Month: June 2014

Do you know how certain people
on the Internet are fond of formulations like “Everything you need
to know about ____________”? It is of course an asinine statement,
since it is impossible for any single human to judge any other
human’s precise need for knowledge, let alone presume to have
amassed the precise quality and mix of the stuff. Nitpicky
throat-clearing aside, if you have an interest in and worry about
the tumult in the Middle East and North Africa, and you don’t
consider yourself an expert, then chances are very good that you
will find something useful in tonight’s theme episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
with re-airs three and five hours later).

“Friends, Enemies and Chaos” begins with a series of
backgrounders from Wall Street Journal multimedia
explainer Jason
Bellini, Fox
News Middle Eastern specialist Lisa Daftari, and Michael
Weiss of The Interpreter. Who are the teams? From
where did those ISIS scaries emerge and what do they want? What is
the nature and import of the Sunni/Shia schism? You’ll likely know
more going out than you did going in.

As for what, if anything, the United States should do about the
chaos, both short term and long term, we tease out some scenarios
with The Blaze national security chief (and former CIA
employee) Buck Sexton,
KABC radio host (and multiple-theater combat veteran) Bryan Suits, former
Reagan-administration deputy defense secretary K.T.
McFarland, and Heritage
Foundation Director of National Security Policy Steven Bucci. And because this is
The Independents, there will be a mid-show game you can
compete along with at home, plus a dash of at least some
long-term optimism, in a discussion about whatever the hell
happened to the Arab Spring.

Tweet along your reviews, sartorial and otherwise, @ independentsFBN. Facebook
page is at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
and you can click on this page
for video of past segments.

Keith Alexander, since stepping
down from his position as National Security Administration (NSA)
and U.S. Cyber Command chief following last year’s mass
surveillance revelations, has gotten himself in the business of
cybersecurity consulting.

And not everyone’s comfortable with that. Rep. Alan Grayson
(D-Fl.) yesterday published letters he sent to the “Securities
Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Consumer Bankers
Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and the Clearing
House—all of which Alexander reportedly has approached about his
services,”
according to Wired. The congressman, who sits on both
the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, gave a
roundabout warning to former spy chief:

Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as
Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander
can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses
or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive
sources and methods. Without the classified information he acquired
in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to
you.

He concluded by turning up the heat and asks the organizations
to be transparent:

Please send me all information related to your negotiations with
Mr. Alexander, so that Congress can verify whether or not he is
selling military and cybersecurity secrets to the financial
industry for personal gain.

Grayson isn’t the only skeptic. In his letter, he cites top
computer security expert Bruce Schneier, who has similar concerns.
Regarding Alexander’s eye-popping rates, $600,000 to $1 million a
month, earlier this week Schneier
asked his readers to “think of how much actual security they
could buy with that $600K a month. Unless he’s giving them
classified information.”

There’s a pinch of irony that Alexander, who does a lot of

handwringing over Edward Snowden for exposing government
secrets, is now on the receiving end suspicion for similar
actions.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s

decision Thursday in
McCullen v. Coakley quickly provoked a fair amount of
outrage. The case concerned a Massachusetts law creating a 35-foot
buffer zone around abortion clinics, in which protestors could not
tread. Anti-abortion activist Eleanor McCullen argued—and
Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed—that the buffer zones
were an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. But the
court’s decision was narrow in scope, rejecting not the idea of
buffer zones per se but the way this particular
Massachusetts law was written. 

“For a problem shown to arise only once a week in one city at
one clinic, creating 35-foot buffer zones at every clinic across
the Commonwealth is hardly a narrowly tailored solution,” wrote
Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion cosigned by the court’s
four liberal justices (the other justices offered concurring
opinions). Roberts suggested that a small buffer zone or a less
broad law might pass muster. 

The decision seems like one that should appease folks on both
side of the issue, if not necessarily thrill them. The court was
careful to balance the safety interests of abortion clinic patients
and staff with First Amendment rights. 

Here’s how Cenk Uygur, host of the progressive political
commentary program The Young
Turks responded:

“You’re gonna yell at those women making the toughest decision
of their lives — a choice that’s between them, their doctor, and
having nothing to do with you or big government or your so-called
god, which might not be their god? Well, you tell me every day that
I’ve got Second Amendment rights. I guess in Massachusetts,
Colorado, [and] Montana, those women have to show up with their
guns and be like, ‘Okay, you’ve got rights. You’ve got a right to
get in my face; I’ve got a right to stand my ground, right?’ I
mean, that’s what I’m told by conservatives day in and day
out.”

Oof, so much mess to unpack there. First, Uygur seems to suggest
that being against a woman’s legal right to make her own medical
decisions is somehow anti “big government.” Because this makes so
obviously little sense, I’m going to suggest that Uygur is just
throwing in “big government” there as a dog whistle for the kind of
people who think wanting to limit government power is some sort of
nutty, extremist idea. 

Moving on to the meat of Uygur’s comments here: Why, yes, women
seeking abortions do also have second amendment rights. If they
feel physically unsafe heading to an abortion clinic, they could
very well bring along a gun. And if they needed it for self
defense, they could use that gun. If they chose to wave said gun in
the face of people peacefully protesting, they would be subject to
the same punishments as anyone who recklessly brandishes and
threatens people with a gun.

I am not sure what is controversial about this. And I would
assume that most conservatives, even extremely anti-abortion
conservatives, believe that even women seeking abortions have
Second Amendment rights. That is the thing about constitutional
rights in this country: They apply even to people you don’t like.
Liberals may not like protesters like McCullen, but that doesn’t
mean she doesn’t have First Amendment rights. And for the First
Amendment to mean anything, it has to be interpreted broadly.

I think people like McCullen are scum, but I’m sure she’d think
the same about me. If I was the type inclined to theatrics, I may
choose to go protest her protests, to stand by her side advocating
for reproductive rights–and I can’t imaging many liberals
having trouble with this. But if we create a free speech paradigm
where McCullen’s words and actions are illegal, than so would mine
be. And a government big enough to arbitrarily suppress speech
that’s distasteful is also a government big enough to strip away
any sorts of rights, including the reproductive rights liberals are
so vociferously defending here. 

When I wrote about this issue for another publication in
January, I admit that I had a different viewpoint. But I wasn’t
fully grasping the free speech implications then, and the more I’ve
read about the case, the more I’ve come around. For people
dedicated to the health and safety of those entering abortion
clinics, I understand why the buffer zones may seem like an
appealing idea. But only if you consider them solely within this
context. If people want the right to protest outside Monsanto or
the Westboro Baptist Church or wherever else, than McCullen and her
ilk has to be allowed to protest outside abortion
clinics. 

Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal
asks, “why must harassment, initimidation, and terror have to
be endured before women’s constitutional rights are protected? But
“harassment
and intimidation are already against the law, quite correctly,”
as a surprisingly cogent New York Daily News editorial
notes. 

In New York State, it is specifically illegal to use or threaten
force to injure, intimidate or interfere with access to abortion
clinics. In New York City, an especially powerful law makes it a
crime “to follow and harass another person within 15 feet of the
premises of a reproductive health care facility.”

Massachusetts went far beyond that.

Thuggery is a crime. Speech, even loud and impassioned speech,
is the sometimes uncomfortable consequence of living in a free
society.

Anyway, here’s the whole Uygur segment, if you’re feeling like a
dose of outraged, disingenuous smarm:

h/t Chanelle Johnson 

After the police
riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the city
government made an
hour-long documentary to try to salvage its reputation.
Stations that broadcast the film were then required, in what may be
the single most hilarious application of the
Fairness Doctrine in TV history, to give the organizations he
attacked equal time to respond. Forty-five minutes of their hour
were allotted to the American Civil Liberties Union and the
National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, who made
what was reportedly—I haven’t seen it—a levelheaded description of
how the Chicago cops overstepped their bounds. The other 15 minutes
were allotted to the Yippies, who made this:

Harlan Ellison reacts to the show
here. He also, for some reason, complains about Stevie Wonder’s
mannerisms. Did anyone edit Harlan Ellison’s TV column? Just
asking.

For more on the Yippies, go here.
For past installments of the A/V Club, go here. And for one more
response to the city of Chicago’s film, reported in the October 15,
1968, issue of Tempo, read on:

Dartmouth College is now
expelling all students found guilty of sexual assault through the
campus judiciary process. Inside Higher Ed notes that
automatic expulsion is precisely what many activists want, although
some colleges have settled on a dubious compromise: make
convictions clear and easy but punishments light.

It’s a compromise that pleases no one—and shouldn’t.
Universities are essentially letting the convicted off lightly as
compensation for the fact that the campus judicial process—which
often does not following normal rules of evidence or due process—is
fundamentally unjust. As Inside Higher Ed
notes:

The compromise may be doing little to appease either side, with
lawsuits still being filed by the accused and protests being staged
by survivors and other students. Dartmouth’s decision received
praise from some student groups and safety advocates, but other
colleges and universities may be slow to adopt similar policies,
even as many advocates for sexual violence survivors are pushing
for expulsion to be the default punishment.

… In recent months, a handful of institutions,
including Amherst
College, Duke University and Vassar
College, have put more emphasis on expulsion as a penalty, but
stop short of making it mandatory. Duke’s is perhaps the closest to
Dartmouth’s, with a policy that refers to expulsion in cases
of sexual
misconduct as the “preferred sanction.” For the most part,
however, colleges and universities still decide upon expulsion on a
case-by-case basis, as they would for many other types of
misconduct on campus.

… Last year, the University of Michigan expelled a former
football player for an alleged sexual assault in 2009, and earlier
this year — for the first time in at least a decade — the
University of Iowa also expelled a student accused of sexual
assault.

No criminal charges have been brought against any of the
men, and neither of the universities has a default
expulsion policy for cases of sexual assault. Instead, they follow
the Campus SaVE Act’s broader requirement for addressing assaults,
which only mandates that university policies include “possible
sanctions or protective measures” that institutions can impose in
cases of rape, sexual assault, and other kinds of domestic and
dating violence. [Emphasis added.]

Is it wrong to expect that when a student becomes the
victim of a sexual crime, that person should notify the police and
seek justice under typical criminal procedures? Does student status
confer some special right to have criminal complaints adjudicated
under a much lower standard of evidence, with fewer rights retained
by the accused?

Automatically expelling all students found guilty of rape
is a perfectly defensible policy, but only if guilt is adjudicated
in an actual criminal trial.

Steven Greenhut takes issue
with the term “single use” plastic bags, given that most of us
reuse these light, cheap bags we now get — to dispose of cat
litter, to curb the dog during walks, to line our wastebaskets. And
yet, supporters of new legislation in California want to force
consumers to shift to using the reusable bags. He cites a
recent Reason Foundation study, highlighting that these activists
don’t account for the energy use needed to clean the heavier
types of bags and that consumers are unlikely to reuse them enough
to pay for their additional costs, among several other
issues. 

View this article.