constitutionalley.us

One of the great scientific advances of the “New Age” is the discovery that sex is neither a physical characteristic nor should it be considered primarily a reproductive activity. Rather, gender is a sort of fluid mental state, a matter of compulsive preference that is genetically directed. Copulative activity, in whatever manner and with whomever engaged, is enthusiastically proclaimed to be the world’s first and foremost recreational sport. However, in most countries there are some age, gender, consent and species restrictions that apply. This is in spite of the fact that much of the gay/progressive political agenda has for some time been concerned with minimizing or eliminating these. And so, until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic sowings take root, familiarization with local law and custom is advised so that unpleasant, perhaps fatal, misunderstandings can be avoided.

Here’s some of what Secretary Clinton had to say on International Human Rights Day (12/6) in Geneva, Switzerland as reported by FOX News:

[hana-flv-player video=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Push-to-Protect-LGBT-Rights-Internationally-Fox-News-Video.flv” width=”400″ height=”226″ description=”” player=”4″ autoload=”true” autoplay=”false” loop=”false” autorewind=”false” /]

If that doesn’t meet your Hillary MDR, you can see her full remarks here or read all about it at Huffpost “Gay Voices” here.

Though this sort of thing may be new to you, the State Department has been internationally hawking alternative sexual orientations for some time now. State’s billboard campaign promoting the gay lifestyle in Macedonia was reported in the National Review Online by Kerri Houston in two January of 2004 articles that may be found here and here.

From the first:

Against this backdrop of critical economic and identity development as well as ethnic unrest, the vast majority of Macedonians think that homosexuality is a disease. Therefore, the U.S. embassy in Macedonia is using U.S. taxpayer dollars to erect billboards promoting the homosexual agenda.

Not just billboards, but graphic billboards. The large photo array includes three pictures of gay men holding each other; three pictures of women in suggestive positions (one even using elderly women); and lastly, a ménage à trios with an Asian woman, a blond woman (neither looking even remotely Macedonian), and a man who looks very much like Jesus of Nazareth.

The billboards reads: “Face Reality, The Campaign to Promote the Rights of Sexual Minorities,” and in the lower right-hand corner is the seal of the American embassy, Skopje.

The billboard is prominently displayed in the capital of Skopje, and also in the peaceful, ancient city of Ohrid. It is unclear how many of these billboards dot the Macedonian landscape.

and the second:

The story continues to unfold — or unravel, depending on which side of full disclosure the parties involved stand — at a frantic pace.

The revelation about this gross misappropriation of U.S. taxpayer money has motivated both the House and the Senate to review diplomatic budgets and hunt down additional inappropriate “projects.” The Macedonian press is relentlessly covering the story, and the taxpayer watchdog group Americans for Tax Reform even awarded Lawrence Butler, the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia, its “Enemy of the Taxpayer” award.

U.S. grants totaling $50,000 were given to three NGOs in Macedonia, Croatia, and the Kyrgyz republic for projects clearly described as advocating a gay lifestyle in their grant requests and in the State Department’s approval documents.

These grants were given under the Democracy Commission, a program providing low-level funding to indigenous NGOs for community-based projects supporting the transition to free-market economies and democratic policies. This small grant program, instituted in 1994 by the Clinton administration, is available in 27 countries. Individual grants cannot exceed $24,000. Last year, total funding in Central and Eastern Europe under this program was $4.5 million, with $275,000 provided to Macedonian organizations, including CCHR and a radio station promoting American jazz music.

And just think, at one time Sen. Joe McCarthy only had State Department Communists to worry about! Wonder what the result will be when State gets around to promoting homosexuality in foreign schools the way we do here in the U.S.:

City Journal
Spring 2003
Queering the Schools
by Marjorie King

At a high school in prosperous Newton, Massachusetts, it’s “To B GLAD Day”—or, less delicately, Transgender, Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian Awareness Day. An advocacy session for students and teachers features three self-styled transgendered individuals—a member of the senior class and two recent graduates. One of the transgenders, born female, announces that “he” had been taking hormones for 16 months. “Right now I am a 14-year-old boy going through puberty and a 55-year-old woman going through menopause,” she complains. “I am probably the moodiest person in the world.” A second panelist declares herself an “androgyne in between both genders of society.” She adds, “Gender is just a bunch of stereotypes from society, but I am completely personal, and my gender is fluid.”

