After some fairly credulous coverage yesterday, the new documentary that suggests that the official investigation into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 was a cover-up is getting some more skeptical looks over at CNN and ABC News. As I wrote in today’s Jolt, most news organizations greeted this new documentary with a tone they rarely use when someone alleges a; massive cover-up of the true cause of the death of several hundred people.

Why Is a New Documentary About TWA Flight 800 Getting Strangely Credulous Coverage?

In my 2006 book Voting to Kill — now available at fine remainder bins everywhere — I wrote a chapter about the history of terrorist attacks against Americans since the end of the Vietnam War, and I did some research into TWA Flight 800.

While the National Transportation Safety Board definitively attributed the crash of TWA flight 800 to an explosion of flammable fuel/air vapors in a fuel tank, most likely triggered by an electrical short circuit, many folks have speculated that the plane was shot down. George Stephanopoulos and John Kerry, speaking off the cuff, referred to TWA Flight 800 as a terror attack, sparking a thousand cover-up theories.

Now a new documentary is likely to fuel more speculation that the official explanation of the crash covered up something sinister:

A documentary on the 1996 explosion that brought down TWA Flight 800 offers “solid proof that there was an external detonation,” its co-producer said Wednesday.

“Of course, everyone knows about the eyewitness statements, but we also have corroborating information from the radar data, and the radar data shows a(n) asymmetric explosion coming out of that plane — something that didn’t happen in the official theory,” Tom Stalcup told CNN’s “New Day.”

All 230 people aboard TWA 800 died when the plane, headed for Paris, exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Scores of witnesses observed a streak of light and a fireball, giving early rise to suspicions that the terrorists had struck the plane with a rocket.

That’s from CNN; this documentary garnered fairly credulous coverage from the Los Angeles Times, Slate, ABC News, Fox News, Yahoo, the Bergen Record, and a slew of others. An awful lot of coverage for a group most people would dismiss as cranks. Then again, some folks who weren’t previously thought of as crank-y became true believers over Flight 800 shoot-down theories, including JFK’s press secretary Pierre Salinger and novelist Nelson DeMille.

Here’s the argument for the official explanation:

John Goglia, a member of the five-person NTSB during the investigation, said he “took offense” at the filmmakers’ suggestion that board members ignored evidence. “I would never be part of any cover up — period,” he told CNN.

“This accident, this report, over 50,000 pages, if you take and just look at certain pieces of it, you can move the cause of this accident any way you want. You can take just the radar; you can say it was a missile. You have to take all of the pieces and look at them as a whole.

“The sequencing report that told how the airplane fell apart, none of it supports a missile — none of it. When you look at the physical evidence inside the tank, it’s clear that there was an explosion inside the tank. If the top of the tank goes up and the bottom of the tank goes down, and the forward side goes forward and the back of the tank goes back, that tells you that the blast was inside the tank — not outside.”

He added that no holes in the tank were found that would indicate something penetrated it.

I wouldn’t suggest that the NTSB is infallible; you can almost always find experts who will disagree with the analysis and conclusion of other experts. We’ve seen groupthink take hold in many government operations. But the problem is that if you reject the short-circuit-sparking-fuel-vapors-in-the-fuel-tank theory, what theory do you prefer?

I looked at the terrorism angle for a long time in my book research, and ultimately concluded that if there had been a terrorist involved, A) the perpetrators would have bragged about it or B) at some point, some sort of corroborating intelligence would have been found pointing in this direction — some reference to it in communications, some captured guy would have spilled about this in exchange for leniency, etc. If terrorists did manage to shoot down a U.S. airliner, it also would raise the question of why this terror group never perpetrated the same attack again.

The other big theory is that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot it down during a missile test, and I’m even more skeptical of that. I just don’t believe that everyone up and down the chain of command involved in such a colossal, deadly mistake would keep their mouths shut for 17 years; I don’t believe that the U.S. military is full of men and women who can shrug off the responsibility of accidentally killing several hundred American citizens, and I’m even more skeptical that the entire four-year, 50,000-page investigation of the accident could miss the evidence of a missile strike.

Ed Morrissey writes:

The NTSB, for its part, says that if presented with enough evidence it will reopen the probe, but that they stand by the results of their four-year investigation. But with whistleblowers suddenly popping up all over the place in more recent contexts, it seems like open season on government efforts these days. Expect to see a lot more about TWA 800 aired all over again, especially given the number and expertise of the whistleblowers.

Still, I think a healthy skepticism is the order of the day here. A cover-up of the scale suggested by the whistleblowers would be, as the two ABC reporters note, one of the largest in American history, involving several agencies and scores of people.

Now, if I were conspiratorial, I would wonder if the coverage of some whistleblowers who sound a bit like the Lone Gunmen from the X-Files television series was designed to make all whistleblowers sound a bit nutty and unreliable.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Tobin talks about the importance of distinguishing between legitimate government scandals and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

Folks on the right will find a lot to chew over and a lot to object to in this essay from George Packer in the Guardian (excerpted from his new book), but there’s probably a lot of truth to this section:

The rules and regulations of the Roosevelt Republic were aberrations brought on by accidents of history — depression, world war, the cold war — that induced Americans to surrender a degree of freedom in exchange for security. There would have been no Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking, without the bank failures of 1933; no great middle-class boom if the US economy had not been the only one left standing after the second world war; no bargain between business, labour and government without a shared sense of national interest in the face of foreign enemies; no social solidarity without the door to immigrants remaining closed through the middle of the century.

