Free market anarchist. Like to get on my soapbox and get things going. Love to play bluegrass music for an audience or in a jam session. Like people fine one to one. Don't like 'em so much in groups. Love animals, wildlife, nature.
Falconer proposes swarms of citizen informers casing neighborhoods looking for suspicious behavior
A frontrunner to become Mayor of Orange County Florida proposes to combat crime in the area by creating a 1,000 person strong spy force who would cruise around neighborhoods on bikes reporting suspicious behavior to uniformed supervisors, a creepy program with dark undertones of the Hitler Youth program of 1930’s Nazi Germany.
Matthew Falconer, who professes to be a Libertarian, has been handing out a business card to potential voters outlining his platform.
On the back of the card, Falconer outlines his intention to, “Improve public safety by putting 1,000 additional observers on patrol in your neighborhood.”
Falconer’s website provides more detail as to what exactly this new program will entail.
My solution is to innovate. I call for the implementation of my “COPs” program (Citizen Observers). This program will put 1000 young people on bicycles with radios patrolling our neighborhoods keeping our citizens safe. My mission is to prevent crime and move away from the responsive method of public safety in Orange County. The observers will ride through specific areas, seek out criminal behavior, and report events to a uniformed supervisor. They will also talk with residents to find out who is committing the crimes in the area and attempt to gather information to solve existing crimes.
Falconer’s website states that the “public safety personnel” will receive just $10 dollars an hour, meaning the cost of the entire program will amount to no more than $2.5 million dollars a year.
Falconer’s intention to “move away from the responsive method to public safety” and instead have poorly trained amateur teenage spies watching their neighbors and actively seeking out suspicious behavior with seemingly little accountability whatsoever sets a dangerous precedent. Even if the program has genuine intentions behind it, the potential for members of the 1,000 strong spy force to abuse their power to settle scores with neighbors they don’t like is clearly a possibility, which is exactly what has happened historically when citizens are afforded the power to inform on each other.
Falconer’s proposal is clearly anti-American and unconstitutional. Though some may argue that vigilantes are a good thing in an age of growing corruption and police brutality, the fact is that vigilantes are traditionally responsive to crime and act as watchmen, they do not spy on the innocent and actively seek out potential criminal behavior, as Falconer’s program outlines.
Fears about the creation of an East German-style Stasi outfit that would keep an eye on Americans were raised in July of last year when President Barack Obama, during a speech on the campaign trail, promised a “national civilian security force” that would be just as powerful as the U.S. military.
As we have documented, informant programs that encourage Americans to spy on each other are already in operation across the country in a number of different guises.
The legacy of training Americans to spy on each other in the name of “safety” has its origins in Operation TIPS, which was supposedly nixed by Congress, a DOJ, FBI, DHS and FEMA coordinated program that would have recruited one in twenty-four Americans as domestic informants, a higher percentage than was used by the Stasi in Communist East Germany.
Government funding was cut after an outcry but private funding continues and the same program was introduced under a number of sub-divisions including AmeriCorps, SecureCorps and the Highway Watch program.
Similar programs being run bother privately and under government auspices are increasingly beginning to mirror the citizen denunciation campaigns that became prominent in Nazi Germany.
One common misconception about Nazi Germany was that the police state was solely a creation of the authorities and that the citizens were merely victims. On the contrary, Gestapo files show that 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided from denunciations by “ordinary” Germans.
“There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors,” wrote Robert Gellately of Florida State University.
You Tube user Austin White makes his feelings about Falconer’s proposal clear in the clip below.
Editor's note: Wait a Friggin Minute Here-gov to use children as census workers?
Anyone tempted to ignore the 2010 Census will have a tough time doing it — especially if they have kids in school.
The government has launched Census in Schools, an all-out campaign targeting superintendents, principals, teachers, students and, indirectly, parents, as schools open across the nation this month and next. The message: The Census is coming and here's why everyone should care.
The goal is to send posters, teaching guides, maps and lesson plans to every school in the nation, Puerto Rico and U.S. island territories to encourage everyone to participate in the national count. The materials will land in more than 118,000 schools and reach 56 million students.
"It's great to reach the children because children are such strong voices in their homes," says Renee Jefferson-Copeland, chief of the Census schools program. "In households that are linguistically isolated, they can express the information to their parents."