Only in liberal Massachusetts could a public school endorse such an event for teens, you might think. But you would be wrong. For the last decade or so, largely working beneath public or parental notice, a well-organized movement has sought to revolutionize the curricula and culture of the nation’s public schools. Its aim: to stamp out “hegemonic heterosexuality”—the traditional view that heterosexuality is the norm—in favor of a new ethos that does not just tolerate homosexuality but instead actively endorses experimenting with it, as well as with a polymorphous range of bisexuality, transgenderism, and transsexuality. The educational establishment has enthusiastically signed on. What this portends for the future of the public schools and the psychic health of the nation’s children is deeply worrisome.

This movement to “queer” the public schools, as activists put it, originated with a shift in the elite understanding of homosexuality. During the eighties, when gay activism first became a major cultural force, homosexual leaders launched a campaign that mirrored the civil rights movement. To claim their rights, homosexuals argued (without scientific evidence) that their orientation was a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus deserved the same kind of civil protections the nation had guaranteed to blacks. An inborn, unchangeable fact, after all, could not be subject to moral disapproval. There ensued a successful effort to normalize homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, gays in the military, and other signs of civic equality.

Cont’d. . .

or more recently:

Washington Times
Friday, October 16, 2009
EDITORIAL: Queering our schools

Fifty-three Republican congressmen yesterday demanded that President Obama fire his embattled “safe schools czar,” Kevin Jennings. Mr. Jennings’ bizarre sexual agenda for American grade schools is one reason the president should dump this dangerous radical.

Mr. Jennings wrote the foreword to a 1998 book titled, “Queering Elementary Education.” The book he endorsed was a collection of essays by different authors who supported teaching young children about homosexuality. Mr. Jennings’ foreword explains why he thinks it is important to start educating children about homosexuality as early as activist-educators can get away with doing so. “Ask any elementary-school teachers you know and – if they’re honest – they’ll tell you they start hearing [anti-homosexual prejudice] as soon as kindergarten.” And “As one third-grader put it plainly when asked by her teacher what ‘gay’ meant: ‘I don’t know. It’s just a bad thing.’ “

As another author in the book notes: “Any grade is ‘old’ enough [for the proper education] because even five-year-olds are calling each other ‘gay’ and ‘faggot.’ ” Other writers claim there apparently is no problem getting into these discussions because, “The belief that children are not sexual beings is not substantiated by research.”

The authors of “Queering Elementary Education” don’t seem to be bothered by the dearth of evidence to justify their position in favor of teaching children about homosexual relationships. Because they do not provide the names of teachers who told various anecdotes included in the book, there’s no way to check how many of the stories are secondhand exaggerations or even pure fiction.

Cont’d. . .

Of course, our progressive President fully supports these efforts. After all, didn’t he issue a proclamation declaring June, 2010 “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month”? So, it should be no surprise that this sort of thing is now built into our “foreign policy” — if you can call it that.

And you wonder why we’re not unconditionally loved the world over? It’s not all Israel.

Ciao,
Dennis

Is George Will just a Don Quixote tilting against the Gingrich windmill? Or is Gingrich just a windmill standing in his own breeze? Actually, Mr. Will’s approach to that question waxes in a slightly different metaphorical direction:

Gingrich might stop being (as Churchill said of John Foster Dulles) a bull who carries his own china shop around with him. 

And, unlike many a commentating pundit, Will offers a substantive alternative to his rejection of both Mitt and Newt:

Jon Huntsman inexplicably chose to debut as the Republican for people who rather dislike Republicans, but his program is the most conservative. He endorses Paul Ryan’s budget and entitlement reforms. (Gingrich denounced Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering.”) Huntsman would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Gingrich’s benefactor). Huntsman would end double taxation on investment by eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. (Romney would eliminate them only for people earning less than $200,000, who currently pay just 9.3 percent of them.) Huntsman’s thorough opposition to corporate welfare includes farm subsidies. (Romney has justified them as national security measures — food security, somehow threatened. Gingrich says opponents of ethanol subsidies are “big-city” people hostile to farmers.) Huntsman considers No Child Left Behind, the semi-nationalization of primary and secondary education, “an unmitigated disaster.” (Romney and Gingrich support it. Gingrich has endorsed a national curriculum.) Between Ron Paul’s isolationism and the faintly variant bellicosities of the other six candidates stands Huntsman’s conservative foreign policy, skeptically nuanced about America’s need or ability to control many distant developments.

And, besides, what’s a Mitt ‘n’ Newt?

