Before we begin this week's political wrapup, please be advised that President Obama's speech on reforming the National Security Agency won't be covered here today. Obama just gave the speech this morning, and we feel it is too important to offer up snap judgments, preferring instead to let it percolate for a few days before commenting on the substance of the speech or the newly-announced policies.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at some of the sillier stories of the week, just for fun. Previously, I have complained about the term "Bridgegate," as I'm not a big fan of appending "-gate" on every scandal, so I have to applaud the most amusing headline I've yet read on the Chris Christie story, from Robert J. Elisberg on the Huffington Post: "Merry Christiemess." A little seasonal-specific, but catchy and to the point!

Continue Reading »

President Obama is slated to give a momentous speech tomorrow, on the subject of what changes should be made to the National Security Administration and all of the other alphabet-soup agencies which provide intelligence to the federal government. Much attention has been paid to the N.S.A.'s activities, due mostly to the revelations from Edward Snowden. But there's one subject which Obama should address which has been discussed for years -- ending the blatantly unconstitutional practice of issuing "national security letters." Obama should take the opportunity tomorrow to announce he is adopting one of the key recommendations his oversight commission proposed: forcing judicial oversight of national security letters. In plain terms, making them similar to all other search warrants, to comply with the Fourth Amendment.

National security letters are nothing short of an abuse of power. Their use has exploded since 9/11, with the total issued now in the hundreds of thousands. National security letters, for those unaware of their definition, are search warrants issued by the executive branch with no signoff from the judicial branch. The F.B.I. can (and does) write out a letter demanding certain information (from an Internet Service Provider, for instance, or a phone company) be turned over to the government. No judge signs off on the order. They cannot be appealed. In fact, up until very recently, they could not even legally be talked about by the recipient. There was a "gag order" clause in the letter which stated that the letter's mere existence was a national secret which could not be disclosed to anyone, forever.

This, quite obviously, gives law enforcement officers absolute power over searching anything they felt like, in the sacred name of national security. With no legal recourse whatsoever. That is tyrannic power, folks. In fact, historically, it is no different than the abuses of King Louis XVI which led to the French Revolution. Back then, such orders were called lettres de cachet. But no matter what language you use, such non-judicial seizure orders issued on the sole say-so of the executive power are laughably unconstitutional today.

Continue Reading »

President Barack Obama is scheduled to give a speech later this week where he will outline changes to be made to the National Security Agency and their ability to collect information. This will be a pivotal speech in the realm of national security and how the federal government operates, especially with regards to the privacy of its own citizens. There is no mistaking the truth, however, that this presidential shift in attitude has come as the result of one man's actions: Edward Snowden. Without Snowden's revelations about the N.S.A., we simply wouldn't be at this point in history.

Obama initially reacted to the Snowden document dump with a downright laughable statement, that he "welcomed this public conversation" about the proper reach of governmental spying. He did not in fact welcome the conversation, but he was trying to react to being forced to have such a conversation as best he could. A presidential commission was named to look into the question and report its recommendations. Obama is not waiting for the commission's final report, and is going ahead this week with his own suggestions for changing the way the federal government conducts such surveillance.

None of this would have happened without the actions of Snowden, of course. He has been described as anything from a "patriot" to a "traitor" in both the media and the public at large. Either he bravely exposed government wrongdoing to the media which would never have otherwise had access to this information, or he violated the law and stole secret documents for which he should be punished. This wide disparity in how Snowden is seen reflects how people feel about the disclosures themselves, to a large extent. To those who want to see the government's reach curtailed, Snowden did the right thing. To those who want the government to continue what it has been doing, Snowden did a very wrong thing.

Continue Reading »

New Jersey's governor was just in the news, but because it was unrelated to all the other Chris Christie stories circulating right now, it likely will be ignored by most of the public. Democratic officeholders and candidates for office would do well, however, to pay it a bit more attention. Because this is seems like a tailor-made issue for Democrats to campaign on this fall (and beyond).

The news I am referring to is the fact that Chris Christie just vetoed a study of how to radically restructure student debt. I have written about the idea before, when it originated in Oregon last year, because I think it makes all kinds of sense. It's a fairly simple concept -- instead of taking out loans to pay a set price for public universities (state-run schools), in-state students would be able to attend college now and pay for it later through a "Pay It Forward" program. Students would pay a fixed percent of their earnings for a set period of time, no matter what salaries they made. As a student, you'd go to school, graduate, and then pay something like three percent of your income for twenty years, into a fund which covered future university students. Because the amount you'd owe would be proportional to your income, nobody would ever go broke paying for their college education. And nobody would be forced into a job they didn't like, just because it paid more than (say) being a high school teacher, because they were so far in debt when they graduated.

Continue Reading »

We return to our occasional series of "Wildly Early 2016 Presidential Speculation" articles, because of Washington's current obsession over how much damage Chris Christie has done to his chances to become the next Republican nominee for president. Has Christie hurt his chances beyond all repair? Or will (as some of his supporters are beginning to claim) the entire episode actually help out Christie, two years from now?

In my own personal view, which is based on not much more than gut feeling at this point (since, once again, it is ridiculously early to even be engaging in 2016 speculation), I don't think Christie has either hurt or helped himself much at all. Now, before I attempt to justify that claim, two caveats are in order. For the purposes of discussion, I am going to assume that no second shoe will drop in the scandal -- that no smoking gun emerges pointing right at Governor Chris Christie. Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but in our speculation here we're going to assume that no further information is revealed which damages Christie's chances even further -- a rather large assumption, which is why I'm explicitly pointing it out up front. Secondly, please keep in mind that when I say "Christie's chances" what I am specifically talking about is "Christie's chances to win the Republican nomination." It's wildly early to predict even that, but it is way too early to begin assessing the general election itself. So we're not even going to touch the "could he still win the White House?" question at all.

Continue Reading »

Welcome back to our regular Friday roundup of politics! We've been on hiatus for quite a while now, since we took two weeks off to dole out our year-end awards, and then last week we were just sick as a dog, which precluded all rational thought (much less trying to type coherently). So we've got a lot to cover this week, and our apologies in advance for all the stuff we're bound to have missed in the past month.

Of course, the big news at the end of this week was New Jersey's Chris Christie trying to navigate a bridge over some very troubled waters, but our guess is that this story is going to stick around for some time to come, so we're only going to mention it in passing (although we did write yesterday of our disappointment that we seem to have returned to labeling political scandals with the "-gate" suffix). Is Christie now no longer a viable candidate for the 2016 Republican nomination? Is "Bullygate" more appropriate than "Bridgegate"? Well, we'll have plenty of time to contemplate all of that in the weeks to come, that's for sure.

Continue Reading »

New Jersey governor Chris Christie is in full damage-control mode today, in a desperate attempt to salvage his political career from the depths of a rather ugly scandal. To this end, Christie gave a rather extraordinary two-hour press conference where he concentrated mostly on himself (as is his normal style). Whether he'll be successful at distancing himself from the ugliness or whether it'll sink his future chances of attaining higher office remain to be seen, at this point. But since the rest of the political universe seems to adequately be covering this key question, I thought I'd take a bigger-picture sort of viewpoint today, to ask a crucial question of my own: "Bridgegate? Really?"

Allow me to clarify, since that may be too subtle: "Are we really going back to appending '-gate' to all our political scandals? Haven't we moved on from this, folks?"

Sigh.

Continue Reading »

The dawning of the new year may usher in a seismic shift for at least two subjects in the political arena, because for the first time both proponents and opponents will be forced to frame their arguments based on actual, verifiable reality rather than just wildly overblown hopes or fears. The outcomes are uncertain at this point (since the new year is barely a week old), but the shift towards discussing hard data and facts rather than "this or that might happen" should be a welcome one, if only because we've had so much previous speculation (both good and bad) on the issues of Obamacare and marijuana legalization. From now on, asserting the inevitability of any particular outcome will become impossible, because there will be proof rather than just unfounded supposition. Which should be a welcome change to anyone wishing to intelligently weigh the benefits and drawbacks rather than just exchange political spin.

Continue Reading »

In the running battle over the separation of church and state, it seems we have entered an era where one particular side has seized the offensive. For the past few decades, the battle has mostly centered on whether monuments to the Ten Commandments are allowable on public (government) property, with rather mixed results in the courts. Some monuments have been allowed to remain, some have been removed. But the fight has always been fought pretty much from a single perspective. This is now changing, due to some well-organized attempts to mount legal challenges from the other side of the debate. And since the debate has now gotten a lot more interesting, I'd like to toss my own immodest idea into the arena, in the hopes that someone or some group decides it is worthy.

The news item that got me thinking was the release of a sketch of a proposed statue for the Oklahoma statehouse grounds (which already have a Ten Commandments monument). The statue is about as provocative as can be, since it depicts a rather benign, goat-faced, fully-winged Satan sitting with small children in attendance. After all, if religious displays are allowed, why shouldn't the Church of Satan be given the same equal treatment as Christianity? Legally, there is no reason not to make room for them.

Continue Reading »

An Obama turnaround?

President Obama had a pretty significant month in the polls, which might come as a surprise if all you've been listening to is the conventional wisdom in Washington (which has been happily parroting "Obama's polling is in free-fall!" all month long). In fact, what happened this month was that Obama stopped sliding downwards in the polls, and began actually recovering a bit of the ground he's lost since the disastrous Obamacare website launch at the beginning of October. What's more, Obama looks pretty good to continue this recovery for at least the next month or two. Which, as I said, might just come as a surprise to some.

Let's take a look at this month's chart to see what's going on.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

December, 2013

Continue Reading »