THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Today Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he pleaded with the United States to be cautious in its dealings with Syria. Thanks to the type of journalistic legwork you have come to expect from your Wonkette, we were able to turn up the original draft of Putin’s op-ed, before his handlers and diplomats and people with a better command of the English language put their stamps on it. We present it here for your enlightenment.

Greetings, American swine friends. I write to you today from the great city of Moscow, where we are enjoying unusually balmy September weather of nearly 20 degrees on your Fahrenheit scale. Much warmer than relations between your President Obama and myself, yes? Certainly warmer than the liquid nitrogen rocket fuel I have just ordered our glorious Russian military to pump into our nuclear missiles in preparation for launch.

Ha ha, I kid! Is old Cold War joke, not unlike what your hero President Reagan used to make, yes? Please everyone go change mass-produced capitalist underwear from Hanes. I will wait.

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Some days, the Afghan soldiers worry that the mud walls around their headquarters in this embattled district are barely enough to keep the Taliban out. Perhaps more problematic is that the crumbling facade appears to be keeping the soldiers in.

Nolay Base takes direct fire almost every day from the Taliban. With more forces lost here than almost any other district in the country, the Afghan soldiers seldom leave the installation, and mostly refuse to conduct missions — too dangerous, they say. And when soldiers head out to go on brief home leaves, a growing number of them desert rather than return, their commanders say.

“It’s difficult to find local people who are against the Taliban,” said the executive officer of the brigade here, Col. Abdulhai Neshat. “This place is like a prison.”

In this corner of Helmand Province, widely agreed to be the most critical running battle in the country today, Afghan forces are in trouble. Though it does not reflect the broader security situation in Afghanistan, Sangin (pronounced SANG-in) offers a troubling portrait of life where the Taliban decides to make its mark and the Americans no longer fight, a situation that is likely to multiply as coalition forces completely withdraw next year.

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A young man from Alabama who traveled to Somalia and became an infamous Islamist militant, commanding guerrilla forces and earning a $5 million American bounty on his head, was believed to have been killed by his former extremist allies on Thursday, according to news reports and Islamist Web sites.

The jihadist, Omar Hammami, known for his rap-infused propaganda videos for the Shabab, a brutal Islamist group in Somalia, was reported killed in an ambush on Thursday morning. If true, his death would bring to a close one of the more unusual chapters in more than two decades of fighting in the Horn of Africa.

But Mr. Hammami, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, “the American,” has been declared dead before, only to resurface alive.

There is little question that Mr. Hammami has been on the run from his former comrades. His recent troubles brought to the surface rifts within militant circles in Somalia.

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Pope Francis responded at great length to questions from Eugenio Scalfari, the former editor of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, in a letter published Wednesday. In it, he said that non-believers must “obey their conscience,” because “God forgives those who obey their conscience.”

The carefully-worded letter, which stretched over four full printed pages, stopped short of declaring that atheists and agnostics get into Heaven, but did suggest that “our actions” (“nostro agire“) can be good or bad even outside of the framework of the Church.

However, he did not, as the Telegraph reported, actually say that “mercy of God has no limits” in a manner that “encompassed even non-believers.” He wrote instead that “God’s mercy has no limits if you got to Him with a sincere and contrite heart” (“la misericordia di Dio non ha limiti se ci si rivolge a lui con cuore sincero e contrito“). Non-believers, the Pope asserts, can live good lives if they perform good actions.

// posted by montag @ 1:37 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

There is nothing quite like coming off a patrol, your body-armor-shaped sweat stains still drying and ears ringing from grenades, only to have the hostess at T.G.I. Friday’s tell you to wait a few. Sorry, sergeant, we’ve got to clear a table.

Or hovering over the desert for hours in a throttled-down Apache helicopter on an oh-dark-30 stakeout, disassembling half a dozen Taliban fighters with your chain gun as they plant a roadside bomb, only to get back to base and discover that the Canadian-themed donut shop is selling just coffee because insurgents blew up the latest inbound shipment of donut mix.

What’s a man gotta do to get a maple-glazed in this war?

