Month: November 2013

California leads the way

by David Atkins

Krugthulu points out the obvious concerning California and Obamacare:

At a time like this, you really want a controlled experiment. What would happen if we unveiled a program that looked like Obamacare, in a place that looked like America, but with competent project management that produced a working website?

Well, your wish is granted. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you California.

Now, California isn’t the only place where Obamacare is looking pretty good. A number of states that are running their own online health exchanges instead of relying on HealthCare.gov are doing well. Kentucky’s Kynect is a huge success; so is Access Health CT in Connecticut. New York is doing O.K. And we shouldn’t forget that Massachusetts has had an Obamacare-like program since 2006, put into effect by a guy named Mitt Romney.

California is, however, an especially useful test case. First of all, it’s huge: if a system can work for 38 million people, it can work for America as a whole. Also, it’s hard to argue that California has had any special advantages other than that of having a government that actually wants to help the uninsured. When Massachusetts put Romneycare into effect, it already had a relatively low number of uninsured residents. California, however, came into health reform with 22 percent of its nonelderly population uninsured, compared with a national average of 18 percent.

Finally, the California authorities have been especially forthcoming with data tracking the progress of enrollment. And the numbers are increasingly encouraging.

For one thing, enrollment is surging. At this point, more than 10,000 applications are being completed per day, putting the state well on track to meet its overall targets for 2014 coverage. Just imagine, by the way, how different press coverage would be right now if Obama officials had produced a comparable success, and around 100,000 people a day were signing up nationwide.

Equally important is the information on who is enrolling. To work as planned, health reform has to produce a balanced risk pool — that is, it must sign up young, healthy Americans as well as their older, less healthy compatriots. And so far, so good: in October, 22.5 percent of California enrollees were between the ages of 18 and 34, slightly above that group’s share of the population.

What we have in California, then, is a proof of concept. Yes, Obamacare is workable — in fact, done right, it works just fine.

Krugman’s ultimate point isn’t just that California has its act together, though that’s true. It’s also that once the glitches are worked out–and they will be, sooner or later–this system, kludge though it may be, will work as intended.

Ultimately, the failures in Republican-run states contrasted with successes in Democratic states are going to become more and more obvious as time goes by. Just another in a series of ticking time bombs for the GOP.

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Knocking out the knockout game


by digby

One of the recurring themes in American life is the idea that violent mobs of young black men are on the rampage killing decent white people. It comes up over and over again in our history, going all the way back to the beginning. I wrote a bunch about this after Katrina, starting with this post. I don’t think it’s all that complicated really: when you treat a group of people like dirt it’s natural to fear they might not like you very much.

But the truth is that these “wildings” are almost always a figment of the overactive lizard brain.  When you combine it with nonsensical sociological concepts like the “super-predator” which had the entire country freaking out over young black men who were supposedly impervious to any kind of normal human behavior, you get these bouts of hysteria as we are seeing now with the right wing hand-wringing over the “knockout game.”

Dave Weigel puts the myth to bed:

The new scare is the “knockout game,” in which black youths supposedly attack innocent people just for fun. Conservative pundits decry the MSM for suffering from political correctness and whitewashing crimes perpetrated by black people, but a more reasonable explanation for why most media outlets aren’t devoting round-the-clock coverage to the knockout game is that—sorry, Sean Hannity—there is no hard data showing that it’s a trend. 

An important clarification: the game definitely exists, and has been around for at least a couple of years. I’m not claiming the game doesn’t exist. But the idea that it’s reached epidemic levels, or that it’s only being played by young black people, is a fallacy. As Alan Noble convincingly writes, “Analyzing data is not as simple as watching some YouTube videos and Googling ‘knockout game.'” And when it comes to the knockout game’s supposed popularity, the data is almost entirely anecdotal: 

Here’s the fascinating thing about this “spreading” trend: nobody seems to have any evidence that it’s spreading, or that it’s new, or that it’s racially motivated, or that black youths are the ones typically responsible, or that whites are typically targeted. This hasn’t stopped Mark Steyn, Thomas Sowell, and Matt Walsh from describing this specifically as a crime committed by blacks against whites, CNN from claiming that it is “spreading,” or Alec Torres at NRO from say it is “evidently increasing [in] popularity.”

