Social Security Reforms and Outrage!

It's hard to take seriously anything that is said during State of Union Addresses. After all it wasn't that long ago that President Clinton proclaimed that "....The era of big government is over." No one believed it when it was said, it was even viewed as silliness. Again last evening the Democratic side of the aisle attempted to be silly when they stood and cheered that no progress was made on Social Security reform. This moment was lost on me! In fact it's absolutely insulting to think that our representatives would take such a serious issue, one could even say crisis, so lightly. It's one thing not to agree with the President's reform proposals, it's another stop debate because your party is lacking the talent to come up with alternative solutions! The President deserves credit for keeping this issue at the forefront and was 100 % correct last night when he said that the problem was not going to go away.

The Elections in Palestine

"...I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have a -- if your party has got an armed wing. The elections just took place. We will watch very carefully about the formation of the government. But I will continue to remind people about what I just said, that if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace. ....."

-President Bush - January 26,2006

The results of the Palestinian elections, where the Hamas Party scored a landslide victory, assures that the Middle East Peace Process will be forever altered. One has to wonder if the effect on the peace process means a turn for the worst or for the better? It's hard to sing praises for Hamas, and I am not going to do it here. Hamas is a violent terrorist group, plain and simple. Until they publicly change their platform calling for the destruction of Israel we should have nothing to do with them. I think we need to keep in mind that for all the efforts of endless peace conferences, negotiations and economic persausion, nothing might be more effective in changing Hamas' behavior than to have to carry the mantel of responsibility to bring a better life to the Palestinian people.

Are we to believe that 75% of the Palestinian electorate believes that the destruction of Israel is the most pressing issue in their lives? I think not. In 30 years the Palestine refugee issue has not gotten much better, they remain a very poor people. President Bush made this point when he stated, "When you give people the vote, you give people a chance to express themselves at the polls -- and if they're unhappy with the status quo, they'll let you know."

Even cities like Jenin and al-Birch, urban areas where some economic development has occurred, gave victories to Hamas representatives. Khalid Amayreh explained in the Palestine Times,”The people here have been fed up with rampant chaos and lawlessness, as well as the PA’s failure to fight numerous aspects of corruption like graft, nepotism, favoritism, cronyism and above all the manifestly serious abuse of governance."

For decades the Palestinians have been victimized, not by Israel, but by the self appointed body of the PLO, lead by Yassar Arafat and his cronies. The PLO leadership talked of wanting peace, talked of wanting a Palestine homeland and was rewarded with billions of dollars in economic aid. Arafat realized the more he talked the richer he and his friends could be. There was no incentive for Arafat to actual solved the problems facing his people, these problems were making him and his friends rich. While I am not happy with Hamas taking over the Palestine Authority, I am glad that a change occurred.

I can't begin to predict how Hamas is going to react with this new found power, but I didn't have any faith in the old guard to act on behalf of the Palestinians either. If you believe that the majority of Palestinian people want a better life and not war with Israel, you can only hope that Hamas realizes that the only true way to retain power in the next election is to change the status quo.

NSA Spy Program

I just wanted to weigh in on the NSA spy program that President Bush authorized. I’ll be honest, I don’t know what the heck to think about this, the reporting in the mainstream media has been just terrible.

It seems clear that Article II in the Constitution has empowered the President to take such action to keep the citizens of this country safe in the time of war in his role as Commander-in-Chief. In addition, Congress, by overwhelmingly approving Joint Resolution 23, states:

“That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines, planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Even though JR 23 never called for Congressional oversight (the Joint Resolution authorizing military action in Iraq did) the Bush Administration met with the Congressional Leadership more than a dozen times. That’s more than once every other month. It appears to me (based on just reading the documents – I am not a Constitution Scholar), that in the legal sense the White House didn’t do anything wrong, but ethics of authorization of eavesdropping on suspected terrorists without obtaining a warrant might be another issue. Here is where the mainstream media has let this country down. When the New York Times first reported the story on December 16, conveniently the day of Iraqi Elections, it’s clear to me that they were more interested in creating a new headline with the sole intention of embarrassing the President.

In the late 70’s Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) so that the FBI, NSA or CIA can request warrants to guard against foreign agents. The New York Times reported that in 2004 over 1700 warrants were approved. Though the Times did report that in some cases, warrants for emergency wiretaps can be obtained in a matter of hours, they never did offer any average for how long the FISA warrant process can take or would emergency warrants were able to be obtained for intercepting email and other wireless communications. Outside of the fact that the White House didn’t feel that they were legally obligated to obtain warrants for foreign communications, the timeliness of the process is the major reason why the President authorized such actions.

When the White House issues a statement such as “....We need agility and speed. We need to be able to move quickly to detect and prevent attacks….” As they do at every press briefing since December 20 (and there have been 13 since December 16), it doesn’t take a genius to ask the most obvious followup question…..”Well, exactly how long does it take to get the average warrant from FISA?” Duh! To this day I don’t have that answer and why I can’t judge the ethics of this issue.

Now this maybe cynical to say about the mainstream media, but since they are not pursuing the issue I can only assume that it's not as easy as one would think, otherwise they would be hammering Bush on that every day.