Via Zero Hedge, Republican former VP Dick Cheney comes out against Edward Snowden:

I’m interested by several aspects of his remarks.

First, there is what Cheney didn’t say: Cheney apparently did not call Snowden a liar. I’m not sure if that puts Cheney at odds with Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who said last week:

“[Snowden] was lying…He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he’s even over-inflated what the actually technology of the programs would allow one to do. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

Rogers’ language is a bit slippery: He plants the word “lying” but doesn’t indicate that Snowden was lying about the most crucial revelations, namely, the extent of NSA surveillance of people’s phone records and Internet activities. Between that and Cheney’s apparent silence on the same, I will take the NSA surveillance revelations as ‘confirmed’.

Rogers and Cheney do both call Snowden a “traitor” and suggest that he is a front for someone else; perhaps China. They are not the first to wonder if he’s a front. I figured that Snowden could be acting for an NSA higher-up (who opposes the surveillance programs); but I never totally ruled out (and still don’t) that Snowden could be acting for China. It struck me as a bit odd, from the beginning, that Snowden is holed up with a foreign power which delights in the embarrassment to the U.S. here, and as well, benefits from it.

Anyway, Cheney goes on to strongly defend the NSA surveillance; he suggests it would have prevented the 9-11 attacks, and takes a ‘trust us’ type of stance.

I disagree with Mr. Cheney. I do so respectfully; he’s a great American, and there are two sides to every story. I come down on the Rand Paul / civil liberties side of this one. The current extent of surveillance goes well beyond anything I ever defended the Bush-Cheney administration doing.

And the Obama administration’s other scandals – for example, their IRS / Tea Party scandal, or their multiple spy-on-the-media scandals, or multiple occasions when they happily manipulated classified info for political gain, and/or lied to the American people – have, by now, proven that they (the Obama administration) are profoundly unworthy of trust.

UPDATE – Some tidbits from the last several days:

• Snowden was a prolific online commentor. (Heh)
• Thousands of firms trade confidential data with the U.S. government. Did you know that Internet companies answers tens of thousands of government requests per year?
• More video of the Obama administration contradicting itself on surveillance and civil liberties; this time, Joe Biden of 2006 attacking the Bush programs which were, again, less than what Obama has now.

UPDATE: NSA surveillance has provoked disagreement among the scholars at Cato. Here is a lengthy piece from Julian Sanchez, discussing many legal details from a viewpoint I agree with.

A couple of opinion pieces. First, from Legal Insurrection:

…I’m also concerned with what could be done with the information gathered about American citizens not suspected of a crime if put into the hands of politicians and political groups, and bureaucrats who work for or are sympathetic to such politicians and political groups.

The threat, oddly enough, is proven by the [present] leaks…If some government employee who has sworn to keep information secret is willing to leak [it]…for (allegedly) good purposes, what’s to stop that person from violating his or her oath by leaking data-mined information…for other than good reasons…?

…The issue goes beyond the NSA programs. Obamacare is a form of data mining. Obamacare will put into the hands of the IRS medical and health information of an unprecedented level.

And from Reason:

…everything and everyone are relevant to everything, because anything could yield some clue that could conceivably solve some crime. But that view is the same one that justified those general warrants from King George III.

The problem with indiscriminate [surveillance] of homes and effects is not that it’s ineffective in finding wrongdoing. It’s that the innocent people should not be punished in the pursuit of the guilty….

The danger isn’t (just) in what’s being done with the surveillance databases now; it’s in the fact that they exist, i.e., what could be done with them – and will be, sooner or later. Especially under an administration as power-hungry, deceptive and corrupt as Obama’s.

In the Bush 43 days, I believed that the government was only after real terrorists. But because of Obama’s IRS/Tea Party scandal specifically, I now know otherwise. That scandal has proven that the government’s motives are not pure.

And thus the NSA revelations, while they may be a non-scandal by themselves, they do carry the whiff of all of Obama’s other scandals. Because all of them fit together in a disturbing pattern. I am not against responsible counter-terrorism; I am against Obama’s pattern.

Lots of news this weekend on the NSA (phone surveillance) & PRISM (Internet surveillance) revelations. (Some info on how PRISM works from the Silicon Valley side of things, here.)

