Category Archives: Government
Red Line
Mostly liberal columnist Richard Cohen is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria. Mostly conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria too. Common ground.
Cohen wants to intervene on humanitarian grounds. As for Krauthammer : “A superpower’s role in a regional conflict is deterrence.” He feels Putin has taken Obama’s measure and our president comes up short – to put it kindly.
President Obama has said Bashar Assad will have crossed a red line if he gasses his own people. France says that gas would be Sarin.
Seems we’ve been down this line before.
Transparent
If your in-box had an email from Richard Windsor it wasn’t necessarily junk mail. It was from former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. That was her account for communicating with insiders (which is why you didn’t have mail from Richard Windsor). It turns out lots of people in the administration use secret email accounts.
President Obama has proclaimed his administration the most transparent in history. And it is – if you can afford a million dollars to find out a bureaucrat’s email addresses. That’s what the Labor Department tried to charge AP ($1.03 million).
Kevin O’Brien of the Plain Dealer spills Richard Windsor’s guts here.
Police State
Poor Eric Holder. He might have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply looking up reporter James Rosen’s phone records among the records of all Verizon customers collected by the NSA, as reported in The Guardian.
That action occurred under a FISA court order and was an expansion of phone surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists which began under the Bush administration Patriot Act.
Catherine Herridge at Fox News reports that, in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied that NSA intentionally collects data on millions of Americans.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police may take DNA samples from anyone they arrest. Here’s a piece by Jeffery (the other) Rosen about Scalia’s dissent in favor of the fourth amendment.
Update: It’s not just your phone calls anymore. This morning’s Washington Post reports that the government mines your internet data too.
IRS Song and Dance
IRS lavish spending on conferences included this video. Meanwhile the agency harassed conservative groups. An anti-abortion group was ordered not to protest near Planned Parenthood in exchange for its tax exemption and was asked intimidating questions.
“The questioning included requests for copies of Facebook postings, the content of prayers, political beliefs of members, résumés of board members and dealings with the media.”
Off the Record
President Obama has proclaimed himself a fierce defender of the First Amendment . On cue, Eric Holderman called for a meeting of news honchos to clear the air about his secretive and nasty behavior toward them. True to form, the meeting was off the record.
Strange behavior for a couple of guys who only know what they read.
Update: Here’s a great Nat Hentoff piece on two Obamas. (He mentions the efforts of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to lead the pushback for the first amendment. Nat’s a RCFP steering committee member and so am I.)
