Martin Baron's "blood-soaked regime"

So, Marty, the editorial page under your control has repeatedly described the Syrian regime as "blood-soaked".
The latest example of such a description on the ed page:
Trump shouldn’t repeat Obama’s mistake in Iraq and Syria
2017-10-22:

On Syria, Washington appears content to step aside
as Russia and Iran work to restore the authority of
the blood-soaked regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Just what is your complaint against the regime of Bashar al-Assad?
I have no reason to doubt the reports that it has used brutal methods to suppress opposition.
So has Israel.
So have many other regimes.
Just why, Marty, must Syria be singled out from all the states in the world that have used brutal methods,
which could no doubt be described as "blood-soaked",
for opposition by the U.S.?

Oh, wait, if we read a little further in the editorial we discover something special about Syria.
The editorial ends with

A failure by the United States to defend its allies or promote new political arrangements for the two Arab states will lead only to more war, the rise of new terrorist threats and, ultimately, the necessity of more U.S. intervention.

There you have it. It's all about Israel. Why else did the Post exaggerate the supposed threat from Iraq back in 2003 to incite the disastrous deposing of the, again, "blood-soaked" regime of Saddam Hussein?
With results that the Post now decries, namely, the not very surprising ties between Iraq's Shiites and those of Iran.

We know, Marty, what your game and goal is:
To make the U.S. Israel's patsy.
Pure and simple.

Now, Marty, some questions for you:
Which of the Post's editors, opinion columnists, reporters, and managers are Jewish?
What could be more relevant to discerning the possibility of loyalty to a foreign power?
You know, "the Jewish nation". (A term not of my invention, but one used by Jews themselves).
How about bringing some light to that situation?
After all, you know, "Democracy dies in darkness".

(For a powerful rebuttal to the Post's position, see:
Are Our Mideast Wars Forever?
by Patrick J. Buchanan, 2017-10-24,
by a man who seems to be personna non grata to the Post's editorial page.)

Filthy lies from the Washington Post

2017-04-07-WP-trump-loves-a-conspiracy-theory-now-his-allies-in-the-media-say-hes-falling-for-one-in-syria

Trump loves a conspiracy theory.
Now his allies in the fringe media want him to fall for one in Syria.
By Adam Taylor
Washington Post, 2017-04-07

This WaPo article is sooooo wrong on two issues:
First, the theory that Syria is being falsely accused of using chemical weapons this week is hardly a "conspiracy theory".
Second, the people trying to set the record straight on what happened are certainly not necessarily

closely linked to the “alt-right,” a small, far-right movement whose members are known for espousing racist, anti-Semitic and sexist points of view.

Here are three examples of those trying to counter the MSM's narrative on what happened in Syria:

• http://antiwar.com (An aggregation of articles opposing unnecessary U.S. military actions.)
• https://www.libertarianinstitute.org/scotthortonshow/4617-philip-giraldi-says-ic-military-doubt-assad-gas-narrative/ (An interview with former CIA officer Philip Giraldi)
• http://turcopolier.typepad.com (Run by retired Army Colonel and DIA executive Pat Lang.)

In particular, at that last website, see the detailed counterargument to the MSM's narrative by the anonymous commentator "Publius Tacitus":
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/04/donald-trump-is-an-international-law-breaker.html

(Women might want to note the association of rational, honest thinking regarding Syria
with "sexist points of view".
Really?)


Anyhow, the most important point is that the WaPo does not cite such knowledgeable sources as those linked to above,
but rather goes way out of its way to try to associate those questioning U.S. actions
with such as Alex Jones, rather than such experienced U.S. intelligence figures as Phil Giraldi and Patrick Lang.

WaPo's "fake news" propaganda campaign

Re:

2016-11-24-WP-Craig-Timberg-russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say

Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say
by Craig Timeberg
Washington Post, 2016-11-24


For an example of the real "fake news" problem in the instance of
reporting on the current situation in Syria and the siege of Aleppo, see
this report by former senior DIA MidEast analyst Patrick Lang.

---

Here are some web pages which discuss, and dissect, the WaPo article:

2016-11-25-Alternet-Blumenthal-washington-post-promotes-shadowy-website-accuses-200-publications-russian-propaganda-plants

Washington Post Promotes Shadowy Website That Accuses 200 Pulications Of Being Russian Propaganda Plants
by Max Blumenthal
Alternet.com, 2016-11-25

2016-11-26-TheIntercept-Norton-Greenwald-washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group

Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group
by Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept, 2016-11-26

2016-11-28-RS-Taibbi-washington-post-blacklist-story-is-shameful-disgusting

The 'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting
The capital's paper of record crashes legacy media on an iceberg
by Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone, 2016-11-28

...

Forget also that the group offered zero concrete evidence
of coordination with Russian intelligence agencies,
even offering this remarkable disclaimer about its analytic methods:

"Please note that our criteria are behavioral. ...
For purposes of this definition it does not matter ...
whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point:
If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as
bona-fide 'useful idiots' of the Russian intelligence services,
and are worthy of further scrutiny."

...

2016-11-30-Counterpunch-StClair-Cockburn-the-cia-and-the-press-when-the-washington-post-ran-the-cias-propaganda-network

The CIA and the Press:
When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network
by Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn
Counterpunch, 2016-11-30

[Its first three paragraphs:]

Last week, the Washington Post published a scurrilous piece
by a heretofore obscure technology reporter named Craig Timberg,
alleging without the faintest evidence that
Russian intelligence was using more than 200 independent news sites
to pump out pro-Putin and anti-Clinton propaganda during the election campaign.

Under the breathless headline,
“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,”
Timberg concocted his story based on allegations from a vaporous group called ProporNot,
run by nameless individuals of unknown origin,
whom Timberg (cribbing from the Bob Woodward stylesheet) agreed to quote as anonymous sources.

[Think about that.
Why would such allegations come from anonymous sources?
Why would the people making those accusations not be willing to be identified?
Smells to high heaven to me.]

ProporNot’s catalogue of supposed Putin-controlled outlets reeks of the McCarthyite smears of the Red Scare era.
The blacklist includes some of the most esteemed alternative news sites on the web,
including Anti-war.com, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, Naked Capitalism, Consortium News, Truthout, Lew Rockwell.com, Global Research, Unz.com, Zero Hedge and, yes, CounterPunch,
among many others. I’ll have more on Timberg and ProporNot in my Friday column.

[An observation by KHarbaugh:
I followed antiwar.com rather closely during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
and during the early stages of that misguided occupation.
The reports and forecasts from antiwar.com were far more accurate in describing the likely chain of events in Iraq
than anything those rotten stooges of Israel
(yes, you read that right),
the fucking Zionist propaganda operation at the Washington Post,
ever put out.
Fuck them.]

2016-12-02-Counterpunch-timbergs-tale-washington-post-reporter-spreads-blacklist-of-independent-journalist-sites

Timberg’s Tale:
Washington Post Reporter Spreads Blacklist of Independent Journalist Sites
by Pam Martens - Russ Martens
Counterpunch, 2016-12-02

2016-12-03-TruthDig-journalists_assailed_washington_post_propornot_mccarthyite_drivel

Truthdiggers of the Week:
Journalists Who Ripped Washington Post, PropOrNot for McCarthyite Hogwash
By Natasha Hakimi
Truthdig, 2016-12-03

...

Joshua Frank, co-editor of “CounterPunch,” another left-leaning site named on the blacklist, details a revealing email exchange with PropOrNot:

In further emails, I explained to the group that there were many other media outlets that were not tools of Russian propaganda; Truthout, Truthdig, BlackAgendaReport, Antiwar.com, among others. Here is their reply:

“If Truthout, Truthdig, Antiwar, BlackAgendaReport, etc, were to reach out to us like you did, things might well end up playing out very similarly to how this one has! We’ve asked people to do that on our site. Several have. Others have not.”

And then this gem:

“If someone contacts us and the resulting conversation makes clear that they understand, for example, how Putin’s Russia is a revisionist authoritarian wannabe-imperialist kleptocracy that uses ‘fake news’ as online propaganda, then we have a lot of common ground. That factors into our understanding of the merits, but more importantly, becomes a basis for constructive movement forward.”

Huh? That isn’t very sound methodology if you ask me, more like a shallow smear campaign manufactured by amateurs. PropOrNot will consider taking these sites off their blacklist, not based on the sites’ content but on whether or not they contacted PropOrNot directly and if “they understand” Putin is a bad hombre? The group lists these aforementioned sites right along RT and Sputnik News, both of which are openly funded by the Russian government and provide a point of view that’s in line with the Kremlin. It’s clearly a case of guilt by association.

