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Tag: Opinion

  • Ukraine to get cold shoulder on rapid EU entry

    Ukraine to get cold shoulder on rapid EU entry

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    Top EU leaders are traveling to Ukraine this week, but they won’t be bringing promises that the war-torn country can join the bloc anytime soon.

    Brussels is expected to pour cold water on Ukraine’s hopes that it could swiftly join the EU during a two-day summit in Kyiv, according to a draft statement set to be issued at the event and seen by POLITICO.

    The statement makes no specific mention of the ambitious timeline Ukraine has set out, with the country’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, even telling POLITICO this week that he hopes to join within two years. Instead, the document offers only vague assurances about moving the process forward once all EU-mandated milestones are met.

    “The EU will decide on further steps once all conditions specified in the Commission’s opinion are fully met,” the draft states. “Ukraine underlined its determination to meet the necessary requirements in order to start accession negotiations as soon as possible.”

    The wording follows significant pushback from some EU countries about over-promising Ukraine on its EU membership prospects, a subject Kyiv asked to address at the summit, according to several EU diplomats and officials. Though EU national leaders will not be in attendance at Friday’s summit, officials at the European Council — which includes all 27 EU leaders — have been liaising with EU countries about the final communiqué.

    EU leaders last June granted Ukraine formal candidate status in record time, but that move was much easier than rapidly moving Ukraine through the grueling negotiations required to align a candidate country with the EU’s byzantine systems, rules and regulations. That process typically takes years and years, and often stalls for long periods of time.

    Still, EU countries have split over how quickly the bloc should try to move Ukraine through that accession process.

    “There were clear tensions between Poland and the Baltic states on one hand and other EU countries on the language to EU accession,” said one EU official. 

    The official added that tensions between European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are playing into the debate as well.

    “They are in a race of outbidding each other toward the Ukrainians,” the official said.

    Still, while no breakthroughs are expected in EU accession talks, there is a strong will in Brussels to show solidarity with Ukraine on other issues. 

    “The mere fact that we’re holding a summit in a country at war” is itself significant, said a senior EU official ahead of the meeting.  

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    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

    Indeed, a large gathering of senior EU leaders and commissioners are expected to make the trek to Kyiv this week for meetings with EU officials.

    Progress is expected in certain areas — for example, an agreement on a visa-free regime for industrial goods; the suspension of customs duties on Ukrainian exports for another year; movement on Ukraine joining an EU payment scheme easing bank transfers in euros; and integrating Ukraine into the EU’s free mobile roaming area.

    Also on the summit’s agenda will be Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 10-point peace plan, the reconstruction challenge facing Ukraine, and food security issues, with the EU set to announce a new €‎25 million humanitarian aid package to address Russian mining in the country.

    Another EU official said that the summit sends “a strong signal that we support a country that is a victim of aggression and we underline the right of Ukraine to have a just peace at the end of this war. Ukraine has been attacked, Ukraine has a right to self-defense which they’re exercising … and only this can be a basis for a just peace.”

    Reform path

    The document also stresses the need for “comprehensive and consistent implementation of judicial reforms” in line with the Venice Commission’s advice, citing, in particular, the need to reform Ukraine’s Constitutional Court.

    Though Ukraine recently announced changes to the court, particularly on how judges are appointed, the Venice Commission — a prominent advisory body featuring constitutional law specialists — still has concerns about the powers and composition of the body that selects the court’s candidates.

    Shmyhal told POLITICO this week that Ukraine will address these questions. Kyiv has been keen to signal it is clamping down on corruption amid concerns in Washington and Brussels. 

     “We are holding consultations with the European Commission to see that all issued conclusions may be incorporated into the text,” he said.



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

  • Opinion | The New York Times’ Obsession with Itself

    Opinion | The New York Times’ Obsession with Itself

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    Defying the journalistic maxim that reporters should never be the story, “The Story Behind the Story” frequently chronicles the mundane mechanics of assembling the Times. Recently, the space has featured a first-person piece by a Times reporter about how she got her story about the things people stand in line for these days; how its book critic read and reviewed Prince Harry’s Spare in a day; how its reporter found sources for a piece about young people and personal finance; how its reporter covered the recent 5.6 magnitude earthquake in West Java; inside commentary on the paper’s crossword; a profile of the paper’s photography department; and a profile of a food-truck proprietor who vends on the street outside the Times’ offices.

    Other days the feature runs Q&A’s with reporters in which they regurgitate the facts they’ve already conveyed in published pieces about classified documents, Ticketmaster, and the recent German coup plot. (Some of these Q&A’s are double-dribbled from the Times’ “The Daily” podcast.) Then there have been retrospectives on the influence of the paper’s “Snow Fall” feature from 10 years ago and a history of the guest book at Times headquarters. It would be one thing if any of these pieces broke ground or were great reads, but they don’t and they aren’t. Most days’ entries have that tossed off quality that passes for insight when applied to podcasts. The reading experience is like soaking your brain in brackish well water. Perhaps nobody has ever attacked these columns because nobody ever reads them.