One of the major driving attitudes on the right is a sense that the America we used to knew, the one we grew up in, is slipping away and being replaced with something more divided, nastier, more selfish, less trustworthy; a country whose populace has worse judgment, with far too many citizens incapable of taking responsibility for themselves and their actions. But whatever era you think of as “better days” — the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1980s or 1990s (anyone really want to argue the 1970s were the Golden era?), the trends we see around us make returning to that kind of society nearly impossible. Something better can replace the country we see outside our windows right now, but whatever that “better” will be, it will be different from our idea of the not-too-distant past.

Packer concludes his essay:

Much has been written about the effects of globalisation during the past generation. Much less has been said about the change in social norms that accompanied it. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their behaviour: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 40 times what his average employees made instead of 800 times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero. There will always be isolated lawbreakers in high places; what destroys morale below is the systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing.

Earlier this year, Al Gore made $100m (£64m) in a single month by selling Current TV to al-Jazeera for $70m and cashing in his shares of Apple stock for $30m. Never mind that al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, whose oil exports and views of women and minorities make a mockery of the ideas that Gore propounds in a book or film every other year. Never mind that his Apple stock came with his position on the company’s board, a gift to a former presidential contender. Gore used to be a patrician politician whose career seemed inspired by the ideal of public service. Today — not unlike Tony Blair — he has traded on a life in politics to join the rarefied class of the global super-rich.

It is no wonder that more and more Americans believe the game is rigged. It is no wonder that they buy houses they cannot afford and then walk away from the mortgage when they can no longer pay. Once the social contract is shredded, once the deal is off, only suckers still play by the rules.

Packer is very critical of Republicans, but I’ll bet a lot of grassroots Republicans agree with his closing assessment . . . 

Today’s Morning Jolt features one of the first reviews anywhere of Brad Thor’s new thriller Hidden Order, an examination of why a new documentary about TWA Flight 800 is getting some fairly credulous mainstream-media coverage, and then these highlights from President Obama’s trip to the G-8 Summit:

MR. PRESIDENT, WHAT ABOUT YOUR GAFFES?

We all make mistakes, Mr. President.

MUSIC fan Barack Obama kept getting George Osborne’s name wrong after mixing him up with one of his favourite soul stars — Jeffrey Osborne.

The President explained his confusion to the Chancellor as he apologised for calling him “Jeffrey” three times at the G8 summit of the world’s wealthiest nations.

A witness dubbed the series of slips “a visibly crushing blow” to the Chancellor.

Of course, we know how President George W. Bush calling a foreign leader by the wrong name would be covered. And while I don’t think President Obama intended to blame Catholic schools for Irish sectarianism, I think he offered some very stale, generic, we-all-must-come-together rhetoric that glosses over why Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have such animosity:

Sticking his nose in Northern Ireland’s internal affairs at the Group of Eight summit in Belfast, the president pretty much told the Irish to dismantle their Catholic and Protestant schools, on the grounds they’re hotbeds of hatred.

“If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another, and fear or resentment are allowed to harden — that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” Obama told an Irish audience of 2,000, many of whom were children in religious school uniforms.

It was an odd statement coming from an American president whose nation’s founding was premised on the idea that diverse religions could flourish together as long as there is freedom. America has been a beacon of this idea’s success for more than 200 years.

Mr. President, Northern Ireland is not like the neighborhoods of Chicago.

Well, at least the president still has the diplomatic skills of his lovely and charming family, who always make a lovely impression upon their hosts.

What’s that?

Oh, come on.

Trinity College may have reminded them of Hogwarts, but the Obama children looked like they would have preferred to be at a Harry Potter theme park than poring over dusty documents showing their distant Irish heritage.

The glazed over expressions on the faces of Malia (14) and Sasha (12) during their brief visit to Ireland with First Lady Michelle Obama didn’t go unnoticed by the US media.

ABC’s Good Morning America featured a segment with the reporter noting that “Even the president’s daughters can get a bit bored with history” as they were shown the Book of Kells.

Meanwhile, stateside, the New York Times notices that five years into his presidency, Obama has more or less ignored the states that supported him the least:

Mr. Obama has not given North Dakota his time. It is one of six states he has not visited as president, along with South Dakota, Arkansas, Idaho, South Carolina and Utah. He has gone just once to Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee and Wyoming.

Mr. Obama’s near-complete absence from more than 25 percent of the states, from which he is politically estranged, is no surprise, reflecting routine cost-benefit calculations of the modern presidency. But in a country splintered by partisanship and race, it may have consequences.

America’s 21st-century politics, as underscored by the immigration debate embroiling Congress, increasingly pits the preferences of a dwindling, Republican-leaning white majority against those of expanding, Democratic-leaning Hispanic and black minorities. Even some sympathetic observers fault Mr. Obama as not doing all he could to pull disparate elements of society closer. “Every president should make an attempt to bridge the divide,” said Donna Brazile, an African-American Democratic strategist. “It’s a tall order. I wouldn’t give him high marks.”

Al Cross, who directs the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, said, “You’re president of the whole country.” By all but ignoring the state, he added, Mr. Obama has allowed negative sentiment toward his presidency to deepen.

It’s just one yokel at one rally in New Hampshire, but still . . . 

A man was arrested and two people, including a Concord police officer, were allegedly assaulted during a rally Tuesday in a clash between a gun control group and gun rights supporters.

The event had people supporting the Mayors Against Illegal Guns movement, founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, reading the names of those “killed with guns” since the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary outside their “No More Names” bus.

Some of the loudest shouts came when a reader spoke the name of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects who was killed by police during a gunfight.

“He’s a terrorist,” several protesters shouted.

And if you claim him as a victim of “gun violence,” aren’t you forgetting that little matter of his brother running him over with an SUV?

UPDATE: For that one goofball who insisted the story could not possibly be true:

The office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday apologized for including Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev among a list of shooting victims’ names that were read during a demonstration in Concord on Tuesday.

The apology came after several groups, including the New Hampshire Republican Party, blasted the Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign for included his name.