Weigel goes on to note that the genesis for this latest nonsense happens to be Colin Flaherty “who probably has a Google alert set up for ‘black suspect.'” He concludes:

Crime happens to every type of person, and is perpetrated by every type of person. What makes the false narrative of the knockout game—or any “black mob violence” story—crop up every year is the fact that some people will always believe the color of someone’s skin predisposes him to commit a crime. When a few YouTube videos are able to convince terrified white folks that young black people are dangerous, they may as well assume that all cats can play the keyboard.

When I was writing a lot about this phenomenon, I used to enjoy posting this little anecdote:

Monday, April 6 1741

About ten o’clock in the morning, there was an alarm of a fire at the house of Serjeant Burns, opposite Fort Garden….


Towards noon a fire broke out in the roof of Mrs. Hilton’s house…on the East side of captain Sarly’s house….Upon view, it was plain that the fire must have been purposely laid…. There was a cry among the people, the Spanish Negroes; the Spanish Negroes; take up the Spanish Negroes. The occasion of this was the two fires…happening so closely together….and it being known that Sarly had purchased a Spanish Negro, some time before brought into his port, among several others….and that they afterwards pretending to have been free men in their country, began to grumble at their hard usage, of being sold as slaves. 

This probably gave rise to the suspicion, that this Negro, out of revenge, had been the instrument of these two fires; and he behaving insolently upon some people’s asking him questions concerning them…it was told to a magistrate who was near, and he ordered him to jail, and also gave direction to constables to commit all the rest of that cargo [of Africans], in order for their safe custody and examination….


While the justices were proceeding to examination, about four o’clock there was another alarm of fire….


While the people were extinguishing the fire at this storehouse, and had almost mastered it, there was another cry of fire, which diverted the people attending the storehouse to the new alarm…but a man who had been on the top of the house assisting in extinguishing the fire, saw a Negro leap out at the end window of one of them…which occasioned him to cry out...that the Negroes were rising….

Heckuva job Bushie

by digby

This piece over at Bill Moyers has links to all the good stuff around the web about the Iran deal if you need to get up to speed. It led me to this important post by Dafna Linzer over at MSNBC about the wasted decade we just went through due to idiotic neocon dogma.

When the United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001, it was by a terrorist organization that was no friend to Iran.

Acting from inside Afghanistan and Pakistan – two nations that border Iran – al-Qaeda’s actions destabilized the region and brought on a swift counterattack by U.S. forces who remain in the region.

Hundreds of al-Qaeda members streamed across Iran’s borders. Many were caught and identified. The most dangerous, including Osama bin Laden’s relatives, were imprisoned. Low-level fighters were returned to their home countries – but not before Zarif secretly shared their identities, finger prints, passports and other information with the U.S. government.

There was other quiet but vital cooperation along the Iranian-Afghan border to stop al-Qaeda, the heroin trade and warlords from smuggling weapons and goods out of Afghanistan.

The Bush administration benefited greatly from all of it but that’s not the impression it conveyed to the American public or the Iranian people.

Iran’s leaders, working through a Swiss diplomatic channel, sent the State Department a lengthy proposal for embarking on negotiations. Tehran’s leaders sought a “grand bargain,” with everything on the table, including restoring relations with Israel, and giving up any interest in pursing nuclear capabilities that could be used for weapons.

If only they had been greeted with silence. Instead, Bush used his 2003 State of the Union address to enlist Iran into what he deemed an “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea.

Within two months, operating on his doctrine of preemption, Bush invaded Iraq and had troops on two of Iran’s major borders. His stable of neo-conservative advisers made no secret of their conviction that Iraq was a “demonstration effect,” meant to weaken and pressure Iran.

It had the opposite effect. With Saddam Hussein and the Taliban removed from power, Iran’s influence in the region only grew, particularly in Iraq where U.S. troops struggled with a violent insurgency that eventually claimed the lives of more than 4,000 American troops.

And when an Iranian dissident group revealed a small but secret nuclear effort underfoot at Natanz in Iran, Iran moved quickly to fortify and defend it on the world stage. Years of concealment and obfuscation on the part of Iran defined a bitter relationship with U.N. inspectors who only gathered more evidence that pointed tot he desire for a nuclear weapons program.

Bush was reelected in 2004, defeating John Kerry – who would wait nine years to become the Secretary of State who negotiated Sunday’s deal on behalf of the United States.

In those intervening years, Bush told Iranians in 2005 to stay home on election day rather than exercise one of the few political rights available. In the wake of low turn out, and lower expectations, Ahmadinejad became president, ushering in eight years of open hostility.

