Why it doesn't pay to answer stupid questions from Senators

A couple of days ago, Senator Bernie Sanders asked a stupid question: Does NSA spy on members of Congress? I'll grant you, the response he got was in the "non-denial denial" category.

"Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons," the spokesman said. 

It all reminded me of the last time a Senator asked a stupid question - then it was Rand Paul. He wanted to know whether the Obama administration would target US citizens on American soil for a drone strike. To understand that as a stupid question, it helps to look at events both before and after he asked.

On March 5, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech outlining the legal rationale this administration uses to approve drone strikes - including under what circumstances an individual would be targeted.

On February 4, 2013 an administration white paper on the same topic was leaked to Michael Isikoff.

On March 4, 2013, Attorney General Holder wrote a letter directly to Sen. Paul in response to his question.

And still, on March 6, 2013, Sen. Paul staged a talking filibuster on the grounds that he needed this question answered, by gawd!!!!

Subsequently, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote another letter. This time he left out all attempts to engage as if talking to an adult and brought it down to Sen. Paul's level.

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer to that question is no.

Apparently that was enough to satisfy Sen. Paul (after all, it was the notoriety of the filibuster he wanted, so mission accomplished for him). But was it clear enough for the poutragers? Of course not!

Because now we need a definition of what “engaged in combat” means.

I kid you not. Go check the link. That was a serious response from Marcy Wheeler (otherwise known as "emptywheel").

That's why it doesn't pay to think this administration will EVER satisfy these people. Because aside from the effort to grandstand, they're not interested in engaging in conversation. From nuanced speeches to infantile clarity, there's no trick pony here.

In that light, I find the administration's response to Sen. Sander's question to be completely adequate - if not a bit amusing. Making it clear that members of Congress are treated exactly the same as every other American is not a bad way to go because it points to the stupidity of the question in the first place.

"Placing a bet on humanity"

Today Jon Favreau writes about Pope Francis.

This is a man who washed and kissed the feet of Muslim convicts, handed out phone cards to Eritrean refugees, spent his birthday with the homeless, and reached out to atheists during a Christmas homily. In response to an inquiry about women considering abortion because of rape or poverty, Pope Francis said, “Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?” And in his answer to a question about gay men and women, he uttered what have become the most echoed words of his papacy to date: “Who am I to judge?”

Through these very visible, intentional gestures, it seems as if the Pope is not just signaling tolerance or celebrating diversity but placing a bet on humanity. It is a bet that his core message of peace, love, service, and compassion for the least for these will find a receptive audience among people of differing races, faiths, orientations, backgrounds and beliefs. It is a bet that the existence of the Golden Rule in almost every major religion is no cosmic coincidence. For as Pope Francis said on New Years, “We belong to the same human family and we share a common destiny.”

What struck me about this is that so many of the transformational leaders we revere have placed that same bet on humanity.

Just as the fundamentalists of our day have recoiled when Pope Francis suggests that the alleviation of human suffering should take precedence over obedience to the rules, the Pharisees of Jesus' day had the same reaction. At one point they complained when those who were following Jesus picked grain on the Sabbath (which was against the rules). His response indicates that he placed that same bet on humanity: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."

Fundamentalists tend to fear that kind of thing because their world view is based on the idea that without adherence to the rules, chaos and evil with reign. Jesus didn't negate the rules, but instead called us to something higher. Observance of the Sabbath - like other rules - was meant to be in service to humanity. He trusted us enough to suggest that when it comes to a decision between alleviating human suffering and obedience to the rules, we could make the right choice.

It is that same belief in humanity that Ta-Nehisi Coates ascribed to leaders like Martin Luther King and President Obama.

Here is where Barack Obama and the civil rights leaders of old are joined -- in a shocking, almost certifiable faith in humanity, something that subsequent generations lost. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. may have led African Americans out of segregation, and he may have cured incalculable numbers of white racists, but more than all that, he believed that the lion's share of the population of this country would not support the rights of thugs to pummel people who just wanted to cross a bridge. King believed in white people, and when I was a younger, more callow man, that belief made me suck my teeth. I saw it as weakness and cowardice, a lack of faith in his own. But it was the opposite. King's belief in white people was the ultimate show of strength: He was willing to give his life on a bet that they were no different from the people who lived next door.

