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The book argues that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation. It proves, Shirky argues, that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia – for no financial reward – because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness. Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet's capacity for "an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer" has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.
James Warner: Elena Kagan Unfit for Supreme Court
From The American Thinker:
On June 30, in her confirmation hearings, Solicitor General Elena Kagan gave a response which gives me pause about her fitness to serve on the Supreme Court. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, asked her view of the natural right to self-defense. She responded, hesitantly, that she didn't have a view of natural rights, independent of the Constitution. But natural rights, independent of the Constitution, form the very fabric of it. Let me explain.
The US Supreme Court, the court to which Elena Kagan aspires, said in Ex Parte Grossman, 267 US 87, 108 (1925), "The language of the Constitution cannot be interpreted safely except by reference to the common law and British institutions as they were when the instrument was framed and adopted." All of the men who wrote the Constitution, up until the time of the Declaration of Independence, had considered themselves Englishmen. The law by which they were governed was, in addition to the statutes enacted by colonial legislatures, the British common law. Beginning in 1765, William Blackstone published the first volume of his magisterial work, Commentaries on the Laws of England. The fourth and final volume was published in 1769, the same year as the first American edition. This edition includes a list of subscribers who purchased it in advance of its publication. This list includes several attorneys who sat in the Constitutional convention. The Founders were intimately familiar with the common law.
Blackstone writes of the British "Bill of Rights" which was passed early in the first parliament of William and Mary following the "Glorious Revolution," the revolt which led to the expulsion of the last Stuart monarch, James II. He explains that the Bill of Rights was not an act to grant rights to Englishmen, but an act which Parliament believed was to restore natural rights which had been usurped by the Stuart dynasty. The British Bill of Rights included the right to bear arms for self-defense.
Blackstone wrote that there were three absolute rights which were recognized by the common law as being natural rights: personal security, personal liberty, and private property. These rights were protected by certain auxiliary rights which included 1) the powers of Parliament, 2) limitation on the prerogative powers of the King, 3) access to the courts for justice, 4) the right to petition the King for redress of grievances, and 5) the right to keep and bear arms. The auxiliary rights were necessary, he said, to protect the absolute rights which no government could lawfully abridge.
Given what the Supreme Court precedent has already said, these rights are not "outside of the Constitution" as was suggested by Elena Kagan. Further, Blackstone was not the only influence on the framers.
Donald Lutz, writing in the American Political Science Review in 1984, listed all the British and European thinkers cited by the framers 16 times or more between 1760 and 1805. Blackstone, as I recall, was number five on the list. The list included a number of thinkers who wrote in favor of the existence of natural rights, including the natural right to self-defense, including Baron Montesquieu (#1), John Locke (#3), Cesare Beccaria (#6), Hugo Grotius (#10) and Marcus Tullius Cicero (#11).
Finally, the Constitution could not have been written unless we were an independent nation at the time we wrote it. The life of the Constitution rests upon the validity of the Declaration of Independence. Recall that the author of the Declaration states that the authority by which we declared our independence from Great Britain was "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Thus, the very Constitution which Kagan would be called upon to judge depends upon a natural right which is independent of it.
The most fundamental question for any judge is why laws exist at all. Surely, laws exist to protect the personal security, personal liberty, and private property of those subject to them. This must mean that the rights to these, as Blackstone observed, exist independent of the laws written to protect them. Otherwise any manner of laws could be written, such as a law to tell us what foods we should eat and in what proportions.
To say that she has no view on natural rights means either she does not understand the origin and meaning of the Constitution or she is in fundamental disagreement with both. In either case, she does not belong on the Supreme Court.
David Horowitz on Christopher Hitchens Hitch-22
He says the author of god is Not Great reveals his blind spots about Marxism and the anti-Israel Left, but other than that...From National Review Online:
Hitchens’s blindness in these matters is the most troubling of the confusions to which uncompleted second thoughts have led him and are a source of no pleasure for me. On the contrary, that my friend should be so unjust and incoherent in matters so important not only to others but to himself is both a misfortune and personal source of distress. Yet these reactionary glances do not eclipse that brilliance or the role he has played in the battle against the totalitarianism we confront today. In recognizing, however belatedly, the virtues of his adopted homeland, and in defending individual freedom against forces that are determined to crush it, my friend Hitchens has performed a worthy and necessary service, one that the Commander would have appreciated, and we should all be grateful for that.
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Austin Hay Resigns After 55 Years of Civil Service
Austin Hay's a member of my club (The Arts Club of Washington, DC), as well as perhaps the longest-serving Federal employee in Washington, as well as an actor with a long career as a movie extra. The Washington Post paid him tribute in the Style Section:
Hay deposits himself into slot E63-447 in a honeycomb of cubicles on an upper floor of the southeast wing of the building. He used to have his own office in the old department headquarters. He used to make informational and training films for the Army at a studio in Astoria, N.Y., where he hired Henry Fonda and Paul Newman for guest spots, where he gave Dick Cavett his first on-camera job, where he befriended an up-and-coming Walter Cronkite.Happy Trails, Austin!
He moved to the District in 1973 to work for the Federal Highway Administration, for which he traveled the nation's arteries as a producer-director to capture the sprawling progress on film.
Kelly's success pulled Hay toward stage and screen, but the competitive life of a full-time actor wasn't for him. He wanted a solid career that would allow room for his passions: a movie now and then, painting, playing piano, active membership in many organizations such as the Arts Club of Washington, the Cosmos Club and the National Press Club.
"As the years go by, it's unbelievable how things accumulate," Hay says, sitting at his desk, surrounded by emptied file shelves, 11 boxes of this and that, paintings used in his documentary "Highways of History," a bouquet of deflating "Happy Retirement" balloons that sway in the air conditioning. Nearby is a large, yellow trash bin for discarding the less-meaningful etcetera of an office life. There's a stack of DVDs of movies he has appeared in through Central Casting.
He's the pallbearer who says "What about Chauncey Gardiner?" in the closing scene of "Being There" in 1979. He's Tom Selleck's confidante in "Her Alibi" in 1989. He's the speaker of the House behind Jeff Bridges during his climactic address to Congress in "The Contender" in 2000.
Hay likes how his life has been italicized by glittery moments and chance encounters. He stayed at his job because he enjoyed it, because it anchored him. He's leaving now because some of his friends have died and "life is going by" and he wants to savor it fully. Tomorrow, he'll sleep in. He'll paint. He'll catch up with friends. He'll make travel plans.
Friday, July 02, 2010
Kagan Failed Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing
Which is why I agree with Ann Althouse, that no major news organization or website has posted a transcript. Had she not embarrassed her supporters with her Uriah Heepish "modesty" and inability to admit that her memo in her own handwriting reflected her thoughts, her inability to rule out legislating vegetable portions, her failure to imagine a role for a justice in weighing the spirit of the law against the letter of the law, her strange way to express her love for the US military by banning official recruiting at the career center, etc. you might have been able to read her testimony for free in the so-called "newspaper of record."
But you can't--and that tells a tale of shame. The mainstream media is embarrassed that their "smart" Dean of Harvard Law School was clearly outwitted...by senators from Alabama and Oklahoma! Which is why Senators Specter, McConnell and Hatch are no longer afraid to oppose her nomination. If the Republicans buy ads over the 4th of July weekend, they might be able to defeat her nomination by peeling off a handful of pro-life, pro-gun, pro-dinner without vegetables senators...especially now that Rush Limbaugh has called for a filibuster.
On the other hand, you can still pay to read Senate Judiciary Committee transcripts, on the Federal News Service website: http://www.fednews.com/transcript.htm?id=20100701t3886.
Turns out that hearings aren't always a sham...
UPDATE: I'm not the only one to think she "failed"...Here's an interview with Sen. Sessions from CBS News, titled: "Sessions: Kagan Failed Her Own Test."