Heckuva job Bushie.

President Obama came into office promising to open up a dialog with Iran but was met with huge resistance both from our own extremists and Iran’s, largely as a result of the mismanagement of the situation under the Bush-Cheney regime. But over time, when the Iranians realized they weren’t dealing with total lunatics anymore, they were able to provide a partner than could sit down at a negotiating table.

You cannot overestimate just how useful simple sanity can be. The bellicose tough guy/madman theory keeps being trotted out over and over again and it never works. Maybe we should put that one one in the rubbish pile.

Linzner concludes with a cautious, yet hopeful, observation:

Obama and Rouhani must sell this deal at home, and it will tough for both. The American public still carries the scars of a lengthy hostage crisis that followed Iran’s political and religious revolution and are reluctant to trust a new and possibly vulnerable leadership. Rouhani is under pressure from those very same revolutionary guards who see Washington as the root of Iran’s corrupt past.

Failure going forward would certainly embolden the hardliners on all sides, and push toward conflict, not resolution.

But if the deal sticks – a big if – Rouhani will be the first Iranian leader in more than 30 years who unclenched his fist – delivering his people back into the global fold. Obama may well be remembered as the Nobel laureate who removed the threat of nuclear war through the promise of extending his hand.

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We call ourselves civilized?

by digby

Unbefuckinglievable:

Browder was a 16-year-old sophomore in high school walking home from a party in the Bronx when he was arrested on a tip that he robbed someone three weeks earlier. He was hauled off to Rikers Island, a prison known for punishing conditions and overuse of force, and was held because he couldn’t pay the $10,000 bail. Browder went to court on several occasions, but he was never scheduled for trial. After 33 months in jail, Browder said a judge offered freedom in exchange for a guilty plea, threatening that he could face 15 years in jail if convicted. He refused. Then one day, he was released with no explanation.

“They just dismissed the case and they think it’s all right. No apology, no nothing,” he told WABC-TV. Now at age 20 with his teen years behind him, Browder is first faced with finishing his GED and trying to make up for three years of his teen years lost.

Browder says he spent more than 400 days in solitary confinement, was deprived of meals, and was assaulted and beaten both by officers and fellow inmates. Browder attempted suicide at least six times. Last month he filed a lawsuit last month against the city and several agencies. The Bronx District Attorney’s office has declined to comment.

Huh? What is going on here? This young man has lived out a Kafkaesque nightmare right there in the middle of New York.

Browder’s story lays out a laundry list of some of the most prevalent problems with the criminal justice system. Browder was stopped in the Bronx, where the New York Police Department came under particular fire for its over-aggressive use of stops and unsubstantiated charges of “trespassing.” He was purportedly jailed based solely on one report to police, reinforcing race disparities in the criminal justice system. He was held in jail pursuant to bail policies that routinely punish the impoverished. And he was held in solitary confinement as a juvenile, even though the draconian punishment has particularly detrimental long-term effects on youths.

That’s also known as torture.

It looks as though Gitmo has come home — no trials, solitary confinement and physical abuse. It was always inevitable that it would happen. Once you say that universal principles of human rights as enshrined in our Constitution are only applicable to people the government believes are “worthy” of them, this is where you end up.

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Mizeur steps up with a smart, courageous progressive agenda for Maryland


by digby

Blue America sent the following letter out to our members earlier this morning.   Heather Mizeur is always out front with smart progressive ideas. If you can’t do it in Maryland, where can you do it?

Last summer, Blue America first endorsed Heather Mizeur for Governor of Maryland. If she wins, Heather would be the first woman governor of Maryland and the first openly gay governor in the country. But as she says, she’s not running to make history, she’s running to make a difference. And over the past several weeks, we’ve been noticing that her campaign has been living up to the progressive dream we knew her candidacy would be.

In Maryland, the gubernatorial candidates pick their lieutenant governor before the primary, and Heather wasn’t afraid to make a bold choice– she now has a progressive change agent by her side. His name is Delman Coates, an African-American pastor who runs an 8,000 member church. But he’s not your typical reverend. He played a significant role in the 2012 campaign for marriage equality in Maryland, speaking at rallies and appearing on TV ads. His works stretches to several social justice issues, including common sense gun reform, immigration reform, health care, and voting rights, and has been recognized by the ACLU.

