America Needs Trustworthy Spies

By Austin Bay

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Enhancing survival is the gut reason for spying. In the case of the United States, enhancing survival means reducing the likelihood that enemy surprise attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 will succeed.

America's spies and its intelligence agencies stand between the American public and a nuclear 9/11. They stand between America and several thousand other hideous threats as well.

Less morally compelling and many downright criminal motives for spying are now putting that core mission at risk. Edward Snowden's revelations and the appearance of limitless electronic snooping have shaken public trust in U.S. intelligence agencies. That's unfortunate. America needs trustworthy spies, and "trustworthy spy" is not an oxymoron.

America needs lots of trustworthy spies. Identifying, assessing and deflecting thousands of threats, requires diverse skills. All told, the U.S. has 16 different intelligence agencies within its "national intelligence community," or at least 16 that the government admits exist.

As German chancellor Angele Merkel well knows, the National Security Agency focuses on electronic eavesdropping. The National Reconnaissance Office handles imagery (think satellite photos). The Federal Bureau of Investigation's counter-intelligence section spies on foreign spies who are spying on America. The Defense Intelligence Agency focuses on military threats. The Central Intelligence Agency works cloak-and-dagger with the State Department and the Department of Defense. The CIA also works the globe's sewers. Unfortunately, Mafia kingpins, Guatemalan drug dealers, Iranian gangsters, Somali smugglers and Russian mobsters know stuff. CIA fights an endless war and a particularly dirty one, but the truth is every intelligence agency is a warfighter in an endless war.

A vast bodyguard of bureaucratic and fiscal lies protects America's annual cloak-and-dagger budget. Open source estimates run from $70 billion to $80 billion a year. However, these immense figures may not fully account for the cost of Department of Defense and Department of State intelligence support operations.

DOD provides American spies with lots of assets, from commandos to missiles launching satellites. State Department support is more subtle, but perhaps more pervasive. After learning that NSA had tapped Chancellor Merkel's phone, a German newspaper accused the US embassy of being an intelligence and electronic eavesdropping facility. This isn't news. Every national embassy on the planet is an intelligence facility. Ambassadors are representatives, but they are also tasked with gathering political and economic information, information being a nice word for intelligence. Diplomats are intelligence assets, and every nation knows it, which is why host nations try to keep tabs on the whereabouts of foreign diplomats, even those of close allies. Like I said, it's a dirty business.

Capturing phone conversations and electronic data in foreign nations is what the NSA is supposed to do. However, we know international terrorists operate in the U.S. NSA's PRISM surveillance and data-mining program, which Edward Snowden revealed after he fled to Russia, was a counter-terror initiative that used meta-data analysis as a tool for identifying likely terrorists.

So far, the government has failed to reassure the American public that NSA is not collecting specific information on innocent U.S. citizens. Apparently, a number of NSA employees are increasingly dismayed at what they see as President Barack Obama's failure to strongly defend them and their role in the defense of America. Obama has now supposedly ordered NSA to quit spying on the U.N. That's a mistake. The U.N. is a nest of ambassadors and spies.

Trust needs to be restored. Unfortunately, that may take a new president. Obama wants to present himself as a civil libertarian purist. You can't be president and be a civil libertarian purist; in a life and death crisis, the president's job can get very dirty. However, Obama has contributed to public suspicions that the individual privacy of honest citizens has been violated for crass partisan purposes. Obama's critics suspect, with increasingly good reason, that his administration illegally used Internal Revenue Service data in the last election to damage and deter his political opponents. If he used IRS data, why wouldn't he pinch from NSA?

The Wages of Presidential Deception

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, October 31, 2013

By 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was finally done in by his "credibility gap" -- the growing abyss between what he said about, and what was actually happening inside, Vietnam.

"Modified limited hangout" and "inoperative" were infamous euphemisms that Nixon administration officials used to mask lies about the Watergate scandal. After a while, few believed any of the initial Reagan administration disavowals that it was not trading "arms for hostages" in the Iran-Contra scandal.