But you can't--and that tells a tale of shame. The mainstream media is embarrassed that their "smart" Dean of Harvard Law School was clearly outwitted...by senators from Alabama and Oklahoma! Which is why Senators Specter, McConnell and Hatch are no longer afraid to oppose her nomination. If the Republicans buy ads over the 4th of July weekend, they might be able to defeat her nomination by peeling off a handful of pro-life, pro-gun, pro-dinner without vegetables senators...especially now that Rush Limbaugh has called for a filibuster.
On the other hand, you can still pay to read Senate Judiciary Committee transcripts, on the Federal News Service website: http://www.fednews.com/transcript.htm?id=20100701t3886.
Turns out that hearings aren't always a sham...
UPDATE: I'm not the only one to think she "failed"...Here's an interview with Sen. Sessions from CBS News, titled: "Sessions: Kagan Failed Her Own Test."
Document of the Week: 2007 Freedom of Information Act, as Amended
A new feature of this blog, "Document of the Week." Each week, I'll take a look at an excerpt from a US Government document available on the internet, analyze it, and try to explain what it means. Today's document is the 2007 Freedom of Information Act, as amended by the US Congress.
Here's the text under discussion, a definition of a representative of the news media in section (4)(A)(ii):
What does this mean, from the point of view of this news disseminator? Let's walk through the language, line by line...
1.In this clause, the term ‘a representative of the news media’ means any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience.
IMHO, key concepts are:
"ANY person or entity" means even a robot, or electronic news aggregator, could qualify as a representative of the news media. In our age, machines might do a better job than people of notifying readers of stories. Less personal bias.
"...that gathers information of POTENTIAL interest to a SEGMENT of the public" means that the information does not have to have interest at the present time, only someday. Further, the audience need not be the entire world, only an interested sub-section. And the segment could be pretty small, I would think. If Bill Gates reads my blog's favorable review of some new blogging software, he might buy the company, as he did with PowerPoint. I'd argue a segment might be one person who could act on the information, after all...one can talk to another...and as we saw in the Helen Thomas YouTube case--millions.
"uses its editorial skills to turn the raw material into a distinct work" in my opinion would even include a clipping service, such as every government agency uses--because the selection of which items to include, and in which order to place them is the most basic of editorial skills, that is, knowing what to cut and what to publish, and arranging them in order of importance to catch the eye of the reader. For example, take a look at Reader's Digest or Vital Speeches or the Utne Reader. Even the US Postal Service Daily News Digest contains different articles from that of the US Department of Transportation. Indeed, articles are selected by different criteria, by different editors. So, the process of selection and arrangement for publication is all that is needed to turn something into a distinct work. This is also true in the fine arts, as with collage. It is what editors--as opposed to writers--do.
"...and distributes that work to an audience." Again, I would say an audience of one is an audience. You'd have to persuade me that there is any logic to any other requirement. Because, again, once one person knows--if, unlike the "Journolist" 400 they are not sworn to secrecy--the potential is there for everyone to know about it. As we found out, when one "Journolist" member leaked some emails about Matt Drudge written by David Weigel on the internet.
2. We'll skip the examples, because, as stated, they are "not all-inclusive." In fact, I'd say they are only the most obvious, and IMHO 20th Century rather than 21st Century. I'd say for example, that MATT DRUDGE is a news media entity, in that his website is a medium through which news is transmitted...often into the very newsrooms of those in the "not all-inclusive" list. Of course, so was BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. Which is pretty much what the next line means.
3. "...such alternative media shall be considered to be news-media entities." Indeed, the alternative media probably are better disseminators than the old-line media. Do you think you would have ever heard about Monica Lewinsky if it hadn't been for MATT DRUDGE?
4. The next line is close to my heart: "A freelance journalist shall be regarded as working for a news-media entity if the journalist can demonstrate a solid basis for expecting publication through that entity, whether or not the journalist is actually employed by the entity." This means, in my case, that although I am not paid and they are not responsible for the material on the site, I in a sense work for Google--because Blogger (my host) is owned by Google. I expect publication through Google. Most of my hits come from Google searches. And I can demonstrate this, with Google Analytics.
5. "A publication contract would present a solid basis for such an expectation..."In fact, a publication contract means little. All this shows is that the authors of the clause have an unreasonable deference for publishers. Today, anyone can be a publisher over the internet, through print-on-demand, or by using companies such as xLibris.
In fact, a number of self-published works have become classics--even best-sellers. Here's a list, from SimonTeaKettle's Famous Authors, of notable self-published books:
Self-published authors:
All a publication contract tells you is what someone has been paid. I wouldn't submit one, when I made a FOIA request for the book I'm currently writing, because it's like submitting your pay stub--too personally embarrassing and none of their business! I affirmed I had a contract, that should have been enough. Which is why the second clause is important: "...the Government may also consider the past publication record of the requester in making such a determination." IMHO, this is better than nothing--but what if it your FIRST book? Or, your FIRST documentary film? Why should established writers have a preference under law that unknowns, who have incentives to seek scoops with more vigor, don't?
As Frank Rich pointed out in the Sunday New York Times, it is outsiders who have consistently been able to deliver the most powerful news stories:
Bottom Line: FOIA, as amended, expands the definition of the news media, but not far enough.
Here's the text under discussion, a definition of a representative of the news media in section (4)(A)(ii):
In this clause, the term ‘a representative of the news media’ means any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience. In this clause, the term ‘news’ means information that is about current events or that would be of current interest to the public. Examples of news- media entities are television or radio stations broadcasting to the public at large and publishers of periodicals (but only if such entities qualify as disseminators of ‘news’) who make their products available for purchase by or subscription by or free distribution to the general public. These examples are not all-inclusive. Moreover, as methods of news delivery evolve (for example, the adoption of the electronic dissemination of newspapers through telecommunications services), such alternative media shall be considered to be news-media entities. A freelance journalist shall be regarded as working for a news-media entity if the journalist can demonstrate a solid basis for expecting publication through that entity, whether or not the journalist is actually employed by the entity. A publication contract would present a solid basis for such an expectation; the Government may also consider the past publication record of the requester in making such a determination.
What does this mean, from the point of view of this news disseminator? Let's walk through the language, line by line...
1.In this clause, the term ‘a representative of the news media’ means any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience.
IMHO, key concepts are:
"ANY person or entity" means even a robot, or electronic news aggregator, could qualify as a representative of the news media. In our age, machines might do a better job than people of notifying readers of stories. Less personal bias.
"...that gathers information of POTENTIAL interest to a SEGMENT of the public" means that the information does not have to have interest at the present time, only someday. Further, the audience need not be the entire world, only an interested sub-section. And the segment could be pretty small, I would think. If Bill Gates reads my blog's favorable review of some new blogging software, he might buy the company, as he did with PowerPoint. I'd argue a segment might be one person who could act on the information, after all...one can talk to another...and as we saw in the Helen Thomas YouTube case--millions.
"uses its editorial skills to turn the raw material into a distinct work" in my opinion would even include a clipping service, such as every government agency uses--because the selection of which items to include, and in which order to place them is the most basic of editorial skills, that is, knowing what to cut and what to publish, and arranging them in order of importance to catch the eye of the reader. For example, take a look at Reader's Digest or Vital Speeches or the Utne Reader. Even the US Postal Service Daily News Digest contains different articles from that of the US Department of Transportation. Indeed, articles are selected by different criteria, by different editors. So, the process of selection and arrangement for publication is all that is needed to turn something into a distinct work. This is also true in the fine arts, as with collage. It is what editors--as opposed to writers--do.
"...and distributes that work to an audience." Again, I would say an audience of one is an audience. You'd have to persuade me that there is any logic to any other requirement. Because, again, once one person knows--if, unlike the "Journolist" 400 they are not sworn to secrecy--the potential is there for everyone to know about it. As we found out, when one "Journolist" member leaked some emails about Matt Drudge written by David Weigel on the internet.