Heather released her 10-point jobs plan and it reads like a progressive wish list. She proposed a millionaire’s tax, with the revenue going to income tax cuts for 90 percent of Marylanders. She wants to turn Maryland’s minimum wage into a living wage– $16.70 by 2022, with sizable increases along the way. She even wants to close corporate tax loopholes and use the money to give small business tax rebates. And her plan also includes paid sick days for all workers, more funding for job training and adult education, and the building of major transit projects, schools, and bridges.

Most recently, Heather has called for marijuana legalization, drawing a clear line of distinction between her and her establishment opponents. While there is now sizable public support for legalizing marijuana, our politicians haven’t caught up. But Heather took the bold step of not only supporting it, but also pledging to make it a gubernatorial priority when she gets elected. And what would she fund with the $157 million in annual tax revenue? Universal pre-k.

This is why Blue America was so excited to endorse her candidacy during the summer. With our help, Heather will be one of the next great leaders of the progressive movement. Can you imagine what Maryland would be like with a progressive income tax system, a $16.70 an hour minimum wage, paid sick days, universal pre-k, and legalized marijuana?

You can donate to her campaign on our Blue America page for gubernatorial candidates.

In the past, Heather has told us she wasn’t interested in business as usual at the Maryland State House, and that she wasn’t willing to settle for the status quo. “Whether it’s a $16.70 an hour minimum wage or progressive tax reform,” she explained, “my campaign is about putting people over conventional politics. It’s about returning Annapolis to the people of Maryland, and taking it back from the special interests and party leaders.” We asked her about her very bold marijuana initiative last week.

My proposal to legalize marijuana in Maryland comes from these values. Maryland had the third most marijuana possession arrests proportionally of all states– over 23,000. It’s easy to see that this system is not working. By legalizing marijuana we will save tens of thousands of people from unnecessary run-ins with law enforcement, imprisonment, or worse. 

Marijuana’s time as an illegal substance has run its course. Marijuana laws ruin lives, are enforced with racial bias, and distract law enforcement from serious and violent crimes. Our criminal justice system should keep people safe, treat them fairly, and use limited fiscal resources wisely. Legalizing marijuana is the first step to ensuring that happens.
Marijuana criminalization costs our state $281.7 million every year without making us any safer. A Maryland with legalized, regulated, and taxed marijuana will mean safer communities and fewer citizens unnecessarily exposed to our criminal justice system.
It will also provide Maryland with a dedicated revenue stream to make overdue and critical investments in early childhood education. The new annual revenue will provide 23,625 children with a full day of prekindergarten. Our plan will help ensure that prekindergarten is available to all children in our state. 

This campaign is not just about me– it’s about what we can do when we all come together. The election won’t be won by special interests, lobbyists, or backroom deals in Annapolis. It comes down to which candidate’s vision creates a large enough movement of people to win on Election Day and then lift our communities up when we govern.

You’ll find comprehensive plans for all of her proposals on her website.

If you believe in this kind of progressive vision, please consider making a small contribution to help her turn these plans into real results for Maryland’s families– and to help her set an example for what governors can do across the country.

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A Frightened Country

by digby

For such a powerful “exceptional” nation, we sure are scared of other countries.  Well, I shouldn’t indict the whole nation.  It’s mostly coming from the right, but there are plenty of apolitical and lefty types who are frightened too.  It’s an interesting phenomenon that we see played out all the time, right now in the nearly hysterical reaction to a possible deal with Iran. One would think that coming closer to a peaceful solution to a vexing security problem would make people feel safer, but it seems to have made an awful lot of people more frightened than ever.

Noam Chomsky had some fascinating observations about this in a recent conversation about his seminal work Manufacturing Consent:

Catherine Komp: It’s been twenty-five years since the publication of your and Edward Herman’s acclaimed book “Manufacturing Consent.” How much do you think has changed with the propaganda model, and where do you see it playing out most prominently today?

Noam Chomsky: Well, ten years ago we had a re-edition and we talked about some of the changes. One change is that we were too narrow. There are a number of filters that determine the framework of reporting, and one of the filters was too narrow. Instead of “anti-communism,” which was too narrow, it should have been “fear of the concocted enemy.” So yes, it could be anti-communism—most of that is concocted. So take Cuba again. It’s hard to believe, but for the Pentagon, Cuba was listed as one of the military threats to the United States until a couple of years ago. This is so ludicrous; you don’t even know whether to laugh or cry. It’s as if the Soviet Union had listed Luxembourg as a threat to its security. But here it kind of passes.