Patrick Buchanan analyzes the Washington Post

2016-03-03-PJB-on-the-Post

An Establishment in Panic
by Patrick J. Buchanan
buchanan.org (his blog), 2016-03-03

Donald Trump “appeals to racism.”

“[F]rom the beginning … his campaign has profited from voter prejudice and hatred” and represents an “authoritarian assault upon democracy.”

If Speaker Paul Ryan wishes to be “on the right side of history … he must condemn Mr. Trump clearly and comprehensively. The same goes for every other Republican leader.”

“Maybe that would split the (Republican) party,” but, “No job is worth the moral stain that would come from embracing (Trump). No party is worth saving at the expense of the country.”
If Republican leaders wish to be regarded as moral, every one of them must renounce Trump, even if it means destroying their party.



Who has laid down this moral mandate? The Holy Father in Rome?

No. The voice posturing as the conscience of America is the Washington Post, which champions abortion on demand and has not, in the memory of this writer, endorsed any Republican for president – though it did endorse Marion Barry three times for mayor of D.C.

Anticipating the Post’s orders, Sen. Marco Rubio has been painting Trump as a “scam artist” and “con artist,” with an “orange” complexion, a “spray tan” and “tiny hands,” who is “unfit to lead the party of Lincoln and Reagan.”

The establishment is loving Rubio, and the networks are giving him more airtime. And Rubio is reciprocating, promising that, even if defeated in his home state of Florida on March 15, he will drive his pickup across the country warning against the menace of Trump.

Rubio, however, seems not to have detected the moral threat of Trump, until polls showed Rubio being wiped out on Super Tuesday and in real danger of losing Florida.

Mitt Romney has also suddenly discovered what a fraud and phony is the businessman-builder whose endorsement he so avidly sought and so oleaginously accepted in Las Vegas in 2012.


Before other Republicans submit to the ultimatum of the Post, and of the columnists and commentators pushing a “Never Trump” strategy at the Cleveland convention, they should ask themselves: For whom is it that they will be bringing about party suicide?

That the Beltway elites, whose voice is the Post, hate and fear Trump is not only undeniable, it is understandable.

The Post beat the drums for the endless Mideast wars that bled and near bankrupted the country. Trump will not start another.

The Post welcomes open borders that bring in millions to continue the endless expansion of the welfare state and to change the character of the country we grew up in. Trump will build the wall and repatriate those here illegally.

Trump threatens the trade treaties that enable amoral transnational corporations to ship factories and jobs overseas to produce cheaply abroad and be rid of American employees who are ever demanding better wages and working conditions.

What does the Post care about trade deals that deindustrialize America when the advertising dollars of the big conglomerates are what make Big Media fat and happy?

The political establishment in Washington depends on Wall Street and K Street for PAC money and campaign contributions.
Wall Street and K Street depend on the political establishment to protect their right to abandon America for the greener pastures abroad.

Before March 15, when Florida and Ohio vote and the fates of Rubio and Gov. John Kasich are decided, nothing is likely to stop the ferocious infighting of the primaries.

But after March 15, the smoke will have cleared.

If Trump has fallen short of a glide path to the nomination, the war goes on. But if Trump seems to be the near-certain nominee, it will be a time for acceptance, a time for a cease-fire in this bloodiest of civil wars in the GOP.

Otherwise, the party will kick away any chance of keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House, and perhaps kick away its future as well.

While the depth and rancor of the divisions in the party are apparent, so also is the opportunity. For the turnout in the Republican primaries and caucuses has not only exceeded expectations, it has astonished and awed political observers.

A new “New Majority” has been marching to the polls and voting Republican, a majority unlike any seen since the 49-state landslides of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

If this energy can be maintained, if those throngs of Republican voters can be united in the fall, then the party can hold Congress, capture the While House and reconstitute the Supreme Court.

Come the ides of March, the GOP is going to be in need of its uniters and its statesmen. But today, all Republicans should ask themselves:

Are these folks coming out in droves to vote Republican really the bigoted, hateful and authoritarian people of the Post’s depiction?

Or is this not the same old Post that has poured bile on conservatives for generations now in a panic that America’s destiny may be torn away from it and restored to its rightful owners?

Washington Post editorial lie about Clinton emails

2016-02-08-Washington-Post-editorial-the-voters-need-answers-about-the-clinton-emails

The voters need answers about the Clinton emails
By Editorial Board
Washington Post Editorial, 2016-02-08

[The editorial's first two paragraphs,
with emphasis added by the author of the current blog:]

WAS HILLARY CLINTON, as secretary of state,
careless with classified information that could bring harm to intelligence sources or otherwise benefit U.S. adversaries,
or is she being slammed by her partisan opponents over action that was not criminal
and may have simply reflected a lapse in judgment?
The fog was only deepened by the recent announcement that “top secret” information
was found in seven email chains, covering 22 documents totaling 37 pages,
in the State Department’s review of her emails for release.
Since the “top secret” information will remain hidden, it is hard to know what to make of it.

As we’ve said before, Mrs. Clinton should not have stored her official business on a private computer server based in her home.
It was faulty thinking, perhaps borne of her desire to keep control over the communications and long experience in the political trenches.
She has since turned everything over to the State Department for screening and release.
The emails in question — many of them sent to her by others —
came from the unclassified systems of the government,
and, we are told, did not have any markings on them that identified them as classified.
So it does not seem that she knowingly or willfully mishandled anything classified.
The question of intent here is crucial.

[I have copied the entire first two paragraphs, to show context.
Those of us who have been following this story with some attention know that
she most certainly has not
"turned everything over to the State Department for screening and release."
Rather, she turned over to the State Department roughly half
of the approximately 60,000 emails on her private server.

As a separate action, she has turned over to the FBI the server itself,
for their examination.
They may, or may not, be able to recover and examine the other half of her emails,
evaluating them by whatever criteria they feel necessary to assess her forthcomingness and propriety.
But the general public as yet has not been clued in on their progress,
and may never be.

In any case, the Post's statement highlighted above
is demonstrably untrue.
And who cannot believe that the Post's editorial board has been following this story with sufficient attention to know that that statement is and was untrue?
Thus it qualifies for the phrase "a lie."]

Zionist media control exemplified again

Note the way the issues are framed in the following article
by the Washington Post's reporter, Steven Mufson.

2015-11-11-WP-Mufson-in-meeting-with-netanyahu-obama-has-foreign-and-domestic-concerns

In meeting with Netanyahu, Obama has foreign and domestic concerns
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post, 2015-11-11

President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week with an eye on two fronts:
the chaotic Middle East and the domestic political campaign,
where Democrats are eager to make sure that support for Israel does not become a partisan issue in 2016.

Both categories of concern point toward
a more pragmatic and realistic approach to U.S.-Israel relations for Obama
that could reassure a key ally in an unstable region and soothe uneasy Democrats who backed the Iran nuclear deal.
The new calibration would deprive Republicans who opposed the deal of political fodder they can use against Democrats.

“Most Democratic members of Congress are and will be relieved if tension between the president and prime minister is relaxed,”
said Robert Wexler, a former Democratic congressman from Florida who is now president of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace.
“There is no Democratic member of Congress who benefits from tension in the American-Israeli relationship.”

...

[Note the words the Post's reporter uses to characterize
policies designed to "reassure" Israel and "soothe" "uneasy Democrats":
"pragmatic and realistic".
I beg to differ.
A pragmatic and realistic approach would be to recognize that
America's unquestioning support for Israel
has been a major cause of the hostility of many Muslims to the U.S.
Most importantly, it was cited by Osama bin Laden as the cause for al Qaeda's 9/11 attack on the U.S.
Even if you don't believe bin Laden's words of 2004-10-29,
many other studies have found the not-very-surprising fact
that Israel's actions are a prime cause of Islamic hostility to the U.S.
Precisely how is it realistic to ignore this fact?
How is it pragmatic to not act in accordance with that fact,
and question whether unstinting support for Israel is really in the U.S.'s best interest?

So my claim is that,
in framing the issues as Mufson did above,
he fails to inform his readers of the real costs and consequences
of playing lap dog to Israel.]

Jim Tankersley's coverup of reality

Baby boomers pillaged our economy. They should help fix it.
An alternate link to the above
by Jim Tankersley

Here the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley recites a list of America's problems:
a rising sea of red ink in the federal budget,
a sluggish economy,
and so forth.
And who does he blame for these problems?
The baby boomers, featuring repeated images of elderly couples clinking wine glasses.
Among other things, he blames them for keeping benefits to the elderly high.

