Politico:

Fox News has notably changed its tone since the election…McCain told me, “Rupert Murdoch is a strong supporter of immigration reform, and Roger Ailes is, too’…McCain said that he, Graham, Rubio, and others also have talked privately to top hosts at Fox, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto, who are now relatively sympathetic to the Gang’s proposed bill…The unity of the Gang fractured at one point when Rubio, who often tried to find ways to set himself apart from the seven other senators, announced his support for an amendment requiring biometric tracking for visa holders which the Gang had agreed to oppose…

Rubio sided with the Chamber against the construction workers. ‘There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,’ a Rubio aide told me. ‘There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.’ In the end, the wage issue was settled to the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s satisfaction, and the Building and Construction Trades union won a cap on the number of visas for foreign construction workers…

The senators’ immigration-policy staffers also attended the Gang’s meetings, and, over time, two stood out: Leon Fresco, a Schumer aide, and Enrique Gonzalez, a Rubio aide. Both are Cuban-American lawyers from Miami who know the intricacies of immigration law. On one occasion, Fresco interrupted Schumer and corrected him on a technical point. According to McCain, Schumer, who is known for being colloquial with his staff, retorted, ‘Shut up, Leon!’ McCain remarked that Schumer and Fresco seemed to have a relationship akin to the characters played by John Goodman and Steve Buscemi in the cult movie ‘The Big Lebowski’

VDH:

employers want a continuing influx of young workers who will undercut the wages of American citizens. That the bargaining power of other minorities, Latino- and African-American citizens especially, is undercut by illegal labor matters little. How odd that elite Republicans pander to Latino grandees to win perhaps 35 percent of the Latino vote; that the party garners no more than 5 percent of the much larger African-American vote is never discussed. In the bizarre logic of the Republican elite, you must cater to the Hispanic elite in order to siphon votes from the liberal Latino bloc, while the much more important black demographic is simply written off. Is there one Republican politician who is more worried about the plight of unemployed African-American citizens than he is about granting amnesty to foreign nationals who broke U.S. laws to come here?

As usual, Mickey Kaus is all over the insanity playing out before our eyes. Appalling creatures, these politicians, no? HT: IP

Telegraph:

total credit in Chinese financial system may have reached 221pc of GDP, jumping almost eightfold over the last decade. Companies will have to fork out $1 trillion in interest payments alone this year…“Liquidity conditions have tightened severely due to the crackdown on shadow banking activities,” said Zhiwei Zhang from Nomura. “We believe the series of policy tightening measures in the past three months have reached critical mass, such that deleveraging in the banking sector is happening. Liquidity tightening can be very damaging to a highly leveraged economy,” he said

Morgan Stanley: “Through 2007, creating a dollar of economic growth in China required just over a dollar of debt. Since then it has taken three dollars of debt to generate a dollar of growth. This is what you normally see in the late stages of a credit binge.” So is the spiking of interest rates in Shanghai.

There’s an interesting piece in Forbes about the potential political future of a well known woman. Add to that the administration’s permanent campaign and a database covering every high placed friend and foe, and it just might be that the Forbes writer is aiming too low. Senate in 2016? How about the Oval Office?

Saudi Gazette:

In Syria, it was Russia which wrote the screenplay of the war, this time in order to serve its own strategy and to maintain a foothold for its naval fleet in the Mediterranean, specifically in the Tartus seaport. Tartus is the sole harbor in the Mediterranean for the Russian naval fleet to receive logistic supplies and maintenance. It receives Russian military ships coming from the Black Sea. The seaport, however, is small and can only receive four medium-size ships at a time. President Putin has clearly said that Tartus is vital for Russian security strategy

The NYT says that the US is now going to start sending weapons to the rebels. The US position has changed from two years ago when Assad was a reformer.

WaPo:

CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair: “A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data. This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.

This was earlier in 2012. This was later in 2012. Probably that Snowden fellow hacking her computer, right?

DOJ: “To our knowledge, the Justice Department has never compromised Ms. Attkisson’s computers, or otherwise sought any information from or concerning any telephone, computer, or other media device she may own or use.” Well that’s reassuring.

