Quotulatiousness

August 31, 2013

The leaders discuss the Syrian situation on Facebook

Filed under: Humour, Media, Middle East, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

A rather amusing little squib from Best of Cain (via American Digest):

Cain - Facebook posts on Syria

QotD: “Face It World. You F’d Up; You Trusted Me”

Filed under: Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

For the first time since the Brits grew exhausted with the Hurricane of Fists they were getting from the 13 colonies, the British parliament voted against the government on an issue of war. Obviously, this was not directly Barack Obama’s fault. But he’s hardly blameless either. This mess is part of the larger mess he created. Obama follows polls and acts like it’s courage. He mocks and belittles American leadership and then is shocked when no one wants to follow America. We were supposed to be in an era of renewed global cooperation and engagement. Instead, Obama can’t hold the support of our closest ally — because the British Left balked. Forget forging new alliances with “former” enemies — as Obama promised would happen once it dawned on the Arab street that his middle name is “Hussein” and they realized he’s black; Obama can’t even maintain historic alliances with longstanding friends.

Oh, and thank goodness Hillary Clinton gave the Russians a big toy button with the word “overcharge” on it. We’re really reaping the payoff on that now.

Part of the problem stems from the simple fact that Obama can’t sell anything but himself. Even when he tried — and he really tried — he couldn’t sell Obamacare to the American people. When it comes to the Syria intervention — which, if done right, I am in favor of — he’s not even trying to sell. His body language in that PBS interview was that of a husband forced to explain to his wife how he got the clap. He talked like a teenager looking at the floor while telling his parents that he doesn’t know how their car ended up in the neighbor’s swimming pool. The only thing his “shot across the bow” talk did for him was convince everyone that he’s not wagging the dog to boost his poll numbers. A war-mongering charlatan would at least fake commitment better.

And that goes for his entire national-security team. To listen to this sorry bunch try to explain why they’re doing everything right while doing everything they once criticized is painful, like watching Helen Keller give a whirl at karaoke. I am perfectly willing to concede that this is a very complicated situation with few clear right answers. But this crowd insisted that everything was simple if you were smart like them. And now that the smarty-pants brigade got us into this mess, they still talk like anyone who disagrees with them is a moron. I mean, as bad a salesman as Barack Obama is, Jay Carney is worse. If he ran a massage parlor he couldn’t sell a happy ending to a drunk sailor during Fleet Week in Bangkok.

Jonah Golberg, “The Goldberg File”, 2013-08-30

August 24, 2013

It’s still August … media struggles to fill gaps between the ads

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

In Maclean’s, Emily Senger goes after the biggest issue facing Canada today:

On Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s annual tours of the North, like the one he undertook this week, photographers know to be quick with their cameras whenever Harper mounts an ATV or gets down on the ground to fire a .303 Lee Enfield rifle. Whatever the photo opportunity, though, one thing is constant — the big, blaring CANADA brand frequently emblazoned across his chest or back.

The patriotic clothing line, from the Bay’s Olympic Collection, has become a staple for Harper at events where his go-to sport jacket and open-collar shirt are still too formal. During his 2011 election campaign, Harper wore the jacket for many a stump speech and to photo-ops, sporting it as he posed with preschoolers and bowled with seniors.

Apparently it’s now a big problem that the Prime Minister happens to like wearing a certain line of clothing. We’re back to our media’s sense of shame about anyone showing the slightest pride about Canada (see their collective whingeing about our Olympic teams, for example).

Then we’re treated to a quick review of how “proper” political leaders dress:

We don’t see U.S. President Barack Obama wearing a jacket emblazoned with a screaming bald eagle against a backdrop of stars and stripes (though, we wish he would). Instead, The U.S. president is known to clip a stars-and-stripes pin to his suit lapel. Likewise, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron keeps his sartorial patriotism subtle, and has been spotted wearing Union Jack cufflinks.

See, rustic Canadians? Real leaders of real countries don’t need to advertise! You’re such yokels!

August 16, 2013

The one executive power that Obama doesn’t want to exercise – clemency

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Jacob Sullum on the remarkable lack of use of one executive power the US constitution clearly does grant to the president:

[U.S. attorney general Eric] Holder called upon Congress to reform mandatory minimum sentences and outlined steps the Justice Department will take in the meantime to avoid imposing “draconian” penalties on nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. He said his boss, President Barack Obama, shares his concern about mass incarceration and harsh sentences. But Holder neglected to mention that Obama has the power to free people who do not belong in prison — a power he has exercised just once during almost five years in office.

Article 2, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives the president the unilateral, unreviewable authority to “grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States.” So far Obama, who has not otherwise been shy about pushing executive power to the limit (and beyond), has granted 39 pardons, clearing the records of people who completed their sentences years ago, and one commutation, shortening the sentence of Eugenia Jennings, an Illinois woman who was convicted in 2001 of selling 13.9 grams of crack to a police informant. Obama cut her prison term from 22 years to 10, and she was released in December 2011.

That is an amazingly stingy clemency record for a supposedly enlightened and progressive man who before he was elected repeatedly described our justice system as excessively punitive. While running for president in 2008, Obama promised to “review drug sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive sentencing of nonviolent offenders.” Yet he has granted commutations at a rate that makes Richard Nixon, who declared war on drugs and campaigned as a law-and-order candidate, look like a softie. Nixon granted 60 commutations, 7 percent of the 892 applications he received, during his 67 months in office, while Obama has granted one out of 8,126, or 0.01 percent, over 55 months.

In fact, according to numbers compiled by P.S. Ruckman Jr., a professor of political science at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois, only three of Obama’s predecessors made less use of the clemency power (taking into account pardons as well as commutations) during their first terms: George Washington, who probably did not have many petitions to address during the first few years of the nation’s existence; William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia a month after taking office; and James Garfield, who was shot four months into his presidency and died that September.

August 5, 2013

Nepotism … you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Government, Japan, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Steve Chapman makes a case against nepotism in the modern world:

It would be silly to make Caroline Kennedy the White House science adviser: She’s not a scientist. It would be silly to name her fire commissioner of New York City: She has no background in public safety.

The standards are different in other fields. Kennedy has no previous known interest in Japan, Asia or international relations and is not a diplomat. But Barack Obama has chosen her to be the next ambassador to Japan.

Liz Cheney, likewise, is not inhibited by anything she lacks. She went to high school in northern Virginia, college in Colorado and law school in Chicago, before taking up residence in the Washington, D.C. area. Under George W. Bush, she held a couple of State Department jobs for which she had no obvious qualifications. But now she’s running for the U.S. Senate from Wyoming.

You could pick a name out of the phone book and find someone with better credentials. But these names are not random. They are household names, made famous by their fathers: John F. Kennedy and Dick Cheney. So the daughters carry an aura of expertise and gravity.

They benefit from “branding” — their association with the genuine accomplishments of famous relatives. But the logic behind that appeal only goes so far. Just because you wear Nike shoes doesn’t mean you’d buy a can of Nike beans. A Cheney’s virtues, if any, may not be present in another Cheney.

August 3, 2013

Obama may avoid meeting Putin at the G20 summit

Filed under: Government, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

An interesting sidelight to the suddenly more acrimonious relationship between the Russian and American leaders:

Now that Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia and he has been allowed to leave the airport, things are starting to hot up between the US and Russia. Washington has expressed that they are ‘disappointed’ by the reaction of Moscow and there have been allusions to the fact that President Obama may even go as far as to snub President Vladimir Putin and refuse to meet with him in September 2013.

Russia agreed yesterday to grant Edward Snowden asylum but as a consequence this has put a strain on the relations between Russia and the USA, despite the fact that Putin said that he wanted in no way to jeopardize the relations with the US. Although, sometimes, unbelievably in politics what a politician states is neither firstly necessarily what he thinks nor secondly necessarily what he does; or neither at the same time in the majority of the cases.

But, certainly Putin is probably thinking of himself rather than Obama at the present time. Sheltering Snowden means that he will be able to publically slap Obama in the face and send a strong message of propaganda to his own citizens, telling them that he is not the only one in the world not to respect human rights. If the US does it, then anyone can do it. Secondly, there are 90% of Russians that believe that Snowden’s actions are positive, rekindling the great East-West divide of old, or at least keeping that ideological fire burning bright. There is also the added bonus of it being now possible for Putin to rally up some support in the wake of criticism for arresting opposition leader Alexey Navalny and slapping a five-year prison sentence on him. Putin also has to wage war upon the detractors of his economic policies and face criticism of the slowing down in the Russian economy, with a 30% possibility that the country will enter a recession in 2014 (up from a 20% risk last month), according to a survey by Bloomberg. This affair will help Putin rally support, but it will also galvanize his status in world affairs. He will be empowered to declare that Russia is still a force to be reckoned with and a role to play in geopolitical affairs taking place.

In a recent poll in Russia (Levada Center) there were 43% of Russians that supported Russia’s granting of asylum to Snowden towards the end of July. Only 29% were against it.

But, Putin had very little choice, didn’t he? Snowden was almost barred from leaving the country and flying elsewhere. Either Putin took the decision to hand over Snowden to the US authorities or to provide a safe haven for him in Russia. The first solution would have destroyed his public image and made it look as if he were obsequiously obeying Uncle Sam. The second was the only one that would boost the troops at home.

Now, Washington has hinted that Obama may snub a private meeting with Putin when Obama makes his first public visit to Russia since Putin was reelected in March last year, when Moscow hosts the G20 summit. According to sources at the White House, Obama is presently weighing up the “utility” of the meeting and may even cancel going all together to the summit.

July 30, 2013

The real, long-term source of damage to American interests from the NSA revelations

Filed under: Business, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

In The Atlantic, James Fallows explains why the NSA’s digital overreach has likely harmed US long-term interests in many different ways:

In short: because of what the U.S. government assumed it could do with information it had the technological ability to intercept, American companies and American interests are sure to suffer in their efforts to shape and benefit from the Internet’s continued growth.

    American companies, because no foreigners will believe these firms can guarantee security from U.S. government surveillance;

    American interests, because the United States has gravely compromised its plausibility as world-wide administrator of the Internet’s standards and advocate for its open, above-politics goals.

Why were U.S. authorities in a position to get at so much of the world’s digital data in the first place? Because so many of the world’s customers have trusted* U.S.-based firms like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc with their data; and because so many of the world’s nations have tolerated an info-infrastructure in which an outsized share of data flows at some point through U.S. systems. Those are the conditions of trust and toleration that likely will change.

The problem for the companies, it’s worth emphasizing, is not that they were so unduly eager to cooperate with U.S. government surveillance. Many seem to have done what they could to resist. The problem is what the U.S. government — first under Bush and Cheney, now under Obama and Biden — asked them to do. As long as they operate in U.S. territory and under U.S. laws, companies like Google or Facebook had no choice but to comply. But people around the world who have a choice about where to store their data, may understandably choose to avoid leaving it with companies subject to the way America now defines its security interests.

Update: Also in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations, you’d think that Senator Ron Wyden would get the credit he clearly has been deserving all this time:

For many, many years we’ve covered Senator Ron Wyden’s seemingly quixotic attempts to signal to the American public (and press) that the NSA was doing a hell of a lot more surveillance than most people believed, even those who were carefully reading the laws. Because secrecy rules meant that he couldn’t directly reveal what he’d learned while on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he had to issue vague statements, documents and speeches hinting at things that were going on that he couldn’t actually talk about. Of course, now that Ed Snowden leaked a bunch of documents, it’s shown that Wyden was absolutely correct in what was going on (and that the American public wouldn’t like it).

You’d think that would lead people to have a lot more respect for the incredible efforts he went through to alert people to these issues without breaking the secrecy laws. And, in fact, many more people are aware of those efforts. The Washington Post has a nice article about Wyden’s attempts to bring these issues out and to get a real debate going on them.

However, towards the end, the reporter talks to two different former top lawyers at the NSA, who both appear to be really, really angry about Wyden daring to suggest to the public that the NSA wasn’t playing straight with the American public. First up, we’ve got Stewart Baker, the former NSA General Counsel and top Homeland Security official, who is so anti-civil liberties and pro-surveillance that he’s almost a caricature of himself — including claiming that the Boston bombings prove that Americans need less privacy and that civil libertarians complaining about too much surveillance are the real cause for the September 11 attacks.

July 12, 2013

The flaw in the idea of “smarter government”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:39

Jonah Goldberg finds a brief passing point of consensus before it disappears:

President Obama wants to make government “smarter.” Who could disagree with that? After all, it’s unlikely that even the biggest fans of big government believe the way government does what it does is the very best, very smartest way imaginable. Whether you’re an anarchist, a Leninist, or somewhere in between, everyone can agree that Uncle Sam could afford a few more IQ points.

Let’s put it another way. If government is going to do X, it should do X the smartest way possible. On that proposition both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party agree.

Alas, this momentary flash of consensus disappears before our eyes like a shooting star the moment we ask a related but very different question: Is it smart for the government to do X in the first place? For instance: I think it’s a dumb idea to tickle a grizzly-bear cub while it’s napping on its mother’s belly. But if I’m given no choice but to do it, I’ll eagerly inquire about what’s the smartest way to do a very dumb thing. And if I’m told there is no smart way to do such a dumb thing (which I assume is true), I’ll at least ask for tips on the least dumb way to do it.

July 11, 2013

Police militarization at a faster pace

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

Radley Balko on seven ways the Obama administration has enabled further militarization of the police:

There were signs that President Barack Obama might rein in the mass militarization of America’s police forces after he won the White House. Policing is primarily a local issue, overseen by local authorities. But beginning in the late 1960s with President Richard Nixon, the federal government began instituting policies that gave federal authorities more power to fight the drug trade, and to lure state and local policymakers into the anti-crime agenda of the administration in charge. These policies got a boost during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and then another during President Bill Clinton’s years. Under President George W. Bush, all of those anti-drug policies continued, but were supplemented by new war on terrorism endeavors — yet more efforts to make America’s cops look, act and fight like soldiers.

But Obama might have been different. This, after all, was the man who, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, declared the war on drugs an utter failure. As Reason magazine’s Jacob Sullum wrote in a 2011 critique of Obama’s drug policy:

    Obama stood apart from hard-line prohibitionists even when he began running for president. In 2007 and 2008, he bemoaned America’s high incarceration rate, warned that the racially disproportionate impact of drug prohibition undermines legal equality, advocated a “public health” approach to drugs emphasizing treatment and training instead of prison, repeatedly indicated that he would take a more tolerant position regarding medical marijuana than George W. Bush, and criticized the Bush administration for twisting science to support policy — a tendency that is nowhere more blatant than in the government’s arbitrary distinctions among psychoactive substances.

Indeed, in his first interview after taking office, Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said that the administration would be toning down the martial rhetoric that had dominated federal drug policy since the Nixon years. “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” Kerlikowske told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”

This was an notable break from previous administrations. Rhetoric does matter, and for a generation in the U.S., cops had incessantly been told that they were in a war with drug offenders — this, in a country where about half the adult population admits to having smoked marijuana.

Unfortunately, while not insignificant, the change in rhetoric has largely been only that. The Obama administration may no longer call it a “war,” but there’s no question that the White House is continuing to fight one. Here’s a quick rundown of where and how Obama’s policies have perpetuated the garrison state

July 4, 2013

Bonfire of the civil liberties

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

A recent article by Dan Gillmore in the Guardian was reposted on Alternet yesterday:

No one with common sense believes Obama is planning to become a dictator. But the mail list question was indeed not paranoid — because Obama, building on the initiatives of his immediate predecessors, has helped create the foundation for a future police state. This has happened with bipartisan support from patriotic but short-sighted members of Congress and, sad to say, the general public.

The American media have played an essential role. For decades, newspaper editors and television programmers, especially local ones, have chased readers and ratings by spewing panic-inducing “journalism” and entertainment that helped foster support for anti-liberty policies. Ignorance, sometimes willful, has long been part of the media equation. Journalists have consistently highlighted the sensational. They’ve ignored statistical realities to hype anecdotal — and extremely rare — events that invite us to worry about vanishingly tiny risks and while shrugging off vastly more likely ones. And then, confronted with evidence of a war on journalism by the people running our government, powerful journalists suggest that their peers — no, their betters — who had the guts to expose government crimes are criminals. Do they have a clue why the First Amendment is all about? Do they fathom the meaning of liberty?

The founders, for all their dramatic flaws, knew what liberty meant. They created a system of power-sharing and competition, knowing that investing too much authority in any institution was an invitation to despotism. Above all, they knew that liberty doesn’t just imply taking risks; it absolutely requires taking risks. Among other protections, the Bill of Rights enshrined an unruly but vital free press and guaranteed that some criminals would escape punishment in order to protect the rest of us from too much government power. How many of those first 10 amendments would be approved by Congress and the states today? Depressingly few, one suspects. We’re afraid.

America has gone through spasms of liberty-crushing policies before, almost always amid real or perceived national emergencies. We’ve come out of them, to one degree or another, with the recognition that we had a Constitution worth protecting and defending, to paraphrase the oath federal office holders take but have so casually ignored in recent years.

What’s different this time is the surveillance infrastructure, plus the countless crimes our lawmakers have invented in federal and state codes. As many people have noted, we can all be charged with something if government wants to find something — the Justice Department under Bush and Obama has insisted that simply violating an online terms of service is a felony, for example. And now that our communications are being recorded and stored (you should take that for granted, despite weaselly government denials), those somethings will be available to people looking for them if they decide you are a nuisance. That is the foundation for tyranny, maybe not in the immediate future but, unless we find a way to turn back, someday soon enough.

H/T to Tim O’Reilly for the link.

July 2, 2013

Learning to love the leaker

Filed under: Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:16

Glenn Reynolds, aka the Instapundit, explains why people who like government legitimacy should love the leakers:

… the Snowden affair occurs in the context of an unprecedented administration war on whistleblowers. And that’s a bad idea because whistleblowing is one of the things that maintains the legitimacy of a government as big, and otherwise unaccountable, as ours.

As recently reported by the McClatchy Newspapers, the Obama administration views whistleblowing and leaks as a species of terrorism. According to McClatchy: “President Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of ‘insider threat’ give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct. … Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.”

The Peace Corps? The Department of Agriculture? Really? There’s irony in this, given President Obama’s famous 2009 pledge to make transparency a “touchstone” in his administration. “For a long time,” he said, “there’s been too much secrecy in this city.” His views on this subject seem to have evolved. Now, like many officeholders, he wants to control information to avoid embarrassment.

But that’s a mistake. Because while leaks can bring embarrassment, leaks — or at least their possibility — also bring legitimacy.

The federal government is so huge that no one can really oversee it. (This was, remember, an excuse offered by Obama’s defenders in the IRS scandals.) It’s certainly too big for congressional oversight to do the job, as is evidenced by the numerous unfolding scandals ranging from the NSA to Benghazi to the IRS, all of which seem to have caught Congress by surprise.

June 21, 2013

“Nobody is listening to your calls” … because the metadata is far more useful

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

John Naughton explains why the calming statement that “nobody is listening to your calls” is far from re-assuring:

‘To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has been collecting details of every telephone call placed in the United States without a warrant was, he intoned, no reason for Americans to be alarmed. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he cooed. The torch was then passed to Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who was likewise on bromide-dispensing duty. “This is just metadata,” she burbled, “there is no content involved.”

At which point the thought uppermost in one’s mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there’s no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people “doing intelligence on counter-terrorism”, even that Stasi-scale mob isn’t a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks.

So in this business at least, content isn’t king. It’s the metadata — the call logs showing who called whom, from which location and for how long — that you want. Why? Because that’s the stuff that is machine-readable, and therefore searchable. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an NSA operative in Fort Meade, Maryland. You have a telephone number of someone you regard as potentially “interesting”. Type the number into a search box and up comes a list of every handset that has ever called, or been called by, it. After that, it’s a matter of seconds before you have a network graph of second-, third- or fourth-degree connections to that original number. Map those on to electronic directories to get names and addresses, obtain a secret authorisation from the Fisa court (which has 11 federal judges so that it can sit round the clock, seven days a week), then dispatch a Prism subpoena to Facebook and co and make some coffee while waiting for the results. Repeat the process with the resulting email contact lists and — bingo! — you have a mass surveillance programme as good as anything Vladimir Putin could put together. And you’ve never had to sully your hands — or your conscience — with that precious “content” that civil libertarians get so worked up about.

June 9, 2013

Original author of the Patriot Act decries its current abuse

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

In the Guardian, Jim Sensenbrenner demands to see the current misuse of the Patriot Act brought to an end:

Last week, the Guardian reported that the Obama administration is collecting records of every call made to, from or within the US, as well as records of many digital communications. President Obama has tried to deflect criticism by claiming “every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.” While some members of Congress were briefed — particularly those on the intelligence committees — most, including myself, were not.

The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law.

I was the chairman of the House judiciary committee when the US was attacked on 11 September 2001. Five days later, the Justice Department delivered its proposal for new legislation. Although I, along with every other American, knew we had to strengthen our ability to combat those targeting our country, this version went too far. I believed then and now that we can defend our country and our liberty at the same time.

[. . .]

In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as “two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress”. But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting.

To obtain a business records order like the one the administration obtained, the Patriot Act requires the government to prove to a special federal court, known as a Fisa court, that it is complying with specific guidelines set by the attorney general and that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Intentionally targeting US citizens is prohibited.

Technically, the administration’s actions were lawful insofar as they were done pursuant to an order from the Fisa court. But based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the Fisa court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended.

June 5, 2013

US policy on Syria is 1979 all over again

Filed under: Middle East, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

In the Miami Herald, Glenn Garvin points out that the US went down this geopolitical path in 1979, with less than stellar results:

The problem in our capital is not that there’s too much division between Republicans and Democrats, but that they’ve merged into a single War Party when it comes to the Middle East.

There might have been at least a tenuous case to be made for intervention in Syria back at the beginning of its civil war, at least if you accept the view that the United States cannot disengage from the Middle East because it is, for the foreseeable future, joined at the hip with Israel.

Unlike Libya or Somalia, strategically useless states in the middle of nowhere in which Washington mysteriously chose to intervene, Syria is a pivot point in the Middle East. It shares long borders with our two major allies in the region, Israel and Jordan, who cannot help but be affected by what goes on in Syria.

Two years ago, we could have acted decisively to end the Syrian civil war before it really got started. We could have made a realpolitik decision to support Assad, who, though a vicious brute to his own people, mostly minds his own business. Or we could have thrown in wholeheartedly with the rebels, picking one faction to provide with arms and international prestige, keeping (maybe) the worst elements out of power.

Instead, the Obama administration dithered, denouncing Assad and drawing lines in the sand over his behavior, then backing away every time he crossed one. We managed to alienate both sides as well as convincing all concerned that our bark had no bite.

In short, Obama has adopted as his guide Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy of 1979, when the United States cluelessly half-yanked the rug from beneath the shah in Iran and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, then primly tsk-tsked their opponents. The eventual result was that two of our allies were replaced with regimes implacably hostile to our interests, which quickly began destabilizing everything around them. Sadly, that’s now the best possible outcome in Syria. If the War Party get its way, you’ll see the worst.

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

June 4, 2013

High Noon for patent trolls

Filed under: Business, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick has some very good news:

Back in February, we were a bit surprised during President Obama’s “Fireside Hangout” when he appeared to speak out against patent trolls. Historically, most politicians had always tiptoed around the issue, in part because the pharma industry seems to view any attack on patent trolls as an existential threat — and, frankly, because some small time patent holders can also make a lot of noise. However, it’s become exceptionally clear that there’s political will to take on patent trolls. We’ve noted five different patent law bills introduced in Congress, all targeting patent trolls in one form or another.

And now, it’s been reported that President Obama is going to come out strongly against patent trolling, directing the USPTO and others to fix certain issues, while also asking Congress to pass further laws to deal with patent trolling. The President will flat out note that patent trolls represent a “drain on the American economy.” The announcement will directly say that “patent trolls” (yes, they use the phrase) are a problem, while also talking about the problem of patent thickets like the infamous “smartphone wars.”

The plan is scheduled to be released later today, but we’ve got a preview of the specific plan, and let’s take a look at each of the suggestions quickly. I’m sure we’ll be discussing the concepts in much more detail for the near future. The plan is split into two different parts: legislative actions (i.e., asking Congress to do something) and executive actions (i.e., ordering administration agencies/departments to do things). Let’s start with the executive actions, since those are likely to have the more immediate impact.

This is excellent news, at least for anyone not currently working as a patent lawyer for one of the trolls…

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