    The feature swells with such clueless self-regard some days that it recalls former New Republic Editor Michael Kinsley’s jokey response to a colleague who asked him to concoct a magazine title that would appeal to hardcore New Republic readers. Kinsley pitch was New Republic World: The Magazine for Readers of the New Republic. By giving the Times readers re-tastings of pieces they’ve already read, the paper accomplishes the ouroboros design Kinsley imagined.

    In theory, a continuing Times feature that critically examined the paper’s output could be salutary for both Times readers and journalists. At a time when radical transparency is in vogue and the need to demystify journalism to a skeptical public has never been greater, “The Story Behind the Story” could be an essential campaign to reading the Times. But in its current form, the project does not come close to serving any real function. It’s unworthy of an institution like the Times.

    In theory, an enterprising editor could raise the standards and demand work that is as newsworthy as other Times stories. In fact, the paper has a recent tradition of critical self-reflection. For 14 years, the paper hosted the public editor column that, with varying success, X-rayed and fanny-whacked the Times’ coverage. But the paper spiked the exercise in introspection in 2017, with Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. offering that the “watchdogs” of social media and “readers across the Internet” could fill the void left by the public editor’s departure.

    Even after the vanquishing of the public editor, the paper still ran its barbed media column, launched by the late David Carr and continued by Jim Rutenberg and Ben Smith, which occasionally made the Times its subject. But the paper has yet to replace Smith, who departed about a year ago for his Semafor venture, which means that just about the only place in the Times to read about the Times is this soft, accommodating feature that denies its writers the freedom to be fully honest about how their stories come together. Trust me, reader, sometimes the process can be very ugly. Other times, as we’ve seen from the Times feature attests, it’s as exciting as going grocery shopping.

    Properly reconstituted, the Times insider feature could take up the slack created by the cashiering of the public editor and the failure to replace Smith. If the paper’s true objective is to reveal “who we are and what we do” and deliver “behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together,” “The Story Behind the Story” could do just that by engaging in Maoist self-criticism exercises that confess the paper’s miscues and goofs and state the paper’s case against its critics.

    You could successfully argue that griping about the misuse of a valuable Times print perch in an era when most people engage the paper in its online incarnation is a wasted complaint. But setting the feature’s placement aside, you’re still left with the reality that the world’s top newspaper thinks running an extended, onanistic public relations campaign for itself is a good use of its journalists’ and readers’ time. The first question of any act of journalism is, does the story matter? The second is, who cares? In the case of “The Story Behind the Story,” the answers are “no” and “nobody.”

    ******

    Public Editor Daniel Okrent was, by far, the best of the Times’ public editors. Get his collected columns, Public Editor #1, for $4.50 on Abebooks. Send brackish well-water to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed needs a public editor. My Mastodon account has marked my Post account for death. My RSS feed blankets itself with the print version of the Times for its afternoon naps



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Medics Are Also to Blame for Tyre Nichols’ Death

    Opinion | The Medics Are Also to Blame for Tyre Nichols’ Death

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    As a former paramedic of 25 years, an EMS educator and author, and a former law enforcement officer, I see these cases through a different lens than most. When looking at these videos, as difficult as it is, I try to look past the violence and assess the actions of the first responders that did not intercede to prevent the act from occurring.

    The case of Tyre Nichols is rife with instances of both EMS and police failing to attempt to save the dying man’s life. The video shows several figures off to the side for long stretches, not actively engaging — simply watching, meandering and occasionally talking with the victim who is clearly in distress.

    The video also shows EMS workers failing to render what we call the “standard of care” for trauma patients. Based on national standards and Tennessee state EMS protocols, this consists of, at minimum, assessing the victim’s airway, breathing and vital signs, and in the setting of head trauma, immobilizing the victim’s spine and neck and applying oxygen to prevent brain damage. In recent days, two Memphis Fire Department EMTs on the scene were released of their duty pending an agency investigation. It has not been confirmed if these were the two medics seen in the video.

    In at least two critical areas, the EMS workers fell short.

    First, both National EMS and Tennessee EMS protocols prescribe the application of supplemental oxygen as the first treatment for head trauma. It’s the simplest and yet most critical step to providing aid and does not require changing the position of the patient or removing any restraints (like handcuffs). When faced with significant head trauma, blood flow to the brain becomes severely restricted from swelling. Untreated, the condition worsens as the injured brain is starved of precious oxygen leading to cerebral hypoxia (oxygen deprivation to the brain).

    Second, in emergency medicine there are two important benchmarks that are taught to every EMS technician. The first is the “platinum 10 mins,” which is how long it should take from the arrival of EMS to the rapid transport of a critically injured patient to ensure optimal survivability. The second is the “golden hour,” originating from Baltimore’s famous Shock Trauma Center, which suggests a higher likelihood of survival when proper pre-hospital care, rapid transport and definitive emergency care in the emergency department or operating room is rendered within 60 mins of sustaining the injury.