The United States is a very frightened country. And there are all kinds of things concocted for you to be frightened about. So that should have been the filter, and [there were] a few other things, but I think it’s basically the same.

There is change. Free Speech Radio didn’t exist when we wrote the book, and there are somethings on the Internet which break the bonds, as do independent work and things like the book I was just talking about when we came in, Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars,” which is a fantastic piece of investigative reporting on the ground of what actually happens in the countries where we’re carrying out these terror campaigns. And there’s a lot of talk about drones, but not much about the fact that they are terror weapons.

If we were sitting here wondering if, all of a sudden, there’s going to be a bomb in this room, because they maybe want to kill him or kill us or whatever, it’s terrorizing. In fact, we just saw a dramatic example of this which got a couple lines in the paper. A few days after the Boston Marathon bombing, there was a drone attack on a village in Yemen, kind of an isolated village. Obama and his friends decided to murder some guy. So the villagers are sitting there, and suddenly this guy gets blown away and whoever else is around him. I don’t think it was reported except for the fact that there was Senate testimony a week later by a person from the village who’s quite respected by Jeremy and others who know him. The man, Farea al-Muslimi, who studied at a high school in the U.S., testified to the Senate and he described what happened to his village. He said that everybody knew the man that they murdered, and that they could have easily apprehended him, but it was easier to kill him and terrify the village. He also said something else which is important. He said that his friends and neighbors used to know of the United States primarily through his stories of “the wonderful experiences” he had here.* He said the U.S. bombing has turned them into people who hate America and want revenge—that’s all it takes. And, in fact, this whole terror system is creating enemies and threats faster than it’s killing suspects, apart from how awful that is. These things are going on, and going back to Jeremy, his book exposes a lot of it and also the exploits of the secret executive army, JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command. It’s dangerous, but it’s the kind of thing an investigative reporter could do, and he’s done it. There’s more of it now, fortunately, in some respects, than there was then.

He goes on to point out that the propaganda machine is much stronger than it used to be as well, particularly with the owners of American having so much money now that they can afford to spend it on political propaganda in overwhelming amounts. His comments are well worth rading in full.

I think this insight that the framework is “fear” rather than any specific enemy is key. And I also think it’s important to recognize that it’s the proportionality of fear to threat that really matters. It’s almost as if we are more scared if the threat they’re hyping is absurd. (I’m thinking of the recent nonsense in which a federal court declared Al Qaeda an “existential threat.”)

Anyway, I think this is something that lies at the heart of our dysfunction. It would seem that, contrary to popular myth, Americans really don’t have much confidence after all. Why is that?

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Diversionary peace process

by digby

I’m pretty sure that John Cornyn had many thousands of people mocking him on Saturday night for his inane comments about the Iran deal being an administration plot to distract from the Obamacare roll-out. But apparently, Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation didn’t get the joke:

Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer spoke Sunday morning to House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) about the newly-brokered deal halting portions of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, and asked if the congressman thought the Obama administration had pursued the deal to distract from the troubled Affordable Care Act rollout.

“I was on airplanes this weekend, and more than one person I was talking to about this whole deal pending with Iran said, ‘This might be a diversionary tactic by an administration desperately looking for good news,’” Schieffer said. “Would you put it in that category yet?”

I’m going to ascribe it to senility. Nobody, not even Bob Schieffer can be that dumb.

h/t to Reading is for Snobs

This person was almost a heartbeat away from the Presidency

by David Atkins

Of all the dangerous and destructive things Republicans have done over the last few decades, nominating Sarah Palin to be one John McCain medical problem away from the Oval Office has to be the very worst. Imagine having this for leadership of the free world:

It’s not just that Republicans have a sociopathic Objectivist-yet-theocratic policy agenda. That’s bad enough. But they’re also wildly, recklessly irresponsible. The silver lining of government by plutocratic ideologues is that they’re at least supposed to make the train run on time.

The people who nominated a dolt like Palin to be so close to the Presidency, and who threatened the full faith and credit of the United States? They wouldn’t even be able to get the silver lining right. It’s all the worst elements of both lawful and chaotic evil rolled into one.

