Month: July 2008

Heavy Burden

by Chris Bodenner
The Washington Times picks a fight with PEPFAR:

The PEPFAR bill would also make it easier for HIV-positive aliens to obtain waivers to enter the United States; in general, we have public-health reservations about weakening U.S. law to facilitate the entry of persons with lethal, communicable diseases of any kind. In addition, we doubt that Congress has carefully examined the financial burden that such a change in the law could impose on the American taxpayer. … [I]t would be irresponsible for Congress to enact into law anything resembling this legislation.

(Andrew differs a bit)

Backfire

By Patrick Appel
Noam Scheiber writes:

Late this spring, Republicans delighted in bashing Obama for his two-plus year absence from Iraq–the implication being that Obama wouldn’t merit a Situation Room seat until he’d boarded a trans-Atlantic flight. But, as Obama’s itinerary has taken shape in recent weeks, suddenly the McCain campaign has soured on the idea…It is, of course, hard to not to notice that the McCainiacs had been playing a bit of politics themselves, dwelling on Obama’s lightly-used passport as evidence of his inexperience. Except that the politics abruptly changed when the Obamanauts called their bluff–and took every cameraman in the Amtrak corridor along for the ride. Somehow it didn’t occur to the McCainiacs until too late that an Obama world tour might become the media event of the season…

For all of this, the McCain campaign has only itself to blame. The problem with making an incredibly superficial critique of an opponent is that it can be rebutted incredibly superficially. The Democrats fell into this trap into the 1990s when, rather than critique Republicans on policy grounds, they denounced them as racist meanies. Then, as my colleague Jon Chait has written, Bush came along and surrounded himself with cute black and Hispanic kids. This didn’t affect his policies one lick, but it did defuse the Democratic charges.

 

The McCain campaign made a similar mistake by equating Obama’s foreign travel with his fitness to be president. As with the Democrats and Bush, they may have a case to make on the underlying merits. But, if things go according to plan for Obama this week, they will only have helped ensure it won’t be heard.

The Internet As Battlefield

By Jessie Roberts

Blogs are a problem, not a solution, an anonymous Army IT professional tells Danger Room. The source paints an unsettling portrait of lax military intelligence:

Give a senior service official a BlackBerry and I can guarantee he will transmit sensitive and sometimes classified information on it without thinking. He will use the Bluetooth headset and the built-in phone to talk about sensitive topics without a care in the world as to who is listening. I have lost count of how many times we have had to collect all of the BlackBerries we issue and purge them due to sensitive or classified information being sent on them. The BlackBerry is one of the greatest weapons system in the terrorists’ inventory, and we supply the bullets!

I spent over 20 years in the Air Force working on the “cyberbattlefield,” as the Air Force calls it — and yes, the Air Force has it completely correct: the Internet is a battlefield that needs to be dominated, not the tool set of some guy in a cave . …Until the rest of the Department of Defense sees the Internet as a battlefield that it should dominate, we will continue to give our enemies all the information and tools they need and give them an advantage that can defeat our best weapons and tactics.

Shouldn’t the idea that computers and phones aren’t all that private be intuitive by now? It’s hard to imagine that the institution that developed the internet wouldn’t understand or value it as a tool of war.

Attention Everyone

By Patrick Appel
Appleyard contemplates the age of distraction:

Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.

Dodging The Question

By Patrick Appel
Here’s McCain talking to Harry Smith, co-host of CBS News’ The Early Show:

"One of the other things that (Obama) has said is that maybe the troops should be out within the next 18 months, an idea that Prime Minister al-Maliki basically agrees with,” Smith reminded McCain. "Maybe the surge, in fact, did work. Is it time for American troops to start coming home?”

"Well, Prime Minister Maliki agreed with President Bush that it would be conditions-based,” replied McCain, campaigning in Portland, Me. "If Sen. Obama had had his way, they’ve have been out last March, and we’d have never had the surge and we would have failed and we would have then faced enormous consequences of defeat, both there, and it would have–in Iraq and it would have affected Afghanistan."

Let me see if I have this straight: Bush agrees with Maliki. McCain agrees with Bush and Makiki. Mailiki agrees with Obama. But McCain and Obama say they don’t agree. The election suddenly feels like a math-class word problem.