    Based on the released footage, the medics on the scene of Tyre Nichols’ assault appeared to squander what could have amounted to precious time for the victim to receive care at a trauma center. While the definitive cause of death is pending the final forensic examination (autopsy) and toxicology reports, the combination of delay in delivering care, specifically oxygen, and the delay in transport may have contributed significantly to the death of this young man.

    Unfortunately, this case is by no means unique. The paramedics who responded to George Floyd made the ill-advised decision to “load and go,” as opposed to assessing and treating him on the scene, which was needed considering his state. EMTs and medics responding to Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by NYPD officers in 2014, also did very little when they arrived. The four EMS technicians failed to bring any oxygen or resuscitation equipment to his side, while one EMT failed to even recognize that he was deceased and continued to mill around while talking to him for over two minutes. No criminal charges were filed against these workers, and they faced only administrative discipline. Similarly, in 2016, Dallas paramedics injected a restrained Tony Timpa with a sedative and simply watched him expire without providing any basic care. Those medics never suffered legal consequences and received only administrative discipline for their actions.

    EMS personnel are rarely charged for their malpractice when improperly assessing and treating victims in police custody. There have been several exceptions, however, including in 2017 when medics failed to treat and transport William Marshall, a prisoner in a Michigan jail who swallowed cocaine and subsequently died. In 2021, two medics were charged in contributing to the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year old Black man in Aurora, Colorado, after the medics injected him with a powerful sedative to chemically restrain him. Earlier this month we saw the arrest and indictment of two Illinois EMTs on first-degree murder charges for the mistreatment and subsequent death of a 35-year-old patient after police were called.

    Most EMS workers engage in heroic work. They have suffered greatly during the Covid-19 pandemic and have been rightly recognized for their bravery, skill and compassion. Just a few weeks ago, medics were widely hailed as heroes after saving the life of Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin on live national television.

    So why do so many EMS workers fail to properly treat police-involved trauma cases, yet are competent and capable of treating just about any other form of major trauma?

    The answer is a complex mixture of culture, apathy, racism and cognitive bias. These public servants patrol the very same “mean” streets as their law enforcement partners. And they do so, often arriving before or without police, without the tools law enforcement possesses to protect themselves. EMS is one of the most dangerous occupations in the country according to numerous government and academic reports. While many EMS fatalities and injuries are attributed to automobile accidents and roadside crashes, some are injuries sustained by targeted violence toward these workers. In 2017, a New York City fire department EMT’s ambulance was carjacked in the Bronx and the driver then ran over the EMT, killing her. Last year, a veteran fire department EMS lieutenant was stabbed and killed on a busy Queens street in broad daylight. Numerous EMS workers have been shot or stabbed across the country by those who are intoxicated, mentally ill or involved in violent domestic disputes.

    As such, EMS has come to rely too heavily on their partners in law enforcement to be at their side and protect them. Because it is such a dangerous profession, EMS workers are disinclined to break with their local police by doing anything that is contrary to what the officers want on the scene. It is in this environment that the “blue wall of silence” can extend from police to the EMS.

    While the last few years has been a period of reflection, reform and in some cases reckoning for law enforcement nationwide, EMS workers have largely not addressed their own roles.

    To effect true change will require a broad cultural shift within EMS, but policymakers can also do much to promote reform, including:

    Move EMS out of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

    Because of its origins in preventing deaths on the road, EMS has since its inception been placed in this little-known federal agency. To get the national-level oversight it deserves, EMS should be housed in the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Homeland Security, where it can help respond to major incidents like terrorist attacks, active shooter scenes, natural disasters and pandemics.

    Train EMS technicians in the clinical signs, symptoms and trauma inflicted by police use of force and create specific EMS protocols for treatment of patients who are in police custody.

    Responding to police use of force is not part of national or state EMS standards, training or protocols. Technicians should be trained in proper positioning of retrained patients, compression of airway and treatment of patients who have been tased. The use of chemical restraints (sedatives) in the setting of in-custody patients should receive a national-level review.

    Include police use of force training and scenarios in EMS education.

    Most progressive police departments now require training for the deescalation of the use of force and train members in how to deter, deescalate and intercede in acts of excessive force by other officers. EMS personnel need to be trained so they can understand the scenarios involved with use of force and excessive force that they may witness first-hand or be called to respond to afterward. Teaching similar deescalation techniques to EMS would benefit all present on the scene.

    Pass into law requirements for EMS to not withhold care or treatment from individuals who are in police custody.

    The first rule of medicine is “do no harm” but that does not mean do “nothing.” Emergency medical professionals are taught to serve as patient advocates throughout the continuum of care, particularly when the patient cannot speak or defend themselves. EMS workers need to be empowered to do their jobs without fear of retribution from their law enforcement colleagues.

    Change the culture and power dynamic in which EMS workers feel as if they must be silent, complacent or party to police abuses in order to assure their own continued protection on the job.

    State and local jurisdictions need to work harder to prevent violence against EMS personnel. At the same time, law enforcement agencies need to project an expectation that EMS workers are obligated to report abuses they witness. There should be no quid pro quo exchanging police protection for EMS complacency.

    Hold EMS personnel liable for failure to report police violence.