2. We'll skip the examples, because, as stated, they are "not all-inclusive." In fact, I'd say they are only the most obvious, and IMHO 20th Century rather than 21st Century. I'd say for example, that MATT DRUDGE is a news media entity, in that his website is a medium through which news is transmitted...often into the very newsrooms of those in the "not all-inclusive" list. Of course, so was BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. Which is pretty much what the next line means.
3. "...such alternative media shall be considered to be news-media entities." Indeed, the alternative media probably are better disseminators than the old-line media. Do you think you would have ever heard about Monica Lewinsky if it hadn't been for MATT DRUDGE?
4. The next line is close to my heart: "A freelance journalist shall be regarded as working for a news-media entity if the journalist can demonstrate a solid basis for expecting publication through that entity, whether or not the journalist is actually employed by the entity." This means, in my case, that although I am not paid and they are not responsible for the material on the site, I in a sense work for Google--because Blogger (my host) is owned by Google. I expect publication through Google. Most of my hits come from Google searches. And I can demonstrate this, with Google Analytics.
5. "A publication contract would present a solid basis for such an expectation..."In fact, a publication contract means little. All this shows is that the authors of the clause have an unreasonable deference for publishers. Today, anyone can be a publisher over the internet, through print-on-demand, or by using companies such as xLibris.
In fact, a number of self-published works have become classics--even best-sellers. Here's a list, from SimonTeaKettle's Famous Authors, of notable self-published books:
Remembrance of things Past, by Marcel Proust
Ulysses, by James Joyce
The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter
A Time to Kill, by John Grisham
The Wealthy Barber, by David Chilton
The Bridges of Madison County
What Color is Your Parachute
In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White)
When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
Life’s Little Instruction Book
Robert’s Rules of Order
Self-published authors:
Deepak ChopraAnd books rejected by publishers:
Gertrude Stein
Zane Grey
Upton Sinclair
Carl Sandburg
Ezra Pound
Mark Twain
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Stephen Crane
Bernard Shaw
Anais Nin
Thomas Paine
Virginia Wolff
e.e. Cummings
Edgar Allen Poe
Rudyard Kipling
Henry David Thoreau
Benjamin Franklin
Walt Whitman
Alexandre Dumas
William E.B. DuBois
Beatrix Potter
Pearl S. Buck - The Good Earth - 14 timesI would add James Joyce's Dubliners to the list of books rejected by publishers...
Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead - 12 times
Patrick Dennis- Auntie Mame - 15 times
George Orwell - Animal Farm
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull - 20 times
Joseph Heller - Catch-22 - 22 times (!)
Mary Higgins Clark - first short story - 40 times
Alex Haley - before Roots - 200 rejections
Robert Persig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - 121 times
John Grisham - A Time to Kill - 15 publishers and 30 agents (he ended up publishing it himself)
Chicken Soup for the Soul - 33 times
Dr. Seuss - 24 times
Louis L'Amour - 200 rejections
Jack London - 600 before his first story
John Creasy - 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
Jerzy Kosinski - 13 agents and 14 publishers rejected his best-selling novel when he submitted it under a different name, including Random House, which had originally published it.
Diary of Anne Frank
All a publication contract tells you is what someone has been paid. I wouldn't submit one, when I made a FOIA request for the book I'm currently writing, because it's like submitting your pay stub--too personally embarrassing and none of their business! I affirmed I had a contract, that should have been enough. Which is why the second clause is important: "...the Government may also consider the past publication record of the requester in making such a determination." IMHO, this is better than nothing--but what if it your FIRST book? Or, your FIRST documentary film? Why should established writers have a preference under law that unknowns, who have incentives to seek scoops with more vigor, don't?
As Frank Rich pointed out in the Sunday New York Times, it is outsiders who have consistently been able to deliver the most powerful news stories:
"Politico theorized that Hastings had pulled off his impertinent coup because he was a freelance journalist rather than a beat reporter, and so could risk “burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.”
That sentence was edited out of the article — in a routine updating, said Politico — after the blogger Andrew Sullivan highlighted it as a devastating indictment of a Washington media elite too cozy with and protective of its sources to report the unvarnished news. In any event, Politico had the big picture right. It’s the Hastings-esque outsiders with no fear of burning bridges who have often uncovered the epochal stories missed by those with high-level access..."
Bottom Line: FOIA, as amended, expands the definition of the news media, but not far enough.
Hatch Opposes Kagan Nomination
He told the AP he'll vote against the Solicitor General.
Hmmmmmmmm....contra Kagan's published opinion in this regard, maybe Senate hearings make a difference, after all?
Hmmmmmmmm....contra Kagan's published opinion in this regard, maybe Senate hearings make a difference, after all?
Ryan Crocker on Iraq
From The National Interest:
It is vital that this engagement continue. Iraq is not yesterday’s war.
Strategic patience is often in short supply in this country. It is not a new problem for us, and it is not limited to Iraq. My time in the Foreign Service, from Lebanon in the early 1980s to Iraq twenty-five years later, was in many respects service in a long war. Dates such as 4/18 and 10/23—the bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983—were seared into my memory well before 9/11. I learned a few lessons along the way. One is we need to be careful about what we get into. It is a complex, volatile region with long experience in dealing with outside interventions—our adversaries often do not organize for the war until some point after we think we have already won it. But a second lesson is that we need to be even more careful about what we propose to get out of. Disengagement can have greater consequences than intervention.
Our withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984 was a victory for Syria and Iran who created and used Hezbollah against us with devastating consequences. They drew conclusions about our staying power, and when I stepped off the helicopter in Baghdad on a warm night in March 2007 as the new American ambassador, I had the eerie feeling that I was back in Lebanon a quarter of a century earlier. Iran and Syria had again combined efforts against us, this time supporting Jaish al-Mahdi and al-Qaeda instead of Hezbollah (in fact, Hezbollah trainers were working with Jaish al-Mahdi).
The surge confounded their expectations—we stepped forward instead of back. But they almost succeeded. When then–commander of U.S. forces in Iraq General David Petraeus and I testified before Congress in September 2007, the surge was starting to make a difference. But Americans, and much of Congress, were tired of the war. A major theme in our testimony was that we needed to consider that the costs of disengaging from Iraq could be far greater than those of continued involvement. Al-Qaeda would have had a base on Arab soil from which to plan operations throughout the region—and beyond. Iran and Syria would have won a major victory over the United States, fundamentally realigning the entire area with very grave consequences for the security of our allies, as well as our own. We continue to pay for our loss in Lebanon more than a quarter of a century ago. The costs of defeat in Iraq would have been exponentially higher.
Specter Denounces Kagan Nomination
According to the San Francsico Chronicle:
"So far it's been a winning hand, but it's not been good for the country, the court or the Constitution, and certainly not the Congress," said Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who opposed Kagan's confirmation as solicitor general 16 months ago when he was the committee's ranking Republican.
Specter, who may again oppose Kagan, said Thursday that the nominee uttered "pure prepared pabulum that comes right out of the White House murder boards." He said he was particularly upset because, in a 1995 law review article, Kagan lambasted the confirmation process as "vapid" because of the lack of specificity in nominees' answers.
Veterans Testify Against Kagan Nomination
From Politics Daily:
Army Capt. Flagg Youngblood, USA (Ret.), a Yale graduate, voiced the strongest objections to Kagan's appointment, calling her oversight of the separate-but-equal access for recruiters at Harvard Law "a total disregard for the rule of law" and an "unlawful brand of segregation."
"Imagine Dean Kagan on the lunch counter," Youngblood told the senators, comparing military recruiters to African- Americans during the Civil Rights movement. "What she said to the military in effect was, 'You're welcome here, but would you be so kind as to use the back door by the garbage? You don't mind eating in the kitchen, do you?'"
Army Capt. Pete Hegseth, an Iraq War veteran who attends Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said Kagan treated the military "like second-class citizens" when she continued limiting recruiters' access to the career services office.
"Her actions undercut the military's ability to fight and win wars overseas," Hegseth said. He also lamented the fact that Kagan, whom he considers anti-military, is slated to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, the last remaining veteran on the high court.