Soon enough, he won’t be able to. The Kandahar Airfield boardwalk, for a decade the surreal yet comfortingly familiar heart of the biggest NATO base in Afghanistan, is closing down.

The festive, elevated rectangle of shops and fast-food vendors built around a small soccer field and running track will inevitably live on in the war stories of tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops and contractors who’ve lived at Kandahar Airfield or passed through it on the way to smaller combat outposts.

The businesses will shut down in phases, beginning next month, with the final one closing before the end of 2014, base officials said in an emailed statement. Most of the buildings will be torn down, though the walkway and the sports facilities will remain awhile.

The closure plan mirrors the withdrawal of U.S. troops as the NATO coalition here shrinks in advance of ending its combat mission next year. The 62,000 or so U.S. troops still in Afghanistan are expected to begin leaving in significant numbers after this year’s summer fighting season tapers.

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Federal prosecutors Wednesday charged an ex-TSA worker and former National Guardsman with being responsible for hoaxes and making false threats against Los Angeles International Airport.

Nna Alpha Onuoha, 29, was arrested Tuesday night at a church in Riverside, Calif., after a daylong search by multiple federal and local agencies. He allegedly made a series of threats that began when he resigned that day from the Transportation Security Administration and later turned in a package.

Prior to his resignation, Onuoha had been suspended after he chastised a teenage girl in June about her attire.

Onuoha made an initial appearance Wednesday at U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, but at the request of his deputy federal public defender, the detention hearing was continued to Monday.

He remains in custody. If convicted of the federal charges, Onuoha faces up to 15 years in prison.

According to an affidavit in the case, Onuoha resigned about 9 a.m. PDT Tuesday. About four hours later, he returned to TSA headquarters at LAX and left a sealed express mail envelope addressed to a TSA manager.

He then allegedly called the TSA checkpoint at Terminal 3 a few minutes later. According to an affidavit, he cautioned that the manager should open the "package."

During the same call he advised "that LAX should be evacuated immediately starting with Terminal 2" and then in a second call indicated Terminals 2, 3 and 6 "needed to be evacuated immediately and the TSA was running out of time."

He then allegedly called LAX police and said "they should evacuate the entire airport."

Onuoah, an employee since 2006, had been suspended from July 21 to July 27 for telling the 15-year-old girl to "cover up," according to the court filing.

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A proposal by the United States and New Zealand to create a huge ocean reserve in Antarctic waters has been sharply reduced in scale after opposition from Russia and other nations with large fishing industries. Environmentalists warned that the ambitious project was being badly undermined.

The Ross Sea marine protected area that the two governments proposed last year was to have set aside about 875,000 square miles of the Southern Ocean where commercial fishing would be sharply limited. The area’s relatively pristine ecosystem is crucial to the survival of thousands of species, including whales, seals and penguins, as well as the small fish and crustaceans on which they depend.

On Friday, though, New Zealand announced that the overall size of the proposed reserve was being reduced by 40 percent to gain the support of member nations on the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the international body that sets conservation policy for the Southern Ocean, of which the Ross Sea is a part. Commission delegates are scheduled to meet next month in Hobart, Australia, to consider the proposal.

It was clear in July that the American-New Zealand proposal was on shaky ground after a commission meeting in Bremerhaven, Germany, broke up without agreement. Supporters of the proposal expected delegates there to work on ironing out details, and were stunned when Russia and Ukraine raised legal and procedural questions that halted the discussion, and questioned the commission’s authority to create such reserves. Norway, China and Japan led other fishing nations in calling for smaller reserves, and for “sunset clause” provisions that would allow for the possibility of eventual commercial exploitation of the areas.

Most of the fishing activity in the Ross Sea now is directed at the slow-maturing Patagonian toothfish, often marketed as Chilean sea bass. But there is growing interest in harvesting krill, the tiny creatures that are a pillar of the Southern Ocean ecosystem, and many fishing nations do not want to seal off any future possibilities as fish stocks elsewhere in the world are depleted.

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Two Colorado Democrats who provided crucial support for a slate of tough new gun-control laws were voted out of office on Tuesday in a recall vote widely seen as a test of popular support for gun restrictions after mass shootings in a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school.