As these revelations dominate the headlines, perhaps they do obscure other important Obama scandals like Benghazi, IRS / Tea Party, DOJ spying on AP, Pigford, the many EPA scandals, and more. But I say, look at the bright side. There are plenty of revelations to come in those other scandals, so it’s probably temporary.

And, although it’s bad that the Obama administration is so scandalous: given that it is, it’s good that so many of them are coming to light. If some voter doesn’t care about scandal X, they may well care about scandal Y. Even a good chunk of Obama’s left-wing base who may approve of his IRS abusing the Tea Party, is disturbed that he has gone from criticizing to defending the NSA’s activities in spying on ordinary Americans.

So, meet Edward Snowden, now receiving media attention as the NSA whistleblower. I found the whole article interesting. One minor detail which caught my eye is that Snowden sounds like a disillusioned Obama supporter:

…the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms [of CIA and NSA activities], rendering disclosures unnecessary. [Snowden] left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility…It was then, he said, that he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in”, and as a result, “I got hardened.”…”you can’t wait around for someone else to act…”

By the way, it looks like Obama means to prosecute the recent leaks. If he does, let’s remember that he will be carrying out the law.

Having said that: The difference between Candidate Obama and President Obama on these issues is astounding, even to a seasoned cynic. Here’s Obama from 2007:

[The Bush] administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest…

Now click here for some video of Obama hemming and hawing about how we should all trust the Congressional and judicial oversight of these massive surveillance programs. (more…)

President Obama just gave a speech, wherein he addressed the NSA surveillance revelations. From CNN:

Sweeping up Americans’ telephone records and monitoring Internet activity from overseas are “modest encroachments on privacy” that can help U.S. intelligence analysts disrupt terror activity, President Barack Obama said Friday.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he reassured Americans…

And from Yahoo!:

“I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs,” Obama said…”My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards.”

Isn’t that reassuring? Obama says he means well!

Dan has posed the question, Is revelation of phone data gathering “scandal” a (kind of) distraction?

With respect, my answer is: Perhaps. Maybe the Obama crew staged the NSA revelations, to divert attention from their main scandals.

But, if true, wouldn’t it mean they’re getting desperate? (Telling the media “Don’t cover that scandal, cover *this* one.”) As a fan of truth coming to light, I’m pleased. And don’t worry, the other scandals are still under investigation and have plenty of revelations to come. There will be plenty of oxygen for them.

So, getting back to the NSA revelations…I’m worried by some of the commentary I’ve seen.

Dan quotes law professor John Yoo as saying that this “data collecting isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of phone calls and not information on the dialed numbers, length of the calls, etc.” And Yoo may well be right, as regards the state of the law today.

But that doesn’t necessarily make it right. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The right to be secure in your “papers”. Now, the Framers (of the Constitution) said “papers” in part because they couldn’t conceive of phone calls. In their day, people communicated over distances by paper letters. Can you imagine one of the Framers saying the following?

Having the Post Office collect data for the President on every letter that every person sends isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of letters and not information on the sender and recipient, the weight of the letters (or number of pages), etc.

I can’t. In other words, I don’t find it terribly reassuring to be told that they don’t actually open the letters phone calls and read listen to them.

Finally, I would remind people that the NSA is traditionally much closer to the White House than the other security agencies, which is why I put “for the President” in the above mock-up. I do support counter-terrorism, but… Color me skeptical. I have concerns on this.

By now, most of us have heard the reports that the Tsarnaev family received some $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance.

It touches on a key question that arises when government pays people to basically do nothing: what the heck are they up to, all day?

The classic story that welfare-spending advocates give us is, The Family Who Just Need A Little Help To Get On Their Feet: imperfect but responsible parents who are going to school and looking for jobs (however desperately), while they take care of kids or others who depend on them. I’m sure that some proportion of recipients is like that. I’m also sure that at least some other recipients sit on their rear ends for years at a time. And finally, some others must be up to no good: running meth labs, planning crimes, or studying radical Islam and (perhaps) learning how to commit terror. What are the true proportions of the three groups? That, I do not know.

When people must work for a living, we have a pretty good idea what they’re up to all day: Their jobs. If they’re going to make trouble, they must do it more in their off-hours.