If you want to know what makes right wingers afraid and many leftists suck their teeth about President Obama, this is it. Both sides of that coin panic at the thought of letting go of their belief in the inherent evil of those with whom they disagree.

None of these leaders I've referred to here would deny the existence of evil. Its just that they saw it as their calling to look deeper and call out the good. Here's what Barack Obama said about that in response to a question about the teachings of Reinhold Niebuhr:

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

What grounds us against swinging from idealism to bitter realism is a belief in humanity...that the potential for good can overcome the potential for evil.  I suspect that is a necessary ingredient for leadership that brings about transformational change.

Trying to have a 21st century conversation about privacy on 20th century terms

Lots of folks are wanting to excuse what Edward Snowden did because the results of his leaking of classified information has started what they think is a productive conversation about privacy. Please excuse me if I don't agree. What we're having is a conversation about privacy based on what we assumed it was during the last century - not today.

Let me provide you with a bit of background for that conclusion. First of all, from Al Giordano:

The democratization of public or semi-public exhibitionism has thrown traditional concerns about “personal privacy” out the window. Who needs the CIA anymore when everybody is out there blurting the kinds of secrets it used to take surveillance to discover? Privacy didn’t disappear because Big Brother took it away. We gave it away! Freely! It fell aside to a greater impulse: the need to expose ourselves in public, to have an audience, and to keep it.

Seriously, how often do you read something on your facebook timeline or twitter feed and cringe in reaction at TMI (too much information)!!!!!! We're living in an era when exhibitionism has taken precedence over privacy. The therapist in me is extremely curious about the roots of all that. But whatever the source, the reality is that we're all desperate these days to be heard.

The tool that is facilitating that exhibitionism is the internet - in all its various forms. And behind the scenes there are critical questions remaining about how it will be used. On that front, Dan Conover has written the best article I've seen yet. He starts out by saying that individual pieces of data are not the concern.

Collecting information is easy, traditional, and essentially inconsequential. Connecting information, however, is the radical act that will either empower or destroy us...

The NSA's email metadata campaign is designed to efficiently collect and then discard information. Not because the NSA is a civic-minded agency that wants to protect our theoretical privacy, but because your personal email isn't the target of the fucking machine. Your mundane metadata is the shit that NSA machine operators have to shovel in order to find covert organizations.

If we really want to have a conversation about what privacy means in the 21st century, here's what we should be talking about:

Google knows where you are, what you search for, what you bought. It knows what porn you stream, what political rhetoric you consume, and -- through G+ -- it can compare that knowledge to your social graph. Facebook is doing the same thing, in increasingly annoying ways. Target uses informatics and inference, based on massive data sets compiled from your shopping and mine, to spot women who've just learned that they're pregnant, and to send those women special offers and coupons for expectant mothers... 

Today we're worried about an NSA program that looks big and scary, but really isn't . But the day is coming when corporate control over our information will produce a civil liberties crisis that will make our NSA worries look quaint by comparison That day will come because that day must come, because in the same way that atomic fission was neither good nor bad, smart, unregulated, authoritative networks are neither good nor bad. 

The problem with humans isn't that we're inheriently good or bad, it's that eventually some greedy asshole turns everything we learn into a weapon... 

I am convinced that connected information is ultimately going to be a boon to humanity, and that it's entirely within our power to write rules for the collection, use and control of the "public" information we all contribute to the commons. But to prevent that power from turning on us, we simply must start a conversation that relates to the actual threats, conveyed in the context of their actual potential for abuse.

That's what a conversation about privacy looks like in the 21st century. The new exhibitionism we have embraced on the internet just might be approaching the crossroads of a decision about whether it becomes a "boon to humanity" or a weapon. Engage that one!