The election, which came five months after the United States Senate defeated several gun restrictions, handed another loss to gun-control supporters. It also gave moderate lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.

The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.

In an emotional concession speech, Mr. Morse called the loss of his seat “purely symbolic” and defended the record of the last legislative session as “phenomenal.”

“We made Colorado safer from gun violence,” he said afterward, as his supporters trickled away from a hotel ballroom here in his district. “If it cost me my political career, that’s a small price to pay.”

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The Diplomatic Security Training Center, set back a few miles from the Virginia border, trains all diplomatic security agents, as well as foreign service officers heading to high-threat posts. But the Summit Point facility is only an interim one, built in 2007 to augment previous training sites that the Government Accountability Office called “inadequate” and said posed a “critical challenge” to training.

Today, the State Department says the temporary facility decreases productivity, interrupts scheduling and increases costs. That’s why the department hopes the site won’t be its permanent home.

As Gregory Starr, the acting assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, told Congress in July: “The capacity of the current facility that we are leasing in West Virginia cannot meet our training needs . . . doesn’t even meet our highest threat-level requirements and is a leased facility that at some point may not be available to us.”

Starr said the site couldn’t train as many people as State wanted. While the department’s goal is to train more than 8,000 students per year, the facility’s limitations mean that only about 4,900 will receive training over the next fiscal year. Starr testified that in some cases, officials sent to high-threat posts took only a four-hour online course instead of the intensive in-person course they should receive...

[T]he General Services Administration, the agency that’s in charge of federal properties, picked a site near Virginia’s Fort Pickett, an Army National Guard base southwest of Richmond. The new site, which could meet the training goal of more than 8,000 new students each year, would include indoor and outdoor firing and explosives ranges, driving tracks, staging grounds for live training exercises and other facilities to allow students and staff to work and live on site.

But progress on the facility has stalled. The final environmental impact study – the next step in the process – missed its deadline. When she was asked about the department’s plans, State Department Senior Management Analyst Christina Maier said in an email that budget sequestration had forced the administration to re-evaluate the plans.

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The last and most urgent question – whether any of them will receive the death penalty – will be answered Wednesday, when they are sentenced at a morning hearing. The family of the victim has demanded death sentences, and much of the public seemed to share their anger, flooding the streets last year to demand swift punishment in the case. The police here were braced for aftershocks that might follow the sentencing...

After the verdict, a group of protesters outside chanted, “Hang the rapists! Hang the rapists! Hang the juvenile! Hang the juvenile!” Five men were wearing black hoods, with hangman’s nooses around their necks. “I just want them to be hanged because there is no other way to stop it,” said Vikas Tyagi, 31, who was with the group. “We are the youth of India, and we are her voice.”...

The victim’s parents have called for the death penalty throughout the process.

“These monsters should be hanged,” said her mother, Asha Devi, in an interview to the news channel NDTV, as the family left for court on Tuesday morning. “When I saw her in the hospital later, she burst into tears and said, ‘Mummy, they beat me up very brutally.'” Her father, Badri Nath Singh, agreed.

“If they are not hanged,” he told the reporter, “it will be a shame for everyone.”

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The alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria thrusts the international spotlight onto the same deadly "nerve agents" stored at Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County.

Sarin, one of the world's most dangerous chemical warfare agents, has been identified by the United States as the substance loaded onto rockets on Aug. 21 and shot into the suburbs of Damascus. The Obama administration estimates that more than 1,400 people died.

Syrian President Bashar Assad is also thought to have used a network of front companies to import the precursors needed to make VX, the deadliest nerve agent ever created, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Both sarin and VX are internationally banned, both are stored in Madison County and both are scheduled to be destroyed there by a massive plant that is 72 percent complete. The plant is supposed to be finished in 2015, but it will take until 2020 for it to become operational. Then, according to the current timeline, it will take from 2020 to 2023 to destroy the weapons, said Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a Berea-based citizens group that monitors the remaining weapons in Kentucky and Pueblo, Colo.

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For several decades now, we have celebrated sharp practices and gunslinger business-school schemes by which ordinary people get robbed of their jobs, their pensions, their homes, and their livelihoods, or just generally get ground up in schemes concocted by people they don't even know. We based our entire national economy on the law of the jungle, and then we rigged the jungle. This country is now thick with victims who don't know what happened to them, and how, and it is also thick with clever dicks who have made their fortunes in the grinding up of people whom they do not know. The only thing the country is not thick with is conscence. This is another one of the casual cruelties we are training ourselves to overlook.

Ultimately, it is cruelty that is the real New Normal. We accept it every time we accept that cops can stop teenagers for "furtive movements," or when they respond to every unusual situation as though it were taking place atop Mount Suribachi. We accept it every time we accept that "the economy" is some faceless force over which we have no control, and that the plight of its victims are somehow the natural result of immutable natural laws, instead of the natural result of thousands of individual decisions, many of which were made down the marble halls not 10 feet from this keyboard, where the Congress is back to discuss, seriously, how a distant government could do such horrible things to its own citizens.

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At a closed-door meeting in early 2011, Wall Street regulators were close to throwing in the towel on their biggest case.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s eight-member Lehman Brothers team, having hit one dead end after another over the previous two years, concluded that suing the bank’s executives would be legally unjustified. The group, noting that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents had already walked away from a parallel criminal case, reached unanimous agreement to close its most prominent investigation stemming from the financial crisis, according to officials who attended the meeting, which has not been reported previously.

But Mary L. Schapiro, the S.E.C. chairwoman, disagreed. She pushed George S. Canellos, who supervised the Lehman investigation as head of the S.E.C.’s New York office, to explain how executives who presided over the biggest bankruptcy in United States history could escape without a single civil charge.

“I don’t get it,” she said during a tense exchange with Mr. Canellos in her private conference room in Washington, according to the officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly. “Why is there no case?” she continued, staring at Mr. Canellos, instructing him to continue investigating whether Lehman misled investors. “The world won’t understand.”

She was right. Five years after Lehman’s collapse hastened a worldwide economic panic, the government faces lingering questions about the decision to spare executives like Richard S. Fuld Jr., who ran Lehman for 14 years until its demise. Not a single senior executive from any Wall Street bank faced criminal charges from the crisis, either. And the government’s deadline for filing most charges will expire this month, the anniversary of Lehman’s collapse, providing a reminder of the case and its unpopular outcome.

Federal prosecutors and the S.E.C. have never officially announced their decision to close the Lehman investigation.

But a New York Times examination of the case, based on interviews with more than a dozen lawyers and officials involved in the inquiry and a review of bankruptcy court documents, pulls back a curtain on private deliberations and clashing philosophies surrounding the decision not to bring charges. The S.E.C. quietly reached the decision in 2012 after officials sparred for months over whether Lehman omitted “material” information in disclosures to investors, an important legal standard. Mr. Canellos argued that the omissions were not material. And those who questioned that reasoning — like Ms. Schapiro, as well as some accountants and enforcement officials — acquiesced to Mr. Canellos’s team, which was closest to the evidence.

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National Football League (NFL) player Arian Foster of the Houston Texans recently said that he wanted his 4-year-old daughter to be open to all religious ideas and would even teach her about the “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” a mock religion used by atheists to protest intelligent design being taught as science.

In a column for Yahoo Shine last week, Foster listed six things that he would try to teach his daughter, Zeniah. The final item was the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

“There are billions of people on Earth with hundreds of religions and sects that trickle off each other,” he wrote. “I will never tell her what to believe in. I know parents are very influential on kids’ spiritual beliefs and that can be a positive or negative thing. I can give her a basic understanding of religions when she starts showing interest and asking questions. But I will remain silent otherwise.”

“How can I make a young mind believe this is the truth for them when they don’t yet have the capacity nor the cognitive desire to delve into something like this?” Foster asked. “If she shows interest I would advise her to fully investigate a religion and see if it fits her. And if she chooses none of the above, I’ll be fine with that as well.”

“The values I instill in her should guide her to her decision. What’s most important, I believe, is to support her decision no matter what.”

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On a growing number of sites like this one, short-term loans are just a click away for web-surfing borrowers, regardless of any history of bankruptcy, bounced checks or other credit problems.

The catch is that these so-called payday loans often come with sky-high interest rates of 400 percent or more. The Castle Payday website advertises an effective 888 annual percentage rate, meaning a 14-day loan of $500 will end up costing the borrower $675.

Those who can’t scrape together the cash to pay off the loans along with their other bills may be tempted to take out another short-term loan to cover the first, potentially ensnaring them in a cycle of debt...

Payday loans are illegal in 15 states, including North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Nine others – among them Washington and Florida – do allow payday loans but enforce strict rules that limit fees, require longer repayment periods or restrict the number of loans per customer, according to a Pew Charitable Trust study.

In recent months, state and federal regulators have intensified pressure on banks to stop working with online lenders. But the industry is fighting back in court.

The legal situation is complicated by the fact that many online lending websites are run by Native American tribes, which say their sovereign status means they aren’t subject to state laws. Castle Payday, for example, is operated by the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in Michigan.

The Lac Vieux joined with another tribe this month to seek an injunction against a New York regulator, arguing that states have no authority over them.

Benjamin Lawsky, the New York superintendent of financial services, had sent cease-and-desist orders to Castle Payday and 34 other online lenders to stop them from making payday loans to consumers in New York, where payday loans are illegal. Lawsky also asked more than 100 banks to deny the lenders access to the automated system used to process electronic payments, so that they can’t debit borrowers’ accounts.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, the Lac Vieux and the Otoe-Missouria tribe of Oklahoma condemn what they describe as regulators’ “bare-knuckle attack” on tribal sovereignty. If not stopped, the suit warns, New York’s “campaign of misrepresentations, threats and coercion” will destroy tribal businesses and devastate tribal economies.

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The Republican Party may be turning anti-war.

Some of the shift is driven by visceral distrust of President Barack Obama, who is the one proposing military strikes against Syria. Some is driven by remorse and lessons learned from the Iraq war. And some is fed by the isolationist and libertarian strains of the grassroots tea party movement.

Plenty of Republicans, including key congressional leaders, support Obama’s push for military action against the Syrian regime for allegedly using chemical weapons. But among constituents, rank-and-file members of Congress and many influential voices in the party’s echo chamber, the trend is decidedly anti-war.

“There is a growing isolationist movement within our own party,” said John Weaver, an Austin, Texas-based Republican consultant.

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What is perhaps most surprising about this is that the Obama administration is seeking authorisation for a rather limited use of force. It is loudly proclaiming that there will be no US boots on the ground, no effort at regime change, no direct engagement in the Syrian civil war – just a few cruise missiles to uphold a global norm and teach Bashar al-Assad a lesson. Yet, while Obama will speak to the American people and make his case for military intervention on Tuesday, few political observers believe he will win the day (though one cannot fully discount the possibility).

It is an extraordinary turn of events and one that goes so strongly against the currents of recent history that it may come to represent a sea change, not just in how the US employs military force in the future but in the very construct of American foreign policy. No longer, it appears are Americans and Congress willing to give the commander-in-chief a virtual blank cheque.

So why is this happening?

Part of the reason is undoubtedly politics. Republicans, who in recent years have rarely met a military engagement they didn’t enthusiastically support, would sooner cut off their right arms then give Obama anything that he actually wants. Yet their opposition to involvement in Syria also reflects a growing division within Republicans, between the party’s neoconservative national security elite and its long-dormant isolationist wing. Indeed, the congressional vote on Syria may preview a titanic struggle over the foreign policy direction of the Republican party.

As for Democrats, particularly liberals who opposed the Iraq war and were ambivalent about the Afghanistan surge, even party loyalty may not be enough to get them to go along with the White House’s plans. Unlike Obama, members of Congress will be on the ballot in 2014 and few of them are going to want to stick their neck out for a military strike that has little public support.

Beyond the political gamesmanship, opposition is due in large measure to the fuzziness of the White House’s strategic plan. While norm enforcement and deterring future chemical attacks can be a justifiable rationale, the idea that the US would engage Syria over one category of weapons while doing nothing to stop the civil war that has taken 100,000 lives seems to many to be illogical. Moreover, the lack of clear strategic objectives, or a vital US national interest or even a fallback plan if Assad is not deterred from continuing to gas his people, is raising real doubts about the efficacy of intervention. And truth be told: the White House has done a dreadful job of making the case for war.

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After months of campaigning, revamping and strategic positioning, international federations for wrestling, squash and baseball/softball will find out Sunday if their sports will have Olympic life.

All three will go through a second round of presentations, hoping to earn a place in the 2020 Summer Olympics.

The decision, which will be made in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by the International Olympic Committee's General Assembly around 10 a.m. Colorado time, comes seven months after wrestling was removed from the IOC's list of summer Games core sports.

The February ouster prompted wrestling's international governing body FILA to make possibly the most aggressive changes to its sport among the three finalists that will present their cases before the IOC on Sunday morning.

"We found the strength to change," said Nenad Lalovic, who took over as president of FILA in February.

The change proved effective as wrestling got new life May 29 when the IOC whittled a field of eight sports to three finalists. The sports that didn't make the cut were karate, roller sports, sport climbing, wakeboarding and wushu.

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The controversy over the choice of the next head of the Federal Reserve has become unusually heated. The country is fortunate to have an enormously qualified candidate: the Fed’s current vice chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen. There is concern that the president might turn to another candidate, Lawrence H. Summers. Since I have worked closely with both of these individuals for more than three decades, both inside and outside of government, I have perhaps a distinct perspective.

But why, one might ask, is this a matter for a column usually devoted to understanding the growing divide between rich and poor in the United States and around the world? The reason is simple: What the Fed does has as much to do with the growth of inequality as virtually anything else. The good news is that both of the leading candidates talk as if they care about inequality. The bad news is that the policies that have been pushed by one of the candidates, Mr. Summers, have much to do with the woes faced by the middle and the bottom.

The Fed has responsibilities both in regulation and macroeconomic management. Regulatory failures were at the core of America’s crisis. As a Treasury Department official during the Clinton administration, Mr. Summers supported banking deregulation, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was pivotal in America’s financial crisis. His great “achievement” as secretary of the Treasury, from 1999 to 2001, was passage of the law that ensured that derivatives would not be regulated — a decision that helped blow up the financial markets. (Warren E. Buffett was right to call these derivatives “financial weapons of mass financial destruction.” Some of those who were responsible for these key policy mistakes have admitted the fundamental “flaws” in their analyses. Mr. Summers, to my knowledge, has not.)

Regulatory failures have been at the center of previous crises as well. At Treasury in the 1990s, Mr. Summers encouraged countries to quickly liberalize their capital markets, to allow capital to flow in and out without restrictions — indeed insisted that they do so — against the advice of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (which I led from 1995 to 1997), and this more than anything else led to the Asian financial crisis. Few policies or actions have greater culpability for that Asian crisis and the global financial crisis of 2008 than the deregulatory policies that Mr. Summers advocated.

Supporters of Mr. Summers argue that he is exceptionally qualified to manage crises — and that, while we hope that there won’t be a crisis in the next four years, prudence requires someone who excels at those critical moments. To be fair, Mr. Summers has been involved in several crises. What matters, however, is not just “being there” during a crisis, but showing good judgment in its management. Even more important is a commitment to taking actions to make another crisis less likely — in sharp contrast to measures that almost ensure the inevitability of another one.

Mr. Summers’s conduct and judgment in the crises was as flawed as his lack of commitment in that regard.

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President Barack Obama has announced the names of the five members of a task force to examine the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of Internet and cell phone records, but privacy and open government advocates say they don’t believe the panel is likely to be very critical of the NSA program.

At the time Obama announced the panel’s creation Aug. 9, anger at the extent of the NSA collection efforts was at its height, and the president’s move was intend to calm growing congressional calls for curbs on the program. Obama said the panel would be made up of outside experts and would review the government’s use of its intelligence-gathering capabilities and whether it adhered to constitutional standards.

“The review group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust,” a White House memorandum on the panel said.

But advocates note that four of the five people named to the panel last week have long histories in government or in the intelligence community, and they said that made it unlikely the panel would be critical of the government’s practices when it completes its required final report, which is due on Dec. 15.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ project on Government Secrecy, said even the panel’s assignment misses the major concerns that have been expressed about the NSA programs, which had been kept largely secret from the public until their extent was leaked in June by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“Basically, they’re saying, ‘Well how can we optimize surveillance while taking privacy in to account?’ Aftergood said. But what people really want to know is whether the NSA violates the law and the Constitution, he added. “I’m not sure that that sense of urgency has been adequately communicated to the review board.”

The administration’s announcement of the panel in August sparked controversy, when statements released by the White House suggested that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would lead the inquiry. Obama later denied that Clapper would have a hand in the panel, which the president had insisted would be “independent” of the administration.

But although Clapper will not lead the review, four of the panel’s five members have direct ties to the executive branch and its intelligence gathering apparatus.

// posted by montag @ 12:45 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

What, exactly, inspired him to share his Thanksgiving wisdom?

“My wife Kathryn came up with an idea that literally lit a fire under me,” Limbaugh said.[...]‘Why don’t you write a book for kids?’”

Oh, you’ve no idea how much we wish that sentence were literally true.

Let’s wander on over to his insanely hagiographic website and check out this here inspiring story that the kids will get to learn.

And they shared their bounty with the Indians. Actually, they sold some of it to ‘em. The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed. With all the great expectations and high hopes, it failed. And self-reliance, rugged individualism, free enterprise, whatever you call it, resulted in prosperity that they never dreamed of.

Well, that is a happily ever after how do you do, isn’t it? Sure, the Indians got displaced and killed and whatnot, but they also had the privilege of buying stuff from Americans! Lucky duckies! We wonder if they got a discount if they bought the smallpox blankets in bulk? Maybe Rush covers that in his sequel, Thanksgiving 2, Pillaging Boogaloo.

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Volkswagen is working with the United Automobile Workers at its Chattanooga, Tenn., assembly plant on how to unionize the plant and create a German-style works council there, the president of the labor union said Friday.

The company would be the first German automaker to have such a council at a United States plant. A works council is a group of employees that includes white- and blue-collar workers that meets with management on issues like working conditions and productivity.

But in order to avoid violating American labor laws, the plant would first have to be formally unionized, the company said.

“VW workers in Chattanooga have the unique opportunity to introduce this new model of labor relations to the United States, in partnership with the U.A.W.,” the union’s president, Bob King, said in a statement Friday.

Volkswagen officials told employees at the Chattanooga plant on Thursday that it was negotiating with the union about establishing a works council there, where about 2,000 workers assemble the VW Passat. A letter, signed by the plant’s chairman, Frank Fischer, and its vice president for human resources, Sebastian Patta, said the talks were aimed at “the possibility of implementing an innovative model of employee representation for all employees.”

The VW officials said that a works council can be created at a company in the United States only with the cooperation of a labor union because it might otherwise be viewed as an illegal company-sponsored union. That, the VW officials wrote, is why the company has started its dialogue with the U.A.W. None of the foreign carmakers with auto plants in the South are currently unionized.

// posted by montag @ 1:53 PM 3 Comments Links to this post

New research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the RAND Corp. and Avalere Health have found competitive, affordable prices for individual coverage in states where the information is available. Those states include Washington, California, Florida, South Carolina and Texas.

“Our analysis found no widespread trend toward sharply higher prices in the individual market,” said a statement by Christine Eibner, a senior economist at RAND, a non-profit research organization based in Santa Monica, Calif.

The report from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation examined individual premiums for the largest cities in 17 states that have released either actual 2014 premium rates or rate requests from insurers.

“We know what the cost of employer-based insurance is, and these rates are what you’d expect to see for similar benefits,” said Gary Claxton, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “These rates don’t look to be so high that we should have the sort of widespread sticker shock.”

// posted by montag @ 1:03 PM 0 Comments Links to this post