Doolittle


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May 19, 2006
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MAY:
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MARCH:
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FEBRUARY:
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JANUARY:
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DECEMBER:
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Don’t get caught flat-footed in front of the press!  Below is a quick rundown of today’s “must reads.” – John T. Doolittle, House Republican Conference Secretary

The Morning Murmur – Friday, May 19, 2006

1. Senate Rewards Illegal Workers with Social Security Benefits - Human Events
The Senate shot down an amendment yesterday that would have made it illegal for immigrants to count their years as illegal workers toward the 10-year U.S. work requirement necessary to receive Social Security benefits.

2. NSA Story Has Media Confused, Carried Away - RealClear Politics
The entire debate is being conducted as the phone companies deny that they have ever participated in the program. Of course, when so many agenda journalists regard any statement by Big Business as an outright lie, I guess we shouldn't even consider the possibility that none of this ever happened.

3. The Web's Worst New Idea - Wall Street Journal Op-ed
If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, "Net neutrality" is it. Sometime recently, someone got up on the wrong side of bed and decided that the freedom that has been the hallmark of the Internet now threatens to destroy it.

4. In search of an agenda - Washington Times Op-ed
The Democrats' election-year agenda is still a work in progress as party leaders attempt the impossible: to draft a document that appeals to all of its disparate ideological factions.

5. In Cold Blood - Wall Street Journal
Rep. John Murtha, who voted for the war in Iraq, claims to have advance knowledge of a Pentagon investigation into whether U.S. Marines committed war crimes in a November incident in which 15 Iraqi civilians were killed in Iraq. What happened we know not, but we can tell you that Murtha's description is false.

For previous issues of the Morning Murmur, go to www.GOPsecretary.gov

FULL ARTICLES BELOW:

1.  Senate Rewards Illegal Workers with Social Security Benefits - Human Events

by Ivy J. Sellers
Posted May 18, 2006

Illegal aliens who become official citizens of the U.S.A. (something that would happen next week if the president and most of the Senate could have it their way), will be rewarded for their longevity as criminals in the workplace.

The Senate shot down an amendment (S. 3985) offered by Sen. John Ensign (R.-Nev.) today that would have made it illegal for immigrants to count their years as illegal workers toward the 10-year U.S. work requirement necessary to receive Social Security benefits.

So much for justice -- the bill was defeated 50-49 (Jay Rockefeller (D.-W.V) didn't vote) which means that illegals will be rewarded for their misconduct and placed ahead of those trying to enter and work in America legally.

The GOP traitors are: Sens. Brownback, Chafee, Dewine, Lugar, McCain, Specter, Stevens, Voinovich.

But, as Mary Katherine Ham points out, there won't be any Social Security left for most of them anyway.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/blog-detail.php?id=14973

2. NSA Story Has Media Confused, Carried Away - RealClear Politics

By Dennis Byrne

Not that it matters that three giant phone companies said they didn't do it, they stand convicted of turning over the personal phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans talking to their Aunt Millies.

All we have to go on is a story in USA Today that, while long in words, is thin on facts. Nothing about how the National Security Agency actually monitors billions of phone calls. Nothing about how they aggregate the data. Nothing about what data they're aggregating. Nothing about what they do with it. No confirmation that the story was even close to accurate.

All we know is that President George W. Bush has done it again--committed an immoral outrage against all Americans by "listening in" to their conversations.

"I signed up for a new calling plan today -- the 'NSA Friends and Family' plan. For $100 a month, they listen to all my friends and all my family." --Jay Leno

"If the government has been monitoring my phone conversations, by God, they should be paying half of my phone sex bill." --David Letterman

"Bush's approval rating has fallen into the 20s -- 29 percent in the latest poll. I tell you. It's hard out there for a chimp. ... He says he doesn't pay attention to the polls. If he wants to know what the American people are thinking, he'll listen to your calls." --Bill Maher

(A hat tip to Daniel Kurtzman at Political Humor)

The allegedly illegal "data mining" or "link mining" that the NSA is accused of doing has somehow become in the public mind (and in the minds of some journalists, apparently) actual eavesdropping on phone conversations. As we make appointments with our doctors, book airline tickets, find a baby sitter, call a plumber or dial up our bookie.

Thusly carried away with a vague impression of what actually is going on, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for one, thundered about NSA "bugging" the phones and e-mail of American citizens. Boy, the paper implied, we hope the Senate Intelligence Committee nails Gov. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA, during its hearings into his nomination as new CIA director.