Hegseth also said Kagan's supporters are wrong to point to Harvard Law's increased numbers in the military as a good reflection on Kagan's time as dean. "It increased in spite of Ms. Kagan, not because of her," he said.
Finally, Thomas Moe, an Air Force veteran and POW in Vietnam, said Kagan's disregard for the Solomon Amendment should disqualify her from consideration for the court. "As a citizen, I cannot support the nomination of a justice who can pick and choose the laws they wish to follow," he said.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
NY Times: NRA Opposes Kagan Nomination
The New York Times reports that the NRA has come out against Kagan:
WASHINGTON — The National Rifle Association said on Thursday that it would oppose the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, and would publicize how senators vote on her nomination. The move could drive down support for her among senators from states where gun rights are at issue.Curiously, in its own endorsement today, the New York Times damned Kagan with faint praise: "We hope Ms. Kagan was being candid. Frankly, we had expected somewhat more from her, considering her 1995 article disparaging the hearings process as a 'vapid and hollow charade.' "
“Unfortunately, Ms. Kagan’s record on the Second Amendment gives us no confidence that if confirmed to the court, she will faithfully defend the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms of law-abiding Americans,” the association’s leadership wrote on Thursday in a letter to the chairman and the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The so-called N.R.A. score — the group’s evaluation of candidates, often cited in political campaigns — rates politicians on their friendliness to the group’s agenda, and became an issue in the Supreme Court confirmation last year of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She was confirmed on a largely party-line vote of 68 to 31.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who voted against Justice Sotomayor and who typically votes in line with the rifle association’s positions, said in an interview Wednesday that if the association decided to track votes on Ms. Kagan, it would not influence his vote.
Asked if the group’s opposition would hurt Ms. Kagan more generally with Republicans, though, Mr. Hatch said, “It wouldn’t help.”
SEC Settles with Fired Investigator
The Washington Post reports that the SEC has paid fired investigator Gary Aguirre $755,000 to end his wrongful termination lawsuit, stemming from his cancelled probe of Pequot Capital fraud allegations in 2006.
Aguirre accused the agency of botching a probe into the prominent hedge fund Pequot Capital Management, saying the SEC was overlooking clear signs he uncovered that the firm traded in shares of Microsoft based on insider information. Aguirre also accused the agency of firing him after he pushed, unsuccessfully, to interview Morgan Stanley's then chief executive, John Mack, as part of the Pequot probe. Aguirre argued that the agency didn't want to interview the Wall Street giant because of his "political clout."Since Chris Cox was chairman of the SEC at this time, and the firing of an investigator must have created a hostile environment for those seeking to root out fraud, perhaps someone might take a closer look at Cox's role in Aguirre's firing, as well as his responsibility for the collapse of the US financial system in a climate of widespread fraud and abuse?
The agency fired Aguirre for insubordination and closed the case on Pequot.
But Aguirre's protests led to two internal investigations by the SEC's inspector general into the handling of the Pequot matter and a scathing Senate report that found that the agency bungled the probe and improperly fired Aguirre. Internal documents show the agency's efforts to discredit Aguirre included discussion of a "basket case" strategy that made him seem like a longtime agency gadfly. The former enforcement lawyer, meanwhile, pursued a private legal claim for wrongful termination.
Recently, the agency changed its tune on two counts.
After new evidence came to light in the Pequot case, the SEC opened a new probe and last month settled insider-trading charges with the firm. Pequot and its chief executive, Arthur Samberg, agreed to pay $28 million to settle SEC charges that the firm traded shares of Microsoft based on insider information.
And Tuesday, the SEC agreed to a settlement, finalized by the Merit Systems Protection Board, to pay Aguirre four years and 10 months of salary and attorney's fees in exchange for Aguirre dismissing his claims.
"I think it's fair to the public that the SEC pays for my work over the past four years and ten months, since it generated $28 million to the U.S. Treasury," Aguirre said. "But it's a shame the team I worked with at the SEC did not get to complete the Pequot investigation. The filing of the case in 2005 or 2006, before the financial crisis, would have been exactly what Wall Street elite needed to hear at the perfect moment: The SEC goes after big fish, too."
Andrew Breitbart on Journolist
Andrew Breitbart responds to Andrew Sullivan's ataack on his offer of $100,000 for the complete Journolist archive (ht Media Matters for America):
I was not invited to participate in that list for obvious reasons. I am not bound by those rules. Unless you are going to tell me that in the future, journalists are forever bound not to report information that others have agreed would remain private, you are holding me to a standard that no one else in the media would ever agree to. Such a standard would allow corporate, government and military malfeasance to flourish and would certainly prevent stories like the Risen and Lichtblau exposes in the New York Times from ever being published; even though the programs were top-secret, the Times was not bound by any privacy agreement.IMHO, after reading the published excerpts, what went on on Journolist sounds suspiciously like "Two Minutes Hate" in Orwell's novel 1984. In Kaus's case study, Marty Peretz became a new Emmanuel Goldstein...In Weigel's instance, it was Drudge.
Why was Mickey Kaus not excoriated for breaking the sacred JournoList bond when he posted a series of leaked emails that showed collusion against not-liberal-enough New Republic editor Marty Peretz for his crime of sticking up for Israel?
Kausfiles has obtained a copy of one JournoList discussion, focusing on New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz (for whom I once worked.) This is not a parody! It’s the real thing. I don’t know whether or not it is representative. I’ve edited it only to remove potentially defamatory passages–those cuts are marked–and left out various boilerplate links and commands embedded in the thread, such as “Print” and “Report this message.” … I won’t add my own commentary, at least for now. Find your own lede! … Reminder to JournoList organizer E. Klein, who likes to take it private: All communications are on the record. …
Most information of value is held by people that don’t want it to be public. Not that anyone asked, but I would never divulge information discovered that was not pertinent to my stated mission, which is to point out the collusion between the political left and a journalist class that improbably claims there is no such thing as media bias and who dismiss those who accuse the media of having a left wing agenda as paranoid conspiracy theorists.
I would never divulge an individual’s sexual secrets. I did not learn that rule in journalism school, I learned that from my conscience. Something that I have come to realize is lacking in those journalists who claim out of one side of their mouth that they are objective reporters, but then seek the privacy of clubs, cliques and listservs, etc., to fight back against those that would challenge their false “objective order.”
When the talking points of the press match up with each other to the degree that they have in recent years,when the lexicon is virtually identical, when major stories are collectively ignored and the minor ones are collectively inflated, everyone notices.
Washington Times: Kagan Fails Ethics Test for Supreme Court
From The Washington Times:
Elena Kagan has failed the ethical standards necessary for service on the Supreme Court. She also has shown herself to be an apologist not just for legalized abortion, but for legalized partial-birth abortion - a gruesome form of infanticide opposed by up to 75 percent of the American public. In yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Ms. Kagan utterly failed in her attempts to explain away her unethical actions on behalf of an immoral policy. After these revelations, no senator claiming to be a moderate should be able to support Ms. Kagan.
Sen. Sessions: Kagan Not Qualified for Supreme Court
He told National Review Online that she was not honest in her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
Washington, D.C. — After wrapping up the third day of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, tells National Review Online that he has “growing concerns” with President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. “This nominee needs to address several very serious questions about the accuracy of her testimony, about whether she lets her personal agendas drive what she does,” Sessions says.
“She does not have the rigor or clarity of mind that you look for in a justice on the Supreme Court,” Sessions says. “She is personable, people-oriented, and conciliatory, yet she lacks a strict, legal approach. You want a mind on the court. She’s charming, delightful, and personable, but I don’t see that there.”
Sessions points to Kagan’s handling of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law while solicitor general as a major problem area. He wonders why she did not take action on two cases in which “don’t ask, don’t tell” was challenged. Kagan, for her part, defended her decisions, saying she acted “consistently with the responsibility” to “vigorously defend all statutes.”
Sessions is not convinced. “I have become more troubled after today,” he says. “On really tough matters, she becomes very political and acts less in a principled, lawful manner and more in a manipulative, political manner. That’s not what you need on the Supreme Court.” (More about this exchange from Ed Whelan here.)