The school effort is more ambitious than in 2000, the last time the government set out to count everyone. At that time, teachers had to request the material and it was available only in print. Now, the kits and lessons will arrive in every school and lesson plans can be downloaded online, where they will be available in 28 languages.
The Constitution mandates a complete population count every 10 years. The tally — down to the city block — helps redraw political boundaries and determine states' representation in Congress and the distribution of more than $400 billion in federal funds to state and local governments every year.
"It's extremely important for us," says Michael McGrady, associate director for partnership development at the National Head Start Association, which promotes school readiness for low-income children and their families. "Historically, Head Start families have been undercounted and that has a negative effect on their communities."
Between January and March, the Census Bureau will help plan a week of Census education in schools. During Census Week, teachers will devote 15 minutes every day for five days to the topic by discussing such things as civic participation, confidentiality or geography. Beginning in mid-March, more than 120 million Census questionnaires will be delivered to residential addresses.
The Census Bureau is partnering with Sesame Street to extend the 2010 Census message to preschoolers and adult caregivers. Under consideration: Using Sesame Street characters on Census materials and having characters participate in school events and public service announcements.
Source: USA Today Image: Margie Laupheimer / Earthhope Action Network
Details of a revamped version of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 show the Senate bill could give the president a "kill switch" on the Internet and allow him to shut out private networks from online access.
A Senate bill would offer President Obama emergency control of the Internet and may give him a "kill switch" to shut down online traffic by seizing private networks -- a move cybersecurity experts worry will choke off industry and civil liberties.
Details of a revamped version of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 emerged late Thursday, months after an initial version authored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., was blasted in Silicon Valley as dangerous government intrusion.
"In the original bill they empowered the president to essentially turn off the Internet in the case of a 'cyber-emergency,' which they didn't define," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which represents the telecommunications industry.
"We think it's a very bad idea ... to put in legislation," he told FOXNews.com.
Clinton said the new version of the bill that surfaced this week is improved from its first draft, but troubling language that was removed was replaced by vague language that could still offer the same powers to the president in case of an emergency.
"The current language is so unclear that we can't be confident that the changes have actually been made," he said.
The new legislation allows the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and make a plan to respond to the danger, according to an excerpt published online -- a broad license that rights experts worry would give the president "amorphous powers" over private users.
"As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET News.
A Senate source familiar with the bill likened the new power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when he grounded all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, CNET News reported.
Spokesmen for Senator Rockefeller and the Commerce Committee did not return calls seeking comment before this article was published.
But Rockefeller, who introduced the bill in April with bipartisan support, said the legislation was critical to protecting everything from water and electricity to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records.
"I know the threats we face," Rockefeller said in a prepared statement when the legislation was introduced. "Our enemies are real. They are sophisticated, they are determined and they will not rest."
The bill would also let the government create a detailed set of standards for licensing "cybersecurity professionals" who would oversee a single standard for security measures.
But many in the technology sector believe it's a job the government is ill-equipped to handle, said Franck Journoud, a policy analyst with the Business Software Alliance.
"Simply put, who has the expertise?" he told FOXNews.com in April. "It's the industry, not the government. We have a responsibility to increase and improve security. That responsibility cannot be captured in a government standard."
Clinton, of the Internet Security Alliance, praised President Obama's May science policy review, which he said would take cybersecurity in the right direction by promoting incentives to get the private industry to improve its own security measures.
But he faulted the Senate bill, which he said would centralize regulations for an industry that is too varied to fall under the control of a single set of rules without endangering the economy and security.
"We think a lot of things need to be done to enhance cybersecurity," he told FOXNews.com, but this bill is "not something that we could support."
Some of the individuals waging an all out war on American college campuses against Israrel and the Jews are themselves Jewish. Some have called them "non-Jewish" or "self-hating" Jews. What is undeniable is that in the role they have chosen, these individuals are collaborating, often openly and without apology, with groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah and states such as Ahmadinejad's Iran that call for a new genocide. Over the next few weeks, Frontpage will profile some of these Jewish collaborators in the war against Israel and the Jews and show how they give and and comfort to the Islamist enemy -- The Editors.
The campus war against Israel and the Jews is led by a group of anti-Semites, many of them faculty members, who have made a career for themselves by traveling from one university to another supporting Arab terrorism. They invariably pretend that they are promoting peace. But in the Orwellian bubble where they live, Arab aggression and terror become self-defense and Israeli self-defense becomes aggression and terror. Israeli democracy is apartheid, while Arab genocide is liberation.
One of the most bizarre aspects of this campus war against the Jews is how common self-hating anti-Semitic Jews are in the ranks of the movement to achieve the annihilation of Israel. For reasons that only a psychiatrist could fully understand, these people use their birthright to give authenticity to the campaign of delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. Today the leading promoters of "divestment" and of boycotting Israel are academic Jewish leftists, some of them from Israel itself. In a few extreme cases, this detestation of Israel is combined with a fawning courtship of Islamic terrorists, American and European Neo-Nazis, and even Holocaust Deniers.
One of the most public of these Jewish collaborators in the Arab war against Israel's survival is Marc H. Ellis, a Jewish "professor of theology" and director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor, a Baptist University in Waco, Texas. For most of the academic world, especially the world of Jewish scholarship, Ellis is a bigot residing in the lunatic fringe. But in the eyes in the eyes of Holocaust Deniers and Arab terrorists, he is a distinguished theologian. The racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a fan of Ellis' books and often recommends them.
The theology that Ellis teaches is the theology of Jewish evil. Ellis is essentially a Norman Finkelstein look alike. Unlike Finkelstein, who was fired from DePaul University because his "scholarly" books were Jew-baiting propaganda in disguise, Ellis has a job. But, in fact, there are surprisingly few differences between the ranting anti-Semitism for which Finkelstein was fired and the "scholarly work" for which Ellis has been rewarded. Indeed, the two have a long history of collaboration. They appear at one another's conferences and on one another's web sites, standing together in a sort of anti Semitic mutual assistance pact.
Ellis has hosted Finkelstein in Texas on numerous occasions, and the two sit together on the boards of a number of pro-jihad anti-Israel propaganda organizations such as the Deir Yassin Remembered Organization, which also includes among its members such notables as Saudi-financed Paul Findley, Swedish Neo-Nazi Israel Shamir, PLO spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, and Israeli convicted spy and traitor - the communist Mordecai Vanunu who recently spoke at the York University anti-Semitic conference calling for Israel to be exterminated.
Ellis has publicly endorsed not only Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry, but also Finkelstein's scurrilous attacks on Nobel Prize winning writer and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel. Ellis and Finkelstein are listed together in Gabriel Schoenfeld's review of Holocaust pseudo-scholarship in The Return of Anti-Semitism.
Ellis has been a full-time basher of Israel for decades. He holds a PhD from Marquette University, a Jesuit institution in Milwaukee which has never distinguished itself as a serious research center on Jewish thought. His first position after graduation was at Maryknoll School of Theology, a Catholic school in New York that it is evidently not accredited as a research university, although it has had its fair share of "liberation theologists. He moved to Baylor University in 1998 as a full professor and now directs "Jewish Studies," by himself, the sole faculty member at the "Center of American and Jewish Studies." The Center web site lists endorsements by a "Christian feminist theologian," by Noam Chomsky and a few other anti-Semites, but not by a single scholar of Judaism.
Ellis has a publication record that consists almost exclusively of anti-Israel propaganda tracts. These all largely promote liberation theology1 mixed with his thoughts about the Holocaust and Israel's endless track record of "inhumane crimes."2 Most of these works are published with "Fortress Press," a non-academic church publisher associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Ellis sits on the editorial board of Tikkun, a far-leftist, anti-Israel, Sixties-fixated magazine, which touts Marxism and New Age liberation theology dressed up in some nominally Jewish emblems and slogans. Ellis is a regular on the Bash-Israel lecture circuit, especially before Muslim audiences, and is a speaker in demand for the "Palestine Solidarity" events that have become central part of the anti Israel, anti Semitic displays on American college campuses.
The centerpiece of Ellis' crusade against Israeli survival is a warped view of the Holocaust that rivals Norman Finkelstein's. He has authored a number of books that claim to be "Holocaust scholarship," including Ending Auschwitz: The Future of Jewish and Christian Life (Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), O, Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant (Fortress Press, 1999), and Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes (Pluto Press, 2003), the latter two purporting to extract some "lessons of the Holocaust" for use in resolving the Arab-Israeli war.
Ellis summarizes his ambivalence about the Holocaust in these words: "To speak of the Holocaust without confessing our sins towards the Palestinian people and seeking a real justice with them is a hypocrisy that debases us as Jews. Surely, the ultimate trivialization is the use of memory to oppress others and this, rather than the 'industry', is responsible for the difficulties facing those who seek to communicate the historic suffering of European Jews."
A central assertion in Ellis' campaign against Israel is his insistence that Jews have abandoned "Prophetic Ethics." But there is little in his books to indicate that he has the slightest idea of which ethics the Prophets of the Bible really promoted, nor even that he has ever bothered to read those books of the Bible. He evidently is willing to take Tikkun editor Michael Lerner's word on what they contain.3
Ellis' idea of defending the ethics of the Hebrew Prophets is to write Israel-bashing pieces for the same al-Ahram Egyptian daily that regularly prints blood libels about Jews and cites the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as an authoritative source.4 Industriously, if somewhat mysteriously, Ellis finds sources in the Books of the Prophets for the Palestinian "Right of Return," which he so passionately endorses,5 although (or perhaps because) it means an end Jewish national existence. Ellis thinks that Jews should turn their High Holidays into days of mourning for their "crimes" against "Palestinians."6
One of Ellis's recent books is called Judaism does not Equal Israel, and he has touted it in numerous talks on and off the Baylor campus. Its theme is that Israel is not just an evil threat to the region but to Judaism itself. It features a foreword praising Ellis' negative take on Judaism written by fellow Israel-basher Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (The fact that Ellis could not find a Jewish theologian to praise his "take" on Judaism is significant.)
Another work in which he reiterates his insistence that the Holocaust needs to be converted into a weapon against Israel's survival is Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes (Pluto Press, 2003.) The first hint one has of the real orientation of this atrocious little book, which purports to be a theological re-examination of what it means to be Jewish after the Holocaust, is that the only people Ellis and his publisher could find to endorse the book on the jacket are Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and others favoring Palestinian terrorism. Pro-terror and Islamist web sites have given the book rave reviews. So has the PLO's web site. The leftist publication The Nation recently praised the book's call for Israel to be eliminated, although expressing dislike for the fact that Ellis thinks religion still has some positive roles to play in the 21st century.
The only thing of value that Ellis thinks Jews should derive from their experiences during the Holocaust is a duty to unambiguously denounce Israel and to support the demands and agenda of the Palestinian terrorists. He denounces all Jewish denominations and all rabbinic institutions for their failures to endorse Palestinian violence unreservedly. He is as hostile to the Jews of America as he is to those of Israel: "We as Jews come after the Holocaust, but we also come after the illusory promises of Israel and America. And we cannot find our way alone, only with others who realize that the promises they have been handed are also illusory."
Ellis' concept of Israel is of a bunch of "bullies" riding about in helicopters and firing senselessly at poor innocent Palestinian civilians for absolutely no reason at all (an image repeated ad nauseum in many of Ellis' screeds). Suicide bombers blowing up Israeli buses and other perpetrators of mass atrocities against Jews do not interest him. Ellis' Israel is a belligerent selfish entity, mistreating and enslaving (yes, he uses that term) the Palestinians, as part of some sinister grand design of the settlers in the "Palestinian" territories.
Ellis pretends never to have heard of the Oslo "peace process" and writes about Israeli "conquest" and "occupation" of the Palestinians as being "complete," this long after Israel turned almost all of these unfortunates to the Hamas' and the PLO's tender rule.
The theme of Israel and Palestine: Out of the Ashes is the same that Ellis preaches nonstop on the lecture circuit. He asserts that the Jews have utilized the Holocaust as a gimmick to grasp power, steal property, and oppress the poor Arabs. Further, he asserts that Israel's original sin was to utilize the Holocaust as an excuse to occupy "Palestinian" land. The only "massacres" of any consequence that have occurred in the long Mideast struggle, in his view, are Jenin and Deir Yassin (neither of which was in fact a massacre.) What the Palestinians suffered in these ambiguous encounters was, he says, the moral equivalents of the Holocaust of the Jews. But in the 2002 Jenin battle, less than twenty civilians died in the midst of a military operation by Israel against terrorists hiding in the town. And Deir Yassin was the scene of a 1948 battle in which some 100 civilians were killed, in an action immediately condemned by the leadership of the Haganah, the Jewish community's main paramilitary force, and by the area's two chief rabbis. To put these events in the scale of atrocity with the Holocaust is simply obscene.
Ellis is openly contemptuous of any talk about Jews being in need of any national empowerment. Such things constitute "Constantinian Judaism,"7 to use Ellis' favorite nonsense term, a malapropism picked up - one suspects - after spending too much time misrepresenting Judaism at Christian theological institutions. What he means by this term is the conscripting of religion to serve the agenda of the militarist state. (Ellis uses it to describe Jews who support either Israel OR the United States - and of course those evil malicious Jewish "settlers.") Jews can only fulfill their proper ethical role in history, which - Ellis is persuaded - is to promote socialism and leftist fads, if they are stateless and suffering.
Ellis never finds time in all his discussions of the theological implications of the Holocaust to consider the mass murder of Jewish children by his beloved Palestinians. Uniformed Jewish youths certainly have no right to ride around in helicopters to prevent such things. Nor is he willing to acknowledge that any "mistreatment" of Palestinians, such as the assassination of some of their leading terrorists, might have anything at all to do with the atrocities committed by Palestinians against countless Israeli Anne Franks. In a book supposedly about the lessons of the Holocaust for the Jews, there is not a single word about the Nazi-like demonization of Jews by the PLO and its affiliates, nor about the daily Islamofascist calls for genocide against Jews.
Ellis even rejects the political positions of Israel's Far Left as insensitive, brutal, and insufficiently "progressive." He is a passionate supporter of the "One-State Solution," in which Israel will simply be eliminated as a Jewish state and will be enfolded within a larger Palestinian-dominated state that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. (This is also known as the "Rwanda Solution" because of the atrocity that would surely follow its implementation.) He preaches it at conference after conference, insisting that such a fate is the ultimate realization of the Jewish mission and the only permissible lesson that Jews may learn from the Holocaust.
The main theological lesson that Marc H. Ellis draws from the Holocaust and preaches wherever he goes is that Jews must stop trying to defend themselves against violent anti-Semites and that instead "progressive Jews" such as himself should see to it that Israel is destroyed. The only real lesson that Ellis wishes the world to learn from the Holocaust is that Israelis are now behaving like the Nazis who murdered six million of their forbears and that Jews who assist the Palestinian violence in achieving its aims are ethically equivalent to the "good Germans" who rescued Jews in World War II from the Gestapo.
Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog".
The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long.
So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.
A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.
It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.
So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without "loud voices." It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.
We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country's institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.
The leader would be different things to different people. The Obama coalition was the coming together of disparate groups: the white professional liberals seeking absolution for the country in the election of an African-American man, the opponents of the Iraq war who grew more strident as the project in Iraq was taking root, the African-American community that had been invested in the Clintons and then came around out of an understandable pride in one of its own.
The last segment of the electorate to flock to the Obama banners were the blue-collar workers who delivered him Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. He was not their man. They fully knew that he didn't share their culture. They were, by his portrait, clinging to their guns and religion, but the promise of economic help, and of protectionism, carried the day with them.
The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his "first hundred days." Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.
All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008.
He was no FDR, and besides the history of the depression—the real history—bears little resemblance to the received narrative of the nation instantly rescued, in the course of 100 days or 200 days, by an interventionist state. The economic distress had been so deep and relentless that FDR began his second term, in 1937, with the economy still in the grip of recession.
Nor was JFK about style. He had known military service and combat, and familial loss; he had run in 1960 as a hawk committed to the nation's victory in the Cold War. He and his rival, Richard Nixon, shared a fundamental outlook on American power and its burdens.
Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can't rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can't be his. Mr. Obama isn't Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads.
In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation's esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was "morning in America" he meant it; he believed in America's miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power.
The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.
In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.
Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn't underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.
American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.
Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence.
Mr. Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University. He is also an adjunct fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Long-gagged FBI whistleblower's full under-oath testimony from Ohio election case, details Congressional blackmail, bribery, espionage, infiltration, more...
Just over two weeks ago, FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds was finally allowed to speak about much of what the Bush Administration spent years trying to keep her from discussing publicly on the record. Twice gagged by the Bush Dept. of Justice's invocation of the so-called "State Secrets Privilege," Edmonds has been attempting to tell her story, about the crimes she became aware of while working for the FBI, for years.
Thanks to a subpoena issued by the campaign of Ohio's 2nd District Democratic U.S. Congressional candidate David Krikorian, her remarkable allegations of blackmail, bribery, espionage, infiltration, and criminal conspiracy by current and former members of the U.S. Congress, high-ranking State and Defense Department officials, and agents of the government of Turkey are seen and heard here, in full, for the first time, in her under-oath deposition. Both the complete video tape and transcript of the deposition follow below.
Though there was much concern, prior to her testimony, that the Obama Dept. of Justice might re-invoke the "State Secrets Privilege" to keep her from speaking, they did not do so. Nor did they choose to be present at the Washington D.C. deposition.
The BRAD BLOG covered details of some of Edmonds' startling disclosures made during the deposition, as it happened, in our live blog coverage from August 8th. The deposition included criminal allegations against specifically named members of Congress. Among those named by Edmonds as part of a broad criminal conspiracy: Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Bob Livingston (R-LA), Stephen Solarz (D-NY), Tom Lantos (D-CA), as well as an unnamed, still-serving Congresswoman (D) said to have been secretly videotaped, for blackmail purposes, during a lesbian affair.
High-ranking officials from the Bush Administration named in her testimony, as part of the criminal conspiracy on behalf of agents of the Government of Turkey, include Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, and others.
During the deposition --- which we are still going through ourselves --- Edmonds discusses covert "activities" by Turkish entities "that would involve trying to obtain very sensitive, classified, highly classified U.S. intelligence information, weapons technology information, classified Congressional records...recruiting key U.S. individuals with access to highly sensitive information, blackmailing, bribery."
Speaking about current members of Congress during a break in the testimony, Krikorian told The BRAD BLOG that "for people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don't take action against it, in my opinion, it's negligence." (More video statements from Krikorian, Edmonds and attorneys from all parties, taped before, during, and after the 8/8/09 testimony, are available here.)
Edmonds' on-the-record disclosures also include bombshell details concerning outed covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's front company, Brewster Jennings. Edmonds alleges the front company had actually been shut down in August of 2001 --- three years prior to Bob Novak's public disclosure of the covert operative's identity --- following a tip-off to a wire-tap target about the true nature of the CIA front company. The cover was blown, Edmonds alleges, by Marc Grossman, who was, at the time, the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. State Department. Prior to that, Grossman served as ambassador to Turkey. He now works "for a Turkish company called Ihals Holding," according to Edmonds' testimony.
An unclassified FBI Inspector General's report, released on her case in 2005, declared Edmonds' classified allegations to be "credible," "serious," and "warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI." In 2002, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-NE) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), then the senior members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, co-wrote letters on Edmonds' behalf to Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and DoJ Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, calling on all of them to take action in respect to her allegations. And in a 2002 60 Minutes report on Edmonds' case, Grassley noted: "Absolutely, she's credible...And the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story."
The 8/8/09 deposition was brought by Krikorian as part of his defense in a case filed against him before the Ohio Election Commission (OEC) by Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH). The 2nd district Congresswoman has accused Krikorian, an Armenian-American who ran against her as an independent in 2008, of "false statements" during the campaign last year alleging that she had accepted "blood money" from Turkish interests. Krikorian says that Schmidt, co-chair of the Congressional Turkish Committee, accepted more money from Turkish interests during last year's campaign than any other member of Congress, despite few, if any, ethnic Turks among her local constituency. He has suggested she may have been instrumental in helping to hold off a Congressional vote on a long-proposed, much-disputed resolution declaring the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during WWI as a "genocide" by the Turks.
Edmonds herself happens to be a Turkish-American, though she was recently attacked by the Turkish Lobby, following her long-sought, long-blocked testimony.
The complete transcript of Sibel Edmonds' under-oath testimony, may now be downloaded here [PDF]. The complete video-taped testimony follows, in five parts.
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