Much is being made about Democratic senator Ron Wyden’s reprehensible stunt in asking DNI Clapper about the NSA gathering data on 300MM Americans when he knew the answer was yes and that this was classified information. Leave aside the many ways to weasel out of the question. Bottom line: is it better or worse that these practices, and the complicity of every US technology company in abetting them, have now seen the light of day?

Coulter : the Republican Party’s entire battle plan going forward is to win slightly more votes from 8.4 percent of the electorate…This line of attack has real resonance with our stupidest Republicans. (Proposed Republican primary targets: Sens. Kelly Ayotte, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio)…If the GOP is this stupid, it deserves to die

We’ve heard thoughtful conservatives go on about how intelligence professionals have integrity and seek to carry out important defense mandates using the NSA’s tools in defense of American security. Snowden is thus a scoundrel or worse. To some extent these are fair points. But it is said that Petraeus was brought down by cross-referencing secret emails using ISP’s, phone GPS’s, etc, and then adding further corroborating details via hotel bills, online travel itineraries and so forth. Whether or not this is true in the case of Petraeus is irrelevant. The point is that micro-targeting of individuals is apparently easy to do, given the breadth of the available resources. All it takes is a small number of unscrupulous people with the right knowledge to do so. Imagine if you were at the pinnacle of government and could uncover the peccadilloes of not only the opposing team, but those of your own team. You’d potentially have the power to destroy an opponent’s campaign, but also disqualify or influence/control potential candidates on you own team. Imagine if you also had the dirt on the media that shapes the narrative, and the large financial backers of political campaigns. What power! (This last point is not at all theoretical and was centered in the hometown of the executive branch, as we have seen in case after case in the last two months.) The NSA just makes it all the easier to implement the Chicago way on a grand scale. So this fellow Snowden may be a lout, a nut, a gross criminal, and all the rest of it, but is it better or worse to know that the government can easily target for destruction, blackmail, or extortion any high or low placed person in the country, apparently without breaking a sweat?

The NYT from 2006:

HONG KONG, Aug. 6 — Pro-Beijing lawmakers approved legislation here today giving broad authority to the police to conduct covert surveillance, including wiretapping phones, bugging homes and offices and monitoring e-mail. The bill passed the 60-member Legislative Council on a vote of 32 to 0 soon after pro-democracy lawmakers walked out…the heads of security agencies are allowed to order less intrusive surveillance, like monitoring e-mail and phone calls through servers and telecommunications switches…The bill was particularly controversial because it does not prohibit covert surveillance of journalists and because it imposes only a few restrictions on covert surveillance of lawyers…Chinese agencies have tended to operate with considerable independence from the Hong Kong government and its institutions.

The Guardian on Snowden: On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since. He chose the city because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”. Huh? HT: LGF

Guardian:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell…He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” Three weeks ago, Snowden made final preparations that resulted in last week’s series of blockbuster news stories. At the NSA office in Hawaii where he was working, he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose. He then advised his NSA supervisor that he needed to be away from work for “a couple of weeks” in order to receive treatment for epilepsy

He also said: “My predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland.” Weird. Very weird.

Goodwin:

The sweeping collection of data on private behavior is every bit as indiscriminate and flawed as the airport-screening system. In both, everybody is guilty until proven innocent. Because one terrorist hid a bomb in his shoe, we all must remove our shoes before flying. Because one terrorist hid a bomb in his underwear, we all are subject to X-ray- like screenings. The little old Lutheran lady from Peoria is as suspect as the Saudi Arabian student seeking a pilot’s license. Justice is supposed to be blind, not stupid. Meanwhile, the FBI had been warned about the jihadist turn by one of the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon, but took its eye off him, perhaps out of an excessive concern for his rights. The Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood had identified himself as a “Soldier of Allah,” but the brass didn’t bounce him because they were afraid of the diversity cops. The balance of rights and security is out of balance. On one hand, security officials let terrorists slip through the cracks because they fear charges of anti-Muslim bias. On the other, they secretly vacuum up the personal data and habits of 300 million people. The snooping is an outgrowth of 9/11, but “growth” is the operative word. An emergency response has been expanded and institutionalized, secretly and repeatedly. The warrantless wiretapping program the Bush administration started focused on catching terror suspects from abroad communicating with Americans. But, like mushrooms after the rain, the program spread exponentially to where all phone calls in America are subject. Another program extends the snooping to the Internet and credit-card use, though the details are sketchy. It is of little comfort that the seizure of this electronic trail is defended by both Republicans and Democrats

