To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.
Cicero
Miami Heat Win Second Straight NBA Championship
As any faithful reader knows, I am a Spurs fan; I'm not happy with the Spurs losing the final 2 games in Miami to lose the NBA finals 4 games to 3, but I give the winning team props. I thought the Spurs missed several chances to put overtime game 6 away last Tuesday, and when things like that happen, it seems the adversary has a way of taking advantage of their new lease on life, e.g., the improbable 2004 Boston comeback against the Yankees in the post-season; the subsequent World Series seemed little more than a formality.
Andrew C. McCarthy, "The National-Security Right Goes Silent": Thumbs DOWN
I have also heard Krauthammer express a sense of outrage that the same battles that were fought years ago are coming back and the national security coalition has seemingly eroded. I think in a manner of speaking, McCarthy is correct: the bipartisan consensus in the aftermath of 9/11 has dissipated. Another observation is that the "War on Terror" is difficult to sustain because terror is more a tactic than a defined enemy with an end game.
I think McCarthy underestimates the libertarian-conservative objections. There's an implicit cost/benefit analysis to this "war": the government has limited resources. McCarthy is really taking the national intelligence talking points at face value: it's not just metadata being collected, and the vast majority has to do with American citizens with no probable cause of suspicion. This is the logical equivalent of an unconstitutional generalized warrant. We are asked to believe that the same government which made spelling errors in the cases of the underwear bomber and the Boston terror bombings can somehow sift through tons of collected data to find a needle in the haystack. As I've stated in the past, I don't feel any safer because the same TSA agents who fail internal testing procedures grope grannies and small children. McCarthy seems to take the position "if you have nothing to hide...." The records of Americans will not be used--try convincing people that in the aftermath of the Manning and Snowden leaks; the point McCarthy is missing is the only way we can guarantee the public sector won't exploit that data is to never collect it in the first place.
Another point is that the nature and extent of government surveillance has greatly changed, and a lot of that is being done without the knowledge and informed consent of the American people. We now have domestic drone programs, biometric national ID cards under discussion, tracking devices, cameras embedded at traffic lights, etc (in addition to phone or Internet data). New technology is emerging faster than the capability of our judicial system to cope with it; we have double standards of constitutional rights enforcement.
I'm actually more concerned when there is consensus in dealing with uncertainty; individual rights are highly vulnerable.
Tea Party Rally?
Just a brief statement on immigration: unlike the people interviewed here, who are not libertarians, my concern with the Senate bill is that the unions once again have rendered temporary worker visa programs almost useless, and I also oppose the national ID proposal; the bill is thus confusing the disease with its symptoms. I've been dismayed with the Senate Democrats voting down reasonable GOP amendments; the Democrats seem to snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley and Townhall |
The Beatles, "Please Please Me".
