Everyone knows that women in Saudi Arabia can’t drive, at least in the cities. I learned today that women riding bicycles is also frowned upon, but as with their driving cars, there’s not actually a law that forbids it, just custom and a mentality that leads officials toward the officious: “If I think it’s not proper, then it must be illegal.” I do realize that this sentiment is not unknown to LEOs in the US and UK, currently about taking photographs, but this is about Saudi Arabia.
Today’s Saudi Gazette nicely translates a piece from the Arabic daily Al-Watan. It’s about a Saudi woman who doesn’t think much of the way cultural preferences seem to get translated into pseudo-law. She’s been happily playing by ‘the rules’ while creating consternation among the enforcers. Nothing she does is outright illegal; everything she does is with a pretty amazing sense of humor, I think.
She also seems to be winning her argument and an audience. Do read the entire article.
MOUDHI, a noted Riyadh secondary school headmistress, is continuing in her five-year quest to persuade the relevant folk that women have as much right to drive a car as men, furnishing them with the evidence piece by piece, showing that the benefits outweigh the perils. The persistent failure of her previous efforts, however, led her to turn to more practical methods, and so it was that she recently got behind the wheel of a car and drove off into the streets of the capital.
When stopped by police Moudhi produced her international driving license, but the failure of officers to be persuaded by such a document led to a lengthy exchange during which Moudhi showed them that their reasoning was more fragile than a spider’s web. Unmoved, the police told her that she was required to have a driver to protect her and help her should she find herself in difficulties, such as her car breaking down.
“Okay…,” Moudhi said. “We’ll see…”
A few days later Moudhi got behind the wheel again, only this time, seated in the back of the car, was her foreign driver. When the police stopped her – along with the young men who had been pursuing her down the street – officers believed the man in the back to be her bodyguard, and so were taken aback along with the rest of the gathering crowd when Moudhi told them he was her driver, there to “protect her and help her if the car broke down.”
“Isn’t that what you told me I had to do when you stopped me last time?” Moudhi said as perplexed officers glanced at each other.
…
Jason Kottke points to Alex Faaborg’s interesting discussion of how people use Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
In the heat map we can see that the menu items that are used vastly more than all others are the user’s bookmarks, copy and paste.
I use copy and paste all the time, of course, given that I spend a large chunk of my online time writing blog posts. Interestingly, however, while normal users use the bookmarks menu more than anything else, I seldom use it at all anymore. I’ve got maybe a dozen items on my taskbar menu — two thirds related to blogging tasks — but otherwise use the URL window and its auto-complete function or the Google search function to find most sites. I find it quicker to type in “nyt” and click than to scroll through the bookmarks for the New York Times website.
Regardless, the Firefox developer team is apparently taking the study to heart and working to change the browser accordingly:
For the common edit commands like Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste, we are looking into possibly placing these directly to the right of the Firefox button, but only when the user has focused a text field. The benefit is that they are even easier for mouse-based users to access, while maintaining an otherwise streamlined design. The downside is a slight amount of peripheral visual noise as they appear and disappear, which we may try to mitigate with a very light visual design.
We are considering grouping extension menu items that otherwise would appear in the tools menu together into one area at the bottom of the Firefox menu to make them easier to find.
Ten years ago, I loved innovation in software design. Nowadays, though, I’ve become such a creature of habit that I find most changes aggravating. (I still hate Office 2007, for example, finding it much less user-friendly than Office 2003.) Frankly, I’d rather Firefox developers invest their time in making their browser suck less — that is, not crash constantly for no goddamn reason — than tinkering around with the location of menu items. But maybe that’s just me.
CNN, the company that invented 24/7 cable news but now finds itself fighting for relevancy, should abandon it’s “View From Nowhere” model of telling viewers what’s important, Jay Rosen argues. Rather than try to compete with Fox and MSNBC as an ideological-driven outfit, though, CNN should instead re-invent the genre. He even has a prime-time lineup:
7 pm: Leave Jon King in prime time and rename his show Politics is Broken. It should be an outside-in show. Make it entirely about bringing into the conversation dominated by Beltway culture and Big Media people who are outsiders to Beltway culture and Big Media and who think the system is broken. No Bill Bennett, no Gloria Borger, no “Democratic strategists,” no Tucker Carlson. Do it in the name of balance. But in this case voices from the sphere of deviance balance the Washington consensus.
8 pm: Thunder on the Right. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational liberal that mostly covers the conservative movement and Republican coalition… and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are right leaning. The television equivalent of the reporting Dave Wiegel does.
9 pm: Left Brained. Flip it. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational conservative that mostly covers liberal thought and the tensions in the Democratic party…. and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are left leaning.
10 pm: Fact Check An accountability show with major crowdsourcing elements to find the dissemblers and cheaters. The week’s most outrageous lies, gimme-a-break distortions and significant misstatements with no requirement whatsoever to make it come out equal between the two parties on any given day, week, month, season, year or era. CNN’s answer to Jon Stewart.
11 pm.: Liberty or Death: World’s first news program from a libertarian perspective, with all the unpredictablity and mix-it-up moxie that libertarians at their best provide. Co-produced with Reason magazine.
I don’t know that I’d watch this. Then again, I’m not watching cable news these days. But this is indeed a more intriguing lineup than talk radio bloviating with video. The key would be finding show hosts who were sufficiently good interviewers that they could break through the talking points blather that guests come prepared to spew. Not booking people who tend to spew talking points would likewise be helpful.
Of course, Jay seems to be designing shows for intellectuals when the evidence seems to show that people are really after infotainment. The highest rated “news” shows are either red meat diatribes that reinforce the viewers’ prejudices about people who hold different political views or are smarmy satires that reinforce the viewers’ prejudices about people who hold different political views. There seems to be a pattern there.
This article in the NY Times is interesting in that it shows that for all the chatter about how big business cannot be trusted, neither can government. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to California, New York or other states suffering serious budget issues, there are indeed some amazing parallels between what many of financial institutions did and what the states are doing right now.
This first one I haven’t heard of too many businesses doing, taking money that really doesn’t belong to the state,
New Hampshire was recently ordered by its State Supreme Court to put back $110 million that it took from a medical malpractice insurance pool to balance its budget. Colorado tried, so far unsuccessfully, to grab a $500 million surplus from Pinnacol Assurance, a state workers’ compensation insurer that was privatized in 2002. It wanted the money for its university system and seems likely to get a lesser amount, perhaps $200 million.
Some states are altering accounting rules. Must be real handy to be able to change the rules when the rules become a problem,
Connecticut has tried to issue its own accounting rules. Hawaii has inaugurated a four-day school week. California accelerated its corporate income tax this year, making companies pay 70 percent of their 2010 taxes by June 15. And many states have balanced their budgets with federal health care dollars that Congress has not yet appropriated.
Unstated, or “off the books” debt. This is one of the things that brought down Enron; hiding debt and losses in companies not affiliated with Enron to make the balance sheet look better,
California’s stated debt — the value of all its bonds outstanding — looks manageable, at just 8 percent of its total economy. But California has big unstated debts, too. If the fair value of the shortfall in California’s big pension fund is counted, for instance, the state’s debt burden more than quadruples, to 37 percent of its economic output, according to one calculation.
Is Jeffrey Skilling out of prison? I think he has a job to do in California. See when a corporation does it, it is bad, but when a government does it, is is wise leadership.
And of course, we can’t forget about credit default swaps,
In fact, New Jersey and other states have used a whole bagful of tricks and gimmicks to make their budgets look balanced and to push debts into the future.
One ploy reminiscent of Greece has been the use of derivatives. While Greece used a type of foreign-exchange trade to hide debt, the derivatives popular with states and cities have been interest-rate swaps, contracts to hedge against changing rates.
The states issued variable-rate bonds and used the swaps in an attempt to lock in the low rates associated with variable-rate debt. The swaps would indeed have saved money had interest rates gone up. But to get this protection, the states had to agree to pay extra if interest rates went down. And in the years since these swaps came into vogue, interest rates have mostly fallen.
Whoops.
What is causing the biggest issues? State pension plans which tend to be quite generous defined benefit plans.
Pensions are debts, too, after all, paid over time just like bonds. But states do not disclose how much they owe retirees when they disclose their bonded debt, and state officials steadfastly oppose valuing their pensions at market rates.
Joshua Rauh, an economist at Northwestern University, and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago, recently recalculated the value of the 50 states’ pension obligations the way the bond markets value debt. They put the number at $5.17 trillion.
After the $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds was subtracted, there was a gap of $3.23 trillion — more than three times the amount the states owe their bondholders.
“When you see that, you recognize that states are in trouble even more than we recognize,” Mr. Rauh said.
And as the article notes, problems with default and financial crises can develop even over surprisingly small amounts of debt,
One finding was that countries “can default on stunningly small amounts of debt,” he said, perhaps just one-fourth of what stopped Greece in its tracks. “The fact that the states’ debts aren’t as big as Greece’s doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
I find it quite amusing that so many are outraged at what happened on Wall Street and often state that better regulations…indeed better government is the answer, and when we look we see that governments at the state level are doing the exact same things Wall Street did.
So, we are coming out of the storm from the financial meltdown of 2008/2009 just in time for the next meltdown to hit in the form of state budgets. But don’t worry, the states have the power to tax so its not really a problem at all…just like the Federal government had the power to tax and could give vast sums of money to companies like AIG, Citigroup, and others.
Fox News has been heavily promoting its new show with former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. It’s no accident, apparently, that the show debuts on April Fool’s Day.
Like LL Cool J, Toby Keith is slated to appear on “Real American Stories,” a Fox News show hosted by Sarah Palin. Unlike LL Cool J, Keith is still slated to be on the program, but his inclusion was news to him.
We just talked to Toby Keith’s representative. Keith, who says he’s a registered Democrat, was not told about the usage of a past interview for Palin’s program. “We were never contacted by Fox,” his rep tells Hitfix.” I have no idea what interview it’s taken from.They’re promoting this like it’s a brand new interview. He never sat down with Sarah Palin.”
As HitFix already reported here, LL Cool J questioned the usage of an old Fox interview in the Palin show via Twitter. Fox responded by yanking the LL Cool segment from the show, which airs April 1. Keith’s segment is still in.
This is bizarre on so many levels that it hurts. First, why would Fox promote a show based on interviews that weren’t conducted for that show? Second, why would Fox debut a show for its new rock star host using stale interviews? Third, while I’ve chided Palin for becoming a pop culture celebrity rather than a serious politico, why in the world would they juxtapose her with LL Cool J and Toby Keith rather than, say, military heroes or hockey moms or someone else that’s more representative of her base appeal?
When I saw the NYT headline “Secretary of the Army Says He Will Not Pursue ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Discharges,” I was a bit shocked. While there’s always discretion in which policies one emphasizes, it’s unusual, indeed, for a senior official to blatantly announce that they’re going to ignore the law. It took me several paragraphs into Elisabeth Bumiller’s story to realize that John McHugh was instead saying something much more narrow.
The secretary of the Army, John M. McHugh, said Wednesday that he was effectively ignoring the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law because he had no intention of pursuing discharges of active-duty service members who have recently told him that they are gay.
Mr. McHugh, the Army’s civilian leader and a former Republican congressman from upstate New York, said that he had initiated the conversations with service members in recent months as part of the Pentagon’s review of how best to carry out a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, which requires that gay service members keep their sexual orientation secret or face discharge.
President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all called on Congress to repeal the 17-year-old law and allow gay service members to serve openly.
Although Mr. Gates announced revised standards last week that make it harder for the military to discharge service members whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties, gay men and lesbians who willingly reveal their sexual orientation still face ouster from the military, at least as the law is written.
But Mr. McHugh, who spoke at a breakfast with Pentagon reporters, said it made no sense to pursue discharges of service members as he speaks with them about the change in policy. Mr. Obama, Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen have all asked commanders to assess opinion within the military about the change in law. Mr. McHugh said it would be “counterproductive” to “take disciplinary action against someone who spoke with me openly and honestly.” He said the Pentagon was still trying to devise a way to more formally poll large numbers of service members about their views on changing the law.
So, in effect, McHugh is granting retroactive immunity to a specific group of soldiers who told him personally that they were gay as part of his inquiry into the policy. Given that it would indeed be not only “counterproductive” but borderline entrapment — not to mention, simply cruel — to punish people for engaging in an honest dialogue in cooperating with an official investigation, this is of course the correct policy.
As to the larger issue of enforcement, it makes sense for senior officials to use more discretion in how they pursue investigations until the inquiry is complete and a decision is made on the large policy. Ignoring the law entirely, however, would be malfeasance of office.
Meanwhile, as with Bill Clinton, President Obama is finding that going slow and taking half measures with this issue wins him no friends. Pam Spaulding exclaims, “Gee, Mr. President — here’s one branch on board; what’s with the lack of spine to pursue the legislative end to DADT?” And Gay Patriot’s B. Daniel Blatt, noting that McHugh and Bush holdover Robert Gates are leading the way on this, quips, “Seems if Obama wants to get something done, he turns to a Republican.”
There’s been surprisingly little discussion of the last-minute addition to the health care reform law that dramatically recast the federal role in student loans. As such, it’s no surprise that some provisions of that part of the bill that would have caused considerable controversy had the bill been brought to the floor in a more traditional manner. A sure candidate for chief among those must be the little noticed provision outlawing paying tuition with credit cards.
Presumably intended to “protect” students from incurring massive amounts of high interest debt early in life (the conspiratorially-minded will say to prevent competition), the real result (as is so often the case) will actually be to put a major hurdle in the way of some such students getting their tuition paid on time – or at all.
Lots of students and their families use credit cards to bridge the gap between the tuition bill being due and loans or grants arriving. With the feds more or less taking over the sector, that problem is likely to become worse. So now students whose checks are delayed are deprived of the quick and easy — and almost always painless — fix of being able to put it on their plastic and simply pay it off when the tardy check arrives.
To make matters worse, another provision seems extend last year’s Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights Act to cap limits on those omnipresent student credit card offers. So those same students whose checks are late and who need to buy expensive books and/or supplies may also find themselves in another kind of bind.
Nothing about the add-on does anything to address the real problems with student debt. And even giving them the benefit of the doubt that these provisions were well-meaning, these are just the sort of ill-considered, paternalistic interference with decisions that college-age adults ought to be free to weigh and make for themselves, even in today’s day and age.
It’s common knowledge that “grade inflation,” the lowering of standards that leads to ever-higher student grades for the same performance, is rampant. Matthew Denhart and Christopher Matgouranis note that, “It has been estimated that there has been at least a 0.1 percent increase in average student GPA in every decade since the 1950s. In 1991, for example, the average GPA according to gradeinflation.com was 2.93, but had risen to 3.11 by 2006.”
They argue, correctly in my judgment, that this not only weakens the signaling power of grades but also makes it harder for the truly excellent to differentiate themselves from lower achieving peers.
It’s also commonly known, at least within academic circles, that colleges of education are the worst offenders. They somehow take in the freshmen with the worst standardized test scores on campus and produce the students with the highest GPAs on graduation day. And it’s not through attrition.
The average GPA at the top twenty public research university for 2009 was a whopping 3.13. So, like Lake Wobeggon, all the students are above average. (Or, at least, the median student is above average.) In education departments, though, the GPA was 3.72. Almost an A! And, remember, these were the least promising entering freshmen. And, of course, the school GPA is skewed by the inclusion of the large colleges of education; the disparity would be even more stark otherwise.
They also sampled the University of Washington and found an Education Department grade curve with no bend in it. The modal grade, with 76% of the students receiving it, was an A. The next 21% got an A-. Yes, math majors, you did the calculation correctly: 97% got an A or A-. The remaining students got a B+ (3%) or a B (1%). Nobody got as low as a B-.
Via Chris Lawrence’s Google feed. He comments, “While CCAP is often misguided, the ridiculous level of grade inflation among education schools is real – and a serious problem for student accountability in substantive coursework.”
George Takei and Brad Altman appear in perhaps the most memorable Census ad in history.
I’m a bit bemused at the notion that people should fill out the Census based on their own perceptions of reality rather than reality itself. I get that some gays consider themselves married even though they live in states that don’t recognize same-sex unions. But are heterosexual couples who aren’t married supposed to fill out the Census based on whether they think they’re married or whether they are married? For that matter, are we to fill out the Census on where we think we live or where we actually live? Or how many children we have, or have many we think we have?
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw argues that taxation as a percentage of GDP is a misleading way to compare national tax burdens and instead argues that we should consider taxes per person, which he calculates as Taxes/GDP x GDP/Person. Using this metric, the United States is in the middle of the pack of major economies:
France = .461 x 33,744 = 15,556
Germany = .406 x 34,219 = 13,893
UK = .390 x 35,165 = 13,714
US = .282 x 46,443 = 13,097
Canada = .334 x 38,290 = 12,789
Italy = .426 x 29,290 = 12,478
Spain = .373 x 29,527 = 11,014
Japan = .274 x 32,817 = 8,992
I’m not sure that taxes as a percentage of income wouldn’t be more useful than taxes as a percentage of GDP, since what most of us are interested in with respect to taxes is impact on individual consumption rather than impact on aggregate production. Then again, I’m not an economist.
It’s also worth noting that the GPP/Person figures are at PPP (purchasing power parity) rather than raw numbers. I’m not sure what impact that conversion has on the comparison.
UPDATE:Brad DeLong points out that, by Mankiw’s measure, North Korea is a low-tax state. In reality, it’s a high-tax state with a very low GDP.
Matt Yglesias extends that analysis to attack Mankiw’s premise.
Does Mankiw really think that Italy has more scope to increase taxes and the size of its public sector than does the United States? Or consider that in Slovakia per capita GDP is just $20,000. By Mankiw’s logic, Slovakia could raise taxes up to 65 percent of GDP and it would still count as a country with a below-average tax burden!
Common sense is that if you’re worried about the impact of taxes on growth, then when you’re worried about is the scope of taxation relative to the total amount of economic activity taking place. For Slovakia to try to raise as much revenue as we have in the United States would involve potentially ruinous levels of taxation. Conversely, for the American government to raise as much revenue per person as they have in France would be relatively easy.
Both fair points. And, as a commenter points out, Mankiw’s per capita formula spreads the tax burden out to include children and others who don’t pay taxes.
If one’s goal is to determine individual tax burdens, it makes sense to calculate total taxes/total taxpayers. If it’s to determine the impact of taxation on national productivity, though, the traditional taxes/GDP is almost certainly a better measure than Mankiw’s slight-of-hand.
Erick Erickson appears with CNN’s Howie Kurtz to answer for some of his sillier utterances to clear the deck for his future as a regular contributor to that network.
Most of these things are sophomoric, at best, and it’s not unreasonable to expect better from a grown, intelligent man with a degree from a prestigious law school, a position on his city council, and a family.
While we’re by no means close friends, I’ve known Erick for years through occasional meetings at CPAC and elsewhere. He’s smarter and better than the crap he too frequently spews. As Erick himself admits, he’s been slow to grow up and realize that his blog posts and Tweets are read by more than his close circle of friends and that he needs to take what he writes seriously.
Like it or not, his position as the most visible face of Red State and, now, his position as a CNN commentator make him a leader in the conservative movement and the Republican Party. He’s going to have to find his voice as a public intellectual and I sincerely hope he goes with the Real Erick Erickson rather than simply going for laughs and look-at-me sound bytes. It might not be as much fun or even generate as many Web hits but it would be a much more productive use of his position and talents and, I suspect, one he’d look back on more fondly.
Transcript follows in case the video becomes disabled for some reason:
KURTZ: Erick Erickson made his debut this week as a CNN contributor. He is a Georgia lawyer, a church deacon, and managing editor of the conservative Web site RedState.com. Erickson’s hiring generated a great deal of publicity, most of the decidedly negative variety.
I spoke with him earlier from Atlanta.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KURTZ: Erick Erickson, welcome.
ERICKSON: Thanks for having me.
KURTZ: You have been getting hammered by liberal commentators since CNN decided to bring you on as a contributor to John King’s program, and it all revolves around the things that you have written. So let’s just go through some of them.
ERICKSON: Right.
KURTZ: On the administration’s health care spokeswoman, you wrote, “Linda Douglass is really the Joseph Goebbels of the health care shop.”
You’re comparing her to a notorious Nazi?
ERICKSON: Yes, to propaganda. I probably shouldn’t have said that. And to be honest with you, I got her confused with one of the congressman who, the same day she came out and was urging people to begin e-mailing in to the White House the — forwarding on the e-mails from friends who were “misrepresenting” the president’s health care plan, a congressman came out and referred to people as “brownshirts.” And I got my wires crossed that day and thought, you know, if they’re going to go down that road, I will too.
I probably shouldn’t have, but I did.
KURTZ: Yes. And She never said that, and she assures me that she never said that.
The first lady, you wrote the following — the headline was, “Is Obama shagging hookers behind the media’s back?” And you write, “I assume not. I assume that Obama’s Marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbit on him should he even think about it.”
Why would you describe Michelle Obama in those terms?
ERICKSON: Well, you know, back during the campaign trail in 2008, a lifetime ago, frankly, in blogging, I was very passionate, very aggressive in defending my side. And at the time that I wrote that, the Eliot Spitzer story was breaking, and the point was — distracted by the language, obviously — that Barack Obama was as much a creature of the media as Eliot Spitzer was. Neither have been investigated. And, you know, since that time, I’ve really learned, headed into, frankly, the David Souter comment, that I don’t have to get personal in blogging to make my point. I’ve definitely evolved over time.
KURTZ: Well, let’s deal with the David Souter comment. When Justice Souter announced his retirement, you said, you wrote, “The nation loses the only goat (EXPLETIVE) child molester ever to serve on the Supreme Court.”
Do you regret writing that?
ERICKSON: Yes, absolutely. It was about the dumbest thing I’ve done.
You know, counterintuitively, I guess, some good came out of it. It was the very first time I realized, Howard, how what I do for a living affects my family as well. Having my 3-year-old heckled and booed in the front yard by a neighbor, having my wife be berated at her office, you know, being a blogger, up until that moment I always considered I was just a guy chatting with friends, even on Twitter. And I realized that I actually reached a point where people listen to what I say and care about what I say, and frankly it was a wake-up call to me that I had to grow up in how I write.
KURTZ: Well, ,you know, at a time when there’s this great debate about threats against Democratic — mostly Democratic and some Republican lawmakers in the health care debate, I stumbled upon something you wrote about a Washington State controversy in which you said, “At what point do people march down to their state legislator’s house, pull them aside and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?”
Now, I assume you were being metaphorical, but some people might react differently to that.
ERICKSON: You know, the left tried to blow that one up, and I’ve written subsequently about that with a legislator in New York who wants to ban salt in restaurants. And I think the point is valid. The left may not like it.
I’m a local legislator myself, and I am afraid and have been since that time that we’re reaching a point where reasonable people are just going to get kind of crazy with government intrusion in their lives. The particular case in that situation was Washington State banning phosphates from dishwasher detergent.
KURTZ: Yes. I understand, but I’m just talking about your language.
Let me make sure I understand now. Are you now, on RedState.com, going to forcefully make your arguments — and nobody disputes your right do that — without these inflammatory personal attacks?
ERICKSON: Yes, I think so. I mean, I’ve definitely had to grow up over time and realize that it’s not just me and friends anymore.
I think everyone understands you talk in ways with friends and about things with friends you don’t in public. And in some ways, when you talk about things in private and in public, you sometimes use different language. And I’ve definitely had to grow up and realize I am someone now on a national stage and a platform, and what I say and write affects not just me and my family, but others.
KURTZ: I’ve got half a minute here.
This week, David Frum, the conservative author and columnist, frequent guest on this program, was forced out by the American Enterprise Institute after he called the health care vote the Republicans’ Waterloo and criticized it as a big defeat.
Does the right have a lack of tolerance for dissent?
ERICKSON: Oh, good lord, no. You know, David Frum, I think, is disingenuous to a degree.
Yesterday — or I guess it was earlier this past week — said that he wasn’t forced out because of his Waterloo comment. He was forced out because he wasn’t spending any time at AEI.
In fact, in talking to several people at AEI, they’ve all said the same thing, he was never there and never participated. And his story has evolved and the criticisms have evolved. David Frum is one of those Republicans who calls himself still a conservative when it’s clear to me he has evolved, but people still call him that.
KURTZ: All right. Well, “never” might be overstating it slightly.
Erick Erickson, glad we had a chance to talk to you about this. Thanks very much for joining us.
Shahram Amiri, a nuclear physicist in his early 30s, went missing last June three days after arriving in Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage, according to the Iranian government.
The defection of a top Iranian nuclear scientist has confirmed what we already knew.
An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials.
The officials were said to have termed the defection of the scientist, Shahram Amiri, “an intelligence coup” in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran’s nuclear program.
A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment. In its declassified annual report to Congress, the CIA said, “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons though we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons.”
Presumably, Amiri has told CIA things that weren’t already common knowledge. Otherwise, “intelligence coup” means something other than what I think it means.
“The significance of the coup will depend on how much the scientist knew in the compartmentalized Iranian nuclear program,” said former White House counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant. “Just taking one scientist out of the program will not really disrupt it.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, and other Iranian officials last year blamed the U.S. for “kidnapping” Amiri, but his whereabouts had remained a mystery until now.
According to the people briefed on the intelligence operation, Amiri’s disappearance was part of a long-planned CIA operation to get him to defect. The CIA reportedly approached the scientist in Iran through an intermediary who made an offer of resettlement on behalf of the United States. Since the late 1990s, the CIA has attempted to recruit Iranian scientists and officials through contacts made with relatives living in the United States, according to former U.S. intelligence officials. Case officers have been assigned to conduct hundreds of interviews with Iranian-Americans in the Los Angeles area in particular, the former officials said.
Considering we’re dealing with sixty-year-old technology, Clarke’s assessment strikes me as dead-on.
In addition to uncertain healthcare services, economic disadvantages, and finding a place to call home, veterans certainly do not need any more challenges. Unfortunately, the wounds of war can be less obvious than those that we can see. Psychological disorders and sicknesses caused by toxic exposure can be the most damaging aspects of war that veterans bring home. Toxin exposure in particular is of particular concern as previous exposure to asbestos among veterans is causing incidence of the aggressive cancer mesothelioma to rise among former members of the armed services. We must not leave those who risked their lives for our nation in the cold. Our veterans have never questioned the right or wrong of war when it mattered most. They simply did as they were trained. We must now show the same unwavering determination, in all ways we are able, by affording those opportunities to which they are entitled, including financial, medical and emotional support to all veterans.
There’s been surprisingly little discussion of the last-minute addition to the health care reform law that dramatically recast the federal role in student loans. As such, it’s no surprise that some provisions of that part of the bill that would have caused considerable controversy had the bill been brought to the floor in a more traditional manner. A sure candidate for chief among those must be the little noticed provision outlawing paying tuition with credit cards.