Sessions adds that Kagan’s responses about her association with a controversial partial-birth-abortion memo (which Shannen W. Coffin wrote about here) “are another example” of the “nominee’s troubles.”
“That document seems to indicate pretty clearly that she got panic stricken when the president got ready to sign the partial-birth-abortion bill,” Sessions says. “She went into high-speed action to talk him out of it.”
Ann Althouse: Kagan Being Given A "Pass"
From Ann Althouse's blog:
I think it's more likely, in fact, that Kagan is being given a pass, and that the Senators from both parties have their reasons for giving her a pass. It's related to the unavailability of a transcript, I'm guessing.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Ann Althouse Can't Find Kagan Hearing Transcripts Online...
Althouse complains she's having trouble finding Kagan transcripts on the Web:
Why am I having such a hard time finding a transcript of the Kagan hearings on line?So, what's going on here? Why hasn't the Senate Judiciary Committee--or a news organization, or a Beltway NGO--posted the transcripts prominently, yet?
I want to catch up with what I missed of the hearings, without slogging through all the video — the video is very nicely presented on line at C-Span — and in a form I can cut and paste for blogging purposes. But I can't find a transcript!
Could someone point me to a transcript of the first and second day hearings so before my thoughts come to rest on the theory that the media don't want us to be able to comb through the text?
The text! The text is important when we're talking about the Constitution!
Charles Crawford on Russian Sleepers in Suburbia
From Charles Crawford's Blogoir:
This site always praises good technique.Here's a link to the Department of Justice website with PDF files mentioned by Crawford above.
So let's hear it for the FBI, who have done a most impressive number on cracking open a sophisticated Russian spy ring.
Most of the lurid media reports this morning simply rehash what is in the US Justice Department published material. Check out the two PDFs at the link to read the originals.
One of the accused is one Vicky Pelaez, who appears to be a non-Russian (born in Peru) who married one of the 'illegals' ('Juan Lazaro') and was a prominent anti-imperialist New York journalist. Here she is in full neo-Marxist rant, on Honduras.
This pro-Castro site forlornly tries to froth up a conspiracy theory: because Pelaez was the only Spanish language journalist in New York worth a damn, something had to be done about her!
It will be. The detailed Justice Department accounts of her complicated manoeuvres to help 'Lazaro' contact the Russians and carry large amounts of cash too and fro are most instructive.
This one will run for a long time, revealing all sorts of fascinating details about the Russians' spycraft. It's worth recalling that the key problem with having spies is getting from them any useful information they may have picked up, and indeed communicating with them to set targets and follow progress. How to do that regularly without arousing suspicion?
Hence the mysterious world of Steganography, the art of hiding digital information in a publicly available image.
The FBI reveal many other hi-tech ruses used in this case.
Here is an earlier alleged British attempt to effect clever communication which was very smart - until it wasn't.
OMB Watch: "Kagan Has Sided With Secrecy"
OMB Watch considers how Elena Kagan might treat FOIA cases on the Supreme Court (ht FOIABlog):
Kagan Has Sided with Secrecy
During her time as Solicitor General, Kagan has pursued five cases before the Supreme Court concerning application of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the country's most fundamental open government law. In four of the five cases, she has argued in favor of government secrecy. Each time, the Court sided in favor of the government. The Court has not yet taken up the fifth FOIA case.
The most notable of the cases was Department of Defense v. American Civil Liberties Union, in which Kagan fought the release of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees while in U.S. custody. In her argument to the Supreme Court, Kagan stated, "In the judgment of the president and the nation's highest-ranking military officers, disclosure of the photographs at issue here would pose a substantial risk to the lives and physical safety of United States and allied military and civilian personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan." Kagan made this assertion despite the fact that the administration had already released Justice Department memoranda that detailed the policy and actions of U.S. personnel in torturing detainees because "the existence of that approach to interrogation was already widely known." In that case, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision to release the photographs.
In a different case, Kagan argued that it would violate physicians' privacy to release Medicare data on claims paid. Kagan's argument in Consumers' Checkbook v. Dept. of Health and Human Services was that the information could be combined with other publicly available Medicare fee information to figure out how much a physician earned each year. Consumers' Checkbook had argued that physicians' privacy did not outweigh the public interest in using the data to measure physician experience, quality, and efficiency. The Supreme Court refused to overturn a ruling from the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, which sided with the government and allowed the records to be withheld. The Court of Appeals decision had reversed the original ruling of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which found in favor of Consumers’ Checkbook and ordered the agency to release the records.
In two other FOIA cases, Kagan argued against disclosure of records sought by the public. Loving v. Department of Defense concerned a request for documents relating to the president's review of a military death sentence, and Berger v. Internal Revenue Service involved a request for an IRS officer's time sheets. In both of these cases, the Supreme Court chose not to review the cases, essentially siding with Kagan by default and letting the lower courts' rulings to withhold the information stand.
Alleged Russian Agent Had LinkedIn Site
And here's a link that worked this morning (ht Guardian UK): http://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmananna. The Guardian, which has profiled her, also posted a link to her Facebook page. The Guardian Blog calls Anna Chapman the "The Russian Spy Loved by the Media."
CBS News posted this link to her YouTube videos, including this interview in Russian:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=anna+chapman&aq=f.
CBS News posted this link to her YouTube videos, including this interview in Russian:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=anna+chapman&aq=f.
James Taranto on Journolist
From The Wall Street Journal (ht FutureofCapitalism.com)
Remember, Weigel's supposedly off-the-record audience consisted of hundreds of journalists, both left-wing and purportedly objective. What it appears he was doing was not merely expressing an opinion but engaging in partisan politics--i.e., advising other journalists on how they should tailor their coverage so as to avoid "doing more damage to the Democrats."I wondered what Taranto meant by "professional ethics" and found this on the Sigma Delta Chi website for the SPJ Code of Ethics:
We surmise that this was not an isolated occurrence--that a lot of the discussion on Journolist consisted of this sort of blatantly partisan strategizing. We're certainly open to being proved wrong, if Journolist founder Ezra Klein--who still is at the Post--or any other member of the now-defunct list would like to supply us with a copy of its archives. We're willing to promise our source anonymity and even buy a round of drinks, though we're afraid we are not in a position to match Andrew Breitbart's offer of $100,000.
The Weigel kerfuffle has prompted a bit of confusion about journalistic ethics. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote last week: "I've been leaked postings from JournoList before--wonderfully charming things written about me, as you might have guessed--and I haven't had the opportunity to use them, but would be happy to if the need arose." This prompted a John Cole to denounce Goldberg (publicly, on his blog) for his willingness to use his "perch at the Atlantic to publish someone's private emails to viciously destroy their character and career."
But of course all Goldberg is threatening to do is commit journalism. The Journolist member or members who forwarded the emails in question to Goldberg might have violated a confidentiality agreement, but Goldberg was not a party to that agreement. Neither were the guys at the Daily Caller. In fact, Ezra Klein revealed last week on the Post's website that he had blackballed the Caller's editor, Tucker Carlson, on ideological grounds.
If a group of professionals in any other industry were conspiring to serve the interests of a political party in the way that Weigel's Coakley post suggests the Journolisters were, no journalist would deny that the public had a right to know. Why should that be any less true in this case--especially since in this case, such partisan activity would be a violation of professional ethics?
Act Independently
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know.
Journalists should:
—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
— Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
— Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
— Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.
Courtland Milloy on Justice Clarence Thomas's Second Amendment Views
From today's Washington Post:
Thomas agreed with McDonald, concluding that owning a gun is a fundamental part of a package of hard-won rights guaranteed to black people under the 14th Amendment. And just because some hooligans in Chicago or D.C. misuse firearms is no reason to give it up.