    EMS workers in most states are “mandatory reporters” for child or elder abuse and can be held criminally and civilly liable for failure to report such abuses. Individuals under custody, just like prison inmates, are also a population vulnerable to abuse. Hold EMS personnel to the same standards as law enforcement that stand idly and watch their colleagues abuse citizens. This will send a definitive message to the EMS community that it can no longer stand off camera, hands-in-pockets committing acts of passive aggression.

    The death of Tyre Nichols forces us to confront yet another moment where both those who have sworn to protect and those who have sworn to treat appear to have breached their duty. As this, and future, cases receive scrutiny, lawmakers, prosecutors, government officials and the public need to widen their aperture to consider the inactions of those on the periphery. While EMS workers are not necessarily committing the choking, kicking or pummeling themselves, they are in a position to attempt to stop law enforcement from taking a life.

    EMS was created in the wake of the seminal 1966 white paper entitled “Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society.” Now that we have a modern EMS system in this country, we need it to stop neglecting certain segments of our society.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Russia Exiled Them. Big Mistake.

    Opinion | Russia Exiled Them. Big Mistake.

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    Some Putin opponents go further. Gathering outside Warsaw this past November, a group of exiled politicians called the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia declared that in addition to ending the occupation of Crimea and other Ukrainian territories, Russia must pay reparations to Ukraine — and give up war criminals for trials. (The Congress was led by Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of Russia’s parliament to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014; he’s now living in exile in Ukraine.)

    The stakes could not be higher. Another exile organization, the Anti-War Conference of the Free Russia Forum organized by the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former political prisoner, has stated that the conflict is not regional, that Putin’s war is not just with Ukraine but with the liberal Western world order. It is a war over the “basic values” of Western democratic civilization.

    Considering their importance to a Russian defeat and a successful outcome of the war, Russia’s political émigrés deserve our support. So far, they have been adept at self-organization and, for the most part, at self-financing. The West’s assistance is needed mostly in lowering or removing bureaucratic barriers. For instance, the U.S. and the EU should be faster at processing temporary year-long visas for political exiles who have found quick but impermanent refuge in countries like Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Turkey. A recent study by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank, also suggests that Western consulates should be more efficient in issuing work permits and refugee identification papers. Germany and the Czech Republic have already begun designating special categories of immigration for such cases to expedite processing.

    Yet the West should avoid arbitrating or taking sides in the inevitable internecine spats within the émigré community. The goal is an opposition that would as closely as possible reflect the diverse segments of the Russian political configuration that are today being flattened under the regime’s deadly weight. Herzen, again, shows the way in seeking to be as inclusive as possible and welcoming all those who were “not dead to human feelings” into “a single vast protest against the evil regime,” as Herzen’s biographer Isaiah Berlin put it.

    Nor should the West impose political tests; there should be only two criteria for acceptance and support of the political émigrés. One is an unconditional affirmation of Russia’s borders as of January 1, 1992. The other is a broad, deep, persistent and patient de-Stalinization and de-imperialization of Russia — cultural, educational, historiographic. Of course, it would be up to the Russians themselves to decide on how to accomplish these mammoth tasks. We can only hope that, resuming where the sincere but fitful glasnost assault on totalitarianism and the Soviet empire left off, a future Russia that’s at peace with its own people and the world would systematically expunge the foundation of the house that Putin built: Russia as a providential power, a “Third Rome” with a special God-given mission in the world; the equation of greatness with fear and terror; the primacy of state over individual; and the cult of violence.

    As in every modern mass migration, the civic-minded among the Russian immigrants — the human rights activists, bloggers, environmentalists and members of the political opposition — are a tiny minority: an estimated 10,000 men and women out of as many as 1.4 million who have left their country since the beginning of Putin’s third presidency in 2012. Yet the scale of their effort to edify and inspire has already by far exceeded their size.

    “We have saved the honor of the Russian name,” Herzen wrote to his fellow self-exile, 19th century writer Ivan Turgenev. That, ultimately, is why Russia’s political émigrés deserve the West’s admiration and its help.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Russia’s Bloody Sledgehammer

    Opinion | Russia’s Bloody Sledgehammer

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    The administration is of course right that Wagner is engaged in a range of criminal enterprises. There is speculation that its costly siege of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut is motivated by a desire to control salt and gypsum mines in the area. It has also embraced far-right extremism, with links to a white supremacist organization — the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) — that the U.S. already designates as a terrorist group. But if you consider the range and severity of Wagner’s activities — mass murder, rape and torture; using terror to subjugate civilian populations; control of territory; looting of natural resources; enlistment of foreign fighters; sophisticated, Hollywood-style propaganda glorifying the group and Russia — it presents much more of a global threat than the average criminal racket.

    Branding Wagner as a transnational criminal organization is mainly a symbolic move. Because Wagner and some of its associates — including Prigozhin himself — are already subject to economic sanctions, the Biden administration’s designation offers no new meaningful tools for actually fighting the group.

    But if the group were also to be designated a foreign terrorist organization, the U.S. and its allies would be equipped with a much more robust set of tools to starve Prigozhin and his henchmen of resources and halt Wagner’s rampage of destruction.