Noonan:

There is no way a government in the age of metadata, with the growing capacity to listen, trace, tap, track and read, will not eventually, and even in time systematically, use that power wrongly, maliciously, illegally and in areas for which the intelligence gathering was never intended. People are right to fear that the government’s surveillance power will be abused. It will be. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that humans are and will be in charge of it, and humans have shown throughout history a bit of a tendency to play every trick and bend and break laws. “If men were angels,” as James Madison wrote, limits, checks, balances and specifically protected rights would not be necessary. But they aren’t angels. Add to all this simple human mistakes, innocent and not, and misjudgments. And add to that sheer human craziness, partisan lust, political mischief of all sorts. In the Clinton White House there was a guy named Craig Livingstone who amused himself reading aloud the confidential FBI files of prominent Republicans. The files—hundreds of them—were improperly secured and disseminated. Imagine Craig Livingstone at the National Security Agency. Imagine Lois Lerner. So if we have and develop a massive surveillance state, it will be abused.

The failure to do sensible profiling has created a wholly unnecessary Leviathan with powers that surely are abused today. Digging up dirt on your opponents is the Chicago Way, after all. So who would have the means and motive to orchestrate the impressive roll-out of spy scandal after scandal? Could it be the former senior military and intelligence officers who were burnt by people they loathe? Or perhaps their former associates?

More food for thought. Imagine if you could dig up all the dirt, not just on your Republicans opponents, but also on the Democrats who would like to run in 2016. Add to that all the dirt you have on reporters and editors who will shape the coverage of candidates. The power to be a kingmaker and kingbreaker. Unprecedented.

(Mickey Kaus seems to think it’s an inside job on the part of the administration, with which we disagree, but we do appreciate his handy guide to that Rubio silliness.)

It’s California:

An elementary school will hold a toy gun exchange Saturday, offering students a book and a chance to win a bicycle if they turn in their play weapons. Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously. “Playing with toys guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” Hill said. At Saturday’s event, called Strobridge Elementary Safety Day, a Hayward police officer will demonstrate bicycle and gun safety, and the Alameda County Fire Department is sending a rig and crew to talk about fire safety. Fingerprinting and photographing of children will be offered

We wonder if the principal was one of Zombie’s Keystone Kops.

Via Belmont Club:

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper during the March 12 hearing. In response, Clapper replied quickly: “No, sir.”

Move along now. Nothing to see here.

All the tech companies are denying that they ever heard of “PRISM“, and that the government does not have “direct access” to their servers. Amazingly, they all use almost precisely identical language to frame their non-denial denials. It’s another pathetic chapter in a long running series. So they didn’t apparently know the name “PRISM”, and they apparently forwarded the information the government requested to separate servers. Next!

IBD

fracking has made U.S. oil production skyrocket 20% in just the last year, according to the Energy Department. That’s the biggest increase in 21 years, and it is expected to soar another 21% in the next five years. The growth has curbed the U.S. need for energy imports. America is expected to end its dependence on imported liquid fuels by 2025…

Venezuelan exports to the U.S. have fallen 11% in the first two months of 2013 compared to 2012…African nations sounded the sharpest warnings because they have been the first to see the impact of our fracking revolution on their exports, which fell 41% in 2012 from 2011. There are comparable figures elsewhere in OPEC

It was a mere two years ago that we first mentioned fracking, and look how great the progress has been in such a short time.

WaPo:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time….

An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

The Examiner notes some testimony before congress: “Eric Holder refused to answer when asked if the Justice Department is spying on members of Congress, citing the need for a classified conversation.” Wouldn’t a better answer be “no”? This is getting really weird, the speed with which a shoe drops nearly every day. We wouldn’t be surprised if some very senior and recently departed people from the military and intelligence worlds are actively orchestrating these disclosures, and not simply as payback for what was done to them.

The NYT editorial board on the NSA / FBI / Verizon snooping:

The administration has now lost all credibility.

Quite a sentence for the NYT to write. (We note in passing that those unconcerned about these surveillance measures are making the crucial assumption that the information is being used for vital national security purposes and is not being used for domestic political purposes; why would anyone assume such a thing, given this crew’s track record?) HT: TW

HA! The NYT walked it back.

David Gelernter in 2004:

When I was a child in the 1960s, names like Corregidor and Iwo Jima were still sacred, and pronounced everywhere with respect. Writing in the 1960s about the battle of Midway, Samuel Eliot Morison stepped out of character to plead with his readers: “Threescore young aviators…met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War.” Today the Battle of Midway has become niche-market nostalgia material, and most children (and many adults) have never heard of it. Thus we honor “the greatest generation.” (And if I hear that phrase one more time I will surely puke.)…

The Japanese army saw captive soldiers as cowards, lower than lice. If we forget this we dishonor the thousands who were tortured and murdered, and put ourselves in danger of believing the soul-corroding lie that all cultures are equally bad or good. Some Americans nowadays seem to think America’s behavior during the war was worse than Japan’s — we did intern many loyal Americans of Japanese descent. That was unforgivable — and unspeakably trivial compared to Japan’s unique achievement, mass murder one atrocity at a time.

In “The Other Nuremberg,” Arnold Brackman cites (for instance) “the case of Lucas Doctolero, crucified, nails driven through hands, feet and skull”; “the case of a blind woman who was dragged from her home November 17, 1943, stripped naked, and hanged”; “five Filipinos thrown into a latrine and buried alive.” In the Japanese-occupied Philippines alone, at least 131,028 civilians and Allied prisoners of war were murdered. The Japanese committed crimes against Allied POWs and Asians that would be hard still, today, for a respectable newspaper even to describe. Mr. Brackman’s 1987 book must be read by everyone who cares about World War II and its veterans, or the human race.

The attitude of American intellectuals: Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear — after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo — American intellectuals tended to be dead against the U.S. joining Britain’s war on Hitler.

Today’s students learn (sometimes) about right-wing isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. They are less likely to read documents like this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S. intelligentsia’s No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939, signed by John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro and many more of the era’s leading lights. “The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler!’ would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here….The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.” The intelligentsia acted on its convictions. “By one means or another,” Diana Trilling later wrote of this period, “most of the intellectuals of our acquaintance evaded the draft.”

We link to SLA Marshall’s account of D-Day here. For more on the anti-war left in WWII there’s this. HT: PL

The new US ambassador to the UN in 2002 responded to a questioner at UC Berkeley:

Q: Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine-Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, lest if one party or another begins looking like they might be moving toward genocide?…

A: What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of [chuckle] tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old…Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat”. I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention…. Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.

No doubt her views have evolved since her Hagelian episode.

WSJ:

“Wang Huning still believes in Marxism, and he still believes that the party makes the correct choices. He doesn’t believe China should become a multiparty system or have division of powers.” Mr. Wang’s influence derives in part from having daily access to the Chinese leader. He has accompanied three successive presidents on almost every domestic and foreign trip of the past decade…

As head of the Research Office for the past 11 years, Mr. Wang has overseen the “brain trust” for the top leadership, giving policy advice, commissioning research and writing speeches and official reports. “Wang Huning is the biggest internal brains of the CPC,” or Communist Party of China, said Zhu Xufeng, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who has studied the role of think tanks in the Chinese system. As a speechwriter, Mr. Wang would be evaluated based on how much his speech drafts had to be revised, Mr. Zhu said. “If it’s rarely revised by leaders, it’s good — you’re familiar with the leader’s thoughts”…

Mr. Wang’s political break came in 1995, when he was summoned to join the Research Office by then President Jiang, who had gotten to know him as Shanghai party chief in the 1980s and embraced his neoconservative views after the Tiananmen crackdown. Since then, Mr. Wang has played a role in almost every major political initiative…Friends and analysts described Mr. Wang as a workaholic and insomniac who is discreet and almost obsessively low-profile. Several friends said he had largely cut off communication with them since taking charge of the Research Office

China bear Jim Chanos: “The entire Chinese political system is tilted to the current model. Truly changing it will bring on a serious economic contraction. It remains to be seen if Xi/Li have the political will to risk that outcome as a by-product of reform.” Bank loans to GDP are 134% which is unsustainable. We wonder what Mr. Wang is advising.