Welcome to the United States of Paranoia

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Photo Credit: APFeel like Big Brother is watching you these days? You’re not alone.

“This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario,” wrote the late William Safire of The New York Times in 2002, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11. “Here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive . . . will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual, centralized grand database.’ ”

Twelve years on, this is the world we live in, but worse. Through a combination of fear, cowardice, political opportunism and bureaucratic metastasis, the erstwhile land of the free has been transformed into a nation of closely watched subjects — a country of 300 million potential criminals, whose daily activities need constant monitoring.

Once the most secret of organizations, the NSA has become even more famous than the CIA, the public face of Big Brother himself. At its headquarters on Savage Road in Fort Meade, Md., its omnivorous Black Widow supercomputer hoovers up data both foreign and domestic, while its new $2 billion data center near Bluffdale, Utah — the highly classified Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center — houses, well, just about everything. As James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine two years ago, as the center was being completed:

“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private e-mails, cellphone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ ”

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Confessions Of An Ex-TSA Agent

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Photo Credit: Politico Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.

There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.

I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.

Charges of racial profiling by the TSA made headlines every few months, and working from behind the scenes we knew what was prompting those claims. Until 2010 (not long after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentially leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening. The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem:

Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan
Iraq, Iran, Yemen
and Cuba,
Lebanon-Libya, Somalia-Sudan
People’s Republic of North Korea.

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Krauthammer: How to Debunk the ‘War on Women’

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Photo Credit: Screenshot What is it about women that causes leading Republicans to grow clumsy, if not stupid? When even savvy, fluent, attractively populist Mike Huckabee stumbles, you know you’ve got trouble. Having already thrown away eminently winnable Senate seats in Missouri and Indiana because of moronic talk about rape, the GOP might have learned. You’d think.

Huckabee wasn’t quite as egregious, just puzzling and a bit weird. Trying to make a point about Obamacare mandating free contraceptives, he inexplicably began speculating that the reason behind the freebie was the Democrats’ belief that women need the federal government to protect them from their own libidos.

Bizarre. I can think of no Democrat who has ever said that, nor any liberal who even thinks that. Such a theory, when offered by a conservative, is quite unfortunately self-revealing.

In any case, why go wandering into the psychology of female sexuality in the first place? It’s ridiculous. This is politics. Stick to policy. And there’s a good policy question to be asked about the contraceptive mandate (even apart from its challenge to religious freedom). It’s about priorities. By what moral logic does the state provide one woman with co-pay-free contraceptives while denying the same subvention to another woman when she urgently needs antibiotics for her sick child?

The same principle of sticking to policy and forswearing amateur psychology should apply to every so-called women’s issue. Take abortion, which is the subtext of about 90 percent of the alleged “war on women,” the charge being that those terrible conservative men are denying women control of their reproductive health.

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Barack Obama: Patron Saint of the Press

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Photo Credit: APDuring this week’s State of the Union address, the President of the United States concluded his remarks telling the story of Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg. Sgt. Remsburg, on his 10th tour in Afghanistan, nearly lost his life when a roadside bomb exploded.

Sgt. Remsburg suffered brain damage and paralysis on his left side, is now partially blind and has difficulty speaking. It was a touching ending to an otherwise shabby speech. More striking than President Obama’s tribute was the press corps’ reaction. NBC News Senior Political Editor Mark Murray declared on twitter that, “Obama’s ending on Remsburg wasn’t just a story about America — it also was a story about Obama. Nothing has ever come easy.”

Former White House speechwriter Jon Favreau chimed in and agreed. Certainly Barack Obama is incapable of saluting others without making it about himself. After Nelson Mandela died, President Obama saluted him by sending out a picture of the President in Mandela’s jail cell. Honoring the men who died at Pearl Harbor, the president sent out a picture of himself at the USS Arizona. It was then natural to conclude that a narcissist like that would intend to make Cory Remsburg’s story about himself.

Had Mark Murray meant that, it would have been all well and good. But that is not what Murray meant. Writing at NBC News, Murray expanded his tweet, writing, “That story could also apply to Obama himself: Nothing in his seven years on the national political stage … has come easy. … And now the president’s current situation in which he finds himself bloodied and bruised after the botched health-care rollout.”