Never mind that the data mining is considered legal by some experts, and clearly is not eavesdropping on Americans. Yet, the newspaper calls it "apparently patently unlawful." Such a statement disregards the assertion that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) does not address data mining, or prohibit it.

What's as scary as the claimed threats to privacy is the incomprehensible acceptance of the idea that someone, anyone, could effectively listen in to 200 million customers making what the FCC said was 463 billion domestic phone calls in 2004. Supercomputers can do a lot of things, but I doubt that differentiating whether you're calling in sick or calling a terrorist is one of them.

Mind you, this entire debate is being conducted as the companies deny that they have ever participated in the program. Of course, when so many agenda journalists regard any statement by Big Business as an outright lie, I guess we shouldn't consider the possibility that none of this ever happened.

What's needed is thoughtful explanation of the difference between eavesdropping ("listening in on") of the kind the NSA is accused of doing, and the much more complicated "data mining." The best explanation I saw was a May 12 article in the Chicago Tribune, by reporter Jon Van: "Right questions key to data mining

Finding phone links possible but difficult." He wrote:

Connecting the dots is difficult, but for homeland security agents, the real trick is figuring out where the dots are and which ones need connecting.

That analogy may be at the core of the federal government's interest in keeping tabs on telephone calls Americans make to each other every day. Government agents reportedly hope that computers can sift through the mountains of phone data to extract nuggets of information revealing terrorist plotters.

Only within the past decade has a subset of computer science called link mining even become available to attempt such a daunting task, though some researchers believe that even the most powerful computers will never deliver the answers that the government seeks.

Congressional leaders were demanding answers from the Bush administration Thursday about a specific type of connecting-the-dots activity: whether the secretive National Security Agency had collected extensive phone call records, and whether the privacy rights of individuals had been violated.

Behind those questions is the arcane science of using superpowerful computers to mine data of all types for information.

"It's a massive data problem, but you can do it," said Kris Hammond, a Northwestern University professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "If it were impossible to get specific answers to specific questions from a huge database, Google couldn't exist."

Van explains the difficulty of making any sense of the billions of calls made by Americans. A key to doing it is asking the right question, such as: "What mobile phones in Washington, D.C. made calls to Tehran during a given period, and whether calls were made from those phones to San Francisco during the same period?" Hammond added that if all you're doing is looking for patterns without asking such specific questions, you'd find millions of patterns.

Social scientists have used this kind of "link mining" to study gossip and other interpersonal systems and a variation of it is used by search engines, such as Google, to find information from a huge, otherwise unmanageable, database.

Despite all this confusion, Americans show some surprising support for what many may actually believe is eavesdropping. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 63 percent said it was an acceptable way to fight terrorism.

And so it is.

Dennis Byrne is a Chicago writer and newspaper columnist. Email dennis@dennisbyrne.net or post a comment at http://dennisbyrne.blogspot.com.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/nsa_story_has_media_confused_c.html

3. The Web's Worst New Idea - Wall Street Journal Op-ed

May 18, 2006; Page A14

If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, "Net neutrality" is it. Sometime recently, someone got up on the wrong side of bed and decided that the freedom that has been the hallmark of the Internet now threatens to destroy it.

Suddenly the Internet service providers, which you always thought were there to let you get onto the Net, are going to keep you off it unless the government imposes new laws and regulations. Congressional hearings have been held. Vint Cerf, Internet progenitor and now Google evangelist, evangelizes. Thus has the cause of Net neutrality in its current incarnation become a new and ardent crusade of the political left.

Net neutrality is generally billed as a way of reining in Internet service providers (typically phone and cable companies), some of whom have made noises about charging content companies extra fees for guaranteeing priority to certain kinds of services. Net neutrality is supposed to save us -- and Google and Yahoo -- from this supposedly unconscionable behavior. Its effect would be more damaging.

It's worth putting this zealotry in a broader historical context. In the decade or so since the commercialization of the Internet began in earnest, the number of users, the speed of their connections and the variety of things they can do on the Net have all rushed forward. Blissfully, but not coincidentally, all this has been accomplished with a light regulatory touch. Excepting pornography and gambling, no bureaucrats have decided what services could be provided over the Internet, or who could offer them or how they could charge for them.