    As we saw in the successful international effort to vanquish ISIS, designating a foreign terrorist group under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act would bring into play one of the most powerful economic tools that the U.S. government has: a criminal statute that would make it illegal to provide “material support” to the Wagner Group. Due to the extra-territorial nature of the statute, such a designation would substantially hamper Wagner’s operations by putting foreign individuals, companies and countries on notice that doing business with the organization means risking prosecution in the United States.

    Several legal and counterterrorism experts have already weighed in that the Wagner Group meets the legal definition of a foreign terrorist organization: a foreign organization, engaged in terror and presenting a threat to the national security of the United States. Members of Congress agree. So why the half measure?

    One answer may be a reluctance to further antagonize the Kremlin, which enjoys close ties to Wagner and has come to rely on the group’s mercenaries. But surely such a designation would be less of an irritant than the weapons Washington is sending to arm Ukraine. It would also fall short of the more aggressive proposal offered by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Russia itself be designated a state sponsor of terrorism, which would bring with it a host of complications.

    Another concern may be the checkered history of “material support” prosecutions in counterterrorism cases. The many excesses of the post-9/11 era mean that this sort of expansive tool has been reviled, with ample justification, by human rights and humanitarian groups. As we have seen with ISIS, Al-Shabaab and Yemen’s Houthis (whose terrorist designation was withdrawn), when a terrorist group has de facto control of territory — as Wagner currently does in the Central African Republic — there can be a chilling effect preventing humanitarian organizations from providing aid and other support, leading to disastrous humanitarian consequences.

    But just because a powerful instrument of foreign policy has been used in an overly broad manner in the past does not mean that it should be jettisoned altogether. Last year, the Treasury Department issued a slate of general licenses to authorize ongoing transactions with individuals or entities subject to sanctions, provided that they are engaged in a range of humanitarian activities. If the Wagner Group is designated a foreign terrorist organization, it will be critical to implement these measures in a way that chokes off the group’s resources and frustrates its activities without visiting collateral damage on already vulnerable populations. This means that the Department of Justice should commit to not pursuing “material support” prosecutions against humanitarian actors.

    One reason for ISIS’ eventual defeat in Syria and Iraq was the collective efforts of the 85-member strong Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS. This alliance collaborated to cut off the group’s finances, combat its propaganda and reduce the flow of foreign fighters to its territories. A coalition to combat Wagner could focus on the same three pillars. Given Wagner’s continued expansion in Africa, it is critical that such an effort include African states.

    With the prospect of a spring offensive by Russia looming, it is time to step up pressure on this vicious fighting force that is prolonging the Ukraine conflict and destabilizing wide swaths of Africa. It requires a truly international effort to stop an ascendant transnational threat, and the U.S. should start by utilizing the most robust economic tool it has, designating the Wagner Group a foreign terrorist organization.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Bengaluru: Nearly 80 percent students demand eggs in mid-day meal, finds opinion poll

    Bengaluru: Nearly 80 percent students demand eggs in mid-day meal, finds opinion poll

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    Bengaluru: Nearly 80 percent students demand eggs in mid-day meal, finds opinion poll

    Bengaluru: More than 38.37 lakh students of primary and high school students chose eggs as their protein source in their mid-day meal amid the “Satvik” food controversy, as per the data given by the education department.

    After the circular released by the Commissioner of Education Department of Karnataka, opinion was sought from the students on whether they want egg, peanut bar or banana as the protein source in their mid-day meals.

    The opinion was taken from the students in the different zones, where almost 80 per cent of students demanded eggs in their meals.

    Around 38.37 lakh students are studying in Classes 1 to 8 in Karnataka, among whom almost 80 per cent of students demanded eggs. Other 2.27 lakh students asked the government to provide peanut bars and Bananas, according to the survey of Education Department.

    Students mainly in the Belagavi division followed by Bengaluru and Kalburgi along with the Mysore division chose eggs for their meals to fulfil their nutrition demands especially when there is a discussion about “Satvik” food in schools.

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    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • Opinion | Don’t Blame the Government for Our Leaders Mishandling Documents

    Opinion | Don’t Blame the Government for Our Leaders Mishandling Documents

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    Sometimes, however, I reviewed a document marked “TS/SCI” and did not intuitively understand why its contents were classified in that way. The information might seem benign on its face and the implications for U.S. national security were far from clear, at least to me. Does that mean that the information in the document was over-classified? Not necessarily.

    Imagine we learn that a leader of a hostile nation — and I am wholly inventing this example — loves turnip ice cream. Could that information be classified at the TS/SCI level? Hypothetically, yes, and properly so. Let me explain.

    Perhaps the only person on the planet who knows of the turnip ice cream preference is someone on his staff. Perhaps that staffer is supplying information to our intelligence community about the foreign leader — his ice cream preferences, for example — but also about other things, including things he overhears the leader talking about during the day. That highly placed source is incredibly valuable to U.S. intelligence because of his proximity to the foreign leader. However, not all his reporting will be crucial and some of it — including the turnip preference — will seem trivial.

    Should we still classify the turnip reporting at the TS/SCI level and endeavor to protect it? Absolutely. If leaked, it might be easy for the foreign leader to determine the source of the leak and something very bad could happen to that staffer (and to U.S. intelligence interests).

    We might also learn of the leader’s turnip fixation through other means because we gather intelligence through many “sources and methods” that are not always obvious from the contents of a document. Indeed, the sources and methods were often opaque to me — and properly so — because though I may need the underlying information to do my job, I did not “need to know” how we obtained that information.

    Even if we saw the documents found at the homes of Trump, Biden and Pence, we might not understand how the information was compiled nor why the sources and methods are unique, sensitive and worthy of protection. We also could not say that their mishandling was the result of over-classification because we cannot know that.

    That is why extraordinarily reckless and irresponsible people like Edward Snowden can do so much damage to U.S. national security interests. They cannot know — and do not understand — the nature of the information they are disclosing, how it was obtained, who they are putting at risk with their disclosures, and what the costs to the U.S. might be, in terms of lost access and lost information. But I digress.

    Do we have an over-classification problem in this country? I suppose we do. Information might be classified that should not be classified at all; it might be classified at a level higher than it ought to be classified; or it might be classified for too long when declassification could serve other important public interests like transparency and accountability.

    But accepting all that, it is impossible to know that these types of over-classification issues apply to the documents that turned up at the homes of Trump, Biden and Pence. And, so what? None of this is an excuse for sloppy handling.

    Furthermore, if a document is classified, then we must — as users of classified information — accept that classification on its face and treat it as the rules require us to treat it. If it is over-classified, so be it. It certainly would not be prudent for someone to decide on their own that a document is over-classified and then treat it as if it is not classified at all.

    The classified information system is bulky and imperfect. And there is inevitably an over-classification problem, much of it likely not nefarious. A classification official gets into less trouble and incurs less risk for over-classifying a document rather than under-classifying it. But, in the end, the system relies on trust and diligence and prudence and rules. When people fail to act in those ways — even if unintentionally — we ought not make excuses for them.

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    #Opinion #Dont #Blame #Government #Leaders #Mishandling #Documents
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The GOP’s Strange Budget Strategy

    Opinion | The GOP’s Strange Budget Strategy

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    George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism was an implicit rebuke of Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwing majorities that tried to balance the budget at all costs. Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again populism was a rejection of Paul Ryan’s debt-obsessed majority that hoped to move the goal posts on entitlement reform.

    The problem is that Ryan was right about the substance and Trump is right about the politics, and that dilemma — in a nutshell — is why the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is nearly 100 percent and is projected to keep climbing.

    Like the ne’er-do-well occasionally convinced to scrub up and show up at church on a Sunday, the GOP experiences spasms of fiscal rectitude, followed by longer bouts of going along with the usual Washington practice of devil-may-care fiscal blowouts.

    The party is waging a generational effort … once every 10 years or so. It is showing great staying power … in between the times it barely talks about the issue at all.

    It had looked like GOP fiscal hawks had either all molted into big-government populists, or at least were happy to associate themselves with that flock. So it’s been some comfort to anyone concerned about spending that the House Republican backbench has sounded almost indistinguishable from the GOP conference back in the tea party heyday of 2011.

    Of course, Republican budget hawks would have more credibility if their passion and commitment didn’t seem contingent on — with some honorable exceptions — a Democrat being in the White House. They obviously could have more influence, if they were gutsy enough to exercise it, over a President Trump or DeSantis than they can ever hope to have over a President Biden.

    That said, Republicans never want to spend as much as Democrats do (although they want to cut taxes more), and the dynamic in Washington in recent years meant that if the GOP wanted to relieve depleted defense accounts, they had to give Democrats the non-defense spending that they wanted.

    Now, the barely comprehensible levels of pandemic-era spending over the last three years, when Washington has run more than $7 trillion of budget deficits, should be enough to give anyone pause.

    As the economist Herb Stein famously said, if something can’t go on forever, it will stop. No one can know how long we can go on with the debt on the current trajectory without baleful consequences — it could be 20 years, it could be 20 months. Prudence suggests that we should avoid finding out.

    And that inevitably means squeezing the entitlements that Trump — the party’s past president and perhaps future nominee — says shouldn’t be cut by a penny.

    If the federal budget consisted only of discretionary spending, it’d be in decent enough shape.

    With some upward jags — the war on terror, the financial crisis — both domestic and defense discretionary spending are down as a percent of GDP from their levels in the 1980s.

    As budget maven Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute points out, mandatory spending is where the action is.

    In 1965, mandatory spending was 34 percent of total federal spending; in 2022, it was 71 percent. Social Security and Medicare alone are now 34 percent of the budget.

    In 2032, Social Security, health entitlements and interest costs are projected to account for 86 percent of the increase in spending over 2008 levels, according to Riedl. The growing Social Security and Medicare shortfalls will account for almost all of the growing deficit over the next 10 years. (The 2017 GOP tax cuts contribute to the projected deficits going forward, but only marginally.)

