Today’s Morning Jolt features… (sigh) yes, some Bob Filner and Carlos Danger Anthony Weiner revelations and reaction, but also an eye on the upcoming lower-ticket campaigns that might not get nearly as much attention…

Looking at the House Races and Even Lower on the Ticket…

You can always tell which incumbents a national party committee thinks are most vulnerable by who they tout the most. The NRCC has the “Patriot Program,” which lists 20 incumbents who… well, I’ll let the NRCC describe it: “a goal-oriented program helps Members stay on offense and fully prepare for their re-election campaigns. Through a number of Member-based communications, fundraising and strategy goals established at the beginning of the cycle, the program helps to ensure that its members are ready to run well-funded and organized campaigns against their Democratic opponents.”

The current lineup: Reps. Dan Benishek (Mich.), Gary Miller (Calif.) Michael Grimm (N.Y.), Bill Johnson (Ohio), Tom Latham (Iowa), Tom Reed (N.Y.), Scott Rigell (Va.), Keith Rothfus (R-Pa.) Lee Terry (R-Neb.) Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Steve Southerland (Fla.) Rodney Davis (Ill.) Jeff Denham (Calif.), Mike Fitzpatrick (Pa.) Bob Gibbs (Ohio), Chris Gibson (N.Y.), Joe Heck (Nev.), David Joyce (Ohio), David Valadao (Calif.) and Jackie Walorski (Ind.). Not too many surprises there; most of those districts were either carried by Obama or represented by a Democrat until recently.

Meanwhile, the NRCC notices that the South Florida real estate market is so hot, at least one Democratic Congressman hasn’t been able to move into his district.

It has been almost a year since Joe Garcia told The Miami Herald’s editorial board that he’d move into the new Key West-to-Miami-Dade Congressional District 26 if he won.

Garcia won. But he hasn’t yet moved. His office said the freshman Democrat is in the process of getting a place.

Maybe he’s just waiting for prices to come down.

Meanwhile, Democrats are beginning to realize that having a pop-culturally-dominant messiah at the top of the ticket, but paying less attention down-ticket, has big consequences:

Barack Obama has spent well over $1 billion on his political campaigns, but it’s the $20 million to $30 million Democrats didn’t shell out three years ago that is costing the White House as he slogs through the first six months of his second term.

The GOP’s wildly successful, low-key and stunningly cheap campaign to seize state capitals in 2010 has come back to haunt Obama and his fellow Democrats. It’s now clear that the party’s loss of 20 state legislative chambers and critical Midwestern governorships represents an ongoing threat every bit as dangerous as the more publicized Republican takeback of the House that same year.

There was no stopping the GOP wave that year — but strategists in both parties say Obama’s team might have blunted it if they had somehow managed to cut into the GOP’s cash advantage — $30 million to the Democrats’ $10 million — in statehouse races by making campaigns at the very bottom of the ballot a priority.

Eh. Obama has always been very skilled at persuading voters to believe in him. They’re not so persuaded when he touts Jon Corzine, Martha Coakley, Creigh Deeds, or most of the 2010 Democrats…

Here is the entirety of what President Obama said about guns in his two appearances at events for Organizing for Action last night:

At the “OFA Dinner”:

Obviously, the scourge of gun violence is something that we still have to stay focused on.

At the “OFA Event”:

Nothing.

In those remarks, Obama mentioned the Great Recession, job creation, wage and income flatlining, college debt, health-care costs, immigration reform, climate change, Obamacare implementation, wildfires in Colorado . . . basically, almost every major issue except guns.

Until very recently, Organizing for Action’s fundraising e-mails emphasized the issue of gun control, again and again and again . . . and OFA had previously pledged to withhold support from four Senate Democrats who voted against the gun bill — Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), and Max Baucus (Mont.).

President Obama pivots to the economy . . . arguably for the second time this month. The RNC collected these “pivots” for a while, until they became as numerous as his statement expiration dates.

Sure, the unemployment rate is down to 7.6 percent, after peaking at 10.1 percent; of course, that’s a slow decline since the beginning of 2012 (8.3 percent). This is still high by historical standards (the unemployment rate was below 7 percent from June 1993 to December 2008) and the unemployment rate’s drop is fueled in part by a steep decline in the labor-force participation rate, from 66 percent of all Americans over age 16 to close to 63 percent.

If you’ve got money in the stock market, you’re enjoying a bullish run. About 30 percent of American households have $10,000 or more in stocks. But for most of the folks who suffered the biggest fall in the Great Recession’s start, back in autumn 2008, economic security is hard to find. Wages are stagnant, and actually slightly less than at the end of 2009.

Asked about the issues that will dominate the 2014 races, the heads of the NRCC and DCCC tell Chuck Todd the economy first, before Obamacare and immigration (admittedly related to the state of the economy), gun control, social issues, etc. The issue of our continuing economic troubles never went away; it’s just that the narrative-setters lost interest. To the political class of both parties, the pain is far away (Washington’s economy is comparatively thriving, even in the Age of Sequester) and their preferred options are blocked by the opposition’s role in government.

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer assures us, “Over the next several weeks, the President will deliver speeches that touch on the cornerstones of what it means to be middle class in America: job security, a good education, a home to call your own, affordable health care when you get sick, and the chance to save for a secure, dignified retirement.”

What holds back the economy?

• Companies are reluctant to hire the long-term unemployed.
• The increase in home ownership during the past decade made it tougher for workers to relocate for new opportunities in other places.
• Those who are classified “long-term unemployed” have generally lost skills that kept them competitive in the job market; folks who made a good living as Realtors during the housing boom have a tough time participating in, say, the fracking boom.
• Washington and state governments love certain industries — e.g. green-jobs programs that meet 55 percent of their job-placement targets — and hate others, e.g., EPA officials who compare their approach to oil companies to crucifixion.
• Obamacare’s regulations make part-time workers more economically attractive to employers than full-time workers.
• At the beginning of the year, payroll taxes went up, amounting to a 2 percent reduction in most Americans’ take-home pay.

These problems are not likely to be solved by another big-spending “jobs” bill; some of them are probably beyond the capacity of Washington to solve. But the president needs to say something about it — so he will give more speeches, and assure his followers that “if those mean House Republicans would just pass another version of the stimulus I passed in 2009, everything would be fine.”

The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt features unprintable words about San Diego mayor Bob Filner, new fundraising numbers in Virginia’s Senate race, a thought on stereotyping after the George Zimmerman trial, and then this thought on the “nuclear option” before the Senate . . . 

Save the Earth; Recycle the Opposition’s Old Arguments on the Filibuster

Ah, filibuster debates. So predictable.

Every Republican who wants to keep the filibuster and the current rules in place, just cite the arguments of this guy:

What [the American people] don’t expect is for one party — be it Republican or Democrat — to change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet.

The American people want less partisanship in this town, but everyone in this chamber knows that the majority chooses to end the filibuster. If they choose to change the rules and put an end to democratic debate, then the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse.

We need to rise above the “ends justify the means” mentality because we’re here to answer to the people — all of the people — not just the ones that are wearing our particular party label.

If the right of free and open debate is taken away from the minority party, and the millions of Americans who asked us to be their voice, I fear that the already partisan atmosphere in Washington will be poisoned to the point where no one will be able to agree on anything. That doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests, and it certainly isn’t what the patriots who founded this democracy had in mind. We owe the people who sent us here more than that – we owe them much more.

Those words are from then-Senator Barack Obama, speaking April 13, 2005.

Then again, maybe they can point to the arguments of this other guy:

The filibuster is not a scheme and it certainly isn’t new. The filibuster is far from a procedural gimmick. It’s part of the fabric of this institution we call the Senate. It was well-known in colonial legislatures before we became a country, and it’s an integral part of our country’s 214-year history. The first filibuster in the United States Congress happened in 1790. It was used by lawmakers from Virginia and South Carolina who were trying to prevent Philadelphia from hosting the first Congress.

Since then, the filibuster has been employed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. It’s been employed on legislative matters, it’s been employed on procedural matters relating to the president’s nominations for Cabinet and sub-Cabinet posts, and it’s been used on judges for all those years. One scholar estimates that 20 percent of the judges nominated by presidents have fallen by the wayside, most of them as a result of filibusters. Senators have used the filibuster to stand up to popular presidents, to block legislation, and, yes, even, as I’ve stated, to stall executive nominees. The roots of the filibuster are found in the Constitution and in our own rules.

That, of course . . . is Senator Harry Reid of Nevada back in 2005.

Come on. We all know that any Senate Majority Leader with more than 50 votes but less than 60 votes is going to want to get rid of the filibuster, and any minority leader is going to want to keep it. Neither party has held 60 or more U.S. Senate seats since 1979. Democrats came close in the 111th Congress (the delay in Al Franken’s swearing-in, and the deaths of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, all complicated the Democrats’ effort to control 60 seats) ; the Republicans had 55 in the 109th Congress. For the foreseeable future, most Senate majorities will have between 50 and 60 votes.

If you’re Harry Reid, the current intolerable situation means you need to hold your 53 votes together, keep Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine on board, and then get five Republican senators to go along. That may not be easy, but it’s hardly “Mission: Impossible.” Put simply, pick five out of the following: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Susan Collins of Maine, Jeffrey Chiesa of New Jersey, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. As we all know, John McCain of Arizona, Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and Orrin Hatch of Utah have been known to buck the party line, depending on the issue.

The 60-vote threshold makes sense depending upon the piece of legislation or the importance of the nominee; it’s usually a bad idea to have a sweeping change rammed through, over sizeable objections, by a bare majority. Call us when the minority demands 60 votes for renaming a post office.

Don’t listen to me, listen to Thomas Jefferson: “Great innovations should not be forced on a slender majority.”

Or for a more modern assessment, try Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

Back in 1993, when Hillary Clinton first tried to reform the nation’s health-insurance system, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about the difficulty of getting such a gargantuan bill passed: “The Senate has its own peculiar ecology,” he told me. “Something like this passes with 75 votes or not at all.” Moynihan was then chairman of the Finance Committee, the Senate’s natural choke point for big social-engineering schemes. He was worried that the Clintons, especially the First Lady, were being stubborn, trying to jam their bill through with a bare majority rather than build a bipartisan consensus.

Of course, if you subscribe to President Calvin Coolidge’s belief that “it is more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” the filibuster is a beautiful, noble tool.

I’m amazed there isn’t more vocal scoffing and eye-rolling when President Obama offers meaningless blather like this:

We’ve got to have the brightest minds to help solve our biggest challenges. And it’s a reminder that in this democracy, we the people recognize that this government belongs to us, and it’s up to each of us and every one of us to make it work better. We can’t just stand on the sidelines. We can’t take comfort in just being cynical. We all have a stake in government success — because the government is us.

Wait, why is it “up to each of us and every one of us” to make the government work better?

I didn’t sign up for that job. You probably didn’t, either. The folks who run the government never seem all that interested in my suggestions about how to get it to work better, anyway.

I’ve got other stuff to do besides making an effort to make the federal government work better. You probably do, too.

I thought he spent most of 2007–08 telling us that he was the one who could get the federal government to work better, and then spent 2012 telling us we had to keep him in that job. Now he’s saying that “better” will require effort from . . . everyone. Apparently none of us are allowed to “stand on the sidelines,” or else the whole thing won’t work.

In fact, Obama says at the beginning, “as anyone knows, dealing with the federal government is not always high-technology and it’s not always user-friendly . . . Currently, when our government asks for bids on a project, it’s usually written in complicated language with complicated requirements that most people don’t understand.” Well, we didn’t write those forms. (Okay, I didn’t write those forms, and you probably didn’t.) Why is he saying we have to fix it?

You’re never going to get “each of us and every one of us” to agree on the best way to make the federal government work better. So if this idea really requires “each of us and every one of us” to pitch in to make it work, maybe we should scrap it. If the federal government really can’t work any better than this without every single American working towards the same goal, maybe we should scrap our current approach, set priorities on what we really need the federal government to do, and leave all the extra stuff to the states, local governments, the private sector, or nonprofits. Because when “everybody” is responsible, no one is responsible.

“The government is us.” No, it isn’t. I don’t work for the government. You may or may not. I may have voted for you, I may not have voted for you, but I don’t become a part of the government by voting. The identity of “government” — i.e., having a role in making and enforcing policy decisions — is quite separate from citizen.

I suppose nobody really listens to this sort of stuff from the president, anyway. This is just the speechwriting equivalent of elevator Muzak, pretty words and phrases strung together to sound good, regardless of whether or not they make sense.

If Obama really wants the federal government to work better, he could fill some of those empty inspector-general positions.

“Mr. President, the NSA domestic-surveillance program reports that there are still some Americans who are standing on the sidelines, refusing to help the federal government work better.”

Oh, there’s President Obama’s job-approval rating, down there.

Hmm.

Bit of a rough patch, Mr. President?

Buyer’s remorse kicking in?

The front page of the Washington Post declares: “the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior U.S. officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false.”

Since those of us outside of government have no way to independently verify what we’re told about domestic surveillance programs, every lie makes it tougher to swallow that whole “trust me” line.

The article features a sample of some of that tough congressional oversight and scrutiny that we’re constantly hearing about:

Jane Harman, a former ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that speaking about secret programs can be a “minefield” for public officials.

“Are people deliberately misleading other people? I suppose it can happen,” Harman said in an interview. Facts can be obscured through “selective declassification that means you put out some pieces but not others,” she said. “But I assume most people are acting in good faith.”

Reassuring to know that the former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee recognizes that it is theoretically possible for espionage professionals to lie.

I return from vacation with an epic Morning Jolt, if I may say. There’s a look at the massive protesting crowds in Egypt, a dissection of the Paula Deen controversy, three key paragraphs from a particular book you’ve heard a lot about lately, and more pictures and one-liners than usual.

Man, You Europeans Were a Bunch of Suckers for Obama’s 2008 Rhetoric.

Hope and change, baby! Back in 2008, Germans overcome with enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential nominee referred to their own country as “Obamaland.”