The result has been rich and diverse. Web surfers can make phone calls -- sometimes free, sometimes for a fee. They can legally listen to music, either free, by subscription or by paying per song. They can watch some network television shows online -- again, some are free and supported by ads; others charge per program.

Some of the service ideas have been bad, and failed. Some are wonderful. But many would never have been tried if the Federal Communications Commission had been able to tell businesses whom they could charge, how much or how little, or what they could or couldn't sell on the Net. Freedom, in other words, has been the Web surfer's friend.

Enter Net neutrality, which has so far found its only official expression in a nonbinding policy statement issued by the FCC last year. The FCC statement says, "consumers are entitled" (our emphasis) to the "content," "applications" and "devices" of their choice on the Internet. They are also "entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers."

Take a moment to pause over this expansive list of "entitlements." If we take the FCC at its word, access to online pornography is now a right, even though in a different context the FCC is increasingly preoccupied with policing "decency" standards on television. We'd have thought FCC Chairman Kevin Martin would find all that entitlement talk a little embarrassing, given his campaign for decency standards.

But at least the FCC's guidelines were just that -- guidelines. Increasingly, and with the backing both of the Moveon.org crowd and "Don't Be Evil" Google, a movement is afoot to give these entitlements the force of law. Congressman Ed Markey has introduced a bill to "save the Internet" by codifying Net neutrality principles in law. The FCC would be charged with enforcing "non-discrimination" and "openness" rules.

Under a law like this -- variations are floating around both houses of Congress -- the country could look forward to years of litigation about the extent and nature of the rules. When the dust settled we'd have a new set of regulations that could span the range of possible activities on the Net. What's more, the rules aren't likely to stop with the phone and cable companies that have Mr. Markey and his friends at Moveon.org so exercised.

Non-discrimination cases could well be brought against Net neutrality backers like Google -- say, for placing a competitor too low in their search results. Google's recent complaint that Microsoft's new operating system was anti-competitive is a foretaste of what the battles over a "neutral" Net would look like. Yet Google and other Web site operators have jumped on the Net neutrality bandwagon lest they have to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service from a Verizon or other Internet service provider. They don't seem to comprehend the legal and political danger they'll face once they open the neutrality floodgates. We'd have thought Microsoft of all companies would have learned this lesson from its antitrust travails, but it too has now hired lawyers to join the Net neutrality lobby.

All the recent scare-mongering about the coming ruination of the Internet is cloaked in rhetoric about how recent court rulings and regulatory actions by the FCC have undermined certain "protections." This is mostly bluster. Companies like AOL did not migrate from a "walled garden" to a more-open, Internet-centric model because of mandates from Washington but because the alternative was extinction.

Given the impulse on the left to regulate anything that moves, perhaps the real surprise here is that it's taken this long for someone to seriously suggest the Net will wither in the absence of a federal regulatory apparatus. "Don't ruin the Internet" is a slogan with a lot of merit. But it comes with a modern corollary, which is "Don't regulate what isn't broken."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114791513048756153.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

4. In search of an agenda - Washington Times Op-ed

By Donald Lambro
Published May 19, 2006

The Democrats' election-year agenda is still a work in progress as party leaders attempt the impossible: to draft a document that appeals to all of its disparate ideological factions.

But the word coming out of the Democrats' inner sanctums is, there's deep disagreement over its contents and core message and a brewing argument over the timing of its release.

Parts of the agenda have been floated piecemeal over the past several months, but they were either boilerplate proposals, like raising the minimum wage, or an attempt to sound tough on national security, but without any specifics on how to end the insurgency in Iraq or set timetables for troop withdrawal, as their large antiwar wing demands.

The rest of the agenda being drafted in Democratic backrooms will deal with domestic issues that, once revealed, could alter the dynamics of this election in the GOP's favor.

Last week, NBC's Tim Russert grilled House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California, on "Meet the Press" about her party's message on taxes and spending. Mrs. Pelosi said the Democratic agenda would call for a "pay as you go" approach that would avoid any "deficit spending."

"So, wait a minute. There's no increase in spending if the Democrats take over Congress?" Mr. Russert asked. "No deficit spending, I pledge to you. Pay as you go," she replied.

Mr. Russert immediately caught the well-worn euphemism for tax increases in her answer, saying, "If you raise taxes to pay for the new programs."

Mrs. Pelosi: "You put everything on the table, and you decide what are the priorities for the American people."

