Senate Torture Report Revisited

The earlier post on this subject ended up more rambling than I had hoped.  The salient points were there but may have been lost to the reader because I was not sufficiently concise.  Let me try again.

a)  The Senate Select Committee's report was a terribly one-sided, partisan attack on the Bush      administration.

b)  The news media is incorrectly reporting that the CIA under Bush engaged in torture.  This is not a fact but strictly the opinion of a few lawmakers and biased reporters.

c)  There is certainly room for concluding that torture resulted during the first few years after 9/11 for the non-sanctioned activities of a few CIA operatives but even those conclusions are opinions.

d)  Careful reading of the applicable statutes reveals that the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" we're not necessarily torture.  That interpretation remains in the eye of the beholder until the criminal courts interpret the law.

e)  in spite of its inadequacies, release of the Senate report is good for the country as long as everyone understands that it is biased.

Obama and ISIS

Obama has announced a strategy for dealing with ISIS.  Critics are picking at it but at least it is a strategy.  A high majority of people think it is not enough yet 55% are opposed to using ground troops.  I don't know the correct action and have criticized the President for not having a strategy for dealing with ISIS and taking too long to act.  At this point, though, most of the American public opposes a full-out war.

Obama, ISIS, and the Ukraine

There has been a lot of criticism of the president over the last several weeks.  Certainly, it appears that he has no clue in how to handle a crisis.  Still, having said that and considering that, as the opposition, I delight in some of the criticism, I want to examine both the US position in the Ukraine and with respect to ISIS to see if the criticism is valid.

Is Obama on Drugs?

Okay.  I did not vote for Mr. Obama.  I am not his friend or apologist.  That being said, I am not his enemy either.  I am a citizen of the US. I am a believer that this country was created by folks that believed in liberty.  I believe in liberty.  I want Mr. Obama to be a positive influence on our country. That being said, the continued absence of leadership and Mr. Obama's history have me asking, where is he during these crises? I am suggesting that the current Congress and Senate, is incapable of asking the commander in chief to provide medical records that show him not to be under the influence of unapproved substances.  Yes, I am asking if our sitting president is on dope!

Consider that the White House has so far refused to provide the location of the President during Benghazi, 9/11 (see link).  Consider that we have had dozens of crises where the President appears to be "disengaged", bored, or even worse, UNAWARE.  Seriously, where is the President?

I suggest that he may be on dope!  Let's ask for medical tests.  I do not want his tests to be positive.  I absolutely think that a Biden Presidency would be terrible.  A continued Obama Presidency that looks like the President is on dope, is worse.

If I was still working, I am retired, and had a coworker, even a friend, who was behaving erratically, I might be asked about that person.  In today's world, Human Resources would require that person to undergo drug screening.  Should the President be different?

Provide the data, Mr. Obama.  The first apology, if you are clean, will be mine.  Mr. Reagan did this voluntarily when he was president (see link).

Maybe the voters do not care,  maybe the young folks do not care, 'a stoned president is cool'.  I have worked in sensitive industries.  I have been on call after hours.  Was I ever incapacitated when I was on call, eg, too much wine?  No sir!  I recognize that an actual test will be interpreted by many as inadequate, those persons can never be satisfied.  I, and most people, will accept the results of your tests as evidence that you are not on drugs.

Stand Your Ground Laws

Stand Your Ground laws and Castle Doctrine laws exist in 22 States.  Stand Your Ground laws implement a legal framework that allows the use of deadly force without a duty to retreat if a person reasonably fears for his or her life or safety.  Castle Doctrine laws allow the use of deadly force if your home is invaded;  these laws assume that home invasion implicitly threatens bodily harm or death to the home's occupants. Supporters cite that these laws make their residents safer or at least make the residents safer that avail themselves of firearm protection.  

Recently I became aware of a study done by two Texas A&M economists (See Link) suggesting the opposite.  That is, they suggested that incorporation of Castle Doctrine laws actually increased the number of homicides in the states in question.  I reviewed the paper and had to concede that much of their published work seemed to support their conclusions although the uptick in homicide rates did not seem too significant. After that, and with an open mind, I reviewed the data from the FBI UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) database myself.

My conclusion is that the authors of the paper were wrong, while homicides increased slightly in the first year following implementation, overall, the homicide rate declined after that.  Also, since correlation does not imply causality, Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground can neither be shown to neither decrease nor increase the homicide rates 2-3 years after implementation.

Obamacare again

I just read an article (see link) in the LA Times, a paper with some liberal bias, that suggests serious inroads into enrollment in the ACA (Affordable Care Act) or Obamacare as we move towards the deadline of 31 March.  Their analyst is suggesting between 3.65 and 4.73 million people have enrolled on the ACA website as of the beginning of March with about 75% having paid their first month premium.  This latter means that they are real enrollees, not just shoppers who left their carts and never signed up.  While a 25% reduction in the number of enrolled is significant, the total could be as high as 3.5 million with a month to go making the new (and flexible) goals of the administration within reach by the end of March.  Also, according to the article, the percentage of uninsured has dropped to 15.9% by the beginning of the month vs. 20% to start off.  Whether a 4% change in uninsured justifies the law's incorporation, it still represents a lot of people (and votes!) benefiting from this law (4% of 300 million is 12 million people and perhaps as many as 9 million votes depending upon demographics) 

Dianne Feinstein spied on by CIA, Maybe she gets it Now (updated 11:40 MST)

So today's news had a story that Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, delivered a scathing speech decrying the CIA's alleged spying upon staff members' computers during a probe of some Bush era investigations.  Strange that she was not so incensed about the overall NSA spying fiasco that collects data of every single telephone call and every single email that average citizens send and is only, supposedly, restrained by the Star Chamber er secret FISA court.  She is happy with that process because her committee thinks it has oversight.  Even with her oversight, there is insufficient daylight on the NSA spying for most people's tastes.  

Climate Change Common Ground

Global warming should not be a great controversy.  The controversy is amplified when political operatives take sides and publishers start discriminating against dissenting opinion.  This is especially bad for scientific publications and did happen a few years back.  Non-scientific publications need to be more open to dissenting thought as well.  Recently the Washington Post initially refused to publish Charles Krauthammer’s column in which he simply put forth that global warming was not settled science.  They did publish the column in an op-ed forum.  The political climate change advocates jumped all over this.  The left is 100% committed to the idea that manmade CO₂ causes climate change and that it is bad.  The far right is resistant because they oppose the left (not a good reason) and because the proposed “solutions” are either draconian or silly (carbon exchange credits, etc.).  Since I advocate that carbon exchange credits are silly, you may conclude that I am more right than left. 

Russia and the Ukraine

So far, the Administration is focused on sanctions to make Russia change course in the Crimea and elsewhere.  While Putin is a backward-looking leader who may yearn for the old Soviet Union, there are real reasons for Russian concern.  The Russian Black Sea fleet is headquartered in the Crimea and there is certainly a Russian need to protect their security interests.  In the eastern portions of the Ukraine, there are Russian speakers and loyalists who might fear discrimination by the European-leaning government headquartered in Kiev.

Bugs Bunny and Chuck Hagel, I Was Wrong

Chuck Hagel is worse than Bugs Bunny at Secretary if Defense.  I posted that Hagel was at least as good as Buggs Bunny for Secretary of Defense (See Link).  Well, I was wrong!  Dropping the Army force levels to the point of pre-WWII is an insane, marijuana-fueled, Democratic daydream of the  current administration.

Obama:  We need fewer of these troops, don't you agree, Chuck.

Hagel:  yes sir, great idea.  We don't need no stinking Army, no sir.

Probably too late to flush him but maybe the Senators up for re-election this year like #flush Tom Udall.

Government Snooping, the NSA, and Tom Udall

It was recently announced that Google has purchased the Israeli company SlickLogin, a consumer password manager.  With the NSA (National Security Agency) hacked into every single internet and search provider, including Google, is anything still safe?  Add to this the fact that a virtually unknown government agency (Consumer Finance Protection Bureau) now sees fit to hack into everyone's credit card usage and you can see how unsafe all of this has become.  If Google hopes to use their new purchase, SlickLogin, how can they ensure that the NSA won't be sniffing and gathering that data? I doubt that they can.  This was a bad purchase by Google and a poor use of stockholder equity.

Gun Control Statistics and the 2014 Elections

This is an update of a post from early last year.  Some of the links in the earlier article were superseded by the FBI reporting system.  I have not found the new links in all cases so I highlighted the incorrect links and crossed out the reference.  The data is available from either the FBI UCR database or the FBI NICS database.

It is time to consider that one of our two senators, Tom Udall, is up for re-election in 2014.  Both senators voted for more restrictive gun legislation as proposed by Obama/Biden.   Ms. Lujan-Grisham who was fully invested in the Obama/Biden gun control proposals is also up for re-election in 2014. There are stronger gun advocates up for election in the Republican party who should replace them  Right now, only Allen Weh and David Clements have declared.  I am hoping that Richard Berry will declare but he has not done so so far. Berry has far greater name recognition and would be a more credible candidate to beat Udall.  So far no one has stepped up to challenge Lujan-Grisham.

Patriot Act, Edward Snowden, and NSA Spying

The President has come out with some proposed "reforms" to NSA spying.  He wants to keep the current plan, vacuum up all telephone call meta data on everyone but have the data stored outside of the government.  Does anyone recall Target?  Private companies are less capable of safeguarding the data than the NSA.  He also is proposing to limit data mining to two "hops" instead of three.  A "hop" being defined as the number of calls removed from a foreign caller.

A Crisis in Leadership

Chris Christie, the darling of the Republican establishment finally has hit a wall that, hopefully, will take him off the stage for the Republican presidential nomination.  That is, aides in his New Jersey government got caught deliberately tying up traffic in the city of a political rival.  Of course he has fired the obvious culprits but his explanation that he didn't know about any of it smacks of the current White House resident.  What these failures, as the ones in the Obama administration, illustrate is a crisis of leadership.  Politics apparently revels in unethical behavior that is tolerated by some political leaders providing they have no knowledge of the unethical act.  This is the case for Christie, Obama, Nixon, and Reagan, to name a few.

DROPOUTJEEP, NSA, Edward Snowden

Two posts in two days on the NSA spying issues.  This will be a short post.  This concerns the unintended consequences of NSA hacking into our phones.

First, we don't know how extensive the NSA software hack on iphones is.  That program, apparently called DROPOUTJEEP, is introduced between shipping and receipt of an iphone or perhaps even remotely.  If it is put into all iphones it is a different situation than if it is only put on a few targeted iphones.  Of course, since the NSA has demonstrated no restraint and absolute overreach, we are likely to assume the worst.

Here is the unintended consequence of a phone hack.  If this is spying software that can access your data, your location, your camera, and your microphone, that means that some no-NSA entity might uncover the hack somehow and find a way to get the same data out.  Until now, the iphone has been so unhackable that it can be used for banking over secure wifi networks.  Until someone determines the scale of this latest nonsense, no mobile device can be considered safe from non-NSA criminals.

It is time for action against these programs in congress.  If there is a DROPOUTJEEP program on everyone's iphone or even a large number, the US government should face an enormous class action lawsuit from all iphone users.  While the government can decide who sues, perhaps a large class action suit will force the government to acknowledge the scope of what they've done and help us to  clear off the software from our phones.