"In my view, the record makes plain that the Framers of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the ratifying-era public understood -- just as the Framers of the Second Amendment did -- that the right to keep and bear arms was essential to the preservation of liberty," Thomas wrote. "The record makes equally plain that they deemed this right necessary to include in the minimum baseline of federal rights that the Privileges or Immunities Clause established in the wake of the War over slavery."
Thomas made no mention of the black loss of life and liberty from handguns being wielded by other blacks. But he has made clear on other occasions that the problem is not that there are too many guns in the black community; the problem is too many criminals.
He dismissed the cogent gun-control arguments of his retiring colleague, John Paul Stevens, conjuring up the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens instead: "When it was first proposed to free the slaves and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble?"
Let 'em quake, Thomas appears to be saying.
From Frederick Douglass, Thomas writes: " 'The black man has never had the right either to keep or bear arms,' and that, until he does, 'the work of the Abolitionists was not finished.' "
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
How Russian Spies Came to Suburbia
From The Guardian (UK):
The hip and friendly young man with the brunette girlfriend in the front seat as he whipped around Washington in a top-end Mercedes-Benz attracted more envy than suspicion.
A few hundred miles away, in a tree-lined, middle-class New Jersey suburb that is home to one of America's most famous comedians, residents equally saw little to worry about in the unremarkable couple with two young daughters, although they did register the cars cruising by taking pictures.
And the fiery Latin American newspaper columnist drew more amusement than scrutiny for her repeated praise of Fidel Castro.
So it was from Virginia to Boston, and from New York to Seattle: married couples with families, young get-ahead professionals, even noisy anti-government agitators – all seemingly unremarkable in the American mix. Even the accents did not raise eyebrows in a country of immigrants.
But the carefully-crafted American normality, sometimes built over a decade or more, has been shattered with the arrest of 11 people – including eight who claimed to be married couples – on charges of being part of a long-term, deep cover espionage ring run by the Russian intelligence service.
Some of the accused assumed false names and backgrounds – in one case stealing the identity of a dead Canadian. Others lived openly under their real names, but allegedly maintained a double life controlled by Moscow.
The FBI has so far failed to reveal just what kind of intelligence these alleged deep cover agents were passing on, and while the indictments carry a hint that they may not have been very successful spies, their neighbours were invariably astonished to hear the accusations...
Monday, June 28, 2010
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on British Government Support for Islamism
From The Independent (UK):
Support for Islamicist terrorism is growing partly because more and more Muslims can see how the West plays its games – no rules, no accountability – and partly because it happily does business with Muslim despots and villains. Successive British governments have backed regressive Muslim movements and nations from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to Saudi Arabia, arguably the world's most dangerous Islamic realm. The rulers of that kingdom are today our old best friends despite evidence showing the Saudis are funding Salafism across the globe. That Islamicist ideology is causing untold damage to the spirit of Islam, and spreads – but unlike the BP oil, our politicians do not believe they need to disable the source.
Domestic relations between Muslims and the state are built on the same dodgy model. Some key departmental British Muslim advisers follow Abul ala Maududi, a Pakistani revivalist, founder of the fanatical Jamat-i-Islam which fantasises about worldwide domination. Nobody checked how that determined the advice given. The Muslim Council of Britain, still excessively influential, has among its affiliates groups which promote Saudi religious ideologies. The result is all around us: enlightened Islam is pushed out, and in march the bearded and veiled ones with the blessings of the state.
In an interview in New Left Concept, the investigative journalist and author Mark Curtis discussed his new book, Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam. As in his earlier, remarkable books he uses previously classified documents to build up a deplorable picture: "7/7 and the present broader terrorist threat to Britain is to some degree a product of British foreign policy ... Throughout the post-war period Britain has covertly supported radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, Indonesia and Egypt ... I also think the policy of allowing London to act as a base for jihadist terrorists organising around the world has been intimately related to securing British foreign policy goals". And what might those be then? Ad hoc opportunism, Curtis calls it, a tradition that the ruling classes believe (misguidedly) has served them rather well.
Self-interest is how the whole world works and all nations can act ignobly to gain advantage over others. Just look at the latest, obnoxious global battles over oil and precious minerals. But for a sustainable future politicians need to take a long view, learn from past mistakes and consider unintended consequences. Britain doesn't do that. Believing itself to be frightfully clever and adroit, it beds down with disreputable characters and governments for short-term gain, undermining its own security and prospects.
White House Lobbyists Heart Caribou Coffee
(ht Huffington Post) Whatever happened to the Alibi Club?
David Frum on the Death of Journolist
From FrumForum.com (ht Jonathan Chait):
Ezra Klein’s JournoList was a disaster waiting to happen. I can understand why a reporter would wish to read what was posted there, but participating in closed lists is a bad idea for any writer. The idea that likeminded journalists would engage in formalized pre-discussions amongst ideologically like-minded people before publishing for the broad public is a formula for group-think. Genuinely private discussion via email is one thing. Coordination among colleagues: very different. Coordination seems to have been the purpose of JournoList from the start. It created “secret editors” to whom journalists privately reported, different from and undisclosed to their actual editors. That seems to me a genuinely sinister enterprise, a disservice to readers and corrupting of the participants in the list themselves.Likewise, Sung Chun Kim (ht Ed Driscoll & Instapundit):
Why is no one calling for the outing of the 400 JournoList members and an investigation of whether there were any other attempts to collude and to coordinate the media narrative? Is no else as disturbed by this as I am? We’re constantly told that the media are special, that they’re the Fourth Estate, and that their proper functioning is vital to the health of the Republic. Well, is no one else profoundly disturbed that no one is watching the watchers? Or that the watchers are actually colluding in a virtual smoke-filled back room to massage and frame the narrative?Likewise, Jim Geraghty (ht Michael Roston):
Imagine if a conservative listserv were discovered, and that it included Rupert Murdoch and 400 conservative pundits and journalists. Imagine if it were disclosed that the participants actively discussed coordination in framing stories so as to benefit the Republican Party. Do you think there would be a ho hum “Oh, it was just a private list” response? Of course not, the liberals would be howling to the rafters about the existential threat to the Republic.
So why all the frivolity here? Even now, the Weigel story is breaking down into stupid distractions like whether Weigel actually wished death on Drudge, or whether people on a listserv have an expectation of privacy. Seriously, why is that even remotely important compared to the fact that 400 of this nation’s most prominent journalists and pundits were having discusions about killing or promoting stories based on whether they hurt the Democratic Party agenda? If there is any justice or sanity in this world, this should be bigger than ClimateGate. I want to see an archive of the JournoList postings and then compare them to any contemporaneous stories written by participants. Once that is done, we can tar and feather the bastards for betraying their profession and the people of this country.
Somebody on Journo-List didn’t like Dave Weigel and decided to publish his most furious and incendiary remarks that he thought — unwisely — that he was expressing in confidence. (At least I hope these were his most furious and incendiary remarks; what could top these? “I’m going to deafen David Brooks with a vuvuzela”?) So what else is on there that, if revealed, could make life difficult for Ezra Klein or Jeffrey Toobin or Paul Krugman or Ben Smith or Mike Allen? Or is the idea that as long as they stay in line, they’ll never have some remark they regret publicized to the world? Did Journo-List evolve into a massive blackmail scheme that ensures no one inside the club will ever speak ill of another member?Likewise, Random Observations:
So when something like "Journolist" surfaces -- a private, liberal-only chat group where reporters and pundits discussed breaking stories -- it's likewise easy to wonder if it might have been part of the aforementioned problem. Perhaps, one might speculate, journalists all used it to frame their reporting of stories, and make sure they stayed on the same narrative page?Likewise, Andrew Breitbart (in The American Spectator):
Not to fear: Jonathan Chait dispels such concerns:
If I hadn't been on Journolist, I probably would have been fascinated with it as well. I'd probably be imputing great powers to it, like the fantastic description weaved by David Frum.... Let me disabuse everybody by revealing that Journolist was not created for people to work out some party line. The discussion was private not because the conversations were too explosive to be made public, but because they were too mundane.