George H.W. Bush thundered during his campaign to "read my lips: no new taxes," only to agree later to raise them. Bill Clinton's infamous assertion that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" was followed by proof that he did just that with Monica Lewinsky.

The George W. Bush administration warned the nation about stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and never quite recovered its credibility after the WMD were not found. No one believed Bush when he told incompetent FEMA Deputy Director Michael Brown that in the midst of the Katrina mess he was doing a "heck of a job."

Yet the distortions and lack of credibility of the Obama administration have matched and now trumped those of his predecessors. The public may have long ago forgotten that Obama did not close down Guantanamo as promised, or cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, or stop the revolving door of lobbyists coming in and out of the executive branch.

The public may even have forgiven the president when the stimulus bill never lowered unemployment as promised, or when his misleading boasts about vast increases in oil and gas production came to fruition despite, not because, of his efforts.

But the distortions and broken promises have now become so frequent that many at home and abroad are finally tuning out the president. Almost nothing promised about the Affordable Care Act is proving true. Contrary to presidential assurances, Obamacare has not lowered premiums or deductibles. It will not reduce the deficit or improve business competitiveness. It really will alter existing health plans and in some cases lead to their cancellation. Signing up is certainly not as easy buying something online on Amazon.

Two considerations often turn these presidential ethical lapses into political disasters. Unfortunately, both apply to the present administration.

First, the economy must be robust to offset the deception. Voters rejected the first George Bush for deceiving them, largely because the economy tanked in 1992. Yet the public did not turn on an impeached Bill Clinton, given that the economy was quite robust in 1998. Watergate's lies came at a time of oil embargos and stagnation. In contrast, Reagan survived Iran-Contra because of the boom years.

Second, we expect presidential mendacity to be sporadic rather than serial. By 1968, even when LBJ told the truth, no one listened. In 1973, no one believed anything that the Nixon administration asserted.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama has presided over five years of continued economic sluggishness that have not diverted attention from his administration's disingenuousness. If unemployment were down to 5 percent, the gross national product growing at 4 percent and the budget nearly balanced, we might have forgotten about the Benghazi cover-up, the monitoring of AP reporters, the politicization of the IRS and its vast overpayment in income tax credits, the NSA disclosures and the Syrian mess. Or if Obama had spoken untruthfully only once, made false promises just twice, or offered empty boasts merely three times, he might have been forgiven.

If Republicans agree to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill, can they be sure that Obama won't suspend "settled law" on border enforcement as he did with the employer mandate? If Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius assures yet again that Obamacare is suffering from a mere glitch, why should we believe her?

For that matter, will a Saudi ambassador or an Israeli diplomat now trust Obama when he swears that Syria's next use of chemical weapons will cross a red line, or that another newly discovered secret Iranian nuclear facility is a game-changer?

Will German Chancellor Angela Merkel listen to Obama when he insists that the NSA did not monitor her phone? Would the American public trust administration officials if they stated on television that the next attack on a U.S. embassy was due to anger over a mere video, or that Guantanamo would be closed in 2014?

Obama understandably came into office with a sense of immunity. His personal story and nontraditional background made him an emblematic figure. An enthralled media had unfortunately redefined its role as an appendage to, rather than an auditor of, the presidency. After the unpopular Bush administration, even Obama's empty "hope and change" platitudes were considered deep.

Yet after nearly five years of scandals, untruths and hard economic times, a now-ignored Barack Obama has finally learned that even an iconic president can tell one too many untruths.

Obamacare May Be Beyond Salvaging

By Debra J. Saunders

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Apparently, President Barack Obama was fibbing when he said in 2009 that under his Affordable Care Act, "if you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period." On Wednesday, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler rated that pledge as a four-Pinocchio whopper.

On Monday, Peter Lee, the executive director of Covered California, the Golden State's Obamacare exchange, informed the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board that 800,000 to 900,000 Californians will lose their individual health care plans at the end of the year. Nationally, as many as half of the millions of consumers with private plans will lose their coverage and have to buy an Obamacare plan. Asked about Obama's promise, Lee responded that it was "not well-stated" and "may have been an inarticulate way of describing what the realities are."

Lee argues that Covered California policies are better than today's private plans. Exchange policies offer no lifetime cap on benefits, preventive care with no copayments, and no refusal for pre-existing conditions. Quoth Lee, consumers "can shop as they never did before."

Likewise, White House spokesman Jay Carney charged that the current individual health care market is "the Wild West" with "substandard" care. The suggestion is that those who are about to be thrown off their health plans should be grateful.

James Stokes of Novato, Calif., isn't a happy shopper. An Obama voter, he wrote to me that his family premiums will more than double if he buys under Covered California. "Double premiums for the same service as before," Stokes wrote. "Am I missing something here?"

Robert Laszewski, a Virginia insurance industry consultant, won't be sending the White House a thank-you note. Blue Cross canceled his "Cadillac" policy. "Never had a procedure for either my wife or myself turned down," he blogged. "Wellness benefits are without a deductible. It covers mental health, drugs, maternity, anything I can think of."

If he buys on the exchange, Laszewski found, he'll have to pay a 66 percent higher premium for reduced benefits.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton has drafted a "Keep Your Health Plan Act" to save people such as Stokes and Laszewski.

I asked Laszewski what he thought of the Upton bill. "This makes sense, given all of the Obamacare government delays," he replied. He recognizes the downsides: "Will the insurance companies be expected to take all of the sick people with no expectation they will get the healthy people to pay the bills? Will the sick be able to sign up at will while the healthy sit it out?"

"From a political standpoint, it looks like a reasonable compromise," reasoned Joshua Archambault, health policy director for the Pioneer Institute. "From a policy standpoint, it could put the insurers in a very tough spot." Insurers based their new premiums on the expectation that they'd enroll healthy consumers who cannot keep their old plans.

"If we can get a delay, we should delay it," argues Lanhee Chen, a Hoover Institution fellow and former policy adviser to Mitt Romney.

Chen can think of modest fixes -- such as adjusting subsidies to reflect the cost of living -- but sees dicey politics for Republicans who suggest them: "It's just politically so hard because then you get accused of being sympathetic to the law."

Because Obamacare is going to start Jan. 1, I'd like to see a Republicans-to-the-rescue plan. Instead, the R's are going for the cheap-and-easy moment -- for example, Upton's two-page bill that somehow expects insurers to play along.

Maybe Republicans don't think it's in their interest to fix the Affordable Care Act. Or maybe there's no point in reviving the canary in the coal mine. Most likely, like the Democrats who wrote it, the Republicans have no idea how to fix Obamacare.

Broken Promises/Broken Presidencies

by Ken Blackwell

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison.

When Vice President George H.W. Bush accepted the GOP nomination for president in New Orleans in 1988, he memorably said: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Too memorably, as things turned out. He won that election handily, carrying forty states against the hapless Michael Dukakis and 53% of the vote. It was the last comfortable victory the Republicans have seen.

By 1990, however, President Bush was in a bind. He had an army in Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield and he had a solidly Democratic Congress determined to force him to break his tax pledge. His OMB Director, the late Dick Darman, urged him to make a deal with the Hill and get on with the business of governing. When more savvy political advisers protested, citing the “Read my Lips, no new taxes” pledge to the American people, Darman reportedly replied that those were just words some speechwriter put in front of the president.

That may be. But the president’s lips pronounced those words. And his breaking of his over-the-top promise to Americans doomed the Bush presidency. Arguably, the Bush fracturing splintered Ronald Reagan’s winning coalition, a solid majority that Republicans have not been able to reassemble since. Despite a stratospheric 91% approval rating following his lightning victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Gulf War, Bush’s standing sagged for two years. His broken promise fueled grassroots rage and the Perot challenge. Bush 41 fell to Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, gaining an abysmal 37% of the popular vote. Columnist George Will said he had made a sow’s ear of the Reagan silk purse. Even Barbara Bush piled on. Commenting on his retirement sport of skydiving, she puckishly said she hadn’t seen her George take such a plunge since the `92 campaign.

Today, we see millions, yes, millions of Americans, losing their health care coverage. These are the folks who were promised over and over by President Obama “if you like your doctor, you can keep him or her; if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” Well, it turns out that millions of Americans cannot keep their doctors or their plans. They have been betrayed. They are outraged. They should be.

Many of these rejected and dejected millions are Obama voters. As The New York Times’ Ross Douthat has noted, these are folks whose household incomes—in the $50-80,000 range—are too high for subsidies but are too low to easily absorb a doubling of their health care premiums. Moreover, as Douthat wisely points out, these are the folks who chose policies with high deductibles, who were in truth doing the most to keep health care costs down.

These are the folks who work hard and play by the rules. These are the new victims of ObamaCare. These are people whom any administration can ill afford to lose. They are the middle of Middle America.

Now comes news that the entire HealthCare.gov website may have to be rebuilt. Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) says “the way the system is designed, it is not secure.” For those few Americans who have succeeded in getting through the thicket of HealthCare.gov’s intrusive questions and actually registered, Mike Rogers’ words must be chilling. They are probably feeling like German Chancellor Angela Merkel texting her husband: “I wonder if the Obama people reading this text?”

Not to worry, we are assured. Just as Chancellor Merkel is a good friend and ally, the Obama people would never abuse the information that comes into HealthCare.gov, right? That’s why they chose the simon-pure IRS to be the enforcers of ObamaCare. No one could imagine the IRS abusing its authority, right?

The catastrophic rollout of ObamaCare on October 1st has been lampooned left and right. President Obama has good cause for concern when even Jon Stewart shows his contempt for such incompetence. Legend has it Lyndon Johnson knew his Vietnam War strategy had failed when CBS Anchor Walter Cronkite came out against it. “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” he said glumly.

Jon Stewart holds a different status in today’s fragmented media marketplace. Jon Stewart doesn’t tell the nation “that’s the way it is,” as Cronkite pompously pronounced each evening. Instead, Stewart is the King of what’s Cool. His audience is heavily weighted toward the 18-34 demographic. These are not the folks who contribute to political campaigns, perhaps, and even their voting record is spotty. But these are very much the young bloods whom Mr. Obama needs desperately to sign up and sign on. He needs them to rush the website like shoppers at Walmart on Black Friday. He needs them to sign up for ObamaCare so he can afford to pay out the generous subsidies that his health care takeover will require. That’s why the defection of Jon Stewart and the raspberries the president’s signature achievement has gotten from the crew at Saturday Night Live are so important.

We don’t share the view of the cynical Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken. He famously said that democracy is the idea the people should get what they want—and get it good and hard. Nonetheless, the people are getting what they voted for good and hard.

But they voted for Barack Obama based on his pledged word: If you like your plan, you can keep it. As the rollout proceeds—as the November 30th “fix-it” deadline approaches menacingly—millions more will learn to their sorrow that they cannot keep their plans. And they will be bitter about being deceived.

President Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize in October, 2009, five months before passage of ObamaCare. He won it for his efforts to bring peace to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and Syria and other global hotspots. President George H.W. Bush guided U.S. policy through the peaceful reunification of Germany, the mostly non-violent breakup of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, and the bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union. Bush 41, of course, did not win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unlike President Bush’s breaking of his “No new taxes” pledge, President Obama never has to face the voters again. As he told Vladimir Putin, he would have “more flexibility” after he was re-elected. He will need a lot more flexibility to recover from Americans’ outrage at having been deceived about keeping their health plans.

Barneys' 'Racism' Threatens Jay-Z's Street Cred

By Larry Elder

Thursday, October 31, 2013

"World War II Vets Under Attack by Blacks." Can you imagine such a headline in The New York Times -- or anywhere else, except perhaps some in underground racist tract?

But for the second time in three months, an 80-plus-year-old WWII veteran was murdered by black suspects. In Washington, 88-year-old Delbert Belton, who fought and took a bullet to the leg at the Battle of Okinawa, was beaten to death by two black teen suspects. The motive? Police describe the killing as a random attack. In Mississippi, 87-year-old Lawrence E. Thornton, a WWII vet who served as a Navy fireman on a minesweeper, was beaten to death by four black suspects. The motive was robbery.

Even if the vets were racially targeted -- and there is no evidence that they were -- it would be absurd to say that white World War II vets "are under attack" by "black people" because of the bad behavior of some individuals who happen to be black. Yet this is the reasoning the Rev. Jesse Jackson applied following the black teen's death in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case. Jackson, angry when he heard the news of Martin's death, said, "Blacks are under attack."

This brings us to the accusation of "blatant prejudice and discrimination" by the upscale department store, Barneys New York.

In February, plainclothes NYPD cops stopped a black woman and falsely accused her of credit card fraud after she bought a $2,500 Celine handbag. The shopper filed a "notice of claim," announcing her intention to sue. And in April, a black shopper used a debit card to buy a $349 Ferragamo belt. He, too, was falsely accused of fraud.

Now things get even more interesting.

Rapper and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z had entered into a deal with Barneys. A Jay-Z curated, limited-edition collection of designer clothes and accessories rolls out this holiday season, with part of the proceeds going to charity.

A hyper left-wing organization called Color of Change put out an "open letter" appealing to Jay-Z. Another group, Change.org, set up an online petition that calls on Jay-Z to denounce Barneys' "blatant prejudice and discrimination." Some Jay-Z fans now call him a "sell-out" and "Uncle Tom" for giving cover to a racist institution for money. Through his website, Jay-Z said that before he reacted with "emotion," he wanted to get the "facts."

Enter the Rev. Al Sharpton, who never lets "facts" get between him and a race card.

Sharpton, of course, shot to fame by falsely accusing a white man of raping a black teenager; was in the middle of the Crown Heights riots ("If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house"); once called the black mayor of New York an "N-word whore"; and spoke of whites moving into Harlem as "interlopers" and Jews as "diamond merchants." He steps in to calm the waters?!

"Some people want to make this about Jay-Z," Sharpton told reporters, "No, this is about Barneys first." He demanded Barneys "bring the data" to prove that when expensive purchases are made, the store investigates white and minority shoppers equally. Barneys, warned Sharpton, better gather the information quickly and not use the busy holiday season as an excuse. "We'll march all the way down to your store," said Sharpton. "I'll serve turkey right on the corner."

For race hustlers and the eternally aggrieved, Barneys did not unfairly treat a handful of shoppers. No, it's an institutional problem. Anecdotes equal evidence. The election and reelection of President Barack Obama has not stopped so-called "civil rights leaders" from treating America like it's still the back-of-the-bus '50s.

For those who argue racism remains a deep and persistent problem, consider this. Attorney Johnnie Cochran argued that the LAPD had it out for O.J. Simpson because, according to Cochran, Simpson broke the final taboo by marrying a blond, blue-eyed white woman. A few years ago, "Desperate Housewives" ran a sex-themed promo during Monday Night Football. It featured blond actress Nicollette Sheridan and prominent football wide-receiver Terrell Owens. Clad only in a white towel, Sheridan teased and flirted with Owens.

The Federal Communications Commission claimed it received 50,000 complaint letters -- a tiny amount compared to total viewership. But a Freedom of Information request discovered that, in fact, the FCC received fewer than 2,000 letters, with less than 100 -- or less than 5 percent of that total -- saying anything about race.

Let's do the numbers. Out of 17,000,000 viewers, 2,000 bothered to write. Of that, only 100 complained about the promo being racially offensive. That comes to about 5 percent of the .01 percent that wrote -- or a little over .0005 percent of viewers.

Now the discriminated Barneys' customers have already sought legal counsel. Barneys has announced an investigation. Without waiting for the results, Barneys' CEO issued an apology. To ensure that the store keeps its "commitment to fairness and equality" and "zero tolerance for any form of discrimination," Barneys has retained a respected "civil rights expert."

Just tell us it isn't Sharpton.