Alex Katz, deputy communications director for the Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign, said rally organizers relied on a list compiled by Slate.com of people killed by guns since the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., “and his name was on the list.”

I’m sorry, did Terry McAuliffe just reveal that if he’s elected governor, Virginia might no longer be a right-to-work state?

“Listen, I’m not going to answer specifics on projects,” he said in response to a question about what is known as a project labor agreement. “You clearly don’t talk about specifics on future projects until you even know what the projects are and what the bidding process will be.”

McAuliffe also declined to say whether he would protect the commonwealth’s status as a right-to-work state or search for ways to make the state more friendly toward organized labor.

“I’m going to work with management. I’m going to work with labor. I’m going to work with everybody to move Virginia forward,” McAuliffe said. “It’s not ‘either-or.’ We are a right-to-work state that has been here for many years, and it’s not going to change. But the focus has got to be not on trying to divide folks. [It] is, how do we work together to grow the Virginia economy to have the most diverse economy to bring in those 21st-century jobs?”

A right-to-work state is one where a worker does not have to join a union to perform a job; union membership (and dues collection) cannot be mandatory.

Virginia’s existing law is clear:

No person shall be required by an employer to become or remain a member of any labor union or labor organization as a condition of employment or continuation of employment by such employer. . . . No person shall be required by an employer to abstain or refrain from membership in any labor union or labor organization as a condition of employment or continuation of employment. . . . No employer shall require any person, as a condition of employment or continuation of employment, to pay any dues, fees or other charges of any kind to any labor union or labor organization.

UPDATE: The Washington Examiner’s Sean Higgins writes that McAuliffe’s other statements suggest that he won’t change the state’s right-to-work laws, but that he was “obviously trying to delicately tip-toe around the whole issue of how far he would go in backing union rights.”

Our government is negotiating with the Taliban again.

This was an idea that Mitt Romney criticized in January 2012, garnering a lot of sneers from the foreign-policy establishment. They pointed out that there was a broad, bipartisan consensus in favor of peace talks, from John McCain to David Petraeus to the Obama administration.

And then by October it was clear that the negotiations were going nowhere. From the front page of the New York Times:

With the surge of American troops over and the Taliban still a potent threat, American generals and civilian officials acknowledge that they have all but written off what was once one of the cornerstones of their strategy to end the war here: battering the Taliban into a peace deal. . . . Now American officials say they have reduced their goals further — to patiently laying the groundwork for eventual peace talks after they leave. American officials say they hope that the Taliban will find the Afghan Army a more formidable adversary than they expect and be compelled, in the years after NATO withdraws, to come to terms with what they now dismiss as a “puppet” government.

Divisions between the Taliban’s political wing and its military commanders were one big obstacle, as well as the Taliban’s demand that the U.S. release five senior commanders from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the sole American soldier held by the insurgents, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Of course, back in 2008, as a presidential candidate, Obama denounced the Pakistani government for . . . negotiating with the Taliban.

We can’t coddle, as we did, a dictator, give him billions of dollars and then he’s making peace treaties with the Taliban and militants. What I’ve said is we’re going to encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our nonmilitary aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.

Sure, there was a bipartisan consensus in favor of negotiating with the Taliban, but that consensus didn’t extend to millions of Americans with no foreign-policy experience, who probably could summarize their sensibilities in just a few sentences: “They’re the Taliban, and they’re trying to kill our soldiers. Why do we think we can trust them to keep their word? And if we can’t trust them to keep their word on their end of the agreement, why are we negotiating with them?”

That key obstacle remains. Now we’re negotiating again. Why should we expect this effort at a negotiated peace to end differently than the last one?

Today’s Morning Jolt features the Pentagon smacking down Secretary of State John Kerry, some politicians going on a showy diet, and then this easily overlooked development . . . 

Meanwhile, Back in Benghazi . . . 

Remember my story about the smuggling of shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles in and out of Libya during that country’s civil war? Public reports indicate U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was working on tracking those missiles when he was attacked and murdered in Benghazi. While the most lurid allegations of U.S. arms smuggling to Libya are not yet proven, the Obama administration did give its blessing to Qatar’s smuggling of arms to the Libyan rebels in 2011 — and later realized that the weapons were ending up in the hands of Islamist militants. The quiet approval of the arms smuggling violated a United Nations arms embargo — and probably ended up exacerbating a problem that would eventually require Stevens to be in that city at that time — when the danger was so considerable.

There is a new Reuters report from Benghazi that further corroborates the account of Libyans smuggling their leftover weapons, including missiles, through Benghazi to Syria and adds additional details:

Abdul Basit Haroun says he is behind some of the biggest shipments of weapons from Libya to Syria, which he delivers on chartered flights to neighbouring countries and then smuggles over the border.

 . . . The first consignment of weapons was smuggled into Syria aboard a Libyan ship delivering aid last year, Haroun says, but now containers of arms are flown “above board” into neighbouring countries on chartered flights.

That Libyan ship departed shortly before the attack against Americans in Benghazi:

On September 14, 2012, three days after Stevens was killed, Sheera Frenkel, a correspondent for the Times of London, reported from Antakya, Turkey:

“A Libyan ship carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria since the uprising began has docked in Turkey and most of its cargo is making its way to rebels on the front lines, The Times has learnt.

“Among more than 400 tonnes of cargo the vessel was carrying were SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), which Syrian sources said could be a game-changer for the rebels.

“Frenkel’s report identified the ship’s captain as ‘Omar Mousaeeb, a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organisation called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support, which is supporting the Syrian uprising.’”

The Reuters report continues:

A Reuters reporter was taken to an undisclosed location in Benghazi to see a container of weapons being prepared for delivery to Syria. It was stacked with boxes of ammunition, rocket launchers and various types of light and medium weapons.,,

The UN report appears to confirm at least some of Haroun’s account, in its investigation in the case of a second vessel, the Al Entisar.