NYT Editorial Board Fails to Make Their Case

I find one aspect of the New York Times editorial today (suggesting that Edward Snowden should be given clemency) to be helpful. Finally, in one location, we have someone making a list of all the "horrors" revealed in the Snowden leaks. To be honest, I've been trying to figure this one out for a while now. And I keep coming up with "where's the beef?" So lets run through them real quick and see where things stand.

Of course the biggie for everyone still seems to be the metadata program. That's the one where the government collects date, time and number on all domestic phone calls. As the editorial mentions, there are conflicting court rulings on the constitutionality of the program. If there is going to be a final word on it, that will have to come from the Supreme Court.

Next they point out that NSA "broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded their authority thousands of times according to their own internal audit." That the NYT editorial board sees this as such an egregious outrage is interesting given that further down they link to their own paper's statement about it:

It found that there had been no willful violations of the rules, and that fewer than 1 percent of queries by analysts involved errors.

The next two have to do with NSA breaking into data centers to collect information and efforts to undermine encryption systems. Sorry, but this brings a big "Duh" from me. If we're going to task the intelligence community with spying on telecommunication activities, this is what they're going to do.

A biggie for lots of folks these days is that James Clapper lied to Congress when asked about the metadata program. As I see it, he was asked this question in an open session of Congress. If it was legal for him to talk about it in public, then why didn't the Senators who were so concerned talk about it? Perhaps Clapper should be called on the carpet for lying. But wouldn't he have technically been equally complicit if he had disclosed classified information in a public forum? Shouldn't the spotlight also be placed on Senator Wyden for asking a question that he knew it would be illegal for Clapper to answer?

Next comes the claim that the FISA Court ruled one of the NSA programs to be unconstitutional. Lets review this one more time. In Oct. 2011 the court ruled that an NSA program did not contain sufficient safeguards to protect the privacy of Americans whose information was collected while surveilling foreign targets. By November of that same year, NSA had returned with more stringent protections and the Court ruled the program constitutional.

The final point is mind-boggling in that it simply states that a federal judge ruled the metadata program unconstitutional. But the very same editorial had earlier pointed out that another judge had reached the opposite conclusion.

All of this belies their final statement:

When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.

I'd say that the NYT editorial board needs to rethink their claim that "government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law." Reforms might well be worth pursuing. But accusing people of breaking the law is a serious charge that they didn't even come close to demonstrating.

The populist committed to dealing with income inequality: President Obama

Sometimes I get really tired of reading the lazy superficial political analysis of many of our so-called "liberal" pundits. This time its E. J. Dionne who joins the chorus of people suggesting that newly inaugurated Mayor Bill de Blasio joins Senator Elizabeth Warren in sparking a resurgent left to combat the radical right. In his view, politics sounds like a game of tug-o-war and the problem has been a lack of muscle on the left forming a counter-weight to the lunacy on the right.

For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.

If you listen carefully to what he's saying, its all an either/or struggle and if the left got as uncompromising as the right, we'd wind up somewhere in the middle. Yeah, right. I guess it never dawns on these people that that's exactly what the strategists on the right want...total gridlock that sends everyone away screaming "a pox on both your houses!" Or perhaps Dionne just thinks that the Republicans have been fooling us all these years with their commitment to total obstruction and that they would have caved in their demands if only there had been a more uncompromising left. That's why I call this kind of analysis lazy. I doubt he's even bothered to think it through. Its a theory that sounds good in abstract. But when you go beyond the superficial, it makes zero sense.

Of course Dionne trots out the tired old lefty arguments to bolster his case about how Obamacare was simply a give-away to the insurance companies with - GASP - no public option.

Obamacare is complex because the government is trying to create a marketplace in which people shop for private insurance and receive government subsidies if they need them. It goes to a lot of trouble to preserve the private insurance market. The system does not even include a government plan as one option among many.

There is no mention of the fact that Obamacare begins the process of decoupling health insurance from employment, includes the largest expansion of Medicaid in the program's history, or initiates huge changes to the private insurance business model (no exclusion for pre-esisting conditions, no medical underwriting, no lifetime limits, guaranteed essential benefits and overhead/profit limited to 15% of premium dollars). What we got is the most sweeping progressive change to health care in our country's history after over 100 years of failed attempts. But in Dionne's eyes, it was all just a cave to the uncompromising right.

Dionne goes on to herald the populism of politicians like de Blasio for talking about income inequality. And like Peter Beinart (who started this whole meme) he totally misses that the populism was also fueled by the new Mayor's gorgeous bi-racial family and his promise to end the ridiculous stop and frisk policies of his predecessor. In other words, de Blasio energized the Obama coalition in New York City...big time! You want leftist populism - that's where you're going to find it in this country's future. Our mostly white punditry keeps missing that one.

If you want to find a national figure that has championed populism to take on the issue of income inequality, you need look no further than our current President. As I've demonstrated before, tackling those issues is something President Obama has talked about from the beginning and is the reason he ran in the first place. Campaigns that were fueled by small donors, efforts to build on that with OFA and a message that "nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change" might not rely on the word "populism," but no one can doubt that it is at the heart of what he has been committed to from day one.

So I welcome these new faces like Mayor de Blasio and Senator Warren to the table. But lets not forget who set it in the first place. That would be the guy who threw out the failed tug-o-war gridlock way of thinking about politics and built a coalition to actually get some real stuff done.

Bring on the wussification!

Recently Media Matters demonstrated how Fox News has been obsessed with the wussification of America. What I hear from that is a fear and rejection of all of the things that have traditionally been defined as feminine....nurturing, compassion, empathy. But lets be honest, its not just Fox News. Take a look at the commentary from both the left and right critiquing President Obama and you'll hear the constant extortions to "man up, grow some balls, etc." Its still true in this day and age that the worst insult to a man is to be compared to a girl (or even worse, a f***ot - an unmannly man).

Take a look at this trailer from a recent documentary titled The Mask You Live In to see the impact this has on boys.

If we are ever going to free ourselves of the authoritarian impulses that rely on fear and oppression, we are going to have to free our boys from the expectation that their manhood is something they have to prove. Our human potential for nurturing, compassion and empathy are no more "feminine" than strength, courage, and toughness are "masculine."

Here's Riane Eisler explaining why that is so important.

I believe that the reason Fox News is concerned about wussification and so many political pundits are calling on President Obama to "man up" is that what it means to be a man or woman is in the process of changing and that is threatening whole belief systems that are built on these stereotypes. In many ways feminism has begun the process of freeing women from them, but we've lagged in understanding what that means for men.

And so now we have a leader of the free world who regularly challenges us to tackle the empathy deficit, is not afraid to lead from behind, and is completely comfortable with the use of soft power. In other words, he has no desire or need to prove his manhood to anyone. People entrenched in the old patterns and stereotypes are terribly uncomfortable with that and tend to get surprised when he also has the courage and strength to go after Osama bin Laden or just say "no" to Republicans about negotiating on the debt ceiling.

While we are culturally struggling with this kind of change, President Obama is providing a wonderful example to young men who are able to envision a world where boys don't have anything to prove anymore...one where it is ok to let someone touch their soul.

How Obamacare will change the job market

As we've watched the rollout of the health insurance exchanges over the last few months, all eyes have been on the numbers of uninsured that are getting coverage. That is to be expected.

But in the back of my mind has been the thought of how Obamacare will change the job market. Here's a quote from the NYT that sums it up pretty well:

“With coverage,” she said, “I can be my best self. Health insurance won’t control my job choices.”

While we've all been focused on those who didn't have insurance or were covered by junk plans, I suspect that this law will also shake things up for many people who have felt that their job choices were limited due to the fact that their health insurance was tied to their employment.

For example, how many people have avoided starting their own business because to leave their current position would mean losing their health insurance? How about all those who might take early retirement (creating job openings for younger workers) if they could find affordable health care prior to Medicare eligibility?

As people begin to become aware of their options as a result of Obamacare, I believe these numbers will grow...opening up a whole range of possibilities for impact on economic development and employment opportunities. That's a story that isn't being told right now, but something to keep an eye on.