My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s round-up was seriously delayed by the issue I talked about yesterday — the major meltdown at The Old Reader‘s server farm. Due to the time it took to get the site back up and running — and the fact that they were still restoring feed items — today’s collection may have a few gaps.
The election campaign is in full swing in Lion’s Arch, and GuildMag also has up-to-the-minute reporting from the front lines.
Dave Weigel looks at the unexpectedly close vote in congress that would have forced the NSA to “walk back” some of its current domestic surveilance operations:
For a few minutes on Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Justin Amash thought he might have killed the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program. He’d optimistically expected maybe 90 Republicans to back his amendment to the Department of Defense budget. Ninety-four of them did. But he ran out of votes eventually — the Democrats didn’t come through — and by a 217–205 margin, the House killed his amendment.
Amash loaded the confetti cannon anyway. “My friends and colleagues stuck with me on my NSA amendment and changed the dynamic of the debate with tonight’s close vote,” the Republican congressman tweeted. “What an amazing staff I have. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You guys are awesome.”
[…]
Defenders of the NSA program are furious that Amash even got that far, and are working to undermine him. According to Politico’s Jake Sherman, Amash started this process with an “unworkable amendment” that would have failed easily, until staffers “held his hand” to fix it. That’s their story, but it doesn’t reflect what led up to the amendment. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures, every member of Congress who’d been sitting on some security state reform picked it back up and reintroduced it. In the Senate, Utah’s Mike Lee (a Republican) and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley (a Democrat) brought back the Ending Secret Law Act that they couldn’t pass when FISA was reauthorized. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, both Democrats, introduced legislation to restrict NSA data collection unless the material contained a “demonstrated link to terrorism or espionage.”
At the time, the lack of quick action on those bills suggested that the Snowden story had been a blip. Privacy advocates in Congress now refer to those bills as the first wave, part of a strategy of attrition that will make the current policy politically untenable.
Amash proved the NSA will have to concede some ground when his amendment moved quickly from obscurity to reality to being under attack from the administration. On Monday night, before the Rules Committee voted on which amendments to bring up, Amash was told to meet with Speaker of the House John Boehner on the floor. He returned from that meeting convinced (and surprised) that he’d get a vote after all.
Conor Friedersdorf on Chris Christie’s embrace of all things neocon:
Before today, I expected that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would position himself as a national security state moderate in the 2016 Republican primary, acknowledging that the Rand Paul wing of the party has legitimate concerns, picking a couple fights with the GOP’s John Bolton wing, and making it clear to establishment types that he wouldn’t radically challenge the status quo. That would be smart politics.
There are a lot of Republicans who think Rand Paul makes some good points, but aren’t yet ready to embrace his whole critique of the national security state. Who else is going after those votes? But now it seems clear that Gov. Christie will adopt the neoconservative line on national security, embracing the most radical actions of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Speaking at The Aspen Institute, Christie belittled the libertarian wing of his party for its take on NSA spying. “As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought,” he said.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post offers an account of what came next:
Asked whether he includes Paul — a fellow potential 2016 presidential candidate — in his criticism, Christie didn’t back down. “You can name any one of them that’s engaged in this,” he said. “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. … I’m very nervous about the direction this is moving in.” Christie acknowledged that there will always be mistakes when it comes to national security and protecting privacy, but said Americans need to stay focused on what’s at stake.
He dismissed some of the current privacy/national security debates as “esoteric.”
“I think what we as a country have to decide is: Do we have amnesia? Because I don’t,” he said. “And I remember what we felt like on Sept. 12, 2001.” Christie also praised the national security strategies of both President Obama and George W. Bush. “I want to say that I think both the way President Bush conducted himself and the way President Obama has conducted himself in the main on those types of decisions hasn’t been different because they were right and because we haven’t had another one of those attacks that cost thousands and thousands of lives,” Christie said.
Personally, I’d strongly prefer to leave the widows and orphans of all atrocities out of politics, because it is so unseemly when politicians opportunistically exploit them to compensate for the power their positions lack on the merits. But if a demagogue forced me to argue in front of them?
The rules governing inter-provincial trade in wine date back to the Prohibition era. BC’s Christy Clark would like to see the rules brought into this century:
British Columbia Premier Christy Clark brought a case of her province’s wine to the heart of Ontario’s vine land.
Clark presented the vintages to her dozen provincial and territorial colleagues in a bid to lower trade barriers.
Even though Ottawa eased interprovincial rules surrounding wine last year, it is still illegal for Ontarians to buy wine in bulk directly from B.C. vineyards.
To get around that, Clark’s six-person entourage brought two bottles apiece to have a full case for the premiers at their annual Council of the Federation gathering.
I linked to an item on this issue by Michael Pinkus earlier this year.
The Toronto Star reports on the latest polling information for the Ontario byelections:
The Progressive Conservatives are well ahead in two longtime Liberal strongholds — one in Toronto and the other former premier Dalton McGuinty’s Ottawa riding, according to a Forum Research poll.
The polling firm on Wednesday looked at three of the five Aug. 1 races:
- Etobicoke—Lakeshore, where Toronto deputy mayor Doug Holyday is leading.
- Scarborough—Guildwood, where the Liberal candidate Mitzie Hunter has the edge.
- Ottawa South, where almost half of the voters would support Tory candidate Matt Young.
Regardless of the outcomes, the Liberals’ minority position in the 107-seat legislature will not be affected.
Winning Etobicoke—Lakeshore would mark a crucial breakthrough for the Conservatives in Toronto, where they have been shut out of since 2003, and an important win for Tory Leader Tim Hudak, who is consistently the least popular party leader.
“This race was very competitive to start with, and Tim Hudak has been showing up a lot. Doug Holyday has been handling the media well and it’s beginning to show,” Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff told the Star Thursday.
Holyday was a high-profile last minute entry in the race.
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