Oh! Of course, that makes complete sense. Very boring and useless information is always the kind you want hidden behind a privacy wall. Which explains why a tremendous scandal arose when even one of those postings was made public. (Exposing Dave Weigel, a supposed libertarian journalist, as actually being a lefty.)
Conversations consisted of requests for references -- does anybody know an expert in such and such...
Rather than going to, say, public sources (libraries, research departments), liberals asked each other to recommend "experts" for the various stories they were covering. What kind of "experts" would such process tend to favor? "Experts" from from the Heritage Foundation? Economists of all political stripe? Academics with a wide variety of views on healthcare reform?
No, no story-shaping here, so far.
... instantaneous reactions to events...
So: one liberal journalist posts his "instantaneous reaction" to each event, and those which were most popular among other (liberal, journalist) readers then rose to the top and were repeated most often. The people who read these narratives then went on to craft national news stories on the events in question.
Okay, no story-shaping there either.
...joshing around, conversations about sports, and the like. Why did this have to be private? Because when you're a professional writer, even in the age of Twitter, you try to maintain some basic standard in your published work. I don't subject my readers to my thoughts on the Super Bowl as of halftime, or even (usually) the meaning of the Pennsylvania special election two minutes after polls close....
Hilarious! While attempting to tell us this forum wasn't used to frame important news stories, Chait can't help but throw in example after example of political stories, such as "the meaning of the Pennsylvania special election two minutes after polls close." Concerns are being dispelled with every sentence!
Not very self-aware, is he?
Why was the group exclusively non-conservative?
Again, I thought he was supposed to be dispelling these kinds of concerns, not confirming them?
Breitbart said Journolist functioned as a "cabal" through which liberal reporters and editors colluded to counteract the influence of alternative media voices like Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh.Likewise, this comment on Ann Althouse's blog:
Especially after the 2004 election, Breitbart said, liberals realized they h
ad "lost control of the narrative," and began organizing projects aimed at preventing stories that hurt Democrats from gaining traction in mainstream media. Breitbart compared the Journolist "cabal" to Professor Peter Dreier's "Cry Wolf" project that offered $1,000 fees to academics for papers pushing back against conservative policy proposals.
By exerting peer pressure within the press corps, Breitbart said, the participants in Journalist influenced reporters like Weigel to adopt their practice of treating Drudge and Limbaugh as enemies, and to suppress story angles that favored conservatives.
"Anybody who thinks this story is just about David Weigel needs to turn in their credentials as a media critic," Breitbart said.
craig said...
Antitrust law is fairly clear in forbidding collusion not only to set prices, but also to control what products will be offered to the public. I'm pretty sure that such collusion isn't exempt simply by declaring it "private" communications.
How is Journolist any different from a hypothetical mailing list of oil refiners, distributors, and resellers discussing how to market alternative-energy and/or alternative-fuel products to gas station consumers?
Arts Club of Washington Summer Member's Exhibition
My paintings, Ella's Desk and Apples & Pear, can be seen in the gallery until July 31...
The gallery is located at 2017 I St., NW, Washington, DC 20006. Telephone: 202-331-7282. FAX: 202-857-3678.
The gallery is located at 2017 I St., NW, Washington, DC 20006. Telephone: 202-331-7282. FAX: 202-857-3678.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Death of JournoList!
Apparently, Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller blog has killed Ezra Klein's Journolist, by publishing emails from Washington Post reporter David Weigel. Just for fun, let's compare what Klein had to say on the Washington Post blog with some excerpts posted by the Daily Caller:
KLEIN: ...That was the theory behind Journolist: An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.Hahahahahahahahaha...LOL.
JOURNOLIST: ...In April, Weigel wrote that the problem with the mainstream media is “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.”
KLEIN: ...in fact it was always a fractious and freewheeling conversation meant to open the closed relationship between a reporter and his source to a wider audience.
JOURNOLIST: ...The Huffington Post, Weigel pointed out, ran “a picture of Sarah Palin, linking to a poll that suggests 45 percent of Americans believe her death panel lie. But as long as the top liberal-leaning news site talks about it every single hour of every day, I’m sure that number will go down.”
“Let’s move the fuck on already,” Weigel wrote.
KLEIN: ...In any case, Journolist is done now. I'll delete the group soon after this post goes live. That's not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. It was a wonderful, chaotic, educational discussion. I'm proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will re-form it, with many of the same members, and keep it going.
JOURNOLIST: ...In a thread with the subject line, “ACORN Ratf*cker arrested,” Journolisters discussed how James O’Keefe, whose undercover reporting showed officials from activist group ACORN willing to help a fake prostitution ring skirt the law, had been arrested in another, failed operation at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) office.
Weigel’s response: “HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.”
“Deep breath.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHA..
US Adds Chechen to Terror List
From the New York Times:
So, I'm glad that someone in a position of responsibility has finally acknowledged reality...
MOSCOW — Russia on Thursday hailed a decision by the United States to designate the Caucasian insurgent leader Doku Umarov a terrorist, a step announced on the eve of President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s visit to the White House.NOTE: A few years ago, I attended a seminar at Georgetown University on terrorism. When I asked a quesiton about Chechen terrorists, I was emphatically scolded by the professor, who had served in a national security position in the Bush administration: "You can't call Chechens 'terrorists.'"
The State Department late Wednesday released a statement describing Mr. Umarov, formerly a Chechen separatist commander, as being part of a radical jihadist movement that poses a threat to the United States as well. Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, said that Mr. Umarov’s recent attacks on Russian targets “illustrate the global nature of the terrorist problem we fight today.”
Western governments have historically been reluctant to consider Caucasian militants in the same light as organizations like Al Qaeda, in part because they evolved out of a secular push for independence that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. [Editors note: I think reason was more likely had been US support for Chechen independence as an anti-Soviet measure during the Cold War] The designation received approving news media coverage in Russia, whose leaders have often intimated that the insurgency receives financing or encouragement from the West.[Editor's note: it is a documented fact]
“It seems the American leadership has finally acknowledged that Caucasian terrorists and the notorious Al Qaeda are links in the same chain,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a popular tabloid newspaper, wrote. “And maybe now in the West they will seriously take care of militants and their international sponsors.”
Mr. Umarov, 46, has acknowledged that he was barely religious until late in life, but in 2007 he pronounced himself the emir of the Caucasus Emirate, which aims to establish a pan-Caucasian state independent of Russia and based on Islamic law. He revived a dormant Chechen suicide battalion, Riyadus-Salikhin, just as the tactic surged back in the North Caucasus, and in February he vowed to strike in central Russia, saying “blood will no longer spill only in our cities and towns.”
Largely known as a guerrilla fighter, Mr. Umarov emerged from the shadows in March to take responsibility for suicide bombings on Moscow’s subway, which killed 40 people. His organization also took responsibility for the bombing of a luxury train, the Nevsky Express, which killed 28 last November, and an attack that nearly killed the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-bek Yevkurov.
Anatoly E. Safonov, Mr. Medvedev’s representative on terrorism, said the State Department designation would help Russia in its efforts to stamp out the insurgency, by imposing international sanctions on anyone who aids Mr. Umarov or his associates.
“It’s obviously a plus,” he told Interfax. “This is a good signal to all the second-rate and third-rate figures abroad who have supported Umarov in some way. This is a signal to them that if they do not stop, they are next in line.”
Mr. Umarov is the latest on a list of 83 individuals or entities identified by the president or secretary of state under an executive order by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. Four other designations sprang from the conflict in Chechnya and were passed in 2003.
Russian officials celebrated the decision on Thursday, with the Foreign Ministry calling it “an important acceptance of the indivisible and universal nature of international terrorist threats.”
So, I'm glad that someone in a position of responsibility has finally acknowledged reality...
Ann Coulter on Elena Kagan
From AnnCoulter.com:
When liberals say, "nothing is sacrosanct," they mean "nothing other Americans consider sacrosanct is sacrosanct." They demonstrate their open-mindedness by ridiculing other people's dogma, but will not brook the most trifling criticism of their own dogmas.