    The scale of the challenge means that Republicans are unlikely to produce any plan to balance the budget in 10 years, certainly not one without huge magic asterisks.

    Making some progress against spending this year during the debt ceiling fight would be welcome. But — with a hostile press, a divided party (many Senate Republicans aren’t on board with brinkmanship) and markets that will flip out if the limit isn’t extended on time — the GOP’s expectations for the showdown should be realistic.

    Still, the debt limit is a natural point of leverage. Republicans are fooling themselves if they think it’s going to unlock a new era of austerity, but the White House is delusional if it thinks it can refuse to negotiate at all.

    Republicans should seek limits on discretionary spending (although it’s tricky because now is not the time to cut back on defense spending during a time of geopolitical challenge from Russia and China); push some technical, not particularly important savings on entitlements; and embrace the TRUST Act that would create bipartisan committees to at least get the conversation going on how to keep Social Security and Medicare from going insolvent and/or overwhelming the budget.

    If this seems small beer compared to the Budget Control Act adopted during the debt showdown in 2011, it should be remembered that the law’s caps quickly eroded and then disappeared entirely.

    More important than what happens over the next few months is whether the party can nominate and elect a president in 2024 who, unlike Bush or Trump, is in sympathy with the fiscal conservatism of House conservatives.

    Even that won’t be a magic bullet, since the public will still need persuading that medium-term changes to Social Security and Medicare don’t represent a clear and present threat to its well-being.

    Otherwise, even what a decade or so ago would have seemed an embarrassingly modest goal — keeping the debt at roughly 90 percent of GDP — will be out of reach.

    Ronald Reagan quipped that the deficit was big enough to take care of itself. Now, it’s big enough that no single high-stakes battle or act of Congress is going to tame it. Fiscal hawks have to be in for the long haul.

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    #Opinion #GOPs #Strange #Budget #Strategy
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | The Wildly Misleading 2024 Speculation Is About to Begin

    Opinion | The Wildly Misleading 2024 Speculation Is About to Begin

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    All through the second half of 2003, Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was the dominant figure in the Democratic presidential primary. His full-throated denunciation of the Iraq War won him the fervent support of progressives; his campaign’s use of the Internet put him millions of dollars ahead of his rivals. An army of canvassers, clad in orange hats, were swarming through the early states. By year’s end, he was dominating the polls and had won the endorsement of both contenders for the prior Democratic nomination, Al Gore and Bill Bradley. (It was at that point that a CNN anchor asked me on air, “Is the race over?” My “no” is one of the high-water marks of my TV career). Meanwhile Sen. John Kerry was struggling to survive; he was so far underwater in Iowa and New Hampshire that some journalists were engaged in a lottery to pick the day Kerry would drop out.

    Then the voters actually got to weigh in.

    Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, with Sen. John Edwards coming in second. Dean finished a very weak third. And while coverage focused on his caucus night “scream” — a badly misreported event — that happened after Iowa Democrats had soundly rejected him and after his numbers in New Hampshire had begun to crater.

    Four years later, it was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — “America’s Mayor” — who was dominating the Republican presidential race. He was far ahead in national polls and in the early states as well. At one point early in the race, Giuliani explained to me with enthusiasm that the delegate selection rules in places like New York and New Jersey would ensure him the lion’s share of those delegates.

    Then the voters actually got to weigh in.

    It turned out that Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire were not enthralled by a candidate who was pro-abortion rights, pro-gay rights and pro-gun control legislation. By the time the contests began, Giuliani had abandoned the early states, eventually abandoning his campaign altogether. Those delegate selection rules he had confidently seen as his ticket to the nomination helped wrap up the contest for the once left-for-dead Sen. John McCain.

    And on the Democratic side? Hillary Clinton was so far ahead in the polls that the producer of the CBS Evening News ordered up a story from me on why she was so invulnerable. I was saved from embarrassment when a shrewd Republican strategist, Michael Murphy, warned against such judgment. This is a year for a change candidate, Murphy said, and she can’t be a change candidate.

    Then the voters actually got to weigh in.

    Murphy was right. By winning the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama not only emerged as a giant-killer; he demonstrated that a Black candidate could win a more-or-less all white state. Almost overnight, Clinton’s strength among Black Democrats — she had been splitting support roughly evenly with Obama — disintegrated. What was seen as an easy win for Clinton in mid-2003 became a hard-fought contest that extended through the primary season and that she ultimately lost.

    Are these examples too far in the past to be relevant? Well, let’s go back, all the way back to … the last presidential campaign, to see how even the start of the nominating contest may provide more noise than signal about what voters want.

    From the middle of 2019 through the first primaries in early 2020, Joe Biden was something of a pitiable figure: lagging in polls, short of money, drawing meager crowds. It was Bernie Sanders, with his massive fund-raising capabilities, and his emerging strength as the progressives’ champion, who was the candidate to beat. After his (narrow) win in New Hampshire and (landslide) win in the Nevada caucuses, much of the coverage of the race asked the question: Could Sanders amass enough delegates by Super Tuesday to be all but unstoppable?

