In Praise of Congress

The representative branch takes a lot of heat, and much of it rightly, but it is still our best hope in the Federal government. Structurally, for the reasons the Founders identified, it is the one most responsive to the People. Lately, there have been a few signs that Congress is beginning to get some things right.

We saw Congress going after John Kerry in yesterday's post, but they are challenging the State Department's madness on more than one level. A House committee has just approved a bill that would require the State Department to explain why they are not treating the Muslim Brotherhood as a named Foreign Terrorist Organization, expressing the sense of Congress that the Brotherhood has met all of the requirements.

Gowdy's investigations continue to gain access to new information that the Clinton State Department worked to keep hidden from Congress.

And here is a congressman who is also a military pilot, standing up for the ranks of the deployed.



These are just glimmers of hope in a sea of corruption and influence. Nevertheless, they aren't nothing.

Trump Rules

Super Tuesday is around the corner. We can tell we are near, this year, because the Republican debate has descended to the middle-school level.

"I don't repeat myself." "You repeated yourself five seconds ago."

This is being widely commended today as what it takes to stand up against Trump. You've got to show, they say, that you're the Alpha.

Alphas don't yip like puppies, boys.

UPDATE: Governor Chris Christie endorses Donald Trump.

UPDATE: Right-leaning journalists are not happy about it, either. Although I don't think Spencer Ackerman ("Attackerman!") qualifies. I met him once -- and he's a solid journalist, the kind of guy who does the legwork that journalism used to be about. He's just not right-leaning.

Philosophy Major? Fries With That?

Well, that's not impossible, but philosophy tops the humanities in expected salaries according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. So in addition to the real project -- learning to think and understand -- your kids might actually get a decent job, too.

Libertarians for Bernie

Since some of you ascribe to that philosophy, in all or part, Reason has a one-sentence argument in favor of Sanders:

[H]e is the candidate least likely to order a ground invasion of Syria.

True.

The Magisterial John F. Kerry

"Well, Senator, he's not supposed to be doing that."

You don't say?

"The fact is we've got people who've been held without charges for 13 years, 14 years in some cases. That's not American... that's not how we operate."

So we have heard, Secretary Kerry. I believe you prefer to kill people without charges, or trial, or evidence beyond metadata. I notice you forgot to mention the facts about how you do indeed operate, but that's understandable: there must be a dizzying lack of oxygen on your High Moral Ground.

Second Marine Attacked, Left for Dead in DC

Not one but two Marines were brutally attacked on February 12 in two unrelated incidents.

One attack happened at a McDonald's when two teenagers assaulted and robbed a veteran Marine.

A second Marine, 35-year-old Michael Schroeder, was left for dead after a being attacked in Northwest D.C. that same day, according to his family.

Temperatures had dropped down to the teens in weather reports. Laying in the cold, dragged between two cars, face-down, head bashed-in and cash missing is how Schroeder’s family says police found him in the Glover Park neighborhood. Thankfully a dad and son driving by in a taxi saw Schroeder and called the authorities.

"We Cannot Trust Our Government, so We Must Trust the Technology"

The Guardian (UK) hosts an American meditation on the breakdown of trust in our governing institutions.

The debate is being publicly framed on both sides as a deep conflict between security and freedom; between the civil rights of users to maintain their privacy, and the legitimate needs of law enforcement and national security. Yet this is the wrong way to think about it.

The fundamental problem is the breakdown of trust in institutions and organizations. In particular, the loss of confidence in oversight of the American national security establishment.

I think of Raven's comments, just yesterday, that he couldn't help but think when a Census-taker took a GPS reading on his house how useful it would be for a bomb. Nor his remark -- which I have made myself, from time to time -- that Facebook is just what you'd want to roll up networks of enemies of the state. It's exactly the kind of database we used to build in Iraq, identifying family and connections and physical locations and precise relationships, except you fill it out for the state willingly. It would sound paranoid except for the Snowden revelations, which showed that the government was in cooperation with all these technology firms to do spying of exactly that sort. We would dismiss it, in other words, if it were not demonstrably true.

The FBI's move on Apple reminds us all of their coordination with Lois Lerner at the IRS -- it's six years now that the Albuquerque TEA Party has been waiting on its 501(c)3 status. The FBI, having had agents coordinate with Lerner's section, was then assigned to investigate the case. "Surprisingly," after a two-year investigation, no one was charged. Members of Congress are making noises the the effect that they will not accept a repeat of that in the case of former Secretary Clinton, but of course they cannot force the FBI or the DOJ to take action. The President of the United States has repeatedly said that he doesn't think she did anything wrong, and rather than being hustled off to court for her glaringly obvious violations of national security classification law, she is the frontrunner in the Democratic primary to become his replacement in the highest office in the land.