Thus, for example, liberals sneer at the bluenoses and philistines of the "religious right" for objecting to taxpayer-funding of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine, but would have you banned from public life for putting Matthew Shepard in a jar of urine, with or without taxpayer funding.
These famously broad-minded New Yorkers -- "thinking, always thinking" -- actually booed Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he showed up at the opera after pulling city funding from a museum exhibit that included a painting of the Virgin Mary plastered with close-up pornographic photos of women's vulvas.
(The New York Times fair-mindedly refused to ever mention the vulvas, instead suggesting that the mayor's objection was to the cow dung used in the composition.)
Has a decision to fund or not fund "art" ever gotten a politician in any other part of the country booed in public? And how might the Times refer to citizens booing a mayor who had withdrawn taxpayer funding for a painting of Rosa Parks covered in pornography?
If New York liberals insist on bragging about their intellectual bravado in believing "nothing is sacrosanct," it would really help if they could stop being the most easily offended, P.C., group-think, thin-skinned weanies in the entire universe and maybe ease up on the college "hate speech" codes, politically correct firings, and bans on military recruiters.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
General McChrystal & Team America, World Police
Oscar Wilde said that life imitates art, and General McChrystal's resignation certainly looks like a scene from what Rolling Stone said was one of his favorite movies: Team America, World Police.
So, I don't think it was an accident that Michael Hastings' story began in Paris, France...
So, I don't think it was an accident that Michael Hastings' story began in Paris, France...
Google Wins Viacom v. YouTube Case
IMHO, a victory for New Media over Old Media. Here's Google's account, from their corporate blog:
YouTube wins case against Viacom
6/23/2010 01:23:00 PM
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)
Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.
This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other. We’re excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world.
UPDATE 2:12PM: This decision also applies to other parties to the lawsuit, including the Premier League.
Posted by Kent Walker, Vice President and General Counsel
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Centcom's Blog: Central Asia Online
Your tax dollars at work...I guess General Petraeus is in charge of this now, too: http://centralasiaonline.com/.
It looks like the Department of Defense may be using a British sub-contractor or staffers (perhaps PA Consulting?)--since we Americans spell defense D-E-F-E-N-S-E, not D-E-F-E-N-C-E.
BTW, A masthead might help to instill a greater sense of accountability, IMHO.
Disclaimer of Liability
Every effort is made to provide accurate and complete information on CentralAsiaOnline.com. However, with the quantity of documents available, often uploaded within short deadlines, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.With respect to documents and information on this website, neither the U.S. government, nor the U.S. Department of Defence or their employees or contractors make any warranty, expressed or implied, including warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose with respect to documents available from CentralAsiaOnline.com.The U.S. Department of Defence and any other legal entity that has contributed in any way to the preparation, composition or promulgation of CentralAsiaOnline.com data hereby disclaim any overall liability arising from any inappropriate, improper or fraudulent use of data provided to site visitors. Furthermore, neither the U.S. Department of Defence (SIC) nor its contractors shall be held liable for any financial or other consequences, whatsoever, arising from such inappropriate, improper or fraudulent use of material on this website. The consultation or use of CentralAsiaOnline.com data shall automatically imply full acceptance of the above disclaimer of liability.
It looks like the Department of Defense may be using a British sub-contractor or staffers (perhaps PA Consulting?)--since we Americans spell defense D-E-F-E-N-S-E, not D-E-F-E-N-C-E.
BTW, A masthead might help to instill a greater sense of accountability, IMHO.
President Obama's Announces General McChrystal's Replacement
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Today I accepted General Stanley McChrystal’s resignation as commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. I did so with considerable regret, but also with certainty that it is the right thing for our mission in Afghanistan, for our military, and for our country.
I'm also pleased to nominate General David Petraeus to take command in Afghanistan, which will allow us to maintain the momentum and leadership that we need to succeed.I don't make this decision based on any difference in policy with General McChrystal, as we are in full agreement about our strategy. Nor do I make this decision out of any sense of personal insult. Stan McChrystal has always shown great courtesy and carried out my orders faithfully. I've got great admiration for him and for his long record of service in uniform.Over the last nine years, with America fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has earned a reputation as one of our nation’s finest soldiers. That reputation is founded upon his extraordinary dedication, his deep intelligence, and his love of country. I relied on his service, particularly in helping to design and lead our new strategy in Afghanistan. So all Americans should be grateful for General McChrystal’s remarkable career in uniform.But war is bigger than any one man or woman, whether a private, a general, or a president. And as difficult as it is to lose General McChrystal, I believe that it is the right decision for our national security.The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general. It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system. And it erodes the trust that’s necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.My multiple responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief led me to this decision. First, I have a responsibility to the extraordinary men and women who are fighting this war, and to the democratic institutions that I've been elected to lead. I've got no greater honor than serving as Commander-in-Chief of our men and women in uniform, and it is my duty to ensure that no diversion complicates the vital mission that they are carrying out.That includes adherence to a strict code of conduct. The strength and greatness of our military is rooted in the fact that this code applies equally to newly enlisted privates and to the general officer who commands them. That allows us to come together as one. That is part of the reason why America has the finest fighting force in the history of the world.It is also true that our democracy depends upon institutions that are stronger than individuals. That includes strict adherence to the military chain of command, and respect for civilian control over that chain of command. And that’s why, as Commander-in-Chief, I believe this decision is necessary to hold ourselves accountable to standards that are at the core of our democracy.Second, I have a responsibility to do what is -- whatever is necessary to succeed in Afghanistan, and in our broader effort to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda. I believe that this mission demands unity of effort across our alliance and across my national security team. And I don’t think that we can sustain that unity of effort and achieve our objectives in Afghanistan without making this change. That, too, has guided my decision.I’ve just told my national security team that now is the time for all of us to come together. Doing so is not an option, but an obligation. I welcome debate among my team, but I won’t tolerate division. All of us have personal interests; all of us have opinions. Our politics often fuels conflict, but we have to renew our sense of common purpose and meet our responsibilities to one another, and to our troops who are in harm’s way, and to our country.We need to remember what this is all about. Our nation is at war. We face a very tough fight in Afghanistan. But Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths or difficult tasks. We persist and we persevere. We will not tolerate a safe haven for terrorists who want to destroy Afghan security from within, and launch attacks against innocent men, women, and children in our country and around the world.So make no mistake: We have a clear goal. We are going to break the Taliban’s momentum. We are going to build Afghan capacity. We are going to relentlessly apply pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same.That’s the strategy that we agreed to last fall; that is the policy that we are carrying out, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.In that effort, we are honored to be joined by allies and partners who have stood by us and paid the ultimate price through the loss of their young people at war. They are with us because the interests and values that we share, and because this mission is fundamental to the ability of free people to live in peace and security in the 21st century.General Petraeus and I were able to spend some time this morning discussing the way forward. I’m extraordinarily grateful that he has agreed to serve in this new capacity. It should be clear to everybody, he does so at great personal sacrifice to himself and to his family. And he is setting an extraordinary example of service and patriotism by assuming this difficult post.Let me say to the American people, this is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy. General Petraeus fully participated in our review last fall, and he both supported and helped design the strategy that we have in place. In his current post at Central Command, he has worked closely with our forces in Afghanistan. He has worked closely with Congress. He has worked closely with the Afghan and Pakistan governments and with all our partners in the region. He has my full confidence, and I am urging the Senate to confirm him for this new assignment as swiftly as possible.Let me conclude by saying that it was a difficult decision to come to the conclusion that I’ve made today. Indeed, it saddens me to lose the service of a soldier who I’ve come to respect and admire. But the reasons that led me to this decision are the same principles that have supported the strength of our military and our nation since the founding.So, once again, I thank General McChrystal for his enormous contributions to the security of this nation and to the success of our mission in Afghanistan. I look forward to working with General Petraeus and my entire national security team to succeed in our mission. And I reaffirm that America stands as one in our support for the men and women who defend it.Thank you very much.
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