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Tipnronnie and Tweety Too

by digby

Historian David Greenberg’s review of Chris Matthews’ unctuous ode to “Tipnronnie” is just delicious. It’s short, so read the whole thing. But this is too important for me not to memorialize it here on the blog:

The 1980 elections made Ronald Reagan the most conservative American president since before the New Deal and gave the Republicans control of the Senate for the first time since the ’50s. Protecting Social Security, the progressive tax code and other fixtures of the postwar economy fell above all to O’Neill, a corpulent, old-style, steaks-and-cigars Boston Irish pol. The conceit of “Tip and the Gipper” is that for all their ideological differences, Reagan and O’Neill liked each other enough to put politics aside at 6 o’clock — a line Matthews repeats throughout the book — and strike deals in everyone’s interest.

It’s a nice idea for a book, if only it were true.
[…]
Matthews also misreads Reagan in retailing the tired Washington canard that his success lay in his affability. Many insiders did indeed swoon over the president’s ready charm, but his election depended just as crucially on his very public meanness, his zest for the punitive — the vows to crack down on domestic spending, “welfare queens” and the Evil Empire. An account of Reagan’s triumph that locates the key in his Hollywood smile cannot explain the victories that the conservative movement continued to enjoy after his exit.

Most important, Matthews provides no evidence to suggest that whatever personal amicability O’Neill and Reagan maintained mattered. In one or two cases, the Democrats cut good deals with Reagan, such as when they revised the Social Security program. But on the key legislative issue of Reagan’s presidency — the 1981 fight over his budget, which slashed taxes on the rich — O’Neill simply got rolled. Spooked by the president’s popularity, which surged after he was shot by John Hinckley in March of that year, O’Neill failed to compete with Reagan in the new age of media politics. Worse, he also came up short in his supposed strong suit — riding herd on his caucus — as scores of Democrats, fearing the tax-cutting bandwagon, defected to back the Reagan bill. The consequences — skyrocketing budget deficits and debilitating inequality — have plagued us ever since.

Villager nostalgia for a time that never existed has blinded Americans to the reality of their politics. There was no bipartisan comity that brought everyone together: there was confidence and chutzpah on one side and cowardice and corruption on the other. I’ll let you decide which was which.

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Megalomania much?

by digby

Keith Alexander’s “Star Trek bridge” NSA headquarters

This latest NSA revelation from James Risen and Laura Poitras in the New York Times is one of the creepiest yet. It’s a mission statement that forthrightly asserts that if the laws might interfere with the NSA’s ability to function to its full, Orwellian, Big Brother capabilities those laws need to be eliminated. (I guess the Constitution would need an overhaul as well.  Talk about out of date …)

Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.

In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as “the golden age of Sigint,” or signals intelligence. “The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.’s mission,” the document concluded.

Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to “revolutionize” analysis of its vast collections of data to “radically increase operational impact.”

It’s gets more Strangelovian by the day. I guess the old fashioned dictum that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should wasn’t taught in NSA school.

Senior intelligence officials, responding to questions about the document, said that the N.S.A. believed that legal impediments limited its ability to conduct surveillance of terrorism suspects inside the United States. Despite an overhaul of national security law in 2008, the officials said, if a terrorism suspect who is under surveillance overseas enters the United States, the agency has to stop monitoring him until it obtains a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“N.S.A.’s Sigint strategy is designed to guide investments in future capabilities and close gaps in current capabilities,” the agency said in a statement. “In an ever-changing technology and telecommunications environment, N.S.A. tries to get in front of issues to better fulfill the foreign-intelligence requirements of the U.S. government.”

We must stop at nothing that might prevent our government from “keep us safe” from any threats, large or small, that may or may not materialize.

Well, except the threat that stems from 30,000 deaths per year from gun violence. Regulating that in even the smallest way would be an unconscionable infringement of our freedom and frankly, un-American. (Also too: people dying from lack of health care.) But the tiny possibility that some religious yahoo might blow something up with a pressure cooker some day? Let’s tear up the Bill of Rights and pay billions for a bunch of voyeurs to collect every word we utter and keep it on file. Because freedom.

Update: To paraphrase a famous quote by a man who who was driven from office because he couldn’t keep from recording secret information — on himself — I guess this means it’s legal if the Five Eyes do it?

Update II: I’m going to be talking to Marcy Wheeler at 9EST on Virtually Speaking tonight. I hope to ask her to put all these latest revelations in context for us.  There’s been a flood of info in the last few weeks, so much so that I’ve lost the thread a little bit and I’d guess others have too. You can tune in here.