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Obama’s Unserious Foreign Policy And America’s Permanent War Footing

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Photo Credit: The federalist

Photo Credit: The federalist

Obama’s address on the State Of The Union showed the lack of seriousness about international affairs by which his Administration has been making the world ever more dangerous for Americans. The passages on war and peace, like the rest of the speech, consisted of patent untruths loosely related to Administration programs – the former meant to justify the latter.

Whatever one might think of Obama’s domestic agenda, these couplets reflected a serious intent to advance it. Thus, because ”climate change” is the cause of Western drought and Eastern floods, Obama will impose new restrictions on the use of fossil fuels; and because “reform” of unemployment insurance will get people back to work, Congress must extend the term of current insurance for 1.6 million people. People with an interest in such things know to disregard the nonsense and to take the agenda as seriously as it is meant.

But Obama’s discussion of war and peace verged on abstraction from reality, was not heartfelt, and is certain to call forth disdain. For Obama, the world’s major events might as well be happening on the planet Pluto. Russia is re establishing itself in its “near abroad,” and working with Iran to project a neo-Soviet agenda from Southwest Asia to the Mediterranean. China is inexorably asserting sovereignty over the Western Pacific. As Islam’s Sunni and Shia factions tear at each other’s vitals, they seem to agree only on contempt for America. Obama mentioned none of this.

Rather, as with regard to domestic matters he claimed credit in advance for events that he hopes will take place, and asked for the people’s support on the basis of that claim. He ended the war in Iraq, and is ending the war in Afghanistan. In Syria, he is supporting the good guys. He has put al Qaeda “on the path to defeat, and is doing the same to all similar folk. He is ridding Syria of Chemical weapons, while American diplomacy is at work settling the Arab-Israeli war – the key to a larger peace. He asked Americans to believe that Obama is moving the country “off a permanent war footing.” How, he gave no hint. It is difficult to imagine foreign nations, friend and foe alike, taking any of this seriously. Or Americans for that matter.

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Malkin: Standing Up Against Wealth-Shaming

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Photo Credit: MichelleMalkin.com

Photo Credit: MichelleMalkin.com

America, we have a bullying epidemic. No, not the school bullying issues that get constant attention from Hollywood, the White House and the media. No, not the “fat-shaming” and “body-shaming” outbreaks on Facebook. The problem is wealth-shaming. Class-shaming. Success-shaming.

The State of the Job Creator is under siege.

Last week, a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His passionate letter to The Wall Street Journal decried the “progressive war on the American 1 percent.” He called on the left to stop demonizing “the rich,” and he condemned the Occupy movement’s “rising tide of hatred.”

The mini-manifesto was newsworthy because this truth-teller is not a GOP politician or conservative activist or Fox News personality. As he points out, he lives in the “epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco.” No matter. The mob is shooting the messenger anyway. But maybe, just maybe, his critical message in defense of our nation’s achievers will transcend, inspire, embolden and prevail.

The letter-writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a Harvard MBA. He started out at the bottom at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company on the side and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation’s oldest and most important venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

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Is Obama Sacrificing the Senate for Executive Power?

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Photo Credit: Larry Downing-Pool/Getty Images

Photo Credit: Larry Downing-Pool/Getty Images

Almost two decades ago, Bill Clinton stood before the nation and declared that “the era of big government is over.” Tuesday night, President Obama proclaimed himself the Big Man on Campus.

The contrast was stark: Obama’s Democratic predecessor used the language of restraint. This president, on the other hand, spoke of doing more in a campaign-themed “Year of Action”—and doing it on his own.

The White House is gambling with this new message, betting that a public disheartened by years of gridlock and distrustful of government will welcome a president vowing to act unilaterally, particularly to help the economy. Obama’s team is hoping, guessing, that the public won’t fear him.

It’s a risk—one the White House may not fully appreciate. As one frustrated Democratic strategist put it: “People are suspicious of executive power, so you have to tread carefully.”

