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https://www.thinkers360.com/thought-leader-and-influencer-interview-with-chuck-brooks-president-brooks-consulting-international-and-adjunct-faculty-georgetown-university/

Thought Leader Interview

Thinkers360 interviews profile prominent members of the Thinkers360 community who embody the power of ideas in their work. In this edition, we speak with Chuck Brooks, President, Brooks Consulting International and Adjunct Faculty Georgetown University. Chuck is a globally-recognized cybersecurity thought leader and influencer, a two-time Presidential Appointee, with executive experience in marketing/branding, government relations, management, strategic partnering and digital engagement. He was recently featured in the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Cybersecurity.

Thinkers360: Tell us a bit about your background

CB: My background includes service in the public sector, academia, industry, and media.

In government. In government I received two senior Presidential appointments. I was a “plank holder” at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and appointed as the first Legislative Director of The Science & Technology Directorate. Earlier in my career I served as Special Assistant to the Director of Voice of America. For almost a decade on Capitol Hill I was a top Advisor to the late Senator Arlen Specter covering security and technology. In local government I also worked as an Auxiliary Police officer for Arlington, Virginia.

In industry, I served in senior executive roles for Fortune 1000 and smaller corporations including General Dynamics (Principal Market Growth Strategist for Cyber Systems), at Xerox (Vice President & Client Executive for Homeland Security), for Rapiscan and (Vice President of R & D), for SRA as (Vice President of Government Relations), and for Sutherland (Vice President of Marketing and Government Relations). As a globally recognized thought leader and evangelist for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies, I serve as Brand Ambassador for The Cybersecurity Collaborative, a peer-based CISO organization. I am also Executive Cybersecurity advisor to PCiTec, a woman owned HUBZONE small business, and serve on a variety of boards of companies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/ag_bill_barr_will_he_or_wont_he_quit_the_narratives_change_by_the_minute.html

In the past week, there’s been non-stop speculation that Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, may be run out of office or quit. On Tuesday alone, a report that Barr was on the verge of quitting was instantly followed with a statement that he had no intention of quitting.

This all stems from the fact that, when word broke that the vindictive Eric Holder holdovers in the Department of Justice sought the most extreme penalty possible for Roger Stone, Trump and Barr acted almost simultaneously, with Barr later insisting that his actions had nothing to do with Trump.

On February 11, Trump tweeted out that the sentence the DOJ was asking for Stone was an injustice:

At roughly the same time, Barr, as head of the Department of Justice, concluded that the sentencing memo was inappropriate and, instead, filed a memo asking only that the court exercise its discretion over sentencing. The left promptly went insane, saying that never before had an Attorney General been so utterly insane and corrupt. Former DOJ attorneys and officials (who are overwhelmingly Democrats) signed a petition that former Obama and Schiff staffers had written demanding he resign.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/democrats-hold-secret-meeting-iranian-foreign-joseph-klein/

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, along with several of his Senate Democrat colleagues, reportedly met secretly with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (pictured above) during the Munich Security Conference last week. The Federalist raised the question whether that “would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration.”

Senator Murphy tweeted that he was simply engaging in a dialogue with Zarif, which he claimed was within Congress’s authority as “a co-equal branch to the executive.” While acknowledging for the record that “no one in Congress can negotiate with Zarif or carry official U.S. government messages,” Murphy declared that “there is value in having a dialogue.”  He added, “It’s dangerous not to talk to adversaries, esp amidst a cycle of escalation.” That all depends on what Murphy and his cohorts had to say to the Iranian foreign minister behind closed doors.

According to Senator Murphy’s own telling, he used his meeting with Zarif to urge Iranian action to control Iran’s proxies in Iraq, release American citizens being unlawfully detained in Iran, and end the Houthi blockage of humanitarian aid in Yemen. That sounds innocent enough, if Murphy was telling the truth about everything that was said during his tête-à-tête with Zarif. But there is no reason to take Murphy’s self-serving account as representing anywhere near a complete record of the meeting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-takes-a-stand-for-the-mentally-ill-11582071818?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Hundreds of thousands of Americans with serious mental illness sleep in jails, shelters and prisons on any given night. Fewer than 40,000 are in state psychiatric hospitals. This is largely due to a federal policy, the Institutions for Mental Disease Exclusion, which created a financial incentive for states to kick the mentally ill out of hospitals. The White House’s new budget proposes easing the exclusion. It’s the most important thing federal government could do to improve care for the seriously mentally ill.

The IMD Exclusion, part of the 1965 law that established Medicaid, prevents the program from funding care for mentally ill adults while they live in hospitals or even adult homes with more than 16 beds. It was intended to prevent the federal government from taking on care of the mentally ill, which had historically been a state responsibility. Many mistakenly believed that newly developed antipsychotic drugs and community mental-health centers would obviate the need for institutions.

It’s been a disaster. Before Medicaid was enacted, states paid for psychiatric hospitalization, and it was readily available. But states soon realized that if they kicked patients out of hospitals, Medicaid would kick in and pay half the cost of care. This “deinstitutionalization” continues. The country has lost more than 450,000 mental-hospital beds since the 1950s, 12,000 of them since 2005.