Translation: The Bush tax cuts, which are responsible for the economic recovery, will be rolled back to pay for the Democrats' lengthening laundry list of new social-welfare spending.

But the Democratic agenda Mrs. Pelosi and her friends have in mind doesn't end there. If the Democrats take control of the House, they would conduct multiple investigations into the Bush administration -- from Iraq to intelligence to the lobbying scandal -- that could lead to the president's impeachment by the House.

"A Democratic House would launch a series of investigations of the Bush administration," Mrs. Pelosi told The Washington Post. Among her plans to use the subpoena power to investigate: "Certainly the conduct of the war," she said, along with the weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) justification to topple Saddam Hussein and the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance activities.

Asked how far this could go and if it could result in President Bush's impeachment, Mrs. Pelosi said, "You never know where it leads to."

That set off alarm bells among party strategists who feared Mrs. Pelosi's remarks sent the wrong message to voters that a Democratic Congress would be focused on an endless stream of investigations solely to bring down the Bush administration, triggering a bitter political war.

Last week, Mrs. Pelosi and other party leaders went to great lengths to tone down her remarks. "She was talking about oversight. We are not talking about impeachment or censure. We are just talking about congressional oversight in Congress," said Mrs. Pelosi's chief spokesman Brendan Daly.

That's not what Mrs. Pelosi's congressional inquisition sounded like to the impartial ear. It sounded like she was planning on leading her party on a partisan warpath against the administration. And key Democrats warned her privately that is not the kind of agenda that will appeal to independents and swing voters in November.

Right now, "the Democrats do not have a message for swing voters who are going to make the difference in this election," pollster John Zogby told me last week. "There are not enough Democratic voters to give the Democrats a victory without swing voters."

With the Democrats 12 points ahead of the Republicans in the generic surveys and the GOP's polls scraping bottom, Democrats have "an opportunity to make this election a blowout," Mr. Zogby said.

"But if the Democrats don't offer Mr. and Mrs. Middle America something that matters, that means something to them, [the Democrats] can blow a huge opportunity," he said.

House Democratic leadership officials told me last week their long-delayed agenda will be rolled out in June, but Democratic strategist Donna Brazile thinks that would be a huge timing blunder because voters will not be focused on the elections then.

"I don't know if the Democrats get any traction in June when people are focusing on summer vacations and their kids out of school. Wait until they are paying attention in September," Miss Brazile said.

"Our base and the majority of Americans are worried about gas prices, immigration and Iraq. They are not looking for a 20-page document. Put it together for the fall when people are paying attention."

Smart advice for a party that is confused, leaderless and still searching for a message that can appeal to swing voters who usually do not turn out in midterm elections.

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20060518-091429-1492r.htm
 

5. In Cold Blood - Wall Street Journal

BY JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, May 18, 2006 5:00 p.m. EDT

The Pentagon is investigating whether U.S. Marines committed war crimes in a November incident in which 15 Iraqi civilians were killed in Haditha, Iraq. NBC News reports that Rep. John Murtha, who voted for the war in Iraq, claims to have advance knowledge of the investigation's outcome:

Murtha, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said at a news conference Wednesday that sources within the military have told him that an internal investigation will show that "there was no firefight, there was no IED (improvised explosive device) that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

What happened in Haditha we know not, but we can tell you that Murtha's description is false, for the simple reason that it is self-contradictory. If the Marines "overreacted," then the killings were not premeditated. They could not have killed both in the heat of the moment and in cold blood. Murtha therefore either is slandering the Marines by exaggerating their guilt or making excuses for horrific war crimes.

Why would he do such a thing? The key is that phrase "because of the pressure on them." They're depraved on account of they're deployed: Murtha seeks to maximize the evil of the alleged crimes while simultaneously deflecting blame from the actual perpetrators to those who have applied "pressure" to them--i.e., civilian leaders in the executive branch.

Sound familiar? This was just what John Kerry did back in 1971, when he told tales (many of them false) of war crimes in Vietnam. Yet in his own mind, he wasn't accusing troops of anything, as he explained in a 2004 CNN interview:

I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. And if you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership. I said to the Senate, where is the leadership of our country? And it's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers. I never said that. I've always fought for the soldiers.

War crimes do, of course, exist, even if Kerry told fabricated stories. To excuse war criminals by denying that soldiers are responsible for their actions is an insult to everyone who has ever worn a military uniform and conducted himself honorably and lawfully.

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