2010 Elections, Political News

In the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Special Operations Command sent intelligence officers and special operations forces to Afghanistan, making them the first American boots on the ground. Now, with the official end of the Iraq War and the upcoming withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, it is becoming clear that the first ones in will be the last ones out. As the U.S. military begins to shift away from combat missions in Afghanistan over the coming two years, instead focusing on advising Afghan forces, CIA paramilitary operations officers and Defense Department special operations forces will increasingly work together to protect U.S. interests long after conventional U.S. troops have left. “The question that has to be asked is, once the regular troops leave Afghanistan, under what authorities are those special operations troops and intelligence forces going to operate, and what missions are they going to be doing,” said Rick Nelson , a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s something that I think needs to be defined. This authority question affects what these forces can do, how they can do it, what their resources are, and what their oversight will be.” Nelson, who spoke with Trend Lines about how the CIA and Defense Department delegate and collaborate in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, began by describing their differences in terms of congressional oversight. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence oversee the CIA, Nelson said. And the executive branch, through the National Security Council, also provides the agency with guidance and direction. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees oversee military special operations, he continued, adding that troops in Afghanistan are subject to Title 10 of the United States Code , under which military force is applied. These committees often collaborate, explained Nelson, to make sure these forces leverage their strengths and avoid overlap.

FBI Director Robert Mueller called cyber threats the top future threat facing America in testimony this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee, InformationWeek reports. The broad range of online threats, both from state and non-state actors,

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FBI Director Warns of Rising Cyber Threat

Last week’s tax negotiations demonstrate just how much John Boehner has lost control of the House, from declaring the deal with Democrats a victory to suddenly disowning it just a few days later (after tea partiers balked). KEY DATES IN BOEHNER PAYROLL TAX CUT DEBACLE o WEDNESDAY: Speaker Boehner sat at a meeting in Senator McConnell’s office last Wednesday with Senator McConnell and Senator Reid. Speaker Boehner said the two Senate leaders should negotiate a deal, and that Senator McConnell would have his proxy. o THURSDAY: Speaker Boehner made public comments promising to live by whatever agreement the Senate reached. He said, “If the Senate acts, I’m committed to bringing the House back—we can do it within 24 hours—to deal with whatever the Senate does.” o FRIDAY: Speaker Boehner reacted to reports that we may have to settle on a two-month extension by saying if the Senate passed that, he would take it, add the Keystone pipeline provision to it, and send it back to the Senate. So we added the pipeline into the deal in the Senate because that’s what Speaker Boehner said he needed to get the measure through the House. o FRIDAY NIGHT: After Senator McConnell presents the payroll tax deal to his caucus, he is captured on video leaving the caucus “high fiving” a fellow Republican. Later Senator McConnell tells reporters, “Obviously I keep the Speaker informed as to what I’m doing.” o SATURDAY: McConnell calls payroll tax cut compromise a bill designed to pass. McConnell said, “I thank my friend, the Majority Leader, for the opportunity to work together with him on something that could actually pass the Senate and be signed by the President.” o SATURDAY: Speaker Boehner called the deal a “good deal” and a “victory”. According to reports, he urged his caucus to declare victory and pass it, on a conference call. o SATURDAY AFTERNOON: Senator McConnell gave his consent to allow the Senate to adjourn for the year. o SUNDAY: Once Tea Party Republicans in his caucus rebelled, Speaker Boehner reversed course and is now disowning the deal he had supported 24 hours earlier. – Source: Democratic Policy and Communications Center