The [UN] Panel investigated a news report that a Libyan ship with around 400 tonnes of aid had supplied Syrian rebels with “the largest consignment of weapons . . . since the uprising”.

The Panel found that the loading port was Benghazi, that the exporter was “a relief organization based in Benghazi” and the consignee was the same Islamic foundation based in Turkey that Haroun said had helped with documentation.

Great omen for our efforts to arm the Syrians, huh?

Obama to Charlie Rose, yesterday:

I’ve stood up a privacy and civil liberties oversight board made up of independent citizens, including some fierce civil libertarians. I’ll be meeting with them and what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation not only about these two programs but also about the general problem of these big data sets because this is not going to be restricted to government entities.

The board Obama is referring to was created in 2004. Nominations and confirmation delays prevented the board from being particularly effective, and it has been particularly quiet in recent years:

President Obama came into office and fared no better. He didn’t nominate a full slate to the board until December 2011. “We did not expect it to be the first set of nominations he made . . . but we were very disappointed that it took as long as it did to get those nominations,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at the Constitution Project, a legal watchdog. Then Obama’s nominee for chairman, David Medine, was held up by Republicans in the Senate for over a year. Among other things, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) faulted Medine for refusing to say whether or not the country is engaged in a “war on terrorism.”

Without a chairman, the board couldn’t hire staff and had no full-time members. Medine was finally confirmed last month, and he’s still putting the wheels in motion; the board doesn’t even have a website yet. Now, at last, the board might actually function as the commission intended.

Obama’s first two nominations to the board came in December 2010; three more nominations came in December 2011. The Senate confirmed four of the members in August 2012.

The American Civil Liberties Union charged that the “painfully long road reflects not only the extreme partisan gridlock of the times, but also a distinct lack of will within the executive branch to stand up a truly independent oversight body that could risk making the administration look bad.”

Heh:

The predictable buzz from the state Democratic Party convention was, “Watch out, Gov. Scott Walker. We’re coming for you next year!”

But when the question became exactly who Democrats will field to stop Walker from winning a second term in November 2014, the answer was: “We’ll get back to you . . .”

The argument for Walker’s alleged supreme vulnerability in a 2014 election sounds a lot like the one for Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Both states have plenty of Democrats who have run for statewide office, won races for statewide office, or mentioned interest in running for some other statewide office in the future. But for some strange reason, no Democrat has decided to run against the guy they insist is so beatable . . .

National Review contributor Mark Krikorian gets a long and largely favorable profile in today’s Washington Post. Yes, one of the Center for Immigration Studies’ founders gets lengthy scrutiny for allegedly consorting with racists and white supremacists, but the profile begins with Krikorian’s childhood in an Armenian-American household (he couldn’t speak English when he began kindergarten) and concludes with:

It’s a muggy Tuesday night, and Krikorian is steering his Toyota Prius into the parking lot of a dreary office building in Falls Church. The man behind the wheel of the hybrid vehicle is a “crunchy conservative” who says he sometimes pops into Edible Arrangements to collect bags of melon rinds or Starbucks for loads of coffee grounds to replenish his compost pile.

In the building’s hallway, a group of middle-aged men and women — all immigrants — file toward the elevator. They’ve just finished a citizenship class sponsored by Catholic Charities for green-card holders who want to prepare for the civics test they must take to become citizens. Krikorian will be the instructor for the class that starts in a few minutes. This has been his Tuesday night routine for about 1½ years, he says.

On the subject of immigration, Krikorian frets about almost everything, but little seems to animate him as much as his concerns about multiculturalism and his contention that “Spanish-speaking people” have “the potential to create an alternative mainstream” in the United States. “A lot of the immigration pushers don’t like America the way it is,” he says. “They want to change it.”

In a spare conference room, four men settle into plastic chairs before Krikorian. They’re Latinos — Bolivians and Salvadorans. “No, no, no,” he says with a smile when two of the men start speaking Spanish to each other. No Spanish allowed in class.

“Why do people come to America?” he asks the class.

There’s silence.

“Come on, why do people come to America? You know it,” he urges.

“Freedom?” a Bolivian construction worker suggests.

“That’s right!”

When the men answer tough questions, Krikorian hands them little American flags.

Krikorian, whose birthday is Flag Day, once said the purpose of immigration was to Americanize people. On this night, in this conference room with scuff marks on the walls, he seems content in the belief that he is doing just that: making new Americans.

Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that Mark has become one of the most influential and consequential voices in the immigration debate.

There’s probably a danger when polling organizations ask about something that hasn’t been proven quite yet; a majority telling a pollster “I believe X happened” does not necessarily mean X actually happened. But this shift does indicate something . . . 

Last month only 37% of the public thought that the IRS controversy led to the White House, with 55% saying that agency officials acted on their own without direct orders from Washington. Now the number who say the White House directed that IRS program has increased 10 points, to 47%, virtually the same as the 49% who believe the IRS agents acted on their own.

Coupled with Obama’s overall slipping numbers, credited to the NSA revelations . . . well, if you think the NSA has behaved in a shady manner inconsistent with the Constitution, under the president’s direction, it’s probably easier to believe that the IRS did the same.

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Obama: 1,500–1,700 FISA Court Applications Per Year Is a ‘Surprisingly Small’ Number of Requests

Obama to Charlie Rose:

The whole point of my concern, before I was president — because some people say, “Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney.” Dick Cheney sometimes says, “Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel.” My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances? So, on this telephone program, you’ve got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program.

Oh, Mr. President, you’re so, so, so certain that nobody is going to notice your verbal sleight-of-hand.

