Category Archives: Foreign
Red Line
Mostly liberal columnist Richard Cohen is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria. Mostly conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria too. Common ground.
Cohen wants to intervene on humanitarian grounds. As for Krauthammer : “A superpower’s role in a regional conflict is deterrence.” He feels Putin has taken Obama’s measure and our president comes up short – to put it kindly.
President Obama has said Bashar Assad will have crossed a red line if he gasses his own people. France says that gas would be Sarin.
Seems we’ve been down this line before.
Police State
Poor Eric Holder. He might have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply looking up reporter James Rosen’s phone records among the records of all Verizon customers collected by the NSA, as reported in The Guardian.
That action occurred under a FISA court order and was an expansion of phone surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists which began under the Bush administration Patriot Act.
Catherine Herridge at Fox News reports that, in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied that NSA intentionally collects data on millions of Americans.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police may take DNA samples from anyone they arrest. Here’s a piece by Jeffery (the other) Rosen about Scalia’s dissent in favor of the fourth amendment.
Update: It’s not just your phone calls anymore. This morning’s Washington Post reports that the government mines your internet data too.
War Bar
All good things must come to an end. Wars too. The president just doesn’t say how. Krauthammer is not impressed.
Bite of the Apple
Apple CEO Tim Cook was dragged to the U.S. Senate to apologize for his success. While his company paid $6 billion in U.S. taxes last year it paid little if anything on it’s overseas stash. All perfectly legal. Even the president doesn’t pay more than he owes.
Rand Paul said the Senate ought to apologize for the dog and pony show, but Carl Levin was having none of that as he took a crack at American pensions and 401ks by insisting that Apple send more money to foreign countries.
Shelter in Place
Law enforcement seem to love the media until they don’t. The digital wanted poster of the two Boston Marathon suspects was displayed on millions of screens and quickly led to the demise of suspect number one, and the capture of number two. The same media, however, inadvertantly gave away police positions with initial images of the search.
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