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Boehner Not in Charge

Forget the doomsday scenarios for the so-called Super Committee’s failure to agree on debt reduction. Congress set this thing up to fail by making sure the consequences are not really as severe as advertised, leaving plenty of time for lawmakers to change anything they like. And President Obama’s threat today to veto changes is meaningless because even if Congress does nothing right now the automatic cuts that would take effect over the next two years are miniscule. This is such silly political theater it would make Vaudeville blush. It’s why liberals were wrong to assume that President Obama lost a big battle last summer when he agreed to the committee’s creation — and conservatives were wrong to declare victory. Consider the various ways that pain was postponed in the legislation setting up the panel. If the Committee doesn’t produce a bill, the bill is not enacted or the bill produces less than $1.2 trillion in savings, 1) the debt ceiling increases by $1.2 trillion, subject to a disapproval vote, and 2) $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts will be triggered between FY2013-2021. For starters, the disapproval vote on raising the debt ceiling is meaningless. If majorities of the House and Senate try to block the increase President Obama can just veto it, requiring an unlikely two-thirds vote to override. How ironic that the most immediate and certain effect of this much-hyped “debt reduction” strategy is to actually make it easier to borrow more money. Notice that the automatic cuts triggered by failure would not even begin taking effect until after the next election, and are spread out over the next 8 years – more than enough time for Congress to fiddle with, or completely scrap these cuts. If across-the-board cuts are triggered, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other low-income benefits are exempted from cuts. (Exception: Medicare provider payments can be cut by up to 2%.) Half of the cuts will come from defense spending. Here we find that the easy path to avoid major entitlement reform is for this committee to fail. Only Medicare doctors and other providers would be affected by automatic cuts — and their payments would only be cut by no more than two percent. But these automatic payment cuts have been tried many times and Congress usually finds a way out. Basically, the “pain” of failure for this committee was so cleverly postponed and distributed across future years that failing could be the least painful choice for Washington – and that’s no accident. Discretionary Caps $1 trillion in across-the-board discretionary cuts for fiscal years 2012-2021. The cuts are weighted to be the deepest after FY2014. The first two years, the cuts are only $10 billion total and security (defense, homeland security, etc.,) is $5 billion of that. Look carefully at that last sentence. All the boasting by Obama and congressional leaders about immediately cutting $1 trillion really means that the vast majority of the cuts do not even begin until after the next election. The result is that the only immediate budgetary effect of this legislation is $10 billion in cuts over the next two years – such a tiny fraction of overall federal spending that it is hardly worth talking about. Once again Congress managed to dodge a public outcry by appearing to do something until demand for action wanes. It’s about the only thing Capitol Hill does well.

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Failure IS an Option

Sean Holton by Sean Holton Same Time Tomorrow Sept. 10, 2009 Comparing a politician to a poet would be dicey under any conditions. Except for an obscure coincidence in their lives, it would never have occured to me to stand most-powerful-vice-president-in-history Dick Cheney next to world-class-poet-and-mystic Bob Dylan to see how the two stack up in terms of their lifetime achievements as well as their overall contributions to country and humanity. The obscure coincidence: Both men were born in 1941. I mentioned that fact in an earlier post, using the Cheney-Dylan deal as a throwaway example of how issues of aging and generational politics are far more complex these days than what you see portrayed in typical media coverage of politics. People such as Cheney tend to be treated as “patriots” and “traditional Americans” — who simply by virtue of their age, physical appearance and life experience automatically are assumed to have some sort of direct-dial access to what the Founding Fathers always intended our country to be. People like Dylan really serve only to muddy up that simplistic storyline — at least as far as the television cameras are concerned. We’d rather just think of them as forever young, even as they grow old. So how could such people possibly fit into any conversation about the greatness of our nation as envisioned at its founding so long ago by Men Wearing Knickerbockers? Sean Holton is not only my best friend and a renowned journalist, but a longtime Trail Mix pal. For more than two years he has fought a rough battle against brain cancer and lately we have have been enjoying some of his great writings. — Craig Sure, it may just be a quick illustration of the extremes in sensibility that can be present within just a single generation. But I thought it would be fun to go ahead and push the dichotomy forward. So let’s compare Cheney and Dylan in the 13 key categories that professional historians and everyone else universally agree are important in order to determine which man really is the greater American. As our source material, we’ll use the unassailably reliable Wikipedia biographies of each man supplemented by random snatches from my own memory of the lots of stuff I’ve read over the years about both. (You want real research? Buy a newspaper.) And then we’ll throw the answer right back at the cameras and dare them to film it instead of another town-hall meeting on health-care reform. More of Sean’s writings: A White House Mystery: Lincoln Bedroom Buried in Virginia? One Avenue, Two Faces: White House, Crack House The Last Mile, Cycling Across America Seniority: Cheney has been a living, breathing, sentient human being four months longer than Dylan. THE EDGE: Cheney Humble beginnings: Cheney was born in Nebraska, raised by working-class parents in Wyoming, flunked out at Yale before getting busted for a DWI at age 21 and applied for and received five draft deferrments to avoid military service during the 1960s. Dylan was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota by parents who were both children of Jewish immigrants and he dropped out of the University of Minnesota after his freshman year to move to New York, play the guitar and shag groupies. THE EDGE: Tossup Overall Life Trajectory: Dylan had already achieved worldwide fame and immortality as a folk singer and songwriter by the early 1960s — when he was still in his 20s. He subsequently went through several career transformations — from electric, to born-again, to all sorts of other weirdness, including traveling with the Wilburys and doing voice over for lingerie commercials as well as time more recently as a radio DJ. But enthusiasm for his work has never really diminished. Movies and documentaries are still being made about his life and work. Cheney toiled in relative obscurity as a draft-dodging, snot-nosed intern and low-level Washington bureaucrat until his mid-30s, when around 1975 he succeeded Donald Rumsfeld as President Gerald R. Ford’s White House Chief of Staff. [That same year, Dylan released his critically acclaimed Blood on the Tracks album and could have retired right then, done nothing else for the rest of his life and still been more revered than any of his contemporaries]. Starting in 1979, Cheney served five terms as a Wyoming congressman before becoming Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush after the Senate rejected womanizing drunk John Tower for the job. After spending the Clinton years out of power, he returned to the scene in 2000 when he led George W. Bush’s vice-presidential search team to the conclusion that he, Dick Cheney, was the best man for the job. He then went on to be arguably the most powerful man in America — at least during Bush’s first term. He was running the government and calling most of the shots on the fateful, tragic day of Sept. 11, 2001 and he and his aides shaped the framework for the immediate U.S. response in the so-called “War On Terror” that followed. Today Cheney is seen as the cantankerous, vocal standard-bearer for out-of-power Republicans who can’t stand where the country is going. He might even hate America now. Who knows? THE FINAL ANALYSIS: While Dylan has been famous far longer and has made a contribution likely to be far more enduring, Cheney did succeed fabulously in achieving what he spent a lifetime training for — becoming a world-famous, angry, old man with lots of secrets to protect. THE EDGE: Tossup Vision: Dylan is a modern mystic with an unyielding poetic vision and the musical gifts to express it. At around age 24, he wrote the song “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, which contained the following lines: While preachers preach of evil fates/Teachers teach that knowledge waits/Can lead to hundred-dollar plates/Goodness hides behind its gates/But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have/To stand naked. Cheney has been an incredibly gifted bureaucrat, competent manager and Washington political infighter who never really developed the vision to be a national leader in his own right. During Gulf War I, there was probably no one better qualified than Cheney to be Secretary of Defense. I personally remember being thrilled to have him calling the shots at the Pentagon back then. Yet at the pinnacle of his career, which came with the 9/11 attacks, Cheney had a failure of vision. On an entirely human level, this failure makes him almost a tragic figure. His reaction was to be afraid and to lead GW Bush and the rest of us down the path of fear. For the sake of vast simplicity, let’s just say there were 10 paths the country could have gone down after that day. Nine of those paths were wrong, so maybe we should cut Cheney and Bush some slack for being only human when they picked one of the nine bad ones. After all, there was only one right path, and we still aren’t sure which one it was. But a great leader would have stepped back from the immediate fear, imagined the world we wanted to be in 10 years hence, recognized the right path to get there and chosen it at the beginning. We elect our national leaders because they are supposed to have more than competence and knowledge and power – we expect them to have vision to lead the country. Think about how Roosevelt positioned the United States to face the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, or how Churchill led his nation during the relentless, sustained air attacks (not just four in one day) of the Battle of Britain. THE EDGE: Dylan. Dealing with criticism: Both Dylan and Cheney have been undaunted in the face of withering criticism. Dylan was castigated by the old-line folkies when he plugged in an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and he has been castigated at every turn in his career ever since. But he hasn’t cared. He hasn’t really answered many questions about it and hasn’t been defensive. He’s just gone on doing what he wants to do, for decades. Cheney, too, has been unapologetic in the face of criticism both during and after the Bush Administration about things like war, torture and domestic spying. But he has been a bit too showy as he plows through all this adversity – seeking out speaking engagements in front of friendly audiences and TV appearances to mount his defense over and over again while attacking his successors in office. Dare I say he’s been a bit too defensive? A bit of a martyr? Maybe even a big baby? THE EDGE: Dylan . Overall excellence within their chosen field: Let’s go to the history books for some perspective here. If this were 19th Century America and we were looking for examples of great poets and great political leaders who were rough contemporaries, we’d have to look no further than Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln . History’s verdict is that both easily make the cut as great Americans. Dylan, I think, will be spoken about in the same exalted terms as Whitman in terms of artistry and cultural impact after he’s long gone. But Cheney and Lincoln? In the same conversation? THE EDGE: Dylan . Accidents, having them: Dylan crashed a Triumph street bike in 1969, supposedly breaking several vertebrae, nearly killing himself and taking himself out of the public eye for nearly eight years. He explained the accident by saying he’d been up for days without sleep, and that he had taken his bike out for an early morning ride and was topping a hill facing into the sunrise when, ”I went blind for a second and I kind of panicked or something. I stomped down on the brake and the rear wheel locked up on me and I went flyin’.” Here’s my theory: Dylan was a sissy who didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. I’ve seen pictures of him on his Triumph, and he looks like he has no idea what he’s doing. His feet aren’t even on the footpegs, and his grip on the handlebars makes it seem as if he’s holding a high-voltage power line. In short, he looks like the president of the chess club who has been forced by the guys on the wrestling team to try to ride a motorcycle. No wonder he crashed. Now onto Cheney’s accident: He shotgunned his buddy in the face while out pounding beers and bird hunting in the middle of a big Texas ranch. Then he went back and had a big roast beef dinner. Now THAT’s manly. THE EDGE: Cheney . Accidents, dealing with them: As can be seen from the quote above, Dylan almost literally was able to turn his accident into song lyrics (See: “I went flyin’”). And the rebellious nature of being out on a motorcycle coupled with his disappearance from public view only heightened the overall mystique of his legend. Cheney, on the other hand, shotgunned his buddy in the face while out pounding beers and bird hunting in the middle of a big Texas ranch. Then he went back and had a big roast beef dinner. Now THAT’s dumb. THE EDGE: Dylan . Hard power: This one is simple. It’s just a matter of adding up albums sold and gate receipts and comparing those figures to wars started, nations subjugated, weapons systems funded and lives committed to battle. Look up the numbers yourself. THE EDGE: Cheney . Soft power: When Dylan dies, the world will mourn the passing of a great poet and cultural icon who will probably then be elevated to “prophet” status. Great intellectuals will be called to hold forth on “what Dylan meant.” It will make what we just went through with the recent death of Michael Jackson look like a global cotton-candy binge. People such as Cheney — no matter how much hard power they amassed during their lifetimes — are ultimately only functionaries on history’s stage. When such people die, the world usually just burps and asks what’s for dessert. THE EDGE: Dylan . Who’d win a physical fight: We’re talking about a couple of 68-year-old dudes suiting up in wrestling tights here, so this isn’t going to be pretty no matter how it turns out. But it would all pretty much come down to how much Dylan’s medical history of cigarette smoking, substance abuse, weight fluctuation and those broken vertebrae will handicap him even against a Heart-Attack-A-Year man like Cheney. I don’t have height and current weight stats for either man. But I think I’ll go with Cheney in this category, if for no other reason than he must have learned a lot of cool secret death grips from the CIA and Blackwater over the course of his Washington career. THE EDGE: Cheney . Best dinner companion: I’d rather be seen having dinner with Dylan. But, in reality, I’d be way too scared to actually have dinner with either Cheney or Dylan, for entirely different reasons. So I’m saying neither. THE EDGE: Tossup . Greater apparent ’patriot’ (whatever that means): In the photos I posted up top, Cheney is bald, has an angry look on his face and is wearing an American-flag lapel pin. Dylan has unusual facial hair, an enigmatic look on his face and is wearing a cowboy hat and some sort of sissyfied shirt. THE EDGE: Cheney . PRELIMINARY TALLY: Dylan–5; Cheney–5; Tossup–3. TIEBREAKER 1: Love for America. Bob Dylan has railed about America’s hypocrisy in the past and seems non-commital at best about our country’s place in the world today. But as mentioned above, I think right now Cheney may actually hate what America really is. So I’ll say they’re still tied. TIEBREAKER 2: Whose face would I rather have on my T-Shirt as I drove across America? Or as I traveled around the world? Bob Dylan, no contest. FINAL SCORE: Bob Dylan is a greater American. Sean Holton spent 25 years as an award-winning newspaper journalist. His widely-recognized work as a reporter, writer and editor focused on land development, public policy, politics and governmental issues, including nine years as a Washington DC correspondent and bureau chief for the Orlando Sentinel, and as Associate Managing Editor based in Orlando. Sean holds a master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in English and Political Science from Rockhurst University.