Following up on his Washington Post op/ed, Will commiserated with Laura Ingraham on her talk show about the sad state of Newt Gingrich:

If you happened to catch Ms. Ingraham’s comment regarding President Bush II and big government conservatism, you may wish to remind yourself that her position regarding Dubya since the early days of 2002 has reversed itself as is illustrated here. Nothing wrong with that. But, the contrast does highlight the fact that establishment Republicanism has little changed over the past ten years despite being buried by the political avalanches of a mostly disastrous Bush presidency; the West’s financial meltdown, economic stagnation and a possibly pending Eurozone collapse; as well as what’s shaping up to be a catastrophic Obama first term that was at least partially foster-parented by the GOP’s reluctance — or is it inability? — to play principled hardball. Will they ever begin to dig themselves out? The problem seems to be that most establishment Republicans don’t really want to.

I think it’s safe to say that we need more of the same from neither Mitt nor Newt. Nor anyone else for that matter.

Ciao,
Dennis

Today’s pièce de résistance. . .

Exchequer
NRO’s eye on debt and deficits
Is the Fed Pursuing Our Interest or Banks’ Interests?
by Kevin D. Williamson
Posted on December 01, 2011 4:00 AM

The Fed signals that it intends to hitch our national wagon to Europe just as Europe is going over the edge, and the Dow jumps 4 percent. Maybe I’m missing something.

[snip]

Congress should make it clear — today — that the Fed’s mandate does not extend to bailing out Europe’s banks and Europe’s governments. This is especially true after the secrecy and unaccountability with which it conducted the $7.7 trillion shadow bailout on top of TARP.

[snip]

One of the big problems at MF Global (as at Lehman Bros.) was off-balance-sheet accounting, using various bookkeeping shenanigans to hide the fact that liabilities were dwarfing assets. The United States government does that both in the obvious sense — pretending that future entitlement liabilities don’t really exist — but in a more subtle sense, too: Wealth isn’t abstract numbers. Wealth is real stuff: food, oil, steel, houses, people performing useful services, etc. You can flood the world’s financial systems with liquidity and create the impression of economic activity, but that does not create one automobile, pair of shoes, or bag of coconuts. You can finesse the economic metrics, but that doesn’t make you any richer.

Government spending in the United States (at the federal, state, and local level) is about 40 percent of GDP, and we’re borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. We’re spending the money now, with promises of future benefits that amount to (literally) more than all the money in the world, and promising to pay off today’s spending out of future taxes, as though the future is not going to want to spend the money on itself. That is not a program for stability. Not in Europe. Not here.

Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner as presciently portrayed by the Coen Brothers in the 1987 film “Raising Arizona” :

Here’s the final word from history’s foremost economics Guru & Über Mensch:

Yesterday I ‘happened upon’ a couple of interesting facts. First, the total outstanding debt in the U.S. at the end of this past June is only $120.6 billion greater than it was at the end of December of 2008. This just doesn’t seem to jibe with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the past three years about our national debt and fiscal deficits. Second, in the three years from end of 2005 through 2008 total U.S. debt rose by $11.153 trillion!

If you open the accompanying Table Z.1B in a separate tab, you can conveniently follow along as I rattle this off. Please note that all the table values are in billions of dollars.

Line 25 contains the “Credit market instruments liability total” which shows the $11.153 trillion increase in total debt from ’05 to ’08 and the $120.6 billion change from ’08 through the 2^nd qtr of ’11. Of interest are the differences in the changes between the financial and non-financial sectors. The financial sector accounted for 37% of the increase in debt from ’05 to ’08. But from ’08 through ’11 Q2, financial sector debt liabilities shrunk by $3.309 trillion (line 23), while non-financial sector debt liabilities grew by $3.429 trillion (line 8). The result was the comparatively small $120.6 billion increase in total U.S. liabilities. Essentially, the entire reduction in financial sector liabilities was made up by the $3.377 trillion (line 6) increase in U.S. government credit market instruments.

Another interesting switcheroo was the conversion of $3.135 trillion (lines 16 & 17) of “agency- and GSE-backed” mortgage pools into direct government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) credit market liabilities. Thus, the U.S. government has taken on an additional $6.512 trillion of direct credit market liabilities since the financial meltdown of 2008. All without there being any increase in total indebtedness in the U.S. Not a bad trick! – If you can get away with it.

And how do you do that? Why, blame Wall Street, of course! Blame Wall Street for holding a gun to the federal government’s head and forcing our fearless leaders to relieve the financial sector of its government-encouraged and induced excesses. Just make sure that the American voting public forgets all about the “Community Reinvestment Act”, ACORN, nearly-free money from the Federal Reserve, “liar loans”, so forth and so on, along with Rep. Barney Frank, former Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines, a politically pusillanimous President Bush II, and a supporting cast of notoriously slippery characters that includes clueless RINOs.