Now . . . well, I’ll let this picture from AFP sum it up:

“Stasi 2.0.” Dang, that’s going to leave a mark. Obama’s just lucky that these latest revelations broke after he gave his overhyped Brandenburg speech.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA has been going through the phones, computers, and who knows what else of European Union officials. If European politicians were any angrier, they would be commenting on Daily Kos. They’re so mad, Islamic Rage Boy is telling them to calm down. Alec Baldwin is imploring them to not lose their temper.

Really, they’re ticked:

Senior European Union officials are outraged by revelations that the US spied on EU representations in Washington and New York. Some have called for a suspension of talks on the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement.

Europeans are furious. Revelations that the US intelligence service National Security Agency (NSA) targeted the European Union and several European countries with its far-reaching spying activities have led to angry reactions from several senior EU and German politicians.

EU and German politicians on Sunday, however, were reacting primarily to the revelations that the US had specifically targeted the 27-member bloc with its surveillance activities. “If these reports are true, then it is abhorrent,” said Luxembourgian Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn. “It would seem that the secret services have gotten out of control. The US should monitor their own secret services rather than their allies.”

Asselborn characterized the operation as a breach of trust. “The US justifies everything as being part of the fight against terrorism. But the EU and its diplomats are not terrorists. We need a guarantee from the very highest level that it stops immediately.”

A guarantee from the president of the United States that we will no longer collect intelligence on officials in EU countries? “Bzzz! Sorry Hans, wrong guess. Would you like to go for Double Jeopardy where the scores can really change?”

If you’re a European diplomat, and you didn’t already assume that your phone calls, e-mails, and files are constantly being targeted by intelligence agencies from all kinds of countries, hostile and friendly and everything in between . . . well then, fire your counterintelligence staff. Welcome to the real world, Hans. If you’re got information worth having, then somebody, somewhere, is trying to get it.

There’s a line of dialogue from Heat: “Assume they got our phones, assume they got our houses, assume they got us, right here, right now as we sit, everything. Assume it all.” It’s good advice for anyone connected with sensitive information, because even if U.S. intelligence agencies never contemplated snooping in those EU diplomats’ files, the Russians, Chinese, and who knows who else did it, and continue to do it, too. You’re only as secure as your countermeasures.

As an American, I’m not particularly bothered by the NSA giving a technological colonoscopy to every electronic gadget used by every European diplomat. That’s just good old-fashioned intelligence-gathering. The U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment doesn’t say Jacques merde about unreasonable searches on foreign officials.

Of course, it doesn’t bother me because I’m not a European diplomat and I never really thought Obama was the embodiment of hope and change. If I had gone to that big rally in Berlin in 2008 and told my constituents that this president really was the polar opposite of George W. Bush in all the ways that mattered to those kumbaya-minded Europeans, well . . . yeah, I’d feel like a fool, too.

Let’s close with a few words from Obama’s speech in Berlin:

Even as we remain vigilant about the threat of terrorism, we must move beyond a mindset of perpetual war. And in America, that means redoubling our efforts to close the prison at Guantanamo. (Applause.) It means tightly controlling our use of new technologies like drones. It means balancing the pursuit of security with the protection of privacy. (Applause.)
 
And I’m confident that that balance can be struck. I’m confident of that, and I’m confident that working with Germany, we can keep each other safe while at the same time maintaining those essential values for which we fought for.
 
Our current programs are bound by the rule of law, and they’re focused on threats to our security — not the communications of ordinary persons.

Congratulations, EU officials. We don’t think you’re ordinary!

No NSA records were used in the research for this BarackObama.com fundraising message; it just feels that way. Jon Carson, executive director of Organizing for Action, wants you to know he and his staff have been checking up on you:

I just got a list of everyone who’s pitching in to build Organizing for Action — and it looks like you’re not part of it.

Here’s the record we have for this exact email address:

    — Organizing for Action member: No
    — Suggested donation today: $5

So here I am, on the Sunday morning of the biggest deadline we’ve faced as a young organization, and I’m asking you, earnestly and directly:

Please chip in $5 or more to build OFA today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Sunday-Deadline

We have so many big fights we want to take on, and what we do depends on the resources we have at midnight tonight.

I hope you’ll help.

Thanks,

Jon

Jon Carson
Executive Director
Organizing for Action

The e-mail’s subject line: “Is this a mistake?”

“Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.” — President Barack Obama, April 2009.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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.”

Tim Miller of America Rising PAC examined Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign rhetoric and finds, “Secretary Clinton served as a senior member of a national security team that was implementing surveillance programs she once vocally opposed.”

He cites several examples, but perhaps the most glaring is from a 2005 fundraising e-mail that declared, “I am resolved to keep speaking out about my disagreements with this administration and their congressional allies: a budget that cuts back on health care . . . Cronyism and incompetence . . . weaken the social fabric of our nation. A secret program that spies on Americans!”

A secret program that spies on Americans! Yeah, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it, Madam Secretary?

Their graphic: