http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ ILLINOIS IS THE FUTURE OF AMERICA Mayor Randy “Rambo” McCallum Sr. came into office telling cops, “I run this mother___” and ordered them to rob competing drug dealers and split the money with him. When drug dealers were busted, the seized drugs and money were brought to his house where he pocketed the money […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2765/A-Nation-of-Laws-Not-Men-Must-Impeach-Obama.aspx
One of the hats I wear is that of Washington correspondent for Dispatch International, a European weekly newspaper co-edited by Danish journalist and historian Lars Hedegaard. The name may ring a bell with U.S. readers because last February, a man dressed up as a postman with a fake package tried to assassinate Hedegaard, a noted critic of Islamization and proponent of free speech, at his home in Copenhagen. International headlines followed.
One year later, Hedegaard lives under state protection, and there have been no arrests. But that’s not what this week’s column is about.
A few days ago, Hedegaard wrote me with a new assignment:
“Would you write something about a disturbing phenomenon: the fact that Obama rules by decree and neglects the Constitution. How can this go on? Nixon was a complete amateur compared to this would-be Kim Jong-un. It looks like a coup d’etat. Nobody talks about it in Europe.”
So that’s what America looks like from 4,000 miles away.
Given the lack of context “over there,” my overview had to start with the basics of Barack Obama’s presidency: numerous unconfirmed “czars” (like George W. Bush), sweeping executive orders and massive amounts of regulation. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” is the way the president recently described his tools of power, noticeably omitting whether he also had a copy of the U.S. Constitution. By the time I’d recapped the so-called unilateral presidency for the European reader, I was newly aghast.
For many Americans, living through the Obama era day-by-day, executive order by executive order, 100 regulations by 100 regulations (there were 80,000 pages of new regulations in 2013 alone), our nation’s transformation becomes so much enveloping static. Yes, there are shrieks and screams (over Obamacare’s rollout, for instance), but mostly people seem to shut out the background noise of an aggressively collectivizing government doing business. Outrages against the Constitution clank and sputter – What? The executive branch can’t write legislation! – but they never really backfire on Obama. His poll numbers dip, yes. White noise ensues.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-ambassador-nominees-are-a-disservice-to-diplomacy/2014/02/06/2273ef9e-8e86-11e3-b227-12a45d109e03_story.html
And what about Caroline Kennedy as Ambassadrix to Japan….her closest brush with Japan- its history, its strategic importance, its enemies in China and North Korea- is a plate of sushi…..rsk
Henri J. Barkey is a professor of international relations at Lehigh University. He served on the State Department’s policy planning staff from 1998 to 2000.
Two Norwegian lawmakers have nominated Edward Snowden, the bête noire of U.S. intelligence, for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is quite possible that this is the Norwegians’ way of showing their displeasure and shame at having the Obama administration nominate a completely unqualified person to be its ambassador to Oslo.
The nominee, a Long Island campaign bundler named George Tsunis, made a fool of himself during his Senate confirmation hearings last month. He was unaware of some of the most basic facts about Norway. He admitted never having set foot in the country, and he seemed to think that Norway, a monarchy, has a president. He also had no idea which political parties constituted Norway’s governing coalition, even though, as ambassador, he would be dealing with them. It seemed, as some later tweeted, that Tsunis had not even bothered to read the Wikipedia page for Norway.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/snowdens-hypocrisy-on-russia/2014/02/07/23c403c2-8f51-11e3-b227-12a45d109e03_story.html?utm_
Gabriel Schoenfeld is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of “Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.”
Edward Snowden’s removal of thousands, perhaps millions, of highly classified documents from the National Security Agency and his decision to turn them over to journalists for publication ignited a fierce debate about who and what he is. On one side are those who hail Snowden as a whistleblower, someone who, as the New York Times editorialized, “has done his country a great service.” Others regard him as a criminal or traitor. Neither this debate nor the public discussion of government secrecy and surveillance policies that Snowden’s actions sparked will be resolved anytime soon.
Snowden, meanwhile, says that his “mission’s already accomplished,” that he has given Americans a “say in how they are governed” and that he has succeeded in exposing the workings of what he has called the unbridled “surveillance state.”
But one must ask: Are Snowden’s actions in consonance with his words?
Snowden has taken sanctuary in Russia, a country that, when it was under communist control, epitomized the idea of a surveillance state, complete with a secret police force — the KGB — that worked assiduously to monitor and control the population. Today Russia is a quasi-democracy that has retained some features of its communist past. Over the past decade or so, under the tutelage of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, it has been sliding ever deeper back into authoritarianism.
That authoritarianism is maintained in part by a domestic surveillance system. Two intrepid Russian journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, explain in the fall 2013 issue of World Policy Journal how it works. They show that the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor organization to the KGB, has invested in technology that allows it to monitor telephone and Internet communications and to collect and store not just metadata — information about call destinations and durations — but also the content of communications. The Russian state uses that technology to engage in essentially unchecked surveillance of telephone calls, e-mail traffic, blogs, online bulletin boards and Web sites. Soldatov and Borogan conclude that over the past two years “the Kremlin has transformed Russia into a surveillance state — at a level that would have made the Soviet KGB . . . envious.”