There’s a lot more to be mined from the data, but you get the idea. There’s plenty to digest, but not just before Thanksgiving. I’m saving some room for turkey and all the other goodies. Mmmm.

Enjoy your holiday. You have my best wishes.

Ciao,
Dennis

Tech Note: The information used in this analysis is found in the Federal Reserve report that details the breakdown of all U.S. debt by various classes of lenders and borrowers. It’s called the “Z.1” – for lack of a better name, I suppose. A bit of manipulation, however, is required before one can tease the significance of the information out of the innocuous looking scramble of numbers. This is a result of individual line entries being placed in the table, along with various subtotals, without any offsets or separation. However, with a bit of judicious manipulation, blank line insertion and running subtotals, the truth will out. The results are shown in here in Table Z.1A and Table Z.1B. Table Z.1A illustrates how I went about determining which numbers were in which subtotals and splitting the data into groups matching those subtotals. The business end of the analysis is in Table Z.1B. Here you will find the line entries for the years 2005, 2008 and 2011Q2 along with columns showing the differences in line entry values for the three dates.

And if I’ve made any errors, please let me know so I can correct them. Thanks.

The interviewer’s approach says much about the progressive-leftist-marxist-liberal-socialist attitude regarding capital markets. Mr. Bass does an excellent job of explaining why he did what he did, and continues to do. It becomes ever more obvious as the interview proceeds that governments are responsible for the world’s financial messes, not Wall Street. But the BBC babe just doesn’t want to hear/believe it. She’s got a point she wants to make stick. (If she were in court, I believe she’d be declared a “hostile witness”) But Bass is unflappable. He’s the adult in the room.

IMHO, the following is excellent:

Kyle Bass Interview With BBC On European Debt Mess – Part 1

Kyle Bass Interview With BBC On European Debt Mess – Part 2
(The first 5:11 completes the interview. Balance of the 20:36 clip is BBC class warfare propaganda. Interesting but not enlightening.)

Hat Tip: Gary S.

On November 5^th, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” character series of cartoons. The title was “What If Government Were More Like an iPod?” Therein, Mr. Adams gives his opinion regarding what ails the American body politic, and how we might cure it, if only we were willing to update our antiquated approach to the campaign and election processes. Precisely how this is to be done is not fully revealed. But, what troubles me more than that is his seeming disregard for the Constitution and disdain for the Founding Fathers. The whole business is outdated and we really need some Constitutional modernization. And so, Adams begins his quest for a spiffy new government user “interface.”

However, he seems unaware of the fact that the American government user interface has been continuously updated since around 1895. For the most part, these changes have occurred under the guise of legal decisions and judicial practice rather than as legislation or constitutional amendments. The continuous replacement of U.S. of common law with the codified variety has removed many of the basic tools that assured our liberty, and has placed us at the mercy of an ever expanding and more tyrannical federal government.

Before we go off and attempt new, untried experiments, why not abandon those that we have tried and found dangerous to liberty? G.K. Chesterton once offered the following assessment: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” On the other hand, “Government of the people, by the people and for the people” has been tried and found wanting . . . by the ruling classes.

Mr. Adams concludes his essay thus:

If you think my ideas for fixing the republic are ridiculous and impractical, you’re probably right. If you have better ideas, this would be a good time to share them, because whatever you’ve been doing until now hasn’t been working. And who knows—with hard work and some luck, someday you could be like James Madison. And by that I mean not on a coin.

Well, here’s my two-cents in .pdf format: “Fisking Dilbert”

Finally, today being Veterans Day, I want to send my thanks and a salute to all my comrades in arms, past and present.

Ciao,
Dennis
Capt. USAF (fmr)

P.S. My approach to this subject required that I include the entire text of the Adams essay. I trust that this transgression proves not to be a cardinal publishing sin. Furthermore, as compensation, I grant to the Wall Street Journal and Scott Adams free and unrestricted use of this posting.

In today’s American Thinker is an article by Cindy Simpson titled “The Great American Memory Hole” wherein she informs us that. . .

Another Orwellian phenomenon surrounding the “birther” controversy was recently discovered: “JustiaGate,” in which 25 Supreme Court decisions that cited to the same case that defined “natural born” citizen were altered on Justia.com’s public database sometime mid-2008.  The changes consisted of deleted references to the case name (Minor v. Happersett), “mangled” numerical citations, and other instances of missing text.  Within days of the Portland Examiner’s publishing of attorney Leo Donofrio’s findings, Justia removed Wayback Internet Archives access, making it difficult to ascertain the plausibility of Justia owner Tim Stanley’s explanation to CNET.

Now, you can’t “blame” Google for that obfuscating distortion of fact, but Google has recently made the use of their incredibly vast Internet news database substantially less convenient and not nearly as useful as it once was. For instance, here are a few comments that I saved from the Google Labs site regarding the shutting down of their Google News Timeline application:

http://www.googlelabs.com/show_details?app_key=agtnbGFiczIwLXd3d3ITCxIMTGFic0FwcE1vZGVsGLIxDA
(now a dead link)

Google News Timeline
Last updated August 17, 2011

As part of the phasing out of Google Labs, we have shut down Google News Timeline. It was a pleasure to serve you!

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes information chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the “granularity” to weeks, months, years, or decades, or just including a time period in your query (ie. “1977”).

Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts and Twitter status messages, sports scores and various types of media like music albums and movies.

Get started with some of our favorite queries like Nobel Physics Prize, Jack Nicholson movies, Barack Obama quotes, Baseball news photos.

Comments:

sunnydlita
6 days ago
Nooo… Google giveth, and Google taketh away. =^(

LindaK
Aug 20, 2011
This was a superb tool and it’s a major disappointment to see it closed down. Is the historic news data still there somewhere or has Googre abandoned that also ? Can I search it in some other way ?

Seems such a bad move to close it.

Crooksey
Aug 20, 2011
What a stupid idea to shut-down google labs, and what a even stupider idea to remove this application. My very high opinion of Google is sliding all to quickly.

jnibert
Aug 19, 2011
As a news researcher I have depended upon Google Timeline extensively. I have found it to be extremely useful and easy to navigate. I have uncovered many, many historical facts with it. I am at a loss to understand why it is being shut down. I will miss it very much, and I don’t know what I will do now to replace it.

Precisely my sentiment as it was only because of Google News Timeline that I happen to come across the Associated Press article in the Deseret News regarding the thousands of foreign scientists visiting our nuclear weapons labs during the Reagan Administration. (See this.)

More recently, I’ve noticed that Google has also done away with their News Archive search function. Though one can still specify a date range for a search, the sort-by-date and source-specification options are no longer available. This makes it impossible to check a specified source within a range of dates ordered by date. You can see this for yourself by looking at the options available on the Advanced Search template page. Lots of boxes are available for filling, but not much that’s really helpful for doing historical news research.

Now we won’t even be able to recover what did go down the memory hole, including why Google made these changes after having these functions available for so many years.

Wonder what else they don’t want us to remember? Quite a lot, probably.

Ciao,
Dennis

What was once termed the “International Phonetic Alphabet,” but is now known as the “NATO Phonetic Alphabet,”  is used world-wide in flight operations for the purpose of avoiding garbled communication between aircraft or aircraft and controllers. So it is entirely understandable that pilots have turned to using this aid to understanding as a means of expressing volatile sentiment in coded terms, and thereby avoid slips of the tongue that might otherwise prove offensive to others or embarrassing to themselves. For example, when a fighter pilot wishes to express unbridled, enthusiastic approval he simply exclaims “Sierra Hotel!” The coded, two-letter message “S.H.” being expressed is “Shit Hot!” In a similar fashion “Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot”, or “W.T.F”, expands to “What The F***?!”, which is a well-known expression of exclamatory skepticism. Hence, we have this from the “Other McCain”, though a more liberal use of the phonetic alphabet on his part would have been additionally instructive to the uninitiated:

The Spectacle Blog
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Politico?
By Robert Stacy McCain on 11.4.11 @ 10:49AM

WASHINGTON, D.C. — “What the [bleep] is Politico doing?” said the man on the phone. “And how the [bleep] are they getting away with this [bleep]?”

Reporters rival sailors* for their proficiency in profanity, and one of the most experienced political journalists in Washington was cussing a blue streak Thursday evening as he railed against the shoddiness of Politico’s reporting on the Herman Cain “scandal.”

Scare-quotes around the word “scandal” are necessary in that, as of Thursday night, Americans still had only vague suggestions of what it is Cain is accused of having done to women who worked at the National Restaurant Association during his tenure as president of that organization in the late 1990s.