    Then the first large contingent of Black Democratic voters weighed in. On Feb. 29 in South Carolina, Biden won with nearly 50 percent of the vote — two and a half times that of Sanders. Within 96 hours, most of Biden’s rivals had pulled out of the race and endorsed him; Biden then bulldozed through the Super Tuesday field, and the nominating contest was over.

    These examples are part of a broader picture; they don’t include the times when a candidate became the leader in the polls one week, only to be swept into insignificance the next. (At one point in these contests, Joe Lieberman, Wesley Clark, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ben Carson all placed first in public opinion polls). They don’t include those moments in the heart of the primary season when a single event at a debate can render months’ worth of analysis inoperative. (Think of Rick Perry’s inability to remember the name of one of the Cabinet agencies he pledged to eliminate during a debate in 2011. Hint: It was the Energy Department, which he’d later lead under Donald Trump.)

    The point here is not to argue for a vow of journalistic silence in the long slog leading up to the actual contests; it’s to put that part of the process into context, along with a serious dose of humility. Yes, Trump looks weakened, but are we really ready to anoint Ron DeSantis the nominee before he proves himself on the big stage? Yes, Biden is an octogenarian whose approval rating has been underwater since August 2021, but is anyone in his party really about to challenge his hold on the White House?

    To flip the wildly overused George Santayana warning: By remembering the past hyperventilated early coverage of presidential contests, perhaps we won’t be condemned to repeat it.

    As a first step, it might be a genuine service to readers and viewers to end any 2024 stories with one last line: “Of course, none of this is likely to matter when the votes are cast.”

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    #Opinion #Wildly #Misleading #Speculation
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Opinion | Sloppy Joe

    Opinion | Sloppy Joe

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    Some say it’s to Biden’s credit that he’s cooperated with investigators, unlike Donald Trump, who has variously insisted that he declassified the documents improperly stored at his residence, that they belong to him and that the documents were planted by the FBI. (I keep waiting for him to say he can wallpaper Mar-a-Lago with the docs if he wants.) But why give Biden cover because he’s acknowledging he’s in the wrong and is helping the cops instead of fighting them? Biden’s purported violations represent extreme negligence. At least Trump is forthright about his mishandling of documents. He never thought the secrecy rules applied to him, which is why he routinely leaked sensitive intelligence while president. Nobody thinks that Biden, who knows better, intentionally made off with the documents. He just shrugged off the rules like a reckless driver.

    Wasn’t it supposed to be different? Wasn’t the Biden presidency supposed to mark the return of grown-ups and professionalism to the White House? Weren’t Biden’s hallmarks his pedigree and experience, his competency and diligence? Or, setting aside his deficiencies for a moment, wasn’t Biden supposed to have surrounded himself with an able team of advisers who have been with him for decades, some back to his days in Delaware politics, to guide and protect him? What were they doing to protect Biden when the Very Important Classified Documents bled out to his think-tank office, his garage and his house, and stored for years? Or, are they just as sloppy as Biden and carriers of over-inflated reputations?

    You could attribute Biden’s document bungles to his age. He’s now 80, after all. But that excuse doesn’t stanch his self-inflected wound. Sloppiness has been Biden’s signature move for as long as he’s practiced politics. Over the course of his political career, Biden has gaffed the way Mount Etna erupts — in steady, hot, gassy burps. In 1987 while running for president, he sloppily pinched major parts of a British politician’s speech and called it his own. Last March, in a seemingly off-the-cuff statement that appeared to challenge Russia to start World War III, Biden said that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” which sounded like a direct call for regime change. The White House immediately walked back his statement, as it frequently does, saying, “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” Oh, sure. As this recent New York Post piece charting Biden’s presidential gaffes, he’s grown hotter and gassier, indicating an inability to edit or discipline himself.

    To put it in the vernacular, he’s very sloppy.

    The White House clean-up crew that follows Biden 24/7 to undo his gaffes will probably rescue him from his Very Important Classified Documents catastrophe. When the Biden doc discoveries commenced, pundits speculated that they amounted to an unintended gift to Trump: Even though the two cases are not directly comparable, it would look bad to punish Trump for making off with documents but not Biden (who can’t be indicted anyway under Department of Justice rules). But as the classified documents pile up on Biden’s door — who knows where they’ll find them next, his Rehoboth beach pad? — Trump’s document troubles now look like a gift to Biden. What Biden did was wrong, his supporters will argue, but he didn’t deliberately take them, like Trump. What’s the big deal? He’s always been sloppy Joe, this logic goes, he will always be sloppy Joe. What did you expect?

    ******

    A post-presidential fast-food franchise: Sloppy Joe’s. Hunter can run it. Send menu suggestions to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed worked at McDonald’s in its youth. My Mastodon account wants an In-N-Out Burger franchise when they come east. My Post account likes a Spicy Chicken Deluxe from Chick-fil-A. My RSS feed never stops erupting.



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    #Opinion #Sloppy #Joe
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )