The Commentariat -- June 13, 2013

I won't be able to do any more today, but I should be back at work more-or-less full-time tomorrow. Thanks for your patience. -- Marie

Lee Ferran & Akito Fujita of ABC News: "Alleged NSA leaker Edward Snowden claimed today to have evidence that the U.S. government has been hacking into Chinese computer networks since at least 2009 -- an effort he said is part of the tens of thousands of hacking operations American cyber spies have launched around the world... The South China Morning Post reported it had conducted a lengthy interview with the 29-year-old former NSA contractor.... The Post said Snowden provided documents, which the paper described as 'unverified,' that he said showed U.S. cyber operations targeting a Hong Kong university, public officials and students in the Chinese city. The paper said the documents also indicate hacking attacks targeting mainland Chinese targets, but did not reveal information about Chinese military systems." ...

     ... The New York Times story, by Keith Bradsher, is here. The Guardian story, by Ewen MacAskill & Tania Branigan, is here. ...

     ... CW: I would say this revelation helps answer the question my local paper asked this morning: Snowden, traitor or hero? I cannot see how U.S. citizens benefit from this latest revelation, & there are obvious downsides. ...

... Andrew Rafferty of NBC News: "The expansive government surveillance programs made public last week have helped prevent 'dozens' of terrorist attacks, National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander told a Senate committee Wednesday. It is unclear, however, what specific surveillance practices helped thwart the alleged plots. And Alexander, an Army general, was quick to clarify that in most cases multiple programs have successfully been used together to stop attacks both in the United States and abroad." ...

     ... The Washington Post story, by Ellen Nakashima & Jerry Markon, is here.

... Ed Pilkington & Nicholas Watt of the Guardian: "Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA's vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role, if any, in foiling the attacks." ...

... Not too worried about the Obama administration's little lapses? Paul Waldman of the American Prospect is: "when President Paul Ryan or whoever takes office and meets with his national security team, what he'll say is, 'Let's see here. I can get every American's phone records, I can read their emails, I can send drones out to kill an American citizen anywhere in the world if I decide that person is a threat, and hell, I can even start a little war without bothering to get Congress' permission if I want to. I'll certainly be using these powers with restraint -- 'ha ha!' And don't forget that when that next Republican president does come along, his administration is going to be stocked to the gills with people who worked for George W. Bush, just because that's how things work in Washington." ...

... Obama 2.0. Karen DeYoung & Greg Miller of the Washington Post: "The CIA's deputy director plans to retire and will be replaced by White House lawyer and agency outsider Avril D. Haines, Director John O. Brennan said Wednesday. Haines, who will succeed career officer Michael Morell on Aug. 9, has served for three years as President Obama's deputy counsel in charge of national security issues and as legal adviser to the National Security Council.... The surprise move gives Brennan an ally in the CIA's executive suite who helped him with the revision of drone-campaign rules that was recently announced by Obama. Unlike an agency insider, Haines has no direct investment in any of the counterterrorism programs that Brennan has indicated he will seek to rein in."

Michael McAuliff & Sabrina Siddiqui in the Huffington Post: some GOP Senators -- e.g., Mitch McConnell -- who thought gun background checks were way too intrusive are A-okay with NSA surveillance of Americans' phone records. CW: nice to know that consistency is not among the hobgoblins of their little minds.

The Grand Old Misogynist Party, Ctd.

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday signed off on a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The bill would narrow the window currently set out by federal law and the Supreme Court, which bans most abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Some Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed similar laws in recent months. The bill passed committee by a 20-12 vote and is headed for the House floor." ...

... Dana Milbank: "... the nameplates on the majority side told the story: Mr. Goodlatte. Mr. Sensenbrenner. Mr. Coble. Mr. Smith. Mr. Chabot. Mr. Bachus. Mr. Issa. Mr. Forbes. Mr. King. Mr. Franks. In all, the nameplates of 23 misters lined both rows on the GOP side; there isn't one Republican woman on the panel. The guys muscled through a bill that, should it become law, would upend Roe v. Wade by effectively banning all abortions after 20 weeks."

Congressional Races

David Bernstein of Boston Daily: President Obama traveled to Massachusetts to a get-out-the-vote rally for U.S. Senate candidate Ed Markey.

Gail Collins on Michael Bloomberg's brilliant plan to defeat anti-gun-safety Democratic Senators Mark Pryor (Arkansas) & Mark Begich (Alaska), thus greatly increasing the likelihood that the entire Senate will fall to the Grand Ole Shoot-'em-up Party. Here's the ad against Pryor:

... Here's Mark Pryor's response. CW: I'm not sure the Mayors Against Gun Violence ad will hurt him a great deal in Arkansas:

News Ledes

Orlando Sentinel: "The judge presiding over George Zimmerman's trial in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin announced Thursday that the jury will be sequestered. None has yet been seated in the case...."

AP: "An argument inside a St. Louis home health care business escalated into gun violence Thursday when a man shot three other people before turning the gun on himself, police said. The shooting occurred at AK Home Health Care LLC.... Authorities said the shooter either owned or was a co-owner of the small business and his three victims were employees."

The Commentariat -- June 12, 2013

I know there's lots more out there, but I haven't time to look for it today. Please use the Comments section to share what you find. Thanks. -- CW

Seung Min Kim of Politico: "The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly agreed to launch a major effort to rewrite U.S. immigration laws, setting the stage for weeks of debate on securing the nation's borders, legalizing undocumented residents and modernizing the country's immigration system. Senators voted 82-15 to move forward on the Gang of Eight immigration bill; 60 votes were needed for passage. All 15 votes against the motion were from Republicans. The bill cleared a second procedural vote later Tuesday." ...

... Suicide by Bigotry. Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg News: " ... it's impossible to know how effectively [House Speaker John] Boehner can manage his unruly troops -- or how far to the right his definition of 'immigration bill' will ultimately be. Last week, House Republicans voted to overturn President Barack Obama's executive order enabling young undocumented immigrants -- who had been brought to the U.S. as children -- to avoid deportation. As policy, the vote was pointlessly cruel. As politics, it was disastrous, targeting the most sympathetic group of undocumented immigrants for punishment, and revealing a Republican rank and file marching behind their most virulently anti-immigrant colleagues. Writing in U.S. News under the headline 'A Finger in the Eye of Hispanic Voters,' Robert Schlesinger asked the obvious question: 'Does this party have a death wish?' We'll soon learn the answer." ...

Markos Moulitsas: it'll be a blue Texas soon, & anti-immigration stances like Ted Cruz's could speed up the state's metamorphosis.

The Grand Old Misogynist Party

Awwwk-ward! Scott Shane & Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "For years, intelligence officials have tried to debunk what they called a popular myth about the National Security Agency: that its electronic net routinely sweeps up information about millions of Americans.... Since the disclosures last week showing that the agency does indeed routinely collect data on the phone calls of millions of Americans, Obama administration officials have struggled to explain what now appear to have been misleading past statements." ...

... Fred Kaplan of Slate: "If President Obama really does welcome a debate about the scope of the U.S. surveillance program, a good first step would be to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, 'Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?' Clapper replied, 'No sir ... not wittingly.;' As we all now know, he was lying." ...

... Dan Roberts, et al., of the Guardian: "Anger was mounting in Congress on Tuesday night as politicians, briefed for the first time after revelations about the government's surveillance dragnet, vowed to rein in a system that one said amounted to 'spying on Americans'." ...

... Adam Serwer of NBC News: "Seeking to drag the shadowy world of U.S. national security law into the light, a bipartisan group of senators has proposed a bill that would declassify significant legal opinions reached by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court is charged with approving intelligence agency requests for surveillance on suspected foreign agents." ...

... Sahil Kapur of TPM: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) both defended the National Security Agency's surveillance program on Tuesday." ...

... Craig Timberg & Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post: "Technology companies stung by the controversy over the National Security Agency's sweeping Internet surveillance program are calling on U.S. officials to ease the secrecy surrounding national security investigations and lift long-standing gag orders covering the nature and extent of information collected about Internet users." ...

... Do We Really Need to Know This? Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post: "U.S. intelligence operatives covertly sabotaged a prominent al-Qaeda online magazine last month in an apparent attempt to sow confusion among the group's followers, according to officials." As Robert Chesney & Benjamin Wittes pointed out, the Post's story on PRISM (but not the Guardian's) was likely damaging to national security. This one can't be helpful, either.

Twivial Pursuits. Maureen Dowd is so past Obambi & is throttling up the old Clinton scandal train, this time focussing on Hillary's new Twitter account, which she morphs into something to do with a U.S. ambassador & prostitutes.

The Commentariat -- June 11, 2013

My postings will be light & sporadic for a time & I'll do most of them in the wee hours. I doubt I will be doing any news ledes. Please stick with me. I'll be back. -- Constant Weader

** Okay, I'll Freak Out Over This. Steven Mufson of the Washington Post: "Global emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use rose 1.4 percent to 31.6 gigatons in 2012, setting a record and putting the planet on course for temperature increases well above international climate goals, the International Energy Agency said in a report scheduled to be issued Monday. The agency said continuing that pace could mean a temperature increase over pre-industrial times of as much as 5.3 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), which IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned 'would be a disaster for all countries.'" ...

... When is an an unelected dictator of a repressive Communist regime more responsible and progressive than Congressional Republicans? Steve Benen has one answer.

Michael Shear & Pam Belluck of the New York Times: "The Obama administration has decided to stop trying to block over-the-counter availability of the best-known morning-after contraceptive pill for all women and girls, a move fraught with political repercussions for President Obama. The government's decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription." CW: Thank you, Judge Edward Korman. (Korman is a 70-year-old Reagan appointee who "angrily accused the administration of blocking the drug because of politics, not science, and ordered [HHS Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius to reverse her decision.")

Michael Schmidt, et al., of the New York Times: "As Justice Department officials began the process Monday to charge Edward J. Snowden, a 29-year-old former C.I.A. computer technician, with disclosing classified information, he checked out of a hotel in Hong Kong where he had been holed up for several weeks, according to two American officials. It was not clear where he went." ...

... How'd He Do That? Peter Finn, et al., of the Washington Post: "Counterintelligence investigators are scrutinizing how a 29-year-old contractor who said he leaked top-secret National Security Agency documents was able to gain access to what should be highly compartmentalized information.... Among the questions is how a contract employee at a distant NSA satellite office [in Hawaii] was able to obtain a copy of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a highly classified document that would presumably be sealed from most employees and of little use to someone in his position." ...

... Cloak & Rubik's Cube. Charlie Savage & Mark Mazzetti on the course of conversations among Snowden, Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian, Barton Gellman of the Washington Post & documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. ...

... Irin Carmon of Salon interviews Poitras. ...

... Oh, and here's a surprise: Glenn Greenwald is pissed off at Barton Gellman. Everybody pisses off Greenwald -- and he's quick to say so. ...

... Eli Lake of the Daily Beast: "Even before last week's revelations by The Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting call records from telecommunications companies and had the ability to mine user data from major U.S. Internet companies, the NSA was already on the trail of the leaker, according to two former U.S. intelligence officers with close ties to the agency.... The people who began chasing Snowden work for the Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence, according to former U.S. intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The directorate, sometimes known as 'the Q Group,' is continuing to track Snowden.... Snowden's disappearance in May was immediately noticed by the directorate, and when The Guardian published the first court order and then documents associated with a program called PRISM, Snowden immediately became the leading suspect in the leak...."

... Spies R Us. Robert O'Harrow, et al., of the Washington Post: "The unprecedented leak of top-secret documents by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden raises far-reaching questions about the government's rush to outsource intelligence work to contractors since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.... In the rush to fill jobs, the government has relied on faulty procedures to vet intelligence workers, documents and interviews show. At the same time, intelligence agencies have not hired enough in-house government workers to manage and oversee the contractors, contracting specialists said. On Monday, lawmakers said they will examine Snowden's hiring and the growing use of private companies for intelligence work." ...

... Alan Travis of the Guardian: "Leading Europeans, from Angela Merkel down to information chiefs across the continent, are lining up to grill American counterparts on the Prism surveillance programmes, amid mounting fury that the private information of EU nationals will have been caught up in the data dragnet. With Merkel set to bring up the issue with Barack Obama next week, and the European commission vice-president, Viviane Reding, eager to grill US officials at a meeting in Dublin on Friday, the issue looks set to dominate a week of summitry. Reding, who is responsible for data protection in Europe, is to seek clarification on whether the access to personal data in the Prism programme is limited to individual cases, is based on concrete suspicion or if wider sets of data are being accessed." ...

... ** Dana Milbank: "As the administration and some in Congress vent their anger about leaks to The Post and to Britain's Guardian newspaper, officials have only themselves to blame. It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst. Instead of allowing a democratic debate about the programs in broad terms that would not have compromised national security, their attempts to keep the public in the dark have created a backlash in which the risks to national security can't be controlled." Read the whole column. ...

... Scott Shane & Jonathan Weisman & of the New York Times on why we're not going to be having that "healthy debate" about secret data collection. ...

... Jeff Toobin of the New Yorker: Edward Snowden is "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.... What, one wonders, did Snowden think the N.S.A. did? Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications.... The Post decided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden'." ...

... Robert Chesney & Benjamin Wittes in The New Republic: most of the revelations in the Post & Guardian stories were unsurprising -- they were what a person who read the law would suspect was going on. But what is surprising about the Snowden leaks is "that the government thinks it already has this authority under Section 215 ... to create giant datasets of telephony metadata that might later be queried..., and still more so that the FISA Court agrees and that members of Congress know this as well." ...

... Michael Kelley in Business Insider: "... the NSA is continuing to intercept and analyze an estimated 1.7 billion U.S. electronic communications each day." CW: this is not Kelley's point, but the volume of communications he cites should convince Americans that no NSA employee or contractor is sitting back in an NSA cubbyhole poring over their private correspondence. ...

... Steve Benen analyzes the public's views. CW: I would add that it may take a while for people to decide what to make of the disclosures. (It's taking me a while.) What the public thinks today could change in a month or two, as more (a) clarity & (b) demagoguery enter the mainstream consciousness.

Erika Eichelberger in Mother Jones: "Rejecting health care money for poor mentally ill people is an extremely costly way for states to stick it to the Obama administration." But 17 states are doing just that, even though many of them are already have the among the worst mental-healthcare systems in the country. ...

     ... BTW, I wonder if Elena Kagan & Steven Breyer are sleeping well, knowing that they helped enable 17 states to make poor people even more unequal than others. And, thanks, John Roberts (not to mention the other Fourth Dancing Tenthers), for the brilliant interpretation of the Constitution. Maybe you seven dwarfs should all go stand out in front of that monstrous Supreme Court building, look up at the entablature where inscribed in stone for some odd reason is the phrase "equal justice under law," scratch your chins, and ask yourselves just what the fuck that means.

The Grand Old White Party is still the GOWP. You knew that, of course, but Alex Roarty of the National Journal puts some detail to it: "... an early examination of the party's 2014 efforts shows that Republicans have yet to begin writing new pages for their old playbook. Efforts to expand the map by fielding candidates in diverse states have so far been stymied.... The GOP's midterm strategy will rely heavily on whites, especially those without a college education, and particularly in rural states where its presidential candidates win easily."

John Boehner, Immigration Reformer? ...

     ... Jonathan Chait says yes. ...

     ... Ed Kilgore is skeptical.