What a lying bastard.
The reason those benefits for the elderly are so high is because
year after year,
the elderly vote out anyone who threatens those benefits,
or in years past, did not raise them to the current level.
Baby boomers only started retiring in 1945+65 = 2010.
In all the previous years,
it was the people who were then over 65
who voted overwhelmingly for those high benefits.
Indeed, as Tankersley should know, Social Security and Medicare have long been known as "The third rail" of the American political system.
Are the newly over-65 baby boomers voting any more strongly for those high benefits
than the older generations have done in their over-65 years?
I haven't seen any evidence of that.
So why single out the baby boomers as being the cause of those unsustainably over-generous benefits?

On the issue of "Who broke the 1950s economy",
the best answer is in the 2010 book
The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz,
which ever since it was published has been featured on my principal web site.
And you know what?
That book wasn't even reviewed by the Washington Post.

A short summary of the decline of the 1950s economy would include the following points:

• The mania for free trade, which benefits, at least in the short term, consumers
  at the expense of American producers.
  For a sample of media opinion-leaders favoring consumers over producers,
  see "John Edwards and the Shrimp" by Gail Collins,
  or the stories in Tankersley's Washington Post
  which describe free trade as "smart".
  I certainly don't believe that trading off American jobs and industrial capability
  for cheaper consumer goods is necessarily a "smart" tradeoff.
• Labor unions, which pushed American wages and benefits up to the point where
  the competitive disadvantage for production in America became overly large.
• The constant push to raise the cost of doing business in the United States.
  When you buy something from China,
  how much of the price you pay goes for, say,
  parental-leave benefits for the Chinese workers who made that product?
  On the other hand, when you buy something made in the "progressive" USA,
  the labor cost has been jacked up by the full panoply of "progressive" regulations.
  The point is:
  Those "progressive" regulations have an impact on moving jobs to
  not-so-progressive countries.
  But do you think the Washington Post is going to make that connection?
  Evidently not, when they can just blame the baby-boomers for the flagging economy.
• Finally, the shift from "stakeholder values" to "shareholder values"
  which was advocated in the 1980s by Milton Friedman,
  and has been described both in the Prestowitz book cited above
  and in my web page derived from that book,
  "From stakeholder values to shareholder values".

American jobs have been killed by a variety of factors.
To blame baby boomers rather than, say,
those people of a variety of ages who have pushed for free trade
without regard to its effect on American jobs
is only distracting from what the real causes of America's problems are.

What Martin Baron ignored

2015-08-31-WashTimes-us-officials-claim-spies-at-risk-as-china-russia-r

U.S. officials claim spies at risk as China, Russia review hacked data from OPM, Anthem breach
By Andrew Blake
Washington Times, 2015-08-31


Comments by KHarbaugh

This is an important story.
It should have been a page A1 story in the print edition of the Washington Post.
Yet it did not make the print edition at all.
Instead there was a brief story in its on line edition,
in its weblog "Power Post", written by Elise Viebeck.
That weblog entry, in its entirety:

Chinese and Russian spy agencies are using hacked U.S. data
to identify American intelligence officers and agents.
“At least one clandestine network of American engineers and scientists
who provide technical assistance to U.S. undercover operatives and agents overseas
has been compromised as a result, according to two U.S. officials,”
the Los Angeles Times reports.
“Counterintelligence officials say their adversaries combine those immense data files
and then employ sophisticated software to try to isolate disparate clues
that can be used to identify and track —
or worse, blackmail and recruit —
U.S. intelligence operatives.”

A very pale shadow of the much fuller Washington Times story.

Whose interests are Martin Baron serving by not printing this story?
Certainly not the interests of the United States of America.

In lockstep:media Tweedledee and Tweedledum

Are the Washington Post and the New York Times
the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of journalism?
Is there a dime's worth of difference between their positions on most issues?
Notice how they move in total lockstep on the homosexual agenda.

For example, the both somehow made the same
not terribly nationally significant issue
the number one story on their web site
as of 6:00 PM EDT on Thursday, September 3, 2015.

The following information and links are from their web sites at that time:

2015-09-03-NYT-kim-davis-same-sex-marriage

Clerk Rejects Proposal to Let Deputies Issue Marriage Licenses
By ALAN BLINDER
New York Times, 2015-09-03

2015-09-03-WP-defiant-kentucky-clerk-could-be-found-in-contempt-thursday

Kentucky clerk ordered to jail for refusing to issue gay marriage license
By James Higdon and Sandhya Somashekhar September 3 at 4:14 PM
Washington Post web site, 2015-09-03

The REAL scandal WaPo ignores

2015-07-05

While the Washington Post played such a large role in over-hyping
the minor issue where several employees of the U.S. Secret Service
availed themselves of the services of Colombian prostitutes
while on a trip to Cartagena, Colombia,
putting this story on page A1 on April 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 22 2012,
and consistently referring to it as "a scandal",
indeed, often calling it (absurdly)
"the greatest scandal in the history of the Secret Service",
a failure of the U.S. government with far more significance to the nation
has received no such prominent coverage,
and indeed, so far as I know, has never been called by the Post a scandal,
although it richly deserves that term.

What I am referring to is the stealing of key personnel files of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
by, evidently, hackers working effectively for the Chinese government.
(To date, no authoritative person has said that for the record,
but off-the-record, that has been strongly implied.)

The scandal, in my view, has several components:
First, it could and should have been prevented by the U.S. government.
Second, it is a scandal that the Post has not adequately reported
the congressional hearing that attempted to shed light on how and why this happened.

---

But enough accusations, at least for the time being.
Let's take a step back and see why this represents such a government failure.
Let's look at the situation, as we know, existed even before the data breach was discovered.

There were three pieces of the puzzle that were known:

1. Vulnerability: That the data stored on the computers used by the OPM was vulnerable to being hacked.
   This was pointed out by the OPM Inspector General
   in a FISMA audit dated November 12, 2014,
   and in various earlier FISMA audits;
   note also this 2015-06-05 NYT article.
2. Capability: That Asian nations (and no doubt others) had both the capability and desire to hack U.S. computer systems was well-known.
   As an example, it was very widely reported that the North Koreans had hacked Sony Studios computer files,
   out of pique over a film Sony planned to release depicting an assassination plot against the leader of North Korea.
3. Significance: While not widely publicized at the time,
   since the hack the signficance of the theft of those files has been widely reported.
   It must have been well known within the USG's intelligence and security apparatus.

Yet the people in OPM and the White House responsible for protecting the government's vital records from this sort of espionage
certainly failed to do so.
What did they do?
That seems to be a worthy question for the media to dig into.

Washington Post, OMB, and the SS

2015-06-19-WP-officials-chinese-had-access-to-u-s-security-clearance-data-for-one-year

Officials: Chinese had access to U.S. security clearance data for one year
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post, 2015-06-19

[Paragraphs 1 - 18 (i.e., down to the thin horizontal rule) of the following
appeared in the print edition of the Washington Post
on Friday, June 19, 2005 on page A18, in the rightmost two columns.]

[1]
The recently disclosed breach of the Office of Personnel Management’s security-clearance computer system took place a year ago, giving Chinese government intruders access to sensitive data for a year, according to new information.

[2]
The considerable lag time between breach and discovery means that the adversary had more time to pull off a cyber-heist of consequence, said Stewart Baker, a former National Security Agency general counsel.

[3]
“The longer you have to exfiltrate the data, the more you can take,” he said. “If you’ve got a year to map the network, to look at the file structures, to consult with experts and then go in and pack up stuff, you’re not going to miss the most valuable files.”

[4]
The compromise of the system was discovered early this month and dates back to June or early July 2014, agency officials said. The network holds a wealth of personal, family and financial details on millions of current, former and prospective federal employees and contractors.

[5]
“This is some of the most sensitive non-classified information I could imagine the Chinese getting access to,” said Baker, who also is a former senior policy official in the Department of Homeland Security.

[6]
The discovery of that breach followed the detection in April of the compromise of a personnel database containing Social Security numbers and other personal information of 4.1 million current and former federal employees. That hack dates back to December, officials said.

[7]
In the case of the personnel database, the time between breach and discovery was four months — much shorter than the one-year interval for the security clearance system.

[8]
OPM officials are still trying to determine how much data was actually stolen and who was affected. The background-check system is complex and antiquated, made up of many databases and fed by numerous agencies. OPM emphasized that it has tried since last year to put in place stronger detection and prevention. Some U.S. officials say OPM has been stymied by bureaucratic hurdles.

[9]
The Obama administration has not publicly named the suspected perpetrator of the intrusions. But U.S. officials, speaking privately, have said it is the Chinese government.

[10]
Jeffrey Wagner, OPM director of information technology security operations, said a breach of that same security clearance system last year, which drew front-page headlines, did not result in any theft of data. “We were actually able to stop” the hackers before they took any information, he said in an interview Thursday.

[11]
But the agency was not able to prevent a different group of Chinese government hackers from successfully penetrating the same network a few months later, said officials with knowledge of the probe. Investigators determined they were a separate group because the tactics and techniques were different, the officials said.

[12]
Senior U.S. officials have said that the Chinese have begun in the last 12 to 18 months to build vast databases of Americans’ personal information for counterintelligence purposes. They have gone after such data contained not only in federal networks, but in systems belonging to health-insurance giants such as Anthem.

[13]
The breach details come as OPM leadership is under fire for its handling of a succession of network hacks over the last year and a half. The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), has called for the resignation of the agency’s director, Katherine Archuleta.

[14]
Under Archuleta, Wagner said, the agency in February 2014 began a program to identify vulnerabilities in the agency’s aging computer systems — some date to 1985 — and to modernize the network.

[15]
The following month, in March 2014, the Department of Homeland Security notified OPM of the first hack of the security clearance database. In May that year, the agency did a “remediation Big Bang,” Wagner said, to try to make improvements to the system.

[16]
But one challenge was a bureaucracy that made it difficult to buy security tools quickly, officials said. “OPM can’t get through government procurement that fast,” said a U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak for the record.

[17]
Agency officials addressed a controversy involving a cybersecurity firm called CyTech Services Inc. In an article published last week, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal that CyTech — not OPM — discovered the breach of the agency’s network through a product demonstration.

[18]
In fact, Wagner said, OPM discovered the malicious software — the tip-off that a breach has occurred — on April 15, six days before CyTech’s product demonstration, using a different firm’s software. That malware was found on a server that had access to the security clearance database.

---

[19]
Wagner said CyTech knew that OPM had already identified the malware. “I gave them the list of malware,” he said. “They were able to identify” the same malware, he said.

[20]
Wagner said he was “a bit shocked” by CyTech’s statement. He said in speaking to the firm, its position was “from our perception, we discovered this.”

[21]
That, he said, “created a new phrase for me: A misconception is a perception.”

[22]
In its investigation, OPM identified traffic moving to suspicious Web sites or domains that were not known. One of the domains was opm.security.org.

[23]
“That was not a legitimate domain for OPM,” Wagner said. That was the first indication that something was amiss, he said.

[24]
The malware OPM discovered was a never-before-seen variant of the malware known as PlugX, officials with knowledge of the probe said. It was shared with the FBI and the National Security Agency, they said.

[25]
The breach of OPM’s network occurred through the theft of login and password data for an employee of KeyPoint Government Solutions, an OPM contractor, sometime before last October, officials said. It is not clear if that theft was related to a hack of KeyPoint that was reported last year, they said.

[26]
OPM officials sought to defend their efforts. “The only reason we even found these breaches was because of Director Archuleta’s strategic plan, which she put in place within her first 100 days,” spokesman Samuel Schumach said.

[End of Washington Post article.]

---

Back to comments by KHarbaugh:

Compare the relatively minor play, on page A18, given to that article about an event of profound importance to the national security,
as evidenced not only by my opinion but by comments made by far more important people in the story itsel,
to the absolutely major play the Post gave to
the so-called "Secret Service scandal"
involving Secret Service employees patronizing prostitutes in Columbia.
That story appeared on the front page of the Post practically every day for two weeks.
On the few days it didn't make the front page, it made an inside page.
Many of the front page stories amounted to a comment by someone or another wondering
"When will more be known about this 'scandal'."
I.e., just a transparent attempt on the part of the Post
to keep what they considered a scandal on the front page.

But when a real scandal comes along, one which really has extremely grave significance for the nation's security,
it makes page A18.

This indicates the priorities of the Post's editors and, by extension, its ownership.
What rotten priorities!

Media conspiracy on Europe's destruction

Let me first state forthrightly my opinion:

If Europe opens its doors to every African and Asian person who wants to come,
so many will accept that
there will be no more (cultural) Europe,
only a melange of Africa and Asia moved to
the geographical peninsula of Asia that we call Europe.
But that view does not seem to be presented
in the dominant print media of the American "elite",
the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Rather, they move in lockstep on this issue,
as they do on so many other issues that can be grouped under the loose term "political correctness".
As evidence of that assertion,
below are the two editorials from those newspapers, on 20 April 2015,
that address this issue.
Can you see any significant difference between them?

(Such agreement on so many issues is quite unlikely to happen just by random chance.
I believe there is a common cause,
that may be suggested by the phrase "It came from Brandeis (University).")

2015-04-20-NYT-europes-duty-on-migrants

Europe's Duty on Migrants
New York Times Editorial, 2015-04-20

The high season of migration from Africa to Europe has begun, bringing with it a new wave of tragic drownings in the Mediterranean. Last year, more than 3,200 people died crossing the Mediterranean. This year, 900 people have already drowned, and on Saturday a boat carrying hundreds more capsized in the Mediterranean north of Libya. Unless Europe acts to reform its policy on migration, 2015 could be the deadliest year yet for the thousands of people who fled to Libya from conflict-torn regions across the Middle East and Africa, only to find Libya equally dangerous.

Obviously Europe is the safer place to be. But migrants cannot request legal asylum in Europe unless they actually set foot on European soil. This makes them easy prey for well-organized smugglers who offer passage across the Mediterranean - for a price, and on unseaworthy boats.

Italy’s Mare Nostrum marine rescue program, created after more than 350 people drowned off Lampedusa in October 2013, rescued 130,000 people last year. But the program was too costly for Italy to continue, and was replaced in January by the much smaller European Triton border patrol program. Triton’s budget is only one-third what Mare Nostrum’s was, and operates only within 30 nautical miles of Europe’s shores. Fortunately, the Italian coast guard and navy have stepped in and continue to patrol waters near Libya, but they cannot handle the current influx without more help. An astonishing 8,480 migrants were rescued last weekend alone.

Europe’s border security agency, Frontex, says that between 500,000 and one million migrants are massed in Libya waiting to set forth for Europe, compared to the 170,000 who arrived in Europe by sea last year. But those figures have been challenged, and in any case the argument that Europe simply can’t afford to take in any more migrants from the Middle East and Africa is also suspect: Turkey has taken in 1.7 million Syrians; Lebanon another 1.2 million.

The European Commission is expected to unveil a new policy in May aimed at sharing the burden among member states, finding more legal avenues for people to come to Europe and setting up immigration screening centers in Africa and the Middle East. The key is to get all 28 member states to support and finance these reforms. With no coherent policy and woefully insufficient funding, lives are needlessly being put at risk, and the European Union’s humanitarian values are exposed as meaningless.

2015-04-20-WP-the-merciless-sea

Europe needs to take a lead role in solving the African migrant crisis
Washington Post Editorial, 2015-04-20

ITALIAN PRIME Minister Matteo Renzi said during a visit to The Post on Friday that the only way to stem the flood of African migrants seeking refuge in Europe was for “the tribes” of Libya “to make peace.” While there is truth in that observation, it understates the obligation of Italy and other European nations to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. That became tragically clear over the weekend, as a vessel estimated to be carrying 700 or more people capsized off the Libyan coast. Only 28 people were rescued as of Monday, which means the death toll could be the highest in the Mediterranean since World War II.

Mr. Renzi is right that Libya is at the root of a crisis that last year caused 170,000 people to travel to Italy by sea — and tens of thousands more so far this year. Many of the migrants are from sub-Saharan Africa, Somalia or even Syria; but most board boats in Libya, often under the direction of smuggling networks. Some originally sought refuge in that once-wealthy north African oil state, only to be driven to leave by its civil war and the appearance of terrorist groups associated with the Islamic State.

It’s also true that an end to Libya’s disorder will require a political settlement among its feuding sides, which currently include two competing governments, each of which is backed by foreign powers. A United Nations mediator said Sunday that 80 percent of a draft peace proposal had been agreed to, but that may sound too optimistic: It’s not clear that either government controls the armed forces nominally fighting for them.

In the meantime, thousands of desperate people are packing onto boats with the coming of spring. The International Organization for Migration says about 10,000 were picked up by the Italian coast guard and other boats in just six days beginning April 10; it says 950 died en route this year even before the weekend disaster. The director of the European Union’s border control agency said recently that between 500,000 and 1 million people were waiting to leave Libya.

Only the European Union can help these migrants, especially once they take to the sea. Shamefully, however, governments under pressure from domestic anti-immigrant parties have shrunk from the task. Last year Italy undertook its own, much-praised operation to rescue people from boats, saving many; but it was scaled back in October after other governments declined to join in and some complained, wrongheadedly, that the effort itself might be attracting migrants. In recent months a much smaller E.U. search-and-rescue mission has been limited to Italy’s territorial waters, making it far more likely that sinkings and other accidents will lead to mass deaths.

Our media race problem

Let me be perfectly clear on my feelings:
The media is run by a bunch of dirtbags,
whose main interest is stirring up
false and unjustified grievances about police mistreatment of blacks.
Now, that is just an opinion.
But here is some evidence which certainly supports it:

Today, Dec. 24, 2014,
both the New York Times and Washington Post web sites
prominently feature a story about a black man in Berkeley, MO,
only a few miles from Ferguson, MO,
being killed by a white police officer.

On the other hand,
when a white police officer in Tarpon Springs, FL,

was shot and run over by a black man on Sunday, Dec. 21, 2014,
the New York Times did not even run a story on it in their print edition.
At least a search using the ProQuest database "Proquest Newstand",
specifically "(charles kondek) AND PUBID(11561)",
turned up nothing.
The NYT web site shows several AP stories about the killing of Kondek,
but they did not make it into the ProQuest database,
and thus not into the New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) print edition
that it covers.

So far as I can tell,
both the New York Times and Washington Post
are essentially infused with the biased view of society espoused by,
for example, the then-radicals of the Brandeis University SDS circa 1970.
Is it any wonder that blacks feel they are discriminated against and persecuted,
when the leading white(actually, Jewish)-owned newspapers run such biased coverage?

Do police lives matter to the New York Times?
Not as much as black lives, it seems quite clear.
What swine its ownership and editors are.

WaPo's prostitution obsession

It seems to me that the Washington Post
has an obsession with making an issue out of male
government officials caught being involved with prostitution.
Here are some examples.

2014-10-09-WP-aides-despite-denials-knew-of-white-house-tie-to-cartagena-prostitution-scandal

Aides knew of possible White House link to Cartagena, Colombia, prostitution scandal
By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura
Washington Post, 2014-10-09
(Page 1, above the fold, spanning multiple columns)

As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military
were punished or fired
following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia,
Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that
anyone from the White House was involved.

But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that
senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that
a prostitute was an overnight guest
in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member —
yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.

...

[Let's try returning to sanity for a minute.
What if it were provably true that a White House aide,
while on a White House trip
had paid sex with a prostitute in Columbia (where prostitution is legal).
Why would this information be of sufficient importance
to justify a front page, above the fold, story
in the Washington Post?
Let us recall that when then-President Clinton
received oral sex from an intern, in the Oval Office,
there were legions of women quoted in the media declaring that

1. this was an issue between him and his wife, and
2. if it did not affect the performance of his official duties,
   then it did not deserve any punishment, in particular, impeachment.

Recall that a common statement from feminists
(which I do not happen to believe)
is that
there is no such thing as consensual sex
between a superior and a subordinate.
By that feminist standard, the sex was not consensual.
And the feminist definition of rape is any sexual act without the consent of the woman.
But did you ever hear a feminist calling for Clinton to resign?
I do not recall any such requests.

Where did the Washington Post stand on that?
I am not sure, but I don't believe they called for Clinton to leave office,
for this reason or any other reason.
(For a review of overall editorial opinion on the matter, click here.)
So why are they making such a big issue out merely
government professionals having sex with prostitutes in a country where that is legal?
Why is that any of their business?

And as to the case of Jonathan Dach, the White House aide in question here,
he had no evident role with White House security,
so the not-very-credible argument that contact with prostitutes
could harm the security of the president
is not relevant here.]

2014-10-10-WP-white-house-disputes-report-that-aides-had-not-thoroughly-investigated-cartagena-tie

White House disputes report that aides had not thoroughly investigated Cartagena link
By David Nakamura and Katie Zezima
Washington Post, 2014-10-10

...

The reverberations from the 2012 scandal,
in which 10 Secret Service agents and 10 members of the military lost their jobs,
have continued to echo through Washington more than two years after the incident.

[Let us recall that the incident where Omar J. Gonzalez entered the White House
made plain the consequences of the Secret Service being understaffed in 2014.
Part of the reason for that understaffing is
the dismissal of 10 valued Secret Service agents
for no better reason than that their activities in Cartagena.
I very sincerely doubt that dismissing them for no better reason than that
was a wise move in the overall scheme of things.]

Washington Post's homosexual agenda

Here we go again.
Yet another op-ed or article in the Washington Post
supporting the homosexual agenda:

2014-10-03-WP-even-though-the-supreme-court-struck-down-doma-its-still-hurting-gays-every-day

Even though the Supreme Court struck down DOMA, it’s still hurting gays every day
By Stacey Schuett
Washington Post web site, 2014-10-03
[Author information on the web site:]
Stacey Schuett is a proud mother of two,
author and illustrator living in Sebastopol, California.
Her wife Lesly died in June 2013.

---

Yeah, right.
The article title gives its point of view right away.

When have you ever seen anything in WaPo critical of the homo agenda?
They call themselves "objective".
HA!
They're as objective as the grossly misnamed "Human Rights Coalition".
What's the difference?

Let's get to a central issue:
The sexual orientation of the "leading ladies" of the Washington Post:
Katharine Graham
and her grand-daughter, Katharine Weymouth.
Both of them were married long enough to give legitimacy to their children,
but not much longer.
Surely women with their social and economic status
could have found highly desirable husbands,
if they had the slightest interest in sex with men.
I think the fact that they did not remarry suggest very strongly that
they had no interest in sex with men.
(And Katharine Graham certainly had a well-publicized close relation, of some sort,
with the never-married Meg Greenfield.
Meg's Wikipedia biography, as of 2014-10-03, says:
"She never married, something she came to regret."
Well, let me suggest that if she was interested in sex with men,
it would not take until old age for her to decide
she was missing out on something by not being married.)
But of course I could be wrong.
So prove me wrong, if I am.

As to the propriety of asking this question,
I certainly agree that for the average Joe or Jane,
the people you encounter in your daily life,
their sexual orientation is nobody's business but their own,
and those to whom they care to divulge that information.

But the Katharine's, Graham and Weymouth,
are most certainly not that average person.
They had immense power, of the sort available to only a handful of others,
to influence American opinion.

And influence American opinion the Post certainly has,
in a strongly pro-homosexual direction.

My opinion is that,
for those people in America who either influence or determine public policy
(e.g., high-ranking elected officials and members of the judiciary
and the various opinion leaders in the media),
that their sexual orientation is very much "fair game" for inquiry.

Media coverage of Ferguson MO violence

The media coverage of
the Ferguson Missouri disorder over the shooting of Michael Brown
has been all but unbelievable in its bias.
They have made the police actions the issue,
rather than the actions that have caused those actions.
And their descriptions of those causing the police presence
is also astonishing in its bias.
As a case in point,
I am now looking at page C1 of the Washington Post Style section
for Friday, August 15, 2014.
Accompanying a large article by Philip Kennicott, taking up well over half the page,
are two photographs from Ferguson.

The caption on one of them is "A protestor with a Molotov cocktail",
i.e., an incendiary device.

Since when is it accurate to call a person carrying a Molotov cocktail a protestor?
The correct term is arsonist.
Why would one carry a Molotov cocktail unless he intended to
intentionally and maliciously start a fire?
And that is the precise definition of arson, according to Wikipedia.
And while we are pointing that out,
why is it that the media, at least the Washington Post,
has consistently described the events in Ferguson
as "vandalism and looting", without mentioning the arson?
Vandalism is commonly thought of as things at the level of breaking windows or writing graffiti;
arson would seem, to me at least, to be a considerably more serious crime.

And what did the Ferguson police, or anyone else, do to cause a need to set fires?


In general, the media coverage has focused on blaming the police.
The looting and vandalism were briefly mentioned,
but then ignored.
Black violence: minimized or ignored.
The reaction of the authorities to that violence: castigated.
Much of the media, moving in the lockstep mode they so often use,
has spent the past week making an issue out of
the equipment the police are using.
So what?
How is that equipment a violation of anyone's civil rights?

What the Washington Post hath wrought

2014-07-25-NYT-in-west-bank-hamas-hailed

In West Bank, Hamas Is Hailed for Its Fight Against Israel
By ISABEL KERSHNER
New York Times, 2014-07-25

...

Just three months ago,
Hamas, financially strapped and diplomatically isolated,
agreed to a reconciliation deal
with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority
and his secularist Fatah faction
after a bitter, seven-year division,
on minimal terms that analysts said reflected the Islamic group’s weakness.

Now Hamas — which refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist
and is considered a terrorist organization by much of the West —
is being hailed in the West Bank as the champion of armed resistance,
while Mr. Abbas, who leads the alternative camp
advocating a negotiated peace deal with Israel,
is being excoriated for having failed to achieve a Palestinian state
after 20 years of intermittent and fruitless Israeli-Palestinian talks.

...

[And just why did Mr. Abbas fail to achieve a Palestinian state?
Was the demand of the Palestinian Authority
that the 1967 boundary be the baseline for negotiations so unreasonable?
I don't think so.
But without American pressure on Israel to let that be the baseline,
the Israeli government rejected that demand.
And why did the American government not put pressure on Israel?
Of course, because putting pressure on Israel
seems to be a policy supported by few in America.
While responsibility for that is widely spread,
surely the Washington Post editorial page
has written editorial after editorial arguing against pressuring Israel,
arguing explicitly that negotiations can only succeed
when each party desires that they succeed.
On the other hand, that same page is more than eager to argue for sanctions
against Iran, Russia, and a host of other parties they consider malefactors.
Well, Israel can show an iron fist as much as they want to the Palestinians,
but I think America needs to take some responsibility
for not encouraging, and as necessary pressuring, Israel
to offer an olive branch instead.
Specifically, agreeing that the 1967 boundary should be the negotiation baseline.]

WaPo, Israel, Russia and sanctions

Here are two Washington Post editorials giving their views on sanctions.
In the case of Israel and its policies in the West Bank, they're against them.
In the case of Russia and its involvement in the Ukraine, they're for them.
It is useful to note how the Post fails to see
that its argument for sanctioning Russia,
namely that only sanctions will force Russia to make meaningful concessions,
also apply to Israel.

2013-12-22-WP-editorial-us-scholars-are-misguided-in-boycotting-israel

U.S. scholars are misguided in boycotting Israel
By Editorial Board
Washington Post, 2013-12-22

[There are at least two tactics Israel’s defenders use to dismiss criticism:
First, they ask
“Why are you picking on Israel,
when there is so much else evil in the world?”
Second, they deny that Israel has achieved its territorial aims by force,
while they claim that others are trying to use force,
military, political, or economic, against Israel.
This editorial demonstrates both tactics.]

[1]
THE AMERICAN STUDIES Association,
a group of about 5,000 scholars devoted to
the interdisciplinary study of U.S. culture and history,
has called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
The association held a vote on a resolution
seeking the boycott as a way to protest
Israeli “state policies that violate human rights” of Palestinians,
including academic freedom for scholars and students.
The resolution drew support of
two-thirds of the 1,252 association members who voted.
The boycott is largely symbolic; it’s also terribly misguided.

[2]
The most difficult thing to swallow about the resolution
is how utterly narrow-minded it seems.
Was the resolution written on a computer manufactured in China,
one of the most repressive regimes on the planet?
[Is the Washington Post dependent on Jewish money for its financial success?]
Did its authors pause to consider China’s incarceration of writers and scholars
who dare to think and speak out for freedom,
or the ethnic groups in China persecuted for refusing to heel to the Beijing masters?
[Does the United States support China economically,
by giving them three billion dollars a year in foreign aid?]
Did they give any thought to what’s happened lately to freedom in Russia,
won at enormous cost in a Cold War that lasted more than four decades?
[Does the United States support Russia diplomatically,
by vetoing in the Security Council resolutions which Russia opposes?]
Does it disturb the scholars that in today’s Russia,
members of a girl band performing a protest against the Kremlin
could be thrown into a cold and miserable prison for two years,
or that civil society organizations are being systematically shuttered?
[Well, perhaps so.
But the fundamental and essential difference is that
without the support of the United States
Israel would not have been able to capture the West Bank in the first place,
and would not be able to continue to hold onto it, 46 years after the 1967 war.]

[3]
Have the scholars overlooked the cries for help
from Cuban dissidents bravely standing up to the Castro brothers,
demanding freedoms —
and suffering beatings and arrest almost every week?
Do they condone the decision of a judge in Saudi Arabia
who has just sentenced a political activist to 300 lashes and four years in prison
for calling for a constitutional monarchy?

[Again,
the United States bears far more responsibility for the misdeeds of Israel,
such as they are,
than it does for the misdeeds of other nations,
which have not received nearly the support from the U.S. that Israel has.]

[4]
To focus a resolution on Israel and ignore these injustices is puzzling at best.
[No.
It just means that the U.S. clearly is far more culpable for the misdeeds of Israel
than it is for those of those other nations.]
It is also fundamentally wrong.
For all of its difficulties, including the wrenching, long conflict with the Palestinians,
Israel has become a lively and durable democracy.
There is more freedom to speak one’s mind and criticize the government
in front of the Knesset
than will be found in either Tiananmen Square or Red Square today —
and far more in Israeli universities than in academia elsewhere in the Middle East.

[Few will deny that Israel has many attractive features.
But this argument misses the point,
that the proposed sanctions can be averted
if Israel would take constructive steps to reach a reasonable compromise with the Palestinians.
If Israel did so,
would that action harm the attractive features of Israel listed by the Post?
If Israel, say, made the 1967 boundary the basis for negotiations on borders,
would that harm Israel's "lively and durable democracy"?
I don't see how it would.]

[5]
This is not to ignore the plight of the Palestinians.
They suffer indignity and human rights violations
for which Israel cannot escape responsibility.
[And the United States too,
for its unstinting support for Israel even under those circumstances.]
But a boycott is not the answer.
Progress toward a resolution of the conflict can be made
if leaders on both sides find the willpower to negotiate with each other
and accept that forceful methods — terrorism, violence and coercion —
lead only to more misery.
The American Studies Association would have more impact
by finding a way to engage deeply with Israelis and Palestinians,
perhaps with scholarly conferences and exchanges,
rather than by punishing Israel with a boycott.

[Israel has demonstrated conclusively, I believe,
by its post-1967 behavior,
that nothing will stop its settlement of the West Bank with Jewish settlers
as long as the United States supports it.]

2014-04-17-WP-editorial-us-sanctions-on-russia-over-ukraine-would-buy-negotiating-power

U.S. sanctions on Russia over Ukraine would buy negotiating power
By Editorial Board
Washington Post, 2014-04-17

[1]
RUSSIA AND the United States
have pursued dramatically different strategies on Ukraine
in the 10 days preceding a diplomatic meeting Thursday in Geneva.
While loudly denouncing
what it has described as direct Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine
and threatening tough sanctions,
the Obama administration elected not to take any concrete action
in the hope that the meeting,
which also includes the foreign ministers of Ukraine and the European Union,
will produce positive results.
The administration also has refused
Ukraine’s desperate requests for non-lethal aid for its military
as it attempts to turn back the quasi-covert offensive.

[2]
Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, in contrast,
clearly is unconcerned about provoking the other side.
Russian operatives, who apparently have infiltrated military forces,
have been steadily stepping up their attacks
on Ukrainian government installations in a dozen or more cities and towns.
On Wednesday these forces and their Ukrainian followers
managed to turn back a weak effort by the Ukrainian government
to retake some of the installations,
in one case disarming a column of government soldiers
and confiscating their armored personnel carriers.

[3]
Consequently, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
will arrive in Geneva with considerable leverage.
With eastern Ukraine in Russian-induced chaos,
Moscow is ready not to negotiate but to dictate terms.
“Ukraine,” said Mr. Lavrov on Wednesday,
“must be forced to start genuine rather than cosmetic constitutional reform.”
By that he means Ukraine should be forced to dismember itself
into autonomous regions that the Kremlin could manipulate and ultimately control.

[4]
What chips do the United States and European Union have
to counter Moscow’s bald aggression?
Little more than vague threats.
“We are actively looking at our options,”
said White House spokesman Jay Carney on Tuesday.
Officials privately say they are working with the Europeans
on a modest expansion of last month’s sanctions against Mr. Putin’s inner circle —
while holding off on the far-more-potent “sectoral sanctions”
that Mr. Kerry said were “on the table” last week.

[5]
The Obama administration is not wrong
to pursue a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.

But diplomacy can’t succeed
when the underlying balance of forces
is lopsidedly in favor of a U.S. adversary —
and the administration declines to take actions
that might create incentives for compromise.

That’s as true of Mr. Putin’s Russia as it is of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria,
which dismissed the last U.S. effort to broker an accord in Geneva
after Mr. Obama elected not to provide significant support for Syrian rebels.

[6]
Administration advocates of inaction argue that
Washington should move only in concert with European governments,
which have much larger economic interests in Russia
and consequently are more reluctant.
But as it demonstrated with Iran,
the United States has the power to take potent action on its own,
especially in the financial sector —
and such steps can induce other countries to join in.
By waiting for Europe,
the Obama administration essentially hands a veto over its response
to what it describes as unacceptable transgressions to states such as Cyprus and Malta.

[7]
The Obama administration’s attempt to smooth the way for a diplomatic solution
has virtually ensured that the Geneva meeting will fail.
Once it does, the president should take action
that will give Mr. Putin tangible cause to pull back.

Israel's flacks in Washington

2013-12-22-WP-editorial-us-scholars-are-misguided-in-boycotting-israel

U.S. scholars are misguided in boycotting Israel
By Editorial Board
Washington Post, 2013-12-22

[There are at least two tactics Israel’s defenders use to dismiss criticism:
First, they ask
“Why are you picking on Israel,
when there is so much else evil in the world?”
Second, they deny that Israel has achieved its territorial aims by force,
while they claim that others are trying to use force,
military, political, or economic, against Israel.
This editorial demonstrates both tactics.]

[1]
THE AMERICAN STUDIES Association,
a group of about 5,000 scholars devoted to
the interdisciplinary study of U.S. culture and history,
has called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
The association held a vote on a resolution
seeking the boycott as a way to protest
Israeli “state policies that violate human rights” of Palestinians,
including academic freedom for scholars and students.
The resolution drew support of
two-thirds of the 1,252 association members who voted.
The boycott is largely symbolic; it’s also terribly misguided.

[2]
The most difficult thing to swallow about the resolution
is how utterly narrow-minded it seems.
Was the resolution written on a computer manufactured in China,
one of the most repressive regimes on the planet?
[Is the Washington Post dependent on Jewish money for its financial success?]
Did its authors pause to consider China’s incarceration of writers and scholars
who dare to think and speak out for freedom,
or the ethnic groups in China persecuted for refusing to heel to the Beijing masters?
[Does the United States support China economically,
by giving them three billion dollars a year in foreign aid?]
Did they give any thought to what’s happened lately to freedom in Russia,
won at enormous cost in a Cold War that lasted more than four decades?
[Does the United States support Russia diplomatically,
by vetoing in the Security Council resolutions which Russia opposes?]
Does it disturb the scholars that in today’s Russia,
members of a girl band performing a protest against the Kremlin
could be thrown into a cold and miserable prison for two years,
or that civil society organizations are being systematically shuttered?
[Well, perhaps so.
But the fundamental and essential difference is that
without the support of the United States
Israel would not have been able to capture the West Bank in the first place,
and would not be able to continue to hold onto it, 46 years after the 1967 war.]

[3]
Have the scholars overlooked the cries for help
from Cuban dissidents bravely standing up to the Castro brothers,
demanding freedoms —
and suffering beatings and arrest almost every week?
Do they condone the decision of a judge in Saudi Arabia
who has just sentenced a political activist to 300 lashes and four years in prison
for calling for a constitutional monarchy?

[Again,
the United States bears far more responsibility for the misdeeds of Israel,
such as they are,
than it does for the misdeeds of other nations,
which have not received nearly the support from the U.S. that Israel has.
For some data in support of that fact,
see this May 2014 remark by U.S. SecDef Chuck Hagel.]

[4]
To focus a resolution on Israel and ignore these injustices is puzzling at best.
[No.
It just means that the U.S. clearly is far more culpable for the misdeeds of Israel
than it is for those of those other nations.]
It is also fundamentally wrong.
For all of its difficulties, including the wrenching, long conflict with the Palestinians,
Israel has become a lively and durable democracy.
There is more freedom to speak one’s mind and criticize the government
in front of the Knesset
than will be found in either Tiananmen Square or Red Square today —
and far more in Israeli universities than in academia elsewhere in the Middle East.

[Few will deny that Israel has many attractive features.
But this argument misses the point,
that the proposed sanctions can be averted
if Israel would take constructive steps to reach a reasonable compromise with the Palestinians.
If Israel did so,
would that action harm the attractive features of Israel listed by the Post?
If Israel, say, made the 1967 boundary the basis for negotiations on borders,
would that harm Israel's "lively and durable democracy"?
I don't see how it would.]

[5]
This is not to ignore the plight of the Palestinians.
They suffer indignity and human rights violations
for which Israel cannot escape responsibility.
[And the United States too,
for its unstinting support for Israel even under those circumstances.]
But a boycott is not the answer.
Progress toward a resolution of the conflict can be made
if leaders on both sides find the willpower to negotiate with each other
and accept that forceful methods — terrorism, violence and coercion —
lead only to more misery.
The American Studies Association would have more impact
by finding a way to engage deeply with Israelis and Palestinians,
perhaps with scholarly conferences and exchanges,
rather than by punishing Israel with a boycott.

[Israel has demonstrated conclusively, I believe,
by its post-1967 behavior,
that nothing will stop its settlement of the West Bank with Jewish settlers
as long as the United States supports it.]

Media coverup of key healthcare.gov issues

If one wonders why Republicans in Congress are viewed so unfavorably by the general American public (according to polls),
one must begin with the unjustifiably negative coverage of them by the MSM.
Take as Exhibit A the following opinion piece by the Washington Post’s master of mockery, Dana Milbank:

2013-11-13-WP-Milbank-darrell-issas-obamacare-kangaroo-court

Darrell Issa’s Obamacare kangaroo court
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post, 2013-11-13

“The American people do not want to see a kangaroo court here,” Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, said midway through Wednesday’s four-hour prosecution of Obama administration technology experts by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) hopped to attention. “ ‘Kangaroo court’ is quite an accusation,” he said, “and I hope the gentleman from Tennessee, when he uses the term kangaroo court in the future, will think better of making an accusation.”

Sorry, Mr. Chairman, but the pouch fits. It was indeed a kangaroo court, and Issa was the main marsupial.

No human makes leaps quite like Darrell Issa. He leaps to conclusions. He makes huge leaps of logic. He leaps before he looks. And he invariably leaps right into the White House, alleging high-level political misbehavior and administration corruption for just about everything that goes wrong.

On Wednesday, the topic was Obamacare, but the California Republican followed the script he used when investigating “Fast and Furious” gun-running, the Benghazi attack, and IRS targeting: make inflammatory allegations of high-level skullduggery, release selective information that appears to support the case while withholding exculpatory details, then use his chairman’s privileges to turn hearings into episodes of “The Darrell Issa Show.”

He went well beyond his own five minutes of questioning time Wednesday without halting, then cut off the ranking Democrat on the panel when he tried to do the same. Issa proceeded to interrupt no fewer than 12 members of the panel — Republicans and Democrats alike — to make additional speeches and ask further questions.

“Would the gentleman yield?”

“Would the gentlelady yield?”

“Could you yield for just 10 seconds?”

“Point of privilege!”

“I want to make a statement.”

He certainly did. And, as usual, Issa’s determination to be judge, jury, prosecutor and witness was counterproductive. The administration has a serious screw-up on its hands with the Obamacare launch, and President Obama’s poll numbers show it. Other congressional committees already were deep into investigations of the rollout before Issa started throwing around subpoenas and accusations. His involvement seems to have done little more than revive dispirited Democrats.

Three weeks ago, Issa alleged that the White House ordered contractors to disable the “anonymous shopper” function that would allow people to compare plans. “The White House was telling them they needed these changes,” he told CBS News. Why? He told Fox News that the administration “buried the information about the high cost of Obamacare” so that consumers wouldn’t get “sticker shock.”

In testimony Wednesday, however, an administration IT expert testified that he ordered the “shopper” function disabled until defects could be repaired and that there had been no political interference.

“So when Chairman Issa stated on national television that the White House ordered you . . . to disable the shopper function in September for political reasons, to avoid consumer sticker shock, that’s not true, is it?” asked Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.).

“I object,” Issa howled. “The gentleman is repeatedly disparaging and mischaracterizing what I’ve said.” Tierney then proceeded to read Issa’s quotes, verbatim.

The chairman, who made a fortune in car alarms before getting into politics, opened the hearing with his theory that this was “a monumental mistake” made because “efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines.”

He then allowed the witnesses to say a few words, but couldn’t help interjecting a question between the witnesses’ statements, before adding, “Please, don’t answer yet.”

When his question time did come, he finished it by telling the witnesses he would “recognize the ranking member” — Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) — “to try to rehabilitate your testimony.”

Issa sprung himself on colleagues regardless of rank or party — Republicans John Duncan (Tenn.) and Patrick McHenry (N.C.), Democrats Gerald Connolly (Va.) and Eleanor Holmes Norton, a D.C. delegate — asking them to yield him the floor.

When Republicans Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Jason Chaffetz (Utah) finished before their questioning time had expired, Issa helped himself to it. When Cooper noted, rhetorically, that “we’re not software engineers,” Issa interrupted to say, “You’ve got several here” on the Republican side of the dais.