Back in 2001, Mickey Kaus noted some of the links between welfare benefits and terrorism. I also remember Bruce Bawer talking about it in his 2006 book: the idea that the European welfare state paid benefits to its unassimilated Islamist immigrants as a kind of appeasement, oblivious to the fact that it was (in effect) paying them to remain unassimilated and Islamist.

The headline is what I just saw on Yahoo! (hence the quotes). The article is from Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor:

Former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul has slammed US law enforcement for responding to the Boston Marathon bombing with “police state tactics.”

In a post on the website of libertarian activist Lew Rockwell, Mr. Paul said Monday that the governmental reaction to the tragic explosions was worse than the attack itself. The forced lockdown of much of the Boston area, police riding armored vehicles through the streets, and door-to-door searches without warrants were all reminiscent of a military coup or martial law, Paul added.

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” according to Paul.

Furthermore, this response did not result in the capture of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Paul charged. He was discovered hiding in a boat by a private citizen, who called police…

The article seems to be written by a leftie: it unfortunately goes on to quote the pompous and silly Glenn Greenwald, and uses guilt-by-association to insinuate that Austrian economics (Ludwig von Mises) somehow goes with racism.

But brush that aside: the main topic is still interesting. Your thoughts? Who went too far: Ron Paul, or the Boston police?

The incomparable Ed Morrissey:

Criminals rarely go to the trouble of applying for gun permits…

…Dzhokhar [Tsarnaev] was already ineligible for a handgun license, being under 21, and Tamerlan probably would have been ineligible because of his conviction for domestic assault. Did those laws prevent the Tsarnaevs from getting handguns and explosives? That’s a rhetorical question, unless you’ve been asleep for a week.

RTWT.

In the aftermath in today’s media culture of such horrors as yesterday’s bombing in Boston, we had hardly begun to mourn the victims before some voices politicized the atrocity as if their own inner “need” to make a political point superseded our own need to grieve.

We still don’t know who set the explosion in Boston and most Americans — of all political persuasions — feel numbed by what happened yesterday, particularly given the death of an 8-year-old boy. After such atrocities, writes Dana Loesch,

. . .the normal person responds by falling to their knees in prayer. The compassionate person responds with concern for the affected. The professional reports the facts and differentiates between speculation and confirmation.

It is the desperate and professionally and spiritually anemic who heartlessly view tragedy as a chance to settle some imaginary score. These individuals are baselessly impugning innocent groups and in doing so, inadvertently impugn themselves and their profession.

Via Instapundit.  Today, the nation should be united in grief, mourning those who lost their lives, praying for those injured by the attacks and resolved to discover the truth.

Whoever set these bombs, intending to kill innocent human beings, is evil — regardless of his political ideology or religious affiliation. That we know.  And at this point, we know little more than that.

Let us keep that in mind as we remember what happened yesterday in Boston and remind ourselves that our ideological adversaries, at least most of them, share our outrage at the perpetrators’ actions, our gratitude for the emergency responders — and private citizens — who helped out, our grief for those who died and our concern for the surviving victims’ wellbeing.

I’ve hesitated to comment on yesterday’s Boston terror attack. Much of what could be said right now would be either obvious, or premature.

In the ‘obvious’ category: To attack masses of ordinary people trying to do something happy is singularly evil. (Some call it ‘cowardly’; but that’s not enough: It’s human evil.) Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

As to ‘premature’, I haven’t seen much real info yet on the identity or motives of the perpetrators. But hey, if you have seen something (or, as we get more news), please feel free to post it in the comments. Ditto for patterns in the Obama administration’s response.

As to patterns in the media coverage, it does seem as though some of the usual suspects want to wrongly insinuate the patriotic Right being at fault; but even there, the pattern (if any) is still forming.

As to the trial of Kermit Gosnell (who also slaughtered innocents) and its possible impacts, here are a few items of interest:

• The lamestream media has finally been forced to send reporters to the trial.
• Other unsafe/unsanitary abortion clinics are coming to light. (I thought these clinics were supposed to be better than back alleys?)
• LauraW (at Ace) puts her finger on why this matter is so sensitive for the pro-abortion Left: “As long as the belief persists among most reasonable people that the child has not been formed yet, and will not suffer, they will tolerate [abortion]…However, as soon as they understand that big, live, squealing babies are being murdered in abortion facilities, the spell is broken.”

UPDATE: As of this morning, Obama is calling the Boston attack ‘evil’ and an act of terror. Kudos – glad to see him state it clearly. Still no info, yet, on who did it.

And, so far as I know, still no comment from Obama on Gosnell. Yes, I am drawing a moral equivalency here between Gosnell and the Boston terrorist(s): both appear to have killed wantonly.

UPDATES: It looks like a pressure-cooker IED was used in Boston.

Steny Hoyer (D) says the attacks are “proof” that the ‘sequester’ budget cuts are bad, before catching himself and conceding that the paltry cuts are not “having any impact presently.”

UPDATE: The Obama administration, on the other hand, seems to have slashed the domestic bombing-prevention budget by 45% in its time, while reportedly spending $200 million on Hawaiian vacations.

When the grassroots effort began which led to me strongly considering a challenge to Lindsey Graham for US Senate in 2014 — I promised that I would conduct my efforts in a transparent manner through social media.

I’ve been relatively quiet about my decision making process this week.

That was by design. After the enormous reception I received at CPAC, my team of advisors and I thought it best that we keep a lower profile this week.

This has allowed us to do the quiet due diligence that we need in order to make a final decision on whether to enter the race.

I promised that there would be a decision by mid-April, and there still will be.

I’d just ask everyone’s patience with me as I consult with my family, friends and members of the conservative grassroots that I respect dearly.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

-Bruce

Lots of talk lately about the Obama administration’s policy of drone strikes on terrorists.

“Bush did it too”, but Obama has escalated the number of these strikes, and also conducted the first strike ever against an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki).

I’m not sure yet if these strikes are right (i.e., legitimate combat / battlefield strikes), or wrong (i.e., more like extrajudicial killings; possibly war crimes, when they hit civilians on non-battlefields). But I do know that they provide a fascinating window into left-wing hypocrisy. I’ll tally some examples.

• When Bush was President, these strikes were, to lefties, a sign of American darkness. But now that Obama is President, … ?

(more…)

For anyone who loves kids, yesterday’s horror in Connecticut was even more painful than the recent shootings in Colorado and Arizona.  When I first read about it, I didn’t want to believe it and hoped that (the) initial reports (I read) were wrong.  I became almost numb when I learned that they were not.

At times like these, words often fail us.  We struggle to express the sadness we feel as we struggle to understand how man could do this to his fellows, particularly those so young, children who have just begun to taste life.  And we feel anger, anger that this has happened, anger that someone could do this — and we want to direct our anger at some target so we can better make sense of the horror.

So must our ancestors have reacted throughout human history to the perennial problem of man’s inhumanity to man.  Each of us finds difference ways to grapple with something we cannot understand.  And perhaps that is why the image of hell (in its various manifestations) has long resonated with people from a great variety of backgrounds, honoring and worshipping a great variety of deities.

“Gehenna, a synonym for Hell,” John Podhoretz wrote yesterday in Commentary

. . . was revived today in Newton, Connecticut, where as many as 20 children at last report were slaughtered in an elementary school this morning.

We learn in the book of Kings that in the seventh century BCE, the prophet Jeremiah demanded that King Josiah destroy the idolator’s temple in Gehenna to prevent more sacrifices to Moloch. We can presume from the newsworthiness of this act that child sacrifice was once a relatively common practice in the ancient Middle East, as we know it to have been in other pagan cultures.

. . . .

The idea that civilization is dedicated to the protection and preservation the weak and the innocent, and not about fulfilling evil impulses to defile and destroy innocence, is the root and core of the West. One cannot conceive of anything more monstrous than a person or persons who could look small children in the eye and systematically shoot them dead. Which is why this crime, among the worst crimes in American history, is not just an assault on the children, or their families, or the town of Newtown—though it is all those things. (more…)

I have decided not to pull the posts we did on this matter.  We make mistakes from time to time.   We won’t try to hide from that.  And we correct them as soon as we become aware of information contradicting what we have reported.

As bloggers, we often cover stories we find on blogs and other web-sites.  This one seemed legitimate, particularly given the picture and the report of his hospitalization.  Unlike news sites, we don’t have the resources to double check stories.

As I wrote in updating one of my previous posts,

I am almost skeptical of these stories, but was less so this time, given the picture of Kyle Wood.  He is not the first person to have staged such a crime and is perhaps the first gay Republican to have perpetrated such a hoax.  Perhaps, he sought to draw attention to the prejudice we gay Republicans face because of or heterodox (at least in the gay community) opinions.

But, he only succeeded in casting doubt on that prejudice.

We will continue to document that prejudice and breathe a sign of relief that the intolerance of the gay left remains mostly verbal.  And we are tough to withstand such hate speech.

Ever since the conventions, even when Obama led in the polls, conservative bloggers have cited the superabundance of surveys showing Romney leading among independent voters.  Even Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has noticed this:

President Obama has a problem with independents. And it’s not a small problem.

In the last three releases of the tracking poll conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News, Obama has trailed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney among independent voters by between 16 and 20 percentage points.

That’s a striking reversal from 2008, when Obama won independent voters, who made up 29 percent of the electorate, by eight points over Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

(H/t:  Instapundit.)  Jay Cost believes the Republican’s advantage among independents “could prove key“:

And with these voters, Romney has a substantial lead. The most recent Rasmussen Reports poll shows Romney besting Obama by 13 points, 52 percent to 39 percent, among unaffiliated voters. Since 1972, the first year of exit polling, no candidate for president has won election while losing independents by such a wide margin. (more…)

Back in April 2008, Michael Barone’s “geographic analysis” of the primaries that had taken place at that point in the contest for the Democratic nomination and found “a divide between Democratic constituencies—a divide as stark as that between blacks and Latinos or the old and the young—which has not shown up in the exit polls”:

That’s the divide between academics and Jacksonians. In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians [Appalachian voters mostly white].

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war. Economically, defense spending competes for the public-sector dollars that academics and public employees think are rightfully their own. More important, I think, warriors are competitors for the honor that academics and public employees think rightfully belongs to them. Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees.

In the fall, John McCain would edge Barack Obama in a “Jacksonian” district where, in 2004, John Kerry beat George W. Bush by 8,000 votes, Pennsylvania’s 12th district, in the Southwest corner of the state.  (Interestingly, in his 1984 landslide, Ronald Reagan lost many counties in that region, that, in his 2008 defeat, McCain would carry.)

Perhaps if it were not for the market meltdown which hurt McCain in the suburbs, Obama’s weakness among “Jacksonians” might have cost him the election.  This year, as Barone has noted, at least since the Michigan primary at the end of February, Mitt Romney has done very well in affluent suburbs and seems to have, as the sage pundit reported earlier this week, translated that strength from the primary into the general election campaign: (more…)

From the left-of-center New Republic:

A reader just alerted me to this video:

Last night, in reading about the vice presidential debate, I wondered if Paul Ryan had not been as prepared as I had anticipated he would be.  He had not been more assertive because he had not expected Joe Biden to be so aggressive.

Perhaps, I wondered this morning, there was method to his restrained.  He, like most of us, had surely heard Joe Biden yesterday ask if a reporter had ever seen him “rope-a-dope“? Steven Hayward is “certain . . .”

. . . that it was Biden’s plan to try to get under Ryan’s skin, drive Ryan off his core strength (his passionate wonkiness), cause him to make a mistake, lose his composure, or look too young and unready for high office.  Biden utterly failed to do this.  Ryan kept his cool throughout.

“Perhaps“, offered Jim Geraghty echoing the point, Biden’s antics were part of “a bold but failed strategy to try to get Ryan to suddenly exclaim, “What the hell is wrong with you, man?”

Did the Democrats want to provoke an angry reaction from Ryan to suggest that the young men is unfit for higher office?  But, instead of Ryan’s reaction becoming the subject of today’s conversations — and jokes — Biden’s boorishness is.  If the Democrat had meant to rope a dope last night, Paul Ryan wasn’t the dope who got roped.

(Or was Biden hoping Ryan would ask moderator Martha Raddatz to step in and so look weak?)