The government has repeatedly failed to hold wrongdoers accountable. More than that, it has protected them. It has enabled corruption in the highest offices, and is currently doing its best to enable its continuance.

If the government wants our trust back, and the legitimacy that comes from having the faith of the American people, it needs to earn it. It needs to start proving that it will prosecute and punish those in power who abuse authority, those in power who break laws, those in power who betray trusts.

If it will not, the Federal government of the United States will begin a long fall. It cannot survive in its current form if it is mistrusted by the American people. Right now, such mistrust is rational. If that is to change, the institutions need to start performing. Anyone in the Federal bureaucracy -- political appointees or not -- who wants Americans to trust and have faith in government needs to take up this charge. Any individuals who want an America that heavily involves government solutions to practical problems needs to devote themselves to pushing for accountability and punishment for the wicked or corrupt.

Otherwise, as this case of technology shows, we the People shall begin finding ways to do without the government of the United States.

Sorities at Sea

Former SECNAV Sean O'Keefe says the Navy should stop worrying about having 300 ships:

"The resignation of one of my predecessors, Jim Webb, was prompted at what he thought was the outrage of falling below the 600-ship Navy," O'Keefe said. "You look back on it as if it was the seminal moment of some strategic shift and it wasn't. It was less a statement of capability and more of just a marker on the wall of what's a measure of merit."

Webb wasn't immediately available for comment.

Will it still be a navy with 271 ships instead of 300? Sure, I suppose. Could it theoretically be as capable with 271 ships as 300? Sure, or even more, depending on the exact mix of ships.

However, is the ~300 ship navy as capable as a 600 ship navy? We'd have to say that increases in ISR and telecommunications and other technologies have improved the capacities of our ships versus the Reagan administration, and that's a big deal for the Navy. Probably one ship can control more sea than it used to do.

Nevertheless, it's not an idle question. 300 ships is just not 600 ships. 250 ships is not 300.

Hillary for Prison 2016 Update: Gee, These Emails Are Worded A Lot Like Top Secret Documents

This is what the Clinton campaign likes to refer to as "overclassification":

U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as “top secret” because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.

The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server…

Under the law and government rules, U.S. officials and contractors may not transmit any classified information – not only documents – outside secure, government-controlled channels. Such information should not be sent even through the government’s .gov email network.

Readers of the Hall understand that this last is a remarkable understatement. Not only must you not transmit Top Secret information through a .gov email, you may not transmit it through a .sgov email -- the secured, air-gapped system for merely Secret information. Top Secret information has an even more tightly controlled system where physical access to the computers is restricted by lock and key, as well as by additional information controls should you manage to physically reach such a computer.

But no, let's just retype the same information into unencrypted, unsecure private email and transmit it via a server kept in some Mom and Pop's bathroom in an industrial park. That's just as good, right? Who'd think to look there?

Why Not Add an Impeachment to the 2016 Election Season?

With the fate of the Supreme Court already hanging in the balance, and one frontrunner promising to prosecute the other if elected, who'll notice a little more drama?

[Speaker of the House Paul] Ryan reminded reporters that Congress voted overwhelmingly for the National Defense Authorization Act, which contains a provision saying the president may not move Guantanamo inmates to U.S. soil.

"We are making legal preparations if the president tries to break the law," Ryan said. "And what boggles my mind, is that the president is contemplating directing the military to knowingly break the law."

No dodging that fight, if he does. Military officers will have to refuse clearly illegal orders, and he'll have to try to prosecute them for insubordination. Think he's got the guts for that?

Sturgill Simpson

Merle Haggard is a fan. I wasn't too impressed the first time around, but tonight I ran into this Outlaw Country jam.

There's a little NSFW language, so don't blast it in the office. Well, unless you have a particularly cool office.



Here's a Gospel piece you can listen to at work just fine.

Trump v. Clinton

A hypothetical monologue.

Trump will capitalize on his reputation as a truth-teller, and be vicious about both Clinton’s sudden changes of position (e.g. the switch on gay marriage, plus the affected economic populism of her run against Sanders) and her perceived dishonesty. One can already imagine the monologue:

“She lies so much. Everything she says is a lie. I’ve never seen someone who lies so much in my life. Let me tell you three lies she’s told. She made up a story about how she was ducking sniper fire! There was no sniper fire. She made it up! How do you forget a thing like that? She said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the guy who climbed Mount Everest. He hadn’t even climbed it when she was born! Total lie! She lied about the emails, of course, as we all know, and is probably going to be indicted. You know she said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! It was a lie! Thousands of American soldiers are dead because of her. Not only does she lie, her lies kill people. That’s four lies, I said I’d give you three. You can’t even count them. You want to go on PolitiFact, see how many lies she has? It takes you an hour to read them all! In fact, they ask her, she doesn’t even say she hasn’t lied. They asked her straight up, she says she usually tries to tell the truth! Ooooh, she tries! Come on! This is a person, every single word out of her mouth is a lie. Nobody trusts her. Check the polls, nobody trusts her. Yuge liar.”

The article goes on to say that some of this is fair and some of it isn't. The only one that isn't fair is the hit on Iraqi WMD. She really did say it, but there really were WMD. That won't save her, though, because her own party's partisans have spent so long convincing the American people that there never were.

UPDATE: An encyclopedia against Clinton from the Daily KOS. The only issue on which she looks better to them than Bernie is guns -- where Bernie looks better to me.

Fast Times in Venezuela

A lonely blogger reports:

Throughout last night, panicked people told their stories of state-sponsored paramilitaries on motorcycles roaming middle class neighborhoods, shooting at people and storming into apartment buildings, shooting at anyone who seemed like he might be protesting....

Online media is next, a city of 645,000 inhabitants has been taken off the internet amid mounting repression, and this blog itself has been the object of a Facebook “block” campaign.

What we saw were not “street clashes”, what we saw is a state-hatched offensive to suppress and terrorize its opponents.

Is it true? Hard to say, because so much is going on that nobody might even notice paramilitary gangs. Caracas has in recent week seen outages of drinking water, a trial of its mayor, hijackings of food trucks, power rationing, a spike in gasoline prices, a Zika outbreak, a plague of frogs... OK, not the last one, but still.

And Now For Something Completely Different

USAJOBS is Bogus

The American Legion reports. This certainly matches my experience.

Killing You on Metadata

Wretchard:

[F]ormer Director of the CIA and NSA, General Michael Hayden, explained that the administration's drone kill list, contrary to the narrative, was not a masterpiece of judicial and Solomonic judgment by president Obama but simply the result of a computer program. “We kill people based on metadata,” Hayden said.

He then qualified that stark assertion by reassuring the audience that the US government doesn’t kill American citizens on the basis of their metadata. They only kill foreigners.

Pakistanis, specifically. It turns out that the NSA hoovers up all the metadata of 55m mobile phone users in Pakistan and then feeds them into a machine-learning algorithm which supposedly identifies likely couriers working to shuttle messages and information between terrorists.

A program prints it out. Obama reads it and signs it. In a very real sense occupant of the Oval Office has been partially replaced by a hit-list generator actually called Skynet, as Ars Technica explains.

Foreign Policy reports on an independent review of the White House's drone program that uses a report-card rating system. On not selling drones recklessly to foreign states, they get a C. Overall, they get an F.

The number of civilians killed or wounded in the strikes has also generated controversy and raised concerns that the operations foment more violent extremism directed at the United States. The Obama administration has insisted only a small number of civilians have been inadvertently killed in the strikes. Independent estimates from the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, which are based mainly on local media reports, have put the number in the hundreds, ranging from about 300 to more than 900 between 2004 and 2014. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates several thousand civilians have died in the drone bombing raids.

This comes to mind in part because of the President's self-congratulatory speech on closing GitMo. The reason he can consider closing that facility's prison is that he does not take prisoners. He kills everyone a computer program thinks even might be associated with terrorism, based on opaque metadata that is not subject to an independent review based on other evidence, nor is this killing subject to due process of any kind.

Nevertheless, the GitMo speech was delivered as yet another lecture from the High Moral Ground.

Apple and the FBI

So I've not seen the debate reach the Hall yet, so I figured this was a good time to put in my $0.02 about it.  And I don't suppose my opinion on the matter will surprise anyone.  That said, let's first explain exactly what the situation is.

Campus Carry Update (and a Floor Debate on the Klan)

The Campus Carry bill has been assigned to the Georgia Senate's Judiciary Committee, chaired by one Joshua McKoon. McKoon is a fairly reliable friend of the NRA, but he is in the news most recently for taking the floor to condemn a fellow Republican -- a state senator from Jefferson, Georgia -- for making a remark that appeared supportive of the original Ku Klux Klan.



It is a little strange that we'd be having that discussion in 2016, when I thought the Klan's place in Georgia history was well understood. Obviously they were a terrorist organization, as McKoon says, carrying on the war by other means. There is a distinction worth making between the Klan that existed immediately after the war and the one that was 'reborn' around the time of the movie Birth of a Nation. There is a distinction worth making between that second Klan and the one(s) that exist now. Those distinctions are for clarity among historians, though: none of them were any good.

This is Legislative Day 26, if you're counting. 14 more working days until they have to go away and leave us in peace.

Introduction to Statistical Mechanics

Via Armed Liberal:

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

I'm Pretty Sure That's Not True

Headline: "Hillary Clinton: The Leader You Want When The World Ends."

So, when the world ends, I'll want our enemies read in on all our classified material?