Prairie Weather

DADT DEAD? Finally?

The Pentagon has concluded that allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the United States armed forces presents a low risk to the military’s effectiveness, even at a time of war, and that 70 percent of service members believe that the impact of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law would be either positive, mixed or of no consequence at all. ...

...The report, by Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s chief counsel, and Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe, also found that much of the concern in the armed forces about openly gay service members was driven by misperceptions and stereotypes. Leaving aside those with moral and religious objections to homosexuality, the authors said that the concerns were “exaggerated and not consistent with the reported experiences of many service members.” ...NYT

Only the Marines are having trouble with this.  Guess we know about those guys -- the few, the proud, and the scaredycats.  And maybe something else?

No benefits for unemployed; more jobs will be lost as a result

Today, Congress sets a new record; in the last 40 years, it has never allowed extended unemployment benefits to expire when the unemployment rate was above 7.2 percent. But today, in an economy that faces a 9.6 percent unemployment rate, Congress will let the benefits expire and force 2.5 million Americans to lose their benefits in the midst of the holiday season. 

What will the reaction be to this as people check in with their unemployment offices?  Some say there will be riots. There will certainly be an economic dip as a result and more jobs lost.

The GOP's determination to obstruct any unemployment extension will drastically impact the state of the economy. Of the 2.5 million Americans whose benefits expire today, 1.2 million will exhaust their 26 weeks of regular benefits without finding work, and 800,000 will lose their benefits immediately. ...Economists estimate that the economy grows by nearly two dollars for every dollar spent on unemployment benefits "because recipients typically spend all of their benefit payments quickly," particularly at small- and medium-sized businesses. The money "ripples through the economy into supermarkets, gasoline stations, utilities, convenience stores." One Philadelphia grocer worried that, with a "good portion" of his customers losing benefits, he will be forced to "cut back on [his] labor force..." ...Progress Report

How all that information was accessed by one PFC

... if Bradley Manning is the culprit...

Marc Armbinder walks us through the process of gaining access to the information Manning alleged accessed and turned over to WikiLeaks.  "Reviews of protocols" are taking place now, and "insider threat groups" mobilized.  But it comes down to Bradley Manning, or someone like Bradley Manning who was interested but who didn't need to be all that smart.

...The tension between access, which is critical for tactical intelligence, and operational security, which is critical for protecting secrets, is tight. In wartime, the number of young, fresh-out-of-school analysts granted security clearances skyrockets as demand for intelligence increases exponentially. In this instance, if Manning is indeed the culprit, all it took was one disaffected young man with a rudimentary knowledge of computer systems to bring down an entire edifice of code names, secret networks, compartmented channels, and protected information.

Hackers, like suicide bombers and other phenomena of the age, will always be a step ahead of the law.  That's probably a good thing when we look at the quality of some governments that enforce the law.  There are undoubtedly many good people in America who have more respect for the whistleblower than we for the cover-blown.

It's all about our love of gossip

Elspeth Reeve at Atlantic has some interesting reactions to The Leaks.  Among them are these.

How Were the Files Leaked? The Guardian's David Leigh explains that the cables arrived at his newspaper on an "innocuous-looking memory stick," whose 1.6 gigabytes of text files contained 251,287 dispatches. The leaker is suspected to be Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old soldier, who reportedly confessed to stealing the info while he was downrange. "It was childishly easy," Leigh writes, noting Bradley bragged, "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months."

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This Was Inevitable, Abraham R. Wagner argues at The Huffington Post. The leaks are "a serious problem of the Government's own making," massive amount of classified materials, unsteady adoption of new technology, and the  "sheer number of people with security clearances." In every large population, you'll find a significant number of people with psychiatric disorders or who are in general disgruntled.

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Ours Is the Age of the Leak, Hua Hsu writes at The Atlantic. "To me, the leak is such a quintessentially 'now' phenomenon. It's the logic that divines pure, flowing, overwhelming data--the words, websites, Tweets, etc. that inundate us daily--from data that seems somehow more worthwhile. It's a gloss of intrigue, a wrinkle in the official narrative, a few bytes of data gone astray, a secret liberated for all to share--or so we assume. An NAACP speech? I'd rather re-watch this clip of a dog vomiting. A clip of an NAACP speech someone leaked to someone else, under the hush of secrecy? Tell me more."

Face it.  A lot of Americans really believe that if they can do something, they should do it no matter the consequences. Thus Bradley Manning.  Wow!  Took a CD-RW in there and "no one suspected a thing."  No prob!  What's not to love!

Abraham Wagner is on target with the complaint about government classification.  Steve Aftergood has been on the government's case for years. 

As for that dog vomit, Hua Hsu is exactly right.  If thousands of bound volumes containing exactly the same material turned up at your local public library, would you rush to read it?  Yeah, sure you would!  It's not the content that turns us on, it's the drama of a leak made more pleasurable and interesting as video clips of angry, embarrassed officials wringing their hands and issuing threats are seen for days, weeks.

Bush has won the tax fight. By default.

Not because Bush tax policy is good, but because the Democrats have caved.  Once again, they have accepted the opposition's framing of an issue and tailored their arguments to fit with that very limiting framework.

Julian E. Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University who has written a book assessing the historical impact of Bush’s presidency, says Bush has won the debate over taxes.

“Bush has already won the debate because a lot of people will see their rates stay the way they are,” Zelizer said. “Obama is working within the framework that President Bush established instead of starting his own agenda in these areas of policy.”

Liberal advocates who favor higher taxes to support government programs designed to create jobs agree that Bush has won a big part of the tax debate.

“It is stunning we’re heading into this period where everyone is focused on deficit reduction to the point they want to go after Social Security and the starting point is that they want to extend the Bush tax cuts for families earning under $250,000,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal advocacy group. ...The Hill

Turns out what Wiki leaked was a bunch of notes for a docudrama -- with subtitles

Dana Milbank reveals that WikiLeaks dumped on us an outline of a Tolstoyan-size view of America's adventures overseas. Milbank quotes from one section about a