Remember, in a FISA court, there is no equivalent of a defense attorney speaking on behalf of the person being investigated. It is not an adversarial court. Nobody speaks for you, Joe Citizen. The government makes its case, and the judge either says, “okay,” or “no, I’m not convinced.” Take a guess at how that works out . . . 

Now check your guess against how often FISA courts turn down those requests:

The court rarely, if ever, denies the government’s requests, according to annual reports issued to senior members of Congress by the Department of Justice and collected by the Federation of American Scientists.

In 2012, the government made 1,789 applications to the court — one was withdrawn by the government and 40 were modified by the court, but “the FISC did not deny any applications in whole or in part,” the report states. In 2011, there were 1,676 applications, of which two were withdrawn and 30 modified, but once again, “The FISC did not deny any applications in whole, or in part.” In 2010, there were 1,511 applications, of which five were withdrawn and 14 modified, but “The FISC did not deny any applications in whole, or in part.”

In 2009, the court denied a single application, modified 14, and approved another 1,320. In 2008, the court denied another application, and made “substantive modifications” to two more, but approved more than 2,000. In 2007, the court denied a whopping three applications. It denied a single one in 2006. It denied zero applications in 2005 and 2004, though it denied four in 2003. It approved all applications in 2002 and 2001.

So, since the start of the War on Terror more than 11 years ago, the court has denied just 10 applications, and modified several dozen, while approving more than 15,000.

Obama to Charlie Rose: “First of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small.”

Mary Katharine Ham, writing at WarmerThanWarmAir.com:

Obama’s just repeating speeches from 2008, paired with demonstrable proof that he’s not interested in acting out the beliefs in those speeches, and expecting us all to move on, satisfied that his guiding hand will prevent abuse. His assurances have held great power in the past, but exactly what would make us think they’re worth anything now? Sure, it’s politically advantageous for him to declare on Benghazi, NSA, IRS (not to mention ERA and State Department), “We have noted your concerns and there’s an investigation underway, now let’s get back to exactly what I’d like to talk about, and don’t I give an awesome speech?”

But that’s not good enough. Obama has allowed abuses to happen on his watch, his administration has floated somewhere between malice and utter incompetence letting them go on, and none of the institutional backstops or failsafes have worked to prevent them or punish those responsible.

Just how out of control could our government be? Jim Hoft, late last night:

Tonight on The O’Reilly Factor Sharyl Attkisson told Bill that she knows who hacked into her home computers.

“I think I know. But I’m just not prepared to go into that. We’re continuing our investigations. There are multifaceted looks at what to do next. . . . Let me just say, whoever did it, to come into a private citizen’s home, whether I’m a journalist or not, and look in my family’s computer and look into my work computer. . . . Well, it’s outrageous.”

The front page of today’s Washington Post previews President Obama’s trip to the EU summit in Northern Ireland, observing that Europeans are deeply disappointed, and feeling betrayed, by Obama’s policies on long-delayed assistance to Syrian rebels, widespread NSA eavesdropping, and expansion of drone warfare.

In his use of drones and the NSA, Obama is acting more like the European caricature of President George W. Bush. Le Monde, in fact, referred to him as “George W. Obama.”

What the five years of Obama’s presidency have taught us is that the dominant worldview in the American Left and Europe in the preceding five years — 2003 to 2008 — was an unrealistic, idealistic fantasyland wishing away complicated problems of terrorism, security, and the politics and culture of the Middle East. As discussed in today’s Jolt . . . 

A Foreign-Policy Shift That Obama Won’t Even Personally Discuss, Much Less Explain

From 2003 to 2008, we were served up large heaping piles of crap that somehow managed to become foreign-policy conventional wisdom:

• A major obstacle to Middle East peace was that the Bush administration wasn’t making it enough of a priority.
• The Iraq War was the main cause of alienation and anti-American attitudes in the Muslim world.
• Greed for oil and war profiteering drove American interventions in the Middle East, not humanitarian concerns or desire to check aggressive, inherently dangerous forces.

After taking the wheel of American foreign policy, the Obama administration pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed the Israelis and Palestinians, and five years later, we see that the basic obstacle to peace — i.e., one side wants to destroy the other, and the other side refuses to accept destruction — remains. The troops are home from Iraq, and the United States is still hated in much of the Muslim world. (They actually hate us even more now in Jordan and Pakistan than during the Bush years.)

And now the United States will be sending some sort of military assistance to the Syrian rebels, finding the brutal actions of Ba’athist Arab dictator — including use of sarin gas — too dangerous to ignore any further.

Although apparently the president doesn’t really want to do this. This weekend, the New York Times reported:

[Obama’s] ambivalence about the decision seemed evident even in the way it was announced. Mr. Obama left it to a deputy national security adviser, Benjamin J. Rhodes, to declare Thursday evening that the president’s “red line” on chemical weapons had been crossed and that support to the opposition would be increased. At the time, Mr. Obama was addressing a gay pride event in the East Room. On Friday, as Mr. Rhodes was again dispatched to defend the move at a briefing, the president was hosting a Father’s Day luncheon in the State Dining Room.

Come on, man! Mr. President, own your decision. If you don’t think this is the right decision, tell your advisers and former President Clinton and McCain and Graham and everyone else that you think they’re wrong, and stick by it. Don’t adopt a policy that you don’t really believe in just because you want the complaining to stop.

Big Jolt to start the week: President Obama’s approval rating takes a sudden tumble, Obama tries to ignore his recent major shift in policy towards the Syrian civil war, and then . . . 

Stressed Workers of the World, Arianna Huffington Feels Your Pain

If you’re having some trouble balancing work with the rest of your life, a wise, powerful mind is hosting a conference in her home to help come up with new ideas and approaches to help:

“The Third Metric: Redefining Success Beyond Money & Power” was the conference presented last week by Mika Brzezinski, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the Huffington Post, at Ms. Huffington’s new apartment in TriBeCa (some 200 people squeezed into her living room).

Panels, covering topics ranging from “Managing a Frenetic Life” to “Wellness and the Bottom Line,” featured a number of prominent people, among them the actress Candice Bergen and Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama.

The message, one that Ms. Huffington is promoting in her publication and in speeches, is particularly aimed at women. “The way we define success isn’t working,” Ms. Huffington said at the conference. “More, bigger, better — we can’t do that anymore.”

The concepts seem a little fuzzy at times, but the overarching thesis is that it is time to rethink the common wisdom of how to achieve success: sleep four hours a night, work 20 hours a day, see your family rarely and never admit the need for downtime.

That system is wearing us down, Ms. Huffington said. In her commencement speech this year at Smith College, she told students, “If we don’t redefine success, the personal price we pay will get higher and higher. And as the data shows, the price is even higher for women than for men. Already women in stressful jobs have a nearly 40 percent increased risk of heart disease and a 60 percent greater risk for diabetes.

“Right now, America’s workplace culture is practically fueled by stress, sleep deprivation and burnout,” she said.

Wait . . .  that Arianna Huffington? The one who runs the Huffington Post?

The one whose business model was once characterized by Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times as:

The Huffington Post is a brilliantly packaged product with a particular flair for addressing the cultural and entertainment tastes of its overwhelmingly liberal audience. To grasp its business model, though, you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates. Given the fact that its founder, Huffington, reportedly will walk away from this acquisition with a personal profit of as much as $100 million, it makes all the Post’s raging against Wall Street plutocrats, crony capitalism and the Bush and Obama administrations’ insensitivities to the middle class and the unemployed a bit much.

The fact is that AOL and the Huffington Post simply recapitulate in the new media many of the worst abuses of the old economy’s industrial capitalism — the sweatshop, the speedup and piecework; huge profits for the owners; desperation, drudgery and exploitation for the workers. No child labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it . . . 

You’re sure we’re talking about the same woman whose publication inspired this bit of Onion satire:

Shocked and saddened witnesses at the Huffington Post’s news-aggregation facility have confirmed that employee Henry Evers, 25, died Wednesday after being sucked into the website’s powerful news-repurposing turbine, where his body was immediately torn to pieces.

The 200-ton content-compiling device, developed by Greek multimillionaire and site co-founder Ari­anna Huffington, sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company’s home page . . . 

Since The Huffington Post was founded in 2005, its headquarters has consisted of two rooms: Arianna Huffington’s spacious, lav­ishly appointed office overlooking New York City, and the windowless 10,000-square-foot subterranean warehouse that houses the turbine. More than 700 low-wage workers, known as writers, clock in every day, and, dressed in their Huffington Post hard hats and coveralls, work in dark, unsafe conditions to ensure the machine runs smoothly and constantly churns out content.

(Judges have ruled it’s perfectly legal to not pay writers, if they understand the terms of the agreement. Of course, even Obama jokes about how the Huffington Post doesn’t pay some of their writers.)

Anyway, Huffington was trying to squeeze 200 people in her living room in the event in her apartment…

Ahem. The above image was from coverage of Huffington’s purchase of the $8.15 million, 4,200-square-foot loft.

Anyway, remember, in your most stressed moments, that Arianna Huffington, powerful publisher with a net worth of approximately $115 million, wants to help you “redefine success beyond money and power.”

Pollster Scott Rasmussen just dropped some eye-opening survey results:

57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents

There is little public support for the sweeping and unaccountable nature of the NSA surveillance program along with concerns about how the data will be used.

• Fifty-seven percent (57%) of voters nationwide believe it is likely the NSA data will be used by other government agencies to harass political opponents. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 30% consider it unlikely and 14% are not sure.
• 33% approve of the NSA program to fight terrorism while 50% are opposed.
• 26% now believe it is necessary to collect data on millions of ordinary Americans to fight terrorism. Sixty-four percent (64%) believe it would be better to narrow the program so that it monitors only those with ties to terrorists or suspected terrorists.
• Seventy-four percent (74%) believe the government should be required to show a judge the need for monitoring the calls of specific Americans.

What this tells us is that the American people have grown very cynical about their government. And it’s hard to blame them.

I figured this section of today’s Jolt would bring more “you sound like one of those miserable feminists who hate men appreciating the beauty of women” e-mails, but the response has been pretty positive so far.

Why I’m Wary of Even Good-Natured Pundit Beauty Contests

John Hawkins and the guys at Right Wing News are running their annual contest selecting “The 20 Hottest Conservative Women In the New Media.”

The guys who are doing this are not bad guys, but I don’t think these sorts of contests are such a good idea.

On the one hand, we’re fooling ourselves every time we deny the obvious, that attractiveness is a huge factor in human behavior. (“Really? And you let yourself go out of the house looking like that? And that haircut — what, did you put your head under a lawnmower?” Shut up, Jonah’s couch! Your snark is supposed to stay in the Goldberg File!) And I’ll bet a doughnut that the scales say I shouldn’t eat that none of the women mentioned in this contest are offended about being nominated.

On the other hand . . .

I realize I shouldn’t presume to speak on any of these women’s behalf — some of them are friends, and they’re more than capable of speaking for themselves! — but I’d note that none of them set out to be considered notable for their appearance. We can say they’re beautiful enough to be models, but they didn’t choose to be models — or actresses or any other profession in which your appearance is your primary purpose. I presume that if they had wanted to pursue those different fields, they would have done so, and they haven’t. So I wonder how flattering it really is to assess a Michelle Malkin or a Mary Katharine Ham or Dana Perino and to respond . . . “Wow, you’re HOT!”

Yes, but they have limited control over that, and again, at the risk of speaking on their behalf, that’s not what they came here to do. Some of their attractiveness is genetics, and the rest is a sense of style and taking good care of themselves. They’re writers, reporters, authors, activists and analysts and they do stuff, and it’s probably more appropriate to view them and assess them based on their actions, not their attractiveness.

Of course, none of the guys running this contest would say we shouldn’t appreciate their actions, and I’m sure they appreciate those actions. But notice the nomination list consists of the womens’ names, affiliations . . . and then big photos of them. Not what they’ve accomplished, awards, and so on. And the contest isn’t saying they’re the best, having the most impact, most dedicated, or any other measure. It’s the “hottest.”

If you’ve ever checked out the comments section of just about any blog discussing a female conservative pundit, you know the usual vile comments are even more vile than usual, dissecting the woman’s appearance in detail. (I’m sure all of those commenters are comparable to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.) I’m not saying this contest is quite like these repugnant comments, but if women in our industry have to endure being judged on their appearances every day, both overtly and subtly, it doesn’t seem very empathetic to formalize the process, pick out 17 or so for particular praise, and then run a contest to see who is hottest. I mean, there are dozens of conservative women in new media out there who didn’t get picked, and who have just been told, quietly, “yeah, apparently not enough people think you’re not.”

The other thing is . . . You’ve heard the phrase, “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.” (Origin of the cliché discussed here.) Permit me to stand up for “ugly people” for a moment.

Most of us came out of an appearance-obsessed and status-obsessed subculture called “high school.” Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who always felt okay about how you looked; sometimes, you go through it looking like this:

Hopefully somewhere in high school, or maybe after high school, you find something you’re good at and you thrive in it, and you realize your value as a person goes well beyond what other people think of your appearance. It’s always a little sad when someone doesn’t move beyond this measurement of self-worth, because our appearances change, no matter how hard we try.

Look, attractive people. “Washington” — the world of politics and policy that goes well beyond the District of Columbia’s borders — was supposed to be our turf. As I discuss in my novel coming out next year, it’s “Nerd-vana,” where all of us geeks who had interests beyond video games and MTV get to play and be in charge and feel normal. It’s an endangered species preserve for people who care enough about political issues to make a career out of them. You beautiful people got Hollywood, and most of New York, and almost every beach community along the Atlantic Coast from Virginia Beach to South Padre Island, Texas. Some would argue Nashville, too. This was supposed to be the place where how you looked didn’t matter quite as much as what you knew.

Anyway, vote in the contest, don’t vote in the contest, cheer it, boo it, do as you will . . . but let’s at least try to see people beyond their appearances, okay?

The final Morning Jolt of the week examines whether pundits ought to be evaluated by their appearance, further discussion of what, if anything, the U.S. should do in response to a five-figure, soon to be six-figure, death toll in the Syrian civil war, and then this bit of useful mischief . . . 

Come On, Senator, Fair Is Fair. If the Government Can Read Our E-mails . . . 

Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said two days ago he believed that the National Security Agency’s PRISM domestic surveillance program was appropriate for our times. He added:

“In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we’re all in. We censored the mail. When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don’t think it is.”

Now FreedomWorks is asking Graham to disclose his e-mail passwords.

Speaking of disclosure, Debra Heine sends along word . . . 

Enter Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) who figured out away to insinuate White House involvement in the IRS targeting scandal and needle the president about the NSA spy scandal at the same time.

Stockman sent a letter to Chairman Darrell Issa of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on Tuesday, asking him to subpoena all NSA records of phone calls between employees of the White House and the IRS.

“Obama assures the public he only collected this information to uncover wrongdoing and protect civil liberties. Clearly he would want us to use it to investigate this case, because otherwise he’d be lying,” said Stockman.

“If Obama has nothing to hide he has nothing to fear,” said Stockman.

“This case must be investigated fully, given admitted wrongdoing by the IRS, its potentially criminal implications and revelations the White House has been less than honest about what they knew and when,” said Stockman. “Obama says the PRISM program is perfectly legal, so there should be no problem whatsoever in providing the information on White House and IRS phone calls.”

“The only possible scenario in which the administration refuses to comply would be if it would reveal unconstitutional or illegal behavior,” said Stockman.

I have a feeling this will end up generating an exchange along the lines of this legendary one from Serenity, featuring Twitter star Adam Baldwin:

Mal: You want to run this ship?

Jayne: Yes!

Mal: (trying to think) Well . . . you can’t.

I suppose I should give the Obama administration a bit of credit; part of me wondered if they would try to avoid acknowledging the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons until the war was over. A January U.S. State Department cable discussed the possible use of the weapons; Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it had “probably” been used in March.

As I wrote not too long ago . . . 

The vast majority of the American people, want nothing to do with the maelstrom that is what’s left of Syria. That may be even be the wise course considering how neither side appears to be aligned with our interests and both sides have proven capable of brutality.

But polling indicates that public opinion shifts if chemical weapons get used: Support for involving the U.S. military in general rises to 63 percent if Syria’s government uses chemical weapons on its own people. If the Syrian government lost control of their stockpile of chemical weapons — known to be among the world’s largest — 70 percent would support U.S. military action.

So a whole lot rides on whether or not the Western public sees evidence that the Assad regime uses chemical weapons.

A few weeks ago, in Syria, the French government declared sarin has been used:

“These results show the presence of sarin in the samples that are in our possession,” Fabius said. “In view of these elements, France now has the certainty that the sarin gas was used in Syria several times and in a localized manner.”

The announcement did not say when, where or by whom it may have been used in Syria, where rebels have been fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in a civil war.

The announcement coincided with the release of a draft report posted on the website of the U.N. Human Rights Council that concludes: “There are reasonable grounds to believe that chemical agents have been used as weapons. The precise agents, delivery systems or perpetrators could not be identified.”

The administration responded to this with “Well, we’re not quite sure.” Maybe that “red line” is still intact and the president doesn’t have to do anything.

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the United States was working with the French and other allies as well as the Syrian opposition to determine those answers.

“We need to expand the evidence we have,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We need to make it reviewable; we need to have it corroborated before we make any decisions based on the clear violation that use of chemical weapons would represent by the Syrian regime. So, we will continue in that effort.”

Asked how long that might take, he said, “I don’t have a timetable for you.”

Let’s not kid ourselves about what’s happening here. Assad’s regime is periodically using chemical weapons, but not on a large scale, and testing to see what the U.S. reaction is. Our government is looking for any thin reed of plausible deniability, any gray area, any way to avoid acknowledging that the “red line” is getting crossed more frequently than a crosswalk in Times Square.

By avoiding any action beyond garden-variety sanctions and nonlethal aid to the rebels — does anyone think a regime willing to use sarin will be deterred by sanctions? — we’re declaring to every leader, present and future, that you can use chemical weapons against your opponents as long as you don’t use them too broadly. The world hasn’t changed that much since Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

The absurdly revealing comment from Obama national-security staffer Ben Rhoades today: “There is an urgency to the situation. There has been an urgency to the situation for two years.”

Spared by the Sequester: “$60 million to $100 million” for President Obama’s trip to Africa later this month.

Of course, foreign diplomacy has always been a presidential duty, and both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made presidential visits to multiple African countries.

When Bush visited Liberia, Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Benin in 2008, the national debt was $9.3 trillion; when Clinton visited Tanzania and Nigeria in 2000, the national debt was $5.6 trillion.

Today the debt is $16.7 trillion; some voices in Washington are elated that this year’s deficit will be “only” $642 billion, merely the fifth-largest annual deficit in American history after adjusting for inflation, ranking behind… 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.

From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer Analyzed All of These Domestic Surveillance Issues 15 Years Ago

Imagine you’re a bad person up to no good.

Maybe you’re a terrorist who wants to harm or kill many, many Americans, or perhaps you’re a foreign spy attempting to steal U.S. secrets, in an effort to that may someday harm many Americans if your country and the United States go to war.

If you were one of these folks, and you weren’t, say, the dullest knife in the drawer . . . wouldn’t you already presume that the National Security Agency was already grabbing your signals from your cellular phone out of the air? Wouldn’t you presume that the moment they connected a particular e-mail address with you, they could crack the password and look through it with impunity? (All of this presumes you don’t have some sort of special encryption technology from your home country’s intelligence service.) Wouldn’t you assume that they were tracking the GPS in your phone? In every fugitive-on-the-run-from-a-sinister-government-conspiracy movie, the first thing the good guy does is smash his cell phone.

Haven’t these guys ever seen Enemy of the State? It came out in 1998, featured Will Smith and Gene Hackman.

All of Gene Hackman’s dialogue is more or less the actual domestic surveillance system we’ve seen unveiled in recent days:

“The government’s been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties! They’ve infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls… Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It’s a brave new world out there. At least it’d better be.”

“Fort Meade has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You’re talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word ‘bomb,’ ‘president,’ ‘Allah,’ any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.”

“In the old days, we actually had to tap a wire into your phone line. Now with calls bouncing off satellites, they snatch ‘em right out of the air.”

This was fifteen years ago, guys. Sure, it’s Hollywood, but this wasn’t supposed to be science fiction taking place in the far future. (Okay, the implausibly heterosexual lingerie store in Dupont Circle may qualify as science fiction.) . . . 

The last lines of the movie are from then-CNN host Larry King, who asks his fictional government official guest, “How do we draw the line — draw the line between protection of national security, obviously the government’s need to obtain intelligence data, and the protection of civil liberties, particularly the sanctity of my home? You’ve got no right to come into my home!”

Or course, Larry King works for the Kremlin now.

But the point is that while it’s good that the American public has a better idea of what the federal government can do with our phone records, e-mails, social network usage, and so on, in the name of protecting us . . . is it really that plausible that our enemies had no idea that this sort of thing was going on? If you’re FSB (the Russians) or VEVAK (the Iranians) or with the foreign affairs bureau of China’s Ministry of State Security . . . wouldn’t you already be operating on the presumption that the NSA had amazing abilities in penetrating, monitoring, and eavesdropping on every last method of electronic communication?

Don’t get me wrong, Snowden violated his oath and broke the law, and ought to see the inside of a courtroom, where a judge or jury could decide whether his crimes were committed in service of a greater good. But maybe Montana Democrat Jon Tester — not one of my favorite lawmakers — is hitting the right tone here:

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) on Wednesday rejected the notion that Edward Snowden compromised the country’s security when he leaked details of top secret National Security Agency surveillance programs.

Appearing on MSNBC, the Montana Democrat also said he disagreed with Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who argued that journalists who report on intelligence leaks should be punished.Tester said Snowden “probably shouldn’t have done what he did” but doubted that the disclosures undermined national security. In fact, Tester said he found the recent revelations — reported on by both The Guardian and The Washington Post — to be helpful.

“The information that they wrote about was just the fact that NSA was doing broad sweeps of foreign and domestic phone records, metadata. First of all, Snowden probably shouldn’t have done what he did. But the fact of the matter is I don’t see how that compromises the security of this country whatsoever,” Tester said. “And quite frankly, it helps people like me become aware of a situation that I wasn’t aware of before because I don’t sit on that Intelligence Committee.”

Oh, by the way, President Obama’s defense of these programs last Friday asserted, “Now, the programs that have been discussed over the last couple of days in the press are secret in the sense that they’re classified, but they’re not secret in the sense that, when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.”