“Five days!” yelled the veteran reporter on the phone. “Five days and what have we got? Nothing! What the [bleep] were they thinking about, running with a piece of [bleep] story like that?”

[snip]

This morning at breakfast, I picked up The Washington Times and saw Wes Pruden’s column, which absolutely nailed it:

Politico, the political daily of liberal pedigree that set the hounds on Mr. Cain, has not said what he is guilty of, or when, or where, or who says so. Innuendo is enough. Politico says it has a half-dozen sources “shedding light on different aspects of the complaints.” Once upon a time, a reporter trying to get a story merely “shedding light” on “aspects” past a gruff old city editor would have been thrown down the stairs if the gruff old city editor was having a particularly bad day.

Having spent a decade working in Pruden’s newsroom, I can attest that he would have summarily fired anyone who even suggested that his newspaper publish anything as shoddy as what Politico published on Sunday. Throwing the fired employee down the stairs, however, might be considered “harassment.”

So much for that Politico story.

*Or fighter pilots for that matter. As testament to that assertion, I offer the drinking song “Jeremiah Weed” by the legendary group Dos Gringos as they performed it live at a not-to-be-named officers’ club before an enthusiastic audience of “no drinking within 50 feet of the aircraft” fighter drivers. This is definitely for mature audiences only as I’d give it a 10+ rating on the AL scale:

[hana-flv-player video=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dos-Gringos-Jeremiah-Weed.flv” width=”472″ height=”315″ description=”” player=”4″ autoload=”true” autoplay=”false” loop=”false” autorewind=”false”/]

The mellowing of such informal, freewheeling, and boisterous expressions of camaraderie has been fairly rapid, certainly wistful, since the Navy’s hammering of those who participated in the 1991 Tailhook celebration of their participation in Gulf War I combat. Guess we’ll have to come up with a military version of the Wiffenpoof song.

Ciao,
Dennis

Only six-and-a-half minutes, and you’ll get a peek at what they think about radical Islam up there in the Great White North. . .better known in some circles as the “Eh” country. McKenzie Brothers were unavailable for comment.

[hana-flv-player video=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Michael-Coren-with-Jamie-Glazov-exposing-islam-YouTube.flv” width=”560″ height=”315″ description=”” player=”4″ autoload=”true” autoplay=”false” loop=”false” autorewind=”false” /]

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine‘s editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. His new book is Showdown With Evil. He can be reached at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.

Update: The political situation in Switzerland is heating up. Swiss member of Parliament Oskar Freysinger is an order of magnitude more direct than Mr. Glazov. Via Family Security Matters:

Earlier today, thanks to HotAir Headlines, I came across the following:

THE DAILY CALLER
Justice Dept. proposes lying, hiding existence of records under new FOIA rule 
By C.J. Ciaramella
11:50 PM 10/24/2011

A proposed revision to Freedom of Information Act rules would allow federal agencies to lie to citizens and reporters seeking certain records, telling them the records don’t exist.

The Justice Department has proposed the change as part of a large revision of FOIA rules for federal agencies. Specifically, the rule would direct government agencies who are denying a request under an established FOIA exemption to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist,” rather than citing the relevant exemption.

The proposed rule has alarmed government transparency advocates across the political spectrum, who’ve called it “Orwellian” and say it will “twist” public access to government.

Apparently this did not come as much of a surprise to Flight Lead FASTFAC as is indicated by his reply to my email broadcast:

I would be more concerned if I didn’t suspect the Fed Govt had been lying and “Glomaring” for years and years. My real question is what would be the purpose for broadcasting to the world that you were revising the Freedom of Information Act to tell the world you are (usually) lying? What we need is a disclaimer on all public comments from elected officials that simply states, “The information you are receiving may or not be factual and any comments regarding the veracity of the information might be the same!” 

That should work for the most part. But I would also include more than just “elected” officials. After all, Attorney General Eric Holder is an “appointed” official and, as chief law enforcement officer in the U.S., he’s the one actually making this suggestion. Impeachment, anyone? Or is that a bit too harsh?

I am, however, surprised by the reaction of the ACLU, who lamented:

In a public comment regarding the rule change, the ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org, said the move “will dramatically undermine government integrity by allowing a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.” 

. . . the move “will dramatically undermine government integrity. . .”? Is the ACLU now writing for the Daily Show? Who are they trying to kid?

Any comment, Mr. Stewart?

Of course, this sort of thing is no more than a restatement of the Bureaucratic Prime Directive. In its most common vernacular form that’s: “You’re never wrong if you follow procedure.”

Ciao,
Dennis