Several times, before calling on the next questioner, Issa used the moment to offer some additional thoughts of his own: “Mr. [Trey] Gowdy, you’re right on that they should have had the A team on this. . . . You know, I never could quite understand how this thing could handle 60,000 simultaneous users but only do six in a day. . . . Success has many fathers, quite a few mothers, plenty of relatives, but failure is an orphan. You’re going to find an orphan here.”

Ah, yes, the verdict before the trial. And he wants to know why people think he runs a kangaroo court.

Twitter: @Milbank

---

[I (the author of this blog) have some comments on Milbank's article.
I, and I am sure many others, would like to know what went wrong in the development of the healthcare.gov website.
Representative Issa, whatever you may think of his politics, is a serious person,
who I have no doubt in his hearing made a good-faith effort to uncover some answers to that issue.
As an example, from the New York Times coverage of this hearing, we find that:

Mr. Issa tried repeatedly to determine
who in the administration
had decided to go forward with the website on Oct. 1
despite indications that it was not ready.

[Excellent question.
Does Milbank, a Jewish graduate of Harvard, and thus twice part of the "elite",
care about this issue?
Or are such issues and questions of no interest to him?
The issues Milbank discusses at such length have no substantive importance.

Milbank gets one thing right, when he writes:]

The chairman, who made a fortune in car alarms before getting into politics,
opened the hearing with his theory that
this was “a monumental mistake” made
because “efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines.”

[Sure sounds to me like Representative Issa got that exactly right.
What in that would Milbank disagree with?

Milbank concludes with:]

Several times, before calling on the next questioner, Issa used the moment to offer some additional thoughts of his own:
“Mr. [Trey] Gowdy, you’re right on that they should have had the A team on this. . . .
You know, I never could quite understand
how this thing could handle 60,000 simultaneous users
but only do six in a day. . . .
Success has many fathers, quite a few mothers, plenty of relatives,
but failure is an orphan.
You’re going to find an orphan here.”

Ah, yes, the verdict before the trial.
And he wants to know why people think he runs a kangaroo court.

[Again, sounds to me like Issa got that exactly right.
Who in the Obama administration had unique responsibility for the healthcare.gov website?
I.e., it wasn't just one of the things they were responsible for,
but it was their sole responsibility,
and beyond that, they had authority over all decisions regarding the website.
The lack of such a person is a glaring defect in the Obama administration's approach to this development,
a point which Issa brings out,
but which Milbank criticizes him for doing so.
Issues such as this Milbank seems impervious to.
He can mock, but he does not seem willing or able to make a positive contribution
to the public's understanding of what went wrong.
Is this one of the values theWashington Post's asserts they have:
Mocking Issa's conduct of the hearing,
without providing insight into the substantive issues?


Moving away from the Milbank piece,
the Washington Post's main story on Obamacare that day
emphasized the low enrollment figures thus far for Obamacare,
while it all but ignored the Issa hearing:]

2013-11-13-WP-Goldstein-Kane-low-enrollment

Administration: 106,000 enrolled in health insurance in first month of HealthCare.gov
By Amy Goldstein and Paul Kane
Washington Post, 2013-11-13

[The emphasis of this story is that of its headline, not its (full) URL.
The Issa hearing only comes up at the end of the story, in its final four paragraphs:]

...

The jockeying came as the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday
grilled several administration officials overseeing the technical work on the federal exchange.
One of them, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, an adviser to the president,
turned up only after the committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.),
issued a subpoena demanding his presence.
Park re­iterated the administration’s assertion that
the Web site will be working smoothly for the “vast majority” of Americans
by the end of the month,
but he sidestepped repeated requests to be more precise.

The spotlight at the hearing was trained, in part,
on an official with direct oversight of the technical aspects of the Web site:
Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Republicans on the panel accused Chao and Park
of not including adequate protections for consumers’ privacy.
They suggested that political considerations came into play
when officials were deciding which features would be available on Day One.
At times, they referenced testimony Chao gave
during a recent closed-door session that lasted nine hours.

Chao, who has worked at CMS for two decades,
repeatedly said that his comments were taken out of context
and that he was not worried about the privacy of consumers’ personal information.
“There was some rearrangement of the words that I used,” he said.

[For a far more detailed and helpful account of what transpired at the hearing,
see the New York Times story.
Note especially the important information in this story
which Milbank not just ignored, but distracts attention away from
by his emphasis on the hearing's procedural aspects versus its substantive ones.]

2013-11-13-NYT-officials-say-they-dont-know-cost-of-health-website-fixes

Health Website Official Tells of White House Briefings
By ROBERT PEAR and ERIC LIPTON
New York Times, 2013-11-13

WASHINGTON —

The chief digital architect for the federal health insurance marketplace said Wednesday that
he met periodically with White House aides
to discuss the status of the website over the last three years,
but he said the meetings focused narrowly on specific technical issues
and therefore gave the president no clear warning of the disaster that ensued on Oct. 1.

The official, Henry Chao, said he had provided “status briefings” to the White House
on the development of certain features of the website,
envisioned as the main vehicle for people to compare and buy insurance plans under the new health care law.

[Holy crow.
Where was the overview of the site's readiness for prime time,
both in terms of its functionality and its load-bearing capability?]

Jeanne M. Lambrew, the president’s health policy coordinator,
generally attended and often led the meetings,
Mr. Chao said at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The committee, investigating the rollout of the new health care law,
has requested testimony from Ms. Lambrew and from Nancy-Ann DeParle,
who was director of the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2011
and then deputy chief of staff for Mr. Obama until early this year.

Kathryn H. Ruemmler, the president’s chief lawyer,
rebuffed the panel’s request.
In a letter to the committee on Tuesday,
she said the testimony of Ms. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle was not needed
“in light of the extraordinary information
that has been provided to the Congress to date.”
Moreover, Ms. Ruemmler complained that Republicans on the committee
were seeking testimony on a “broad and amorphous range of issues”
not tied to any “legitimate oversight interest.”

[The question remains:
What did the White House managers for this project know about its status,
and what direction did they give?]

The panel is trying to find out
how much the White House knew about defects in the website, HealthCare.gov,
and whether politics contributed to some of the underlying problems.

Committee Republicans said they still wanted to hear from Mr. Lambrew and Ms. DeParle.
“They are the people we need” because
they were “the political people in charge,”
said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio.

At the hearing on Wednesday,
federal officials working on the project were unable to tell committee members
how much it would cost to fix the site,
on which the government has already spent more than $600 million.

Neither Mr. Chao nor Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the White House,
nor Steven VanRoekel, the chief information officer for the federal government,
could answer questions about the cost of repairing the site,
which has been plagued with software and hardware problems since it went live on Oct. 1.

[Unpleasant but understandable.
They really do not, and cannot, know how many problems remain.]

---

Even while testimony was underway before the oversight committee,
a separate House panel questioned other administration officials
about the security of the website
and the protection of personal information that consumers provide
when applying for health insurance and federal subsidies.

Roberta Stempfley, an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said there had been at least 16 reported attempts to infiltrate the system. In addition, she said, there has been at least one effort to delay or shut down the site, by an outside party trying to orchestrate a “denial of service” attack involving repeated queries meant to overload the system.

Ms. Stempfley, testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security, did not provide details of the incidents, which she said were being investigated. After the hearing, a Homeland Security Department official said none of the attempts appeared to have been successful or to have resulted in the unauthorized release of personal information. On an average day, the official said, 620 similar reports come in to the department.

The security of the health care website had not been fully tested when it opened to the public last month, according to federal officials and documents from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Many questions at the oversight committee hearing focused on website procedures that required consumers to create password-protected accounts before they could see the exact cost of health plans for which they were eligible.

Mr. Chao rejected Republican suggestions that the administration had blocked an “anonymous shopping” feature because it feared that consumers would be shocked if they saw the full unsubsidized prices of insurance policies.

In fact, Mr. Chao said, federal officials excluded the feature because it had failed to perform properly during testing. “It failed so miserably that we could not conscionably let people use it,” he said.

However, the chairman of the oversight committee, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, pointed to a government document indicating that the anonymous shopper feature had been tested successfully in September and was to be “turned off” for unspecified reasons.

Mr. Issa tried repeatedly to determine
who in the administration had decided to go forward with the website on Oct. 1 despite indications that it was not ready.

“This was a monumental mistake to go live and effectively explode on the launch pad,” Mr. Issa said.

He added, “We have discovered and will undoubtedly continue to discover that efforts were taken to cut corners to meet political deadlines at the end.”

David A. Powner, director of information technology issues at the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said, “Clearly, knowing what we know now, a delay in the rollout would have made sense.”