Janesdiggo's List: Politics

• “The cases of the UK and Canada were exceptional, he added, because both Gordon Brown and Stephen Harper were in such political trouble at home that the survival of their governments was at stake,” the cable records Mr. Levitte as explaining.
• That Mr. Sarkozy reached out to help embattled foreign colleagues with a little ceremony shows the sense of club among world leaders.

• Mr. Lewis, a Republican and one of the most powerful appropriators in Congress, had denied wrongdoing since the investigation became public four years ago. The inquiry ended as Mr. Lewis is vying to return as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, a decision that Republican lawmakers were likely to make next week.
• Prosecutors had been looking into spending projects that Mr. Lewis directed to clients of the lobbyist Bill Lowery, a former congressman. Some of those clients also made donations to Mr. Lewis’s re-election campaigns and political action committee.
• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a Washington watchdog group, was highly critical of the decision to end the investigation. It maintained that Mr. Lewis had used his office to steer earmarks to some of his biggest campaign donors.

  • The article says nothing about WHY the DOJ dropped the inquire

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• Context of '1945-1975: NSA’s Operation Shamrock Secretly Monitors US Citizens’ Overseas Communications'

• It’s not clear how close Canada and the United States are to signing a deal that would more closely intermesh Canadian and U.S. security bureaucracies. The Prime Minister’s Office refused to comment on the matter on Wednesday evening, and Canadian officials denied an announcement is imminent

  • Typical, why should they tell us anything
• A joint approaching to screening people seeking to enter the United States or Canada, including new security investment in the top 10 publicly owned ports of entry.
• including through the use of biometrics,
• -Cross-border sharing of information on serious offenders, criminals and suspects.
• organizing bi-national port of entry committees to co-ordinate planning and funding, building, expanding or modernizing shared border management facilities and border infrastructure where appropriate, and using information technology solutions, we intend to enhance our risk-management practices
• also include a closer working relationship for the Canadian and U.S. militaries in emergencies,
• Liberal transport critic John McCallum said he’s surprised the Harper government has been engaged in such a potentially big trade and security deal with the United States without informing Canadians or discussing it in advance with Parliament.

  • No surprise, the is SOP for Harper
• “If someone is inadmissible to the U.S., does this mean they’re not allowed in Canada either?”
• The draft statement suggests the Canadian government is acceding to American security demands in order to protect the flow of cross-border trade.
• "To increase security, counter fraud and improve efficiency, we intend to work together to establish and verify the identities of travelers and conduct screenings at the earliest possible opportunity."
• The agreement would also combine efforts to fight terror threats and computer hackers.
• "We intend to work together to prevent, respond to, and recover from physical and cyber disruptions of critical infrastructure and to implement a comprehensive cross-border approach to strengthen the resilience of our critical and cyber infrastructure."

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• The debate over the public option wasn’t what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican “moderates” weren’t negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.
• The skeptic might say that such a threat is not credible.  At the moment, it may not be. Only the President can change that.  The first time he makes a threat and then carries it out is when he gains credibility. 

• The Palin factor is causing consternation among other likely candidates, who are understandably reluctant to get out ahead of a potential locomotive without first knowing how to apply the brakes.
• The second, more important, dynamic speaks to the uncertainty of the Tea Party's role in these primary contests.

• Under pressure from Beijing, the following countries joined China’s boycott of the ceremony: Serbia, Morocco, Pakistan, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Colombia, Ukraine, Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

  • What's interesting here is the number of countries the US considers to be 'friends': Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia

• “It is imprudent in the extreme to borrow $6-billion to give large, already powerful, corporations a tax break when you’re running a $56-billion deficit,” he said. “It is a fundamental disagreement on the economic policy of our country.”
• This clear signal from the Liberal Leader that his party is ready and willing to fight an election over the budget evokes memories of August, 2009, when a combative Mr. Ignatieff vowed to bring down the government.
• But this declaration will force NDP Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe to ask themselves whether and on what grounds they might be willing to prop up a minority Conservative government that is well into its third year.
• “The Conservatives only win when they pretend to be a liberal party. They have to defang themselves.”

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• So all that people who live in the intellectually hermetic world of the right ever hear is that government employment is soaring. And I’m sure that they’ll keep on believing that, for years to come.
• So all that people who live in the intellectually hermetic world of the right ever hear is that government employment is soaring. And I’m sure that they’ll keep on believing that, for years to come.

• The left likes to argue to the head; conservatives know that the further down you go, the more persuasive you will be.
• “morality” is a very different word than in arguments directed at the head. “Morality” here is about thou-shalt-nots, about Sodom and Gomorrah, about the deeply personal and very concrete things each of us hides even from ourselves.
• So when the progressive rhetorician utters the word “morality” to refer to large and impersonal concepts, the hearer is apt to hear it as referring to these deep-down concerns, and the primal fear the word evokes makes it impossible to hear the head-argument.

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• Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) is an electronic-eavesdropping agency that gathers intelligence from abroad
• CSEC’s mission and future, which includes plans for an $880-million headquarters housing hundreds of mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists by 2015.
• CSIS – Canada’s human-intelligence, or “HumInt” agency – has its people and agents train their actual eyes and ears on security threats inside the country.

  • Great, these guys spy on us
• CSEC – the “signals-intelligence” or “SigInt” counterpart – relies almost wholly on technology to hear what people are saying abroad (spying on Canadians is illegal). Since being formed in the 1940s, this agency has rarely told anyone the fruits of its findings, save for its two masters – the Department of National Defence and the Privy Council Office.

  • If spying on Cdns is illegal, why do we have CSIS??
• CSEC’s 1,700 staff and $300-million budget are double what they were a decade ago
• there is also a somewhat unique arrangement that will commit Ottawa to spend up to $5-billion more over the next 34 years. These costs are part of a “public-private partnership” – incorporating a complex mix of debt-servicing costs, standard-operating payments and an unusual facilities-management deal with a private consortium.

  • A 'private consortium'??? WTF

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• The Australian-based Plenary Group won a competitive bidding process and is to absorb the cost of construction, upkeep and basic facilities management while the federal government “buys” the property over 34 years – much like the way a condominium owner pays off a long-term mortgage and monthly maintenance fees.

  • Ah, it's a building consortium; for a moment there thought they were making CSEC privately owned

• Part of the plan involves contracting out about 90 government jobs to the private-sector consortium that will manage the new buildings over the next 34 years. These contractors will do the less sensitive work – such as laying cables around the building, running an information-technology help desk or working as security guards. They will not be cryptographers or signals spies.
• Even so, the plan has incensed some CSEC staff who argue that top secrets are at risk, given that a rotating cast of contractors will be less loyal than sworn-to-secrecy federal employees.

• the United States muddies its moral and diplomatic authority.

  • Assuming it has ever had such authority
• the United States muddies its moral and diplomatic authority.

• We have now produced on the left an echo chamber like that on the far right, where the scurrilous charges of marginal fanatics are disseminated through electronic media and end up, cleansed of their original associations, as respectable opinion.

• President Nicolas Sarkozy began to condemn criminals of “foreign origin”; hundreds of Roma encampments were violently razed; and more than 1,000 of the 20,000 Roma in France were deported.
• Roma have become second-class citizens of the European Union, able to travel freely within the union’s borders but, because of the “transitional” nature of their civil status, allowed to stay in other countries for only three months at a time.

• Sarah Palin has been attacking Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative as yet another example of “the nanny state run amok.” 
• a group of retired top brass and others released a report claiming that 27% of Americans between 17 and 24 are “too fat to fight.
• Just as the year ended, however, the Education Trust issued a report indicating that nearly a quarter of all applicants to the Armed Forces, despite having a high-school diploma, can’t pass the necessary military entrance exam. 
• General David Petraeus
• at the head of the most powerfully destructive force in the Middle East, and later Central Asia, he has won no outright victories and conquered nothing.  His triumph in Iraq in 2006-2007 may yet prove more “confected” than convincing.
• our military’s biting criticism of itself is one of the few positive signs in a fighting force that is otherwise overstretched, deeply frustrated, and ridiculously overpraised by genuflecting politicians.
• In Afghanistan, Rosen points out, most villagers see our troops making common cause with a despised and predatory government. 
• Small wonder that, more than nine years later, a majority of Afghans say they want to be liberated from us.
• The historian John Lukacs once noted: “There are many things wrong with the internationalist idea to Make the World Safe for Democracy, one of them being that it is not that different from the nationalist idea that What Is Good for America Is Good for the World.”
• Though we officially seek to extinguish terrorists, our actions abroad serve as obvious accelerants to terror. 

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