Archive for 2013
June 8, 2013
OH, GOOD GRIEF: Hayward school to sponsor toy gun exchange. “If we want older kids to not think guns are cool, we need to start early.” But wait, there’s more: After the kids surrender their toy guns, they’ll be fingerprinted and photographed. This is what happens when your schools are controlled by fanatical cultists.
UPDATE: First link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
MASSACHUSETTS PUSHBACK: Bay State Dems dispute Obama’s data claims. “Massachusetts lawmakers say they had no idea the feds are collecting millions of phone records from ordinary Americans — pushing back against President Obama’s claims that all congressional members knew about the domestic spy program.”
GLENN DERENE: Why the NSA Prism Program Could Kill U.S. Tech Companies. “Spying on foreigners could create a terrible blowback to the U.S. economy. Has it really come to this? . . . If you lived in Japan, India, Australia, Mexico, or Brazil, and you used Gmail, or synced your photos through iCloud, or chatted via Skype, how would you feel about that? Let’s say you ran a business in those countries that relied upon information services from a U.S. company. Don’t these revelations make using such a service a business liability? In fact, doesn’t this news make it a national security risk for pretty much any other country to use information services from companies based in the U.S.? How should we expect the rest of the world to react? Here’s a pretty good guess: Other countries will start routing around the U.S. information economy by developing, or even mandating, their own competing services.”
UPDATE: A reader emails: “I’ve been wondering why nobody that I’ve read has connected this to Obama’s high tech campaign that won the election. Who could forget the picture of the crazy looking guy with the big hair,glasses and earrings who worked for Obama?”
MORE: Another reader writes:
I thought I was the only thinking such thoughts. The difference is I have been thinking them since the election and my first thought when I heard about the data sweep was the election. Here is why: The turnouts still make no sense to me. How does someone vote for McCain and not for Romney? I can’t get past that basic question. Since the election we have learned of the high tech wizardry of the Obama campaign, we know there was election fraud, we know Obama was effective in shaping Romney’s image using TV and early ads but I still can’t get past that basic question. So what if in addition to all I have just listed the wizardry was not solely used to predict the election and turn out the vote for Obama? What if data (from NSA or Google or Facebook or Apple) was used to reduce Romney’s turnout by identifying lukewarm voters and shaping social network messages with the intent of getting them to stay home? Not switching them, but just getting them to stay home. If you had enough of the right data for large enough of a population you could swing an election.
But wait there is more: Charles Martin wrote about this a bit, but I also was a volunteer for Romney’s high tech effort to get out the vote called Project Orca . It was such a disaster I have long believed there were several Obama moles on the Orca team and that they sabotaged it. Ok, I didn’t really believe that, but it was the best explanation I could come up with. The revelations in the last week have caused me to reassess and I now believe Orca was hacked. IE cyber sabotage. Which is the simplest explanation for the problems that I know about.
Well, it’s certainly nothing you can dismiss out of hand, at this point.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Chris Jefferson writes:
Please don’t let a former Romney operative blame the NSA or Google for the bill of goods that was sold to the hapless Mitt Romney by a school of K-Street sharks. They never even tested that thing to make sure that it worked.
But they all got paid! With money looted from faithful Romney contributors all over the country.
Orca was a disaster from the word “go”!
Well, that is certainly true.
AN UPDATE TO THE Rutgers-Camden Law story.
IN THE MAIL: From Walter Erickson, Chrysalis.
TAXPROF: A Month Of IRS Scandal: Day 30.
BUT WE ARE GOING TO NEED A FIREWALL TO KEEP YOU FROM READING THOSE SUBVERSIVE BRITISH NEWSPAPERS: Obama rejects comparisons between Chinese cyber-spying and NSA programs.
A GOLD MEDAL IN THE HYPOCRISY OLYMPICS: Obama Tells Fatcat Donors Democrats Favor Free-Market Solutions and Less Government Regulation.
“IT DOESN’T STOP IN CINCINNATI:” Cleta Mitchell on how to investigate the IRS.
Ms. Mitchell says she learned this week that the IRS even intervened in the business dealings of a donor to conservative causes. “There were two public companies that were in the process of trying to do a merger and somehow the IRS stepped in and demanded all this information and said, ‘If you don’t give it to us we’ll stop this merger,’ ” she says. “But I cannot get [the donor] to come forward . . . ‘Look I’ve been through this hassle with the IRS. I don’t need any more.’ People are really afraid and the donors are the most afraid.”
See, it’s the IRS that should be afraid here, not its victims.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Illinois Continues Its Sad, Slow Slide.
The Illinois pension saga just keeps getting worse. In response to the state legislature’s failure to pass a pension reform bill before adjourning, Fitch downgraded Illinois’s bonds from A to A- earlier this week. On Thursday Moody’s joined the party, lowering the state’s rating from A2 to A3. S&P is now the only agency not to have downgraded the state, but it is issuing its own dire warnings. As Reuters notes, Illinois now has the lowest credit rating of any state in the country even without the S&P downgrade, and the worst rating in its history.
The higher borrowing costs that accompany credit downgrades are bad news for a state already struggling with its finances. This fact is not lost on Governor Pat Quinn, who has called lawmakers back to Springfield for a special session to get something passed before the state is hit with another downgrade.