But worse yet for Obama, whether he realizes it or not, is the effect this approach could have on Democrats trying to hold onto the Senate. Indeed, while the White House aims to demonstrate that this president remains large and in charge (and aims to boost his flagging stock as a result), the tactic poses a not insignificant chance of denigrating the role of Congress, and by extension the Senate Democrats fighting to preserve his party’s majority rule. Obama may end up hurting that cause more than helping it.

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There He Goes Again

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Screen shot 2014-01-29 at 2.46.13 AMListening to the President’s address last night, I was struck by how similar his remarks were to those he made when accepting the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 2008. His faith in the federal government’s ability to best control the economy has not wavered. In 2008, candidate Obama spoke disparagingly of the long-discredited Republican belief that the best way to create economic growth is through less government intervention and enacting policies that encourage people to take risks, build, create jobs, and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Barack Obama offered instead a new vision, which was really a repackaged old one, of achieving the right kind of growth (as he sees it) through taxing and spending and regulating. His rhetoric promised to take America to new heights, unfortunately only the National Debt has seen them. After five-plus years of Obamanomics, the unemployment rate remains nearly what it was when he took office, and true unemployment much higher. We have the lowest labor participation rate since the early 80s before those “long-discredited” policies implemented by Ronald Reagan, Republicans and many Democrats brought about what some have called “America’s 25 year boom.” The United States experienced the greatest economic expansion in its history, creating tens of millions of new jobs and causing unemployment to drop to under 5 percent.

The truth that Barack Obama should now be able to see, but apparently still does not, is that Big Government does not work. It is the lesson we have had to relearn as a nation about every 30 years since the New Deal. America can once again be the land of opportunity the President spoke about, but it will require policies that encourage risk and business expansion, not punish them through higher taxes and onerous regulations.

We can also reform healthcare, so costs are brought down and Americans are able to control their health choices and keep their healthcare plans, but it will require repealing ObamaCare. The Affordable Care Act’s perverse incentives are causing premiums to skyrocket and millions of Americans to lose their coverage, contrary to assurances made by the President.

America can build upon its position as the energy development leader in the world, but it will require a Chief Executive who is a friend and not a foe to one of the brightest spots in the American economy. Obama boasted of the nation’s record oil production under his tenure, but that development is, in great measure, on private lands. Development on public lands, including here in Alaska, is being thwarted at every turn by this Administration. Exhibit A is its intransigence regarding opening ANWR, despite majority support for it in the state.

Finally, and most importantly, in seeking to implement his vision for America, the President’s complete disregard for the Constitution is unprecedented. Nothing could be more antithetical to the republic our Founders established than the President Obama’s refusal to enforce laws duly passed by the Congress or to “act” without authorization from the people’s representatives or the Constitution.

The President needs a new faith: the path to restoring the American dream does not come from more government bureaucracy, it comes from more American ingenuity.
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Randy DeSoto co-wrote the documentary film I Want Your Money, comparing the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. He authored the book We Hold These Truths.

Huckabee: Reporters Skewer Facts, Semi-Apologize Later (Shocker)

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

The media has an obligation not to rush into a story and influence it, but to report it as it is. Last week reporters from CNN, NBC and other news organizations rushed in and erroneously reported my remarks at the RNC. In their rush to report what they wanted to, they skewered the facts and left me spending my time having to answer ridiculous questions about this fake controversy.

My remarks in case you missed them are here:

“Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on them, it’s a war for them. If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.”

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If You Like Obama’s Executive Orders, You Are Going to Love 2014

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

The American system of government has as it’s chief executive, a president who is carefully checked by a watchful Congress and a consientious judiciary.

Except, when it isn’t.

Case in point: Our president plans to rule us – not govern us – by using the vast powers of his office and absolute control of the federal bureaucracy to ram his vision of hope and change down our throats. Done without the approval of Congress and with little challenge from the judiciary.

Can he get away with it? Watch him:

The new plan “is to bring all of the government alive in a way we have never been very good at,” said another official.

“We’ll be doing that as aggressively as possible…. and if we succeed, that is a big presidency,” a senior administration official told the Post.

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