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Dick Cheney vs. Bob Dylan, American Smackdown

He wasn’t asked if it was an endorsement but it sure sounded like one tonight when Jeb Bush singled out Mitt Romney – the only GOP presidential candidate he mentioned by name – and told CNN’s Piers Morgan the former Massachusetts governor is “cool,” “calm,” “quick,” and “agile.” While that might sound more like an endorsement for the next star of a James Bond movie, it was a telling sign that the Bush family, perhaps motivated by their historic dislike for Rick Perry , is ready to climb aboard the Romney train. Bagging the Bushes would help Romney overall in GOP politics (they do have three presidential terms in the house), but it could be hugely significant in South Carolina. The Bush family has long been influential in that state’s pivotal primary and Romney’s New England “charm” doesn’t exactly connect there. He will need to avoid a dampening defeat following a likely win in New Hampshire, his neighbor state (where he’s currently so far ahead that you wonder whether the other hopefuls should even bother campaigning). Then comes Florida in the GOP primary calendar. That’s where Jeb’s kind words could seal the deal for Romney. While no longer governor, Bush is still boss in the state’s Republican hierarchy (he was recently instrumental in undermining former GOP governor/turned indpependent Charlie Crist , who lost a Senate campaign to the Bush-favored Marco Rubio ). So it is no small thing – and probably no accident – that Jeb is piling on the laudatory adjectives for Romney.

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Jeb Boosts Mitt

The nation’s highest-ranking military officer has tied Pakistan’s powerful military spy agency, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISI) to the Sept. 13 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul by Afghan militants. In a hearing before the Senate Armed

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Pakistan’s Spy Agency Accused of Ties to Terrorist Network

As the White House angles to blame Republicans for blocking the President’s “American Jobs Act,” Democratic leaders who control the Senate are a long way from passing it “right way,” as Obama demands. They can’t even say for sure when they’ll consider it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is making excuses for going slow on the White House bill, despite Obama’s continuing calls for passage without delay. “The floor is pretty well jammed now,” he said on Tuesday. The Senate probably will not even take it up until after it’s next vacation later this month, says the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin : “I think it’s more realistic it would be next month.” The trouble, Reid indicates, is that several Senate Democrats oppose parts of the President’s plan. Translation: He can’t subject Obama’s plan to a vote because he doesn’t have enough Democrats on board to pass it. Keep this up, Senate Democrats, and you give Republicans a believable counter-argument against Obama’s campaign plan to portray them as the party of NO. At best, his Senate Democrats appear to be the party of NOT YET.

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Jobs Bill: Senate Dems Not Ready

The more you examine this debt deal the more illusory it looks. Consider the various ways that pain is postponed in the rules setting up the grandly named “Super Committee” and in imposing the “immediate” Discretionary Caps: Joint Congressional Committee If the Committee doesn’t produce a bill, the bill is not enacted or the bill produces less than $1.2 trillion in savings, 1) the debt ceiling increases by $1.2 trillion, subject to another disapproval vote, and 2) $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts will be triggered between FY2013-2021. For starters, the disapproval vote — if the committee fails — is meaningless. If majorities of the House and Senate try to block the debt ceiling increase President Obama can just veto it, requiring an unlikely two-thirds vote to override. Notice that the automatic cuts triggered by failure would not even begin taking effect until after the next election, and are spread out over the next 8 years – more than enough time for Congress to fiddle with, or completely scrap these cuts. If across-the-board cuts are triggered, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other low-income benefits (including the ACA premium subsidies, we believe) are exempted from cuts. (Exception: Medicare provider payments can be cut by up to 2%.) Half of the cuts will come from defense spending. Here we find that the easy path to avoid major entitlement reform is for this committee to fail. Only Medicare doctors and other providers would be affected by automatic cuts — and their payments would only be cut by no more than two percent. But these automatic payment cuts have been tried many times and Congress usually finds a way out. Basically, the “pain” of failure for this committee is so cleverly postponed and distributed across future years that failing could be the least painful choice for Washington – and that’s no accident. Discretionary Caps $1 trillion in across-the-board discretionary cuts for fiscal years 2012-2021. The cuts are weighted to be the deepest after FY2014. The first two years, the cuts are only $10 billion total and security (defense, homeland security, etc.,) is $5 billion of that. Look carefully at that last sentence. All the boasting by Obama and congressional leaders about immediately cutting $1 trillion really means that the vast majority of the cuts do not even begin until after the next election. The result is that the only immediate budgetary effect of this legislation is $10 billion in cuts over the next two years – such a tiny fraction of overall federal spending that it is hardly worth talking about. All I can say for this whole mess is that they’ve done a fine job of setting a pretty table — there’s just no meal. Liberals should calm down and conservatives have no reason to declare victory. Craig discusses this topic today on CNN 4:40 PM ET

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Debt Panel Designed to Fail?

The Department of Homeland Security soon will complete its review of 1.6 million people who may have overstayed their visas in the United States, witnesses told members of a Senate committee during a hearing Wednesday. “I’m expecting a report of the

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Feds Review Policies Affecting Terrorist Travel