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November 2013

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 09, 2013 3 Comments

Hi Professor, These photos might not seem extraordinary except I took them in Malibu. I spoke with the owner -- lovely woman immigrant from Eastern Europe communism. She laments the insanity of Americans who vote to make the US like the hell hole from which she escaped. Best, Bruno...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on November 08, 2013 13 Comments

As efforts move forward toward an end of November deadline to fix the troubled healthcare.gov website, new issues are being revealed in the process, according to a report from Reuters/via Yahoo: The Obama administration's HealthCare.gov adviser Jeffrey Zients said on Friday that the trouble-plagued federal healthcare website...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on November 08, 2013 13 Comments

The publisher of a book authored by a source of a recent CBS '60 Minutes' report on the Benghazi attack has halted the book's publication, according to an Associated Press report: https://twitter.com/AP_Politics/status/398909182415347712 Publication has been halted for a disputed book about the attack last year on a...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on November 08, 2013 4 Comments
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden gained access to some classified documents at the NSA by persuading other agency colleagues to share their login credentials with him, according to an exclusive Reuters report.
Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues at a spy base in Hawaii to access some of the classified material he leaked to the media, sources said. A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments, said a source close to several U.S. government investigations into the damage caused by the leaks. Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.
Last month, Reuters also reported the NSA failed to install the most up-to-date anti-leak software at the Hawaii facility long before Snowden had been employed there as a contractor.  The software, which had been installed at other US government facilities, is designed to detect unauthorized access attempts.
Well before Snowden joined Booz Allen Hamilton last spring and was assigned to the NSA site as a systems administrator, other U.S. government facilities had begun to install software designed to spot attempts by unauthorized people to access or download data. The purpose of the software, which in the NSA's case is made by a division of Raytheon Co, is to block so-called "insider threats" - a response to an order by President Barack Obama to tighten up access controls for classified information in the wake of the leak of hundreds of thousands of Pentagon and State Department documents by an Army private to WikiLeaks website in 2010.
The Reuters report indicated that the Hawaii facility had not yet installed the software because "it had insufficient bandwidth to comfortably install it and ensure its effective operation," according to a US official with whom the outlet spoke.

Posted by David Gerstman on November 08, 2013 10 Comments

Mideast Media Sampler 11/08/2013 -- Yasser, that's a conspiracy theory....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 08, 2013 35 Comments

We are on the cusp of the most historic sell-out of Israel by any United States administration. We told you all along that in his second term Obama would impose a settlement on Israel according to what he viewed as reasonable: Obama will force his vision of a...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 08, 2013 20 Comments
On October 27, 2013, 60 Minutes ran a blockbuster story of a Benghazi witness who dramatically told of his presence on the scene the night Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed. His story of being on the scene was new, his information regarding prior warnings was not new. The failure of the Obama administration to provide protection and the cover-up that the attack was the result of a spontaneous protest are the scandal. That's why we headlined the 60 Minutes report that 60 Minutes "confirms" the scandal, 60 Minutes confirms Benghazi is a real scandal, and you’ve been lied to. We weren't the only one seeing that the scandal information confirmed prior reports.  Dave Weigel at Slate.com, in trying to minimize the damage to Obama, wrote What Did We Learn From the 60 Minutes Benghazi Report?:
But the report tells us more about what we've known for a year, and known in detail since the spring of 2013. Lara Logan's big coup is an interview with a British security officer who uses a psuedonym; her other on-camera sources, Andy Wood and Gregory Hicks, had testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.... This colors in some of the story, but it doesn't advance the scandal. The Stevens cables that warned State about what might happen were revealed almost a year ago, sparking off some minor head-rolling at State but not much else. What conservatives want to know—and when I go to conferences or political rallies, I hear this—is what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were doing on the night of the attack, and whether they heard earlier warnings but ignored them.
The scandal part of Benghazi now will be lost in the media narrative because it turns out that 60 Minutes star witness may not have been on the scene.  His dramatic story of his own heroics that night appears to be false, or at least subject to serious doubt.

Posted by Andrew Branca on November 08, 2013 15 Comments
Last evening the Florida House conducted a public hearing, judiciary committee debate, and committee vote on HB-4003, which would have done away with Florida's Stand-Your-Ground law by repealing Florida statute 776.013. Home protection; use of deadly force; presumption of fear of death or great bodily harm. The outcome was that HB-4003 was soundly defeated in committee, thereby ending the effort to repeal Stand-Your-Ground in this year's legislative session. 776.013 is a multi-part statute that contains not only the primary "Stand-Your-Ground" statute, but also presumptions of reasonable belief of fear of imminent death or grave bodily harm.  Thus, if successful, HB-4003 would not only have repealed "Stand-Your-Ground" but also have made it more difficult for law-abiding armed citizens to defend themselves in home invasion, carjacking, and kidnapping scenarios. HB-4003 was proposed by Rep. Williams, who is not a member of the judiciary committee and therefore not entitled himself to vote on the proposed bill in this setting. [caption id="attachment_70237" align="alignnone" width="407"](Florida House Rep. Alan B. Williams) (Florida House Rep. Alan B. Williams)[/caption] Not surprisingly, the proponents of HB-4003 consisted mostly of a couple of legislators citing bad statistics, isolated anecdotes, and misinformation; the parents of young black children killed in acts of violence, like Trayvon Martin; and a seemingly endless series of high school and college students who were presumably receiving course credit for appearing and pathetically mischaracterizing Stand-Your-Ground.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on November 07, 2013 45 Comments
Obama promised, repeatedly, that you could keep your plan if you like it.  Period. When called out on that, he tried to deny such a categorical promise, the video notwithstanding. Politifact gave him a "Pants on Fire" rating for trying to make the promise conditional:
According to Obama, "What we said was you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed." But we found at least 37 times since Obama’s inauguration where he or a top administration official made a variation of the pledge that if you like your plan, you can keep it, and we never found an instance in which he offered the caveat that it only applies to plans that hadn’t changed after the law’s passage. And seven of those 37 cases came after the release of the HHS regulations that defined the "grandfathering" process, when the impact would be clear.... We rate his claim Pants on Fire.

Politifact Obama Promise Pants on Fire

Tonight Obama said he was "sorry" that some Americans have had their health insurance plans dropped after his repeated assurances that they could keep their plan if they liked it. From NBC News:
President Obama said Thursday that he is "sorry" that some Americans are losing their current health insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act, despite his promise that no one would have to give up a health plan they liked.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on November 07, 2013 5 Comments

We frequently talk about the idea that politics is downstream from culture, and to some extent, that often includes activism as well.  But this is something I hadn't quite yet imagined. Hacktivists depicted in a ballet. From CNET: Hacker collective Anonymous is going to the ballet. Take...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 07, 2013 37 Comments
John Kerry's public warning to Israel that it will face a 3rd Intifada and international delegitimization unless it relinquishes "illegitimate" settlements and a final peace deal does not leave a single Israeli solder in the West Bank, was a clear threat. The threat took place in an interview with Israeli and Palestinian television, as reported by The Times of Israel, Kerry slams Israel’s West Bank policies, warns of 3rd Intifada (emphasis added):
US Secretary of State John Kerry launched an unusually bitter public attack on Israeli policies in the West Bank Thursday, warning that if current peace talks fail, Israel could see a third intifada and growing international isolation, and that calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions would increase. Kerry made the comments during a joint interview with Israel’s Channel 2 and the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The alternative to getting back to the talks is the potential of chaos,” Kerry said. “I mean does Israel want a third Intifada?” he asked. “Israel says, ‘Oh we feel safe today, we have the wall. We’re not in a day to day conflict’,” said Kerry. “I’ve got news for you. Today’s status quo will not be tomorrow’s…” Israel’s neighbors, he warned, will “begin to push in a different way.”

The secretary went on: “If we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not find a way to find peace, there will be an increasing isolation of Israel, there will be an increasing campaign of delegitimization of Israel that’s been taking place on an international basis.”

Turning to settlements and Israel’s presence in the West Bank, he added: “If we do not resolve the question of settlements, and the question of who lives where and how and what rights they have; if we don’t end the presence of Israeli soldiers perpetually within the West Bank, then there will be an increasing feeling that if we cannot get peace with a leadership that is committed to non-violence, you may wind up with leadership that is committed to violence.”

The highlighted words have a lot of meaning in the context of the dispute, particularly with regard to BDS and delegitimization.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 07, 2013 25 Comments
It's broken windows theory, at a very personal level. If you hang out with people who have zero respect for our laws and who think it is their right to mock us openly and dare us to deport them in accordance with law (knowing full well the political theater that would create), why are you so surprised that they secretly record your meeting and then use it to help their cause even if it embarrasses you? Really, Democratic Representative Luis Gutierrez from Illinois, why did you think there would be any honor from these people and that they wouldn't break your window after breaking our immigration windows? Via Fox Latino, Leading Pro-Immigrant Congressman Severs Ties With DREAMer Groups; Calls Them Manipulative, Racists:
U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the vocal proponent in Congress for a change in policy that would give undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as minors a chance to legalize their status, has cut off ties with two groups that have coordinated provocative protests in recent months. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois, on Monday evening issued a press release announcing that he was no longer going to work with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) and their affiliated advocates at DREAMActivist.org. The congressman said the final straw in a series of actions by the groups that he has found unsettling was the secret recording by a NIYA representative of what was to have been a confidential discussion last week between Gutierrez and parents of immigrants who are being held in an immigrant detention center in El Paso, Tex. "It just shows me how dangerous they are," Gutierrez said in an interview Tuesday with Fox News Latino....
As to the racism part, you have enabled that too.

Posted by David Gerstman on November 07, 2013 6 Comments
There is a campaign in the United States favoring a nuclear deal with Iran. We have seen in it the news pages of the New York Times. It's been noted that Thomas Erdbrink, the Tehran bureau chief of the New York Times is making efforts to portray Iran as a changed country since the election of President Hassan Rouhani, whether the evidence supports it or not. The New York Times in a profile of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy to Syria, doesn't once mention Iran. When an Iranian general, Qasem Solemeini is described as the effective ruler of Syria if not the most powerful man in the Middle East, the oversight is inexcusable. The only reason to obscure Iran's involvement in Syria is in support of a narrative that Iran is no threat to the world in general. In addition to whatever support the "make an agreement with Iran" movement got in the news section, it has gotten plenty in the opinion section. Last week, Paul Pillar wrote Diplomacy is key to a deal with Iran for the Washington Post. The heart of Pillar's argument was:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 07, 2013 14 Comments

Hello?! I run this place.  Quote me, me, me! Patrick Maines, President of The Media Institute, writing in USA Today, quotes Legal Insurrection commenter Moonstone716 regarding the Brown shout down of Ray Kelly, Political divide hurts college free speech: As one commenter poignantly observed in reply to coverage...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 06, 2013 35 Comments
One part of my communications with Brown Prof. Naoko Shibusawa has stuck in my mind:
"You can quote those two lines. Those only."
Shibusawa is the person featured in my post Tuesday night, Brown U. divestment committee faculty member signed 2009 letter calling Israel Apartheid state.  The post started by referencing her support for the Brown shout-down of Ray Kelly expressed in her Letter to the Editor of the Brown Daily Herald:
"... I want to point out that every movement toward social justice in U.S. history has included “misbehavior.” “Misbehavior” is a tactic of the disempowered toward disrupting the status quo.... So unlike [Biology Prof. Ken Miller who denounced the shout-down], I applaud the student protesters for their moral courage in a righteous cause against racial profiling and brutal police tactics and for their resolution in the face of the harsh criticisms they have since endured. I am proud of you. You inspire me to try to be a better teacher, scholar and person.
Shibusawa initially told me by phone “I don’t know what the purpose is [of my call] and what you want to do” and “I’ve checked out your blog.” She continued, that it “looks like you want to portray me as some sort of extremist” but “I believe in social justice.” Shibusawa then said, “You can describe me as extreme.” Fair enough.  But then the follow up email, telling me what I was allowed to say about the conversation (emphasis added):
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