The Governor is right to be anxious for a budget fix. Illinois has allowed this problem to drag on far too long; each day of delay is costing taxpayers. Unfortunately, there’s still no reason to be optimistic that the special session will succeed where past efforts failed. The legislature has been trying to get a bill through for well more than a year now. Three different plans have come up for a vote in the last 12 months alone. If there’s a compromise solution out there somewhere, it has hidden itself very well.
Maybe that explains why House Speaker Michael Madigan isn’t answering his phone.
Would you?
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Pakistan Summons U.S. Envoy Over Drone Strike That Kills 7.
WHEN BIG GOVERNMENT LOOKS BAD, THERE’S A NEGATIVE-HALO EFFECT: GOP Sen. Slams Immigration Bill, Citing NSA Controversy: Why Would That ‘Work Out Any Better?’ You can trust ’em like you can trust the IRS.
Related: Manchin: Obama Should Stop Broad-Based Surveillance Program.
AT AMAZON, up to 55% off on select DeWalt power tools.
Also, today only: Roku LT Streaming Player, $39.00 (22% off). I paid a lot more than that for my older-model Roku, and regard it as money well spent.
And, at the same link, a Lightning Deal good only for the next couple of hours: “Bond 50: The Complete 22 Film Collection” on Blu-ray, $129.99 (57% off).
PETER WEHNER: Obama Can’t Be Trusted With Power.
MICKEY KAUS: Handy U-Print-It Pocket Guide: Why S.744′s a Fraud. “Senate debate on S.744, the Schumer-Rubio ‘comprehensive’ immigration amnesty bill, is scheduled to start within days. As a public service, kausfiles provides this handy pocket guide to the provisions of the bill that promise tough future enforcement, etc. –and the reasons why they don’t do what they pretend to do. You can print a PDF of this guide here.”
PETER SUDERMAN: Why Are Big Tech Companies Denying Involvement in the NSA’s Internet Data Mining Program?
Related: Internet Companies Deny They’re Helping the NSA Collect User Data. Should We Believe Them?
UPDATE: A reader emails:
What if Google killed Reader (a decision that still seems to make little sense to the active user) over PRISM? That is, for those that use Reader for their surfing, it’s a giant collated list of most of what they do online. If the feds were including Reader requests along with all of the email, etc. that they were scooping up, might Google’s best defense (if they were in fact trying to follow the “Don’t be Evil credo”) be to simply discontinue the service and at least quit generating the history going forward?
And what if all this web data was shared with a campaign apparatus? Wouldn’t this be a great way to target your resources towards states that were winnable over ones that were probably (based on web traffic analysis) outside of your abilities to win? Isn’t this just an extension of the Nate Silver type approach, but with orders of magnitude more data to work with? Incumbents would be all but invincible with this kind of information. And that doesn’t even get into the ability to blackmail just about anyone based on something in their web history over the last 15 years.
Please withhold my name if published. I don’t want that thing pointing at me. Though I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, since they’re reading this email anyway. This should bother everyone a whole lot more than it seems to be right now.
I think people are catching on.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: An Accreditation Fast Track?
A proposal is circulating quietly on Capitol Hill to ask accreditors to create a new, more flexible form of approval for new and nontraditional providers of higher education.
The measure, a slight 37 words, contains few details about the new system it envisions. Its odds are long; so far, no lawmakers have volunteered to sponsor it. And its backers are few, albeit potentially influential: Bob Kerrey, the former New School president and Nebraska senator and governor, and Ben Nelson, the founder of the Minerva Project, the for-profit, startup online university with Ivy League-level ambitions. (Kerrey is executive chairman of the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, a fledgling nonprofit established by the Minerva Project.)
Still, the proposal represents a shot across the bow at the traditional system of higher education accreditation, which has been under increasing pressure since the second half of the Bush administration. Margaret Spellings, the former education secretary, tried to take on the system through tighter scrutiny and new regulations, but met opposition in Congress.
Since then, the pressure has only grown.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
THE GOP’S PROBLEM with college-age voters.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Rutgers-Camden Dean: Law School Faces ‘Existential Threat’ From 59% Decline in Enrollment.
UPDATE: A response from Rutgers’ Associate Dean Adam Scales:
The TaxProf item you link to itself links to a story that – while literally accurate – conflates causes and timing of enrollment decline if read without context.
The Law School did suffer a 59% drop in the 2012 entering class, and that did pose an “existential threat” to the school. But the severity of that drop was caused primarily by the planned takeover of the entire Rutgers-Camden campus by another school last year. In January 2012, when plans for that takeover were announced, our applications dried up. By the time the takeover effort was finally defeated in the state legislature in late June, the application season was largely over. Many students had withdrawn during the preceding months because they could not be certain – nor could we – that they would be receiving the Rutgers Law education they had sought.
While it is true that all this unfolded against a backdrop of declining law school enrollment, the article and particularly, the headline, tend to conflate these events, obscuring the unique and now-receded difficulties Rutgers faced last year. Our enrollment so far this year is roughly where we would expect it to be, given national trends, had there been no takeover threat. In other words, we’re doing about the same as everyone else now. The picture isn’t great for law schools generally, but the immediate “existential threat” described in the piece has passed. That will not be clear from the headline, or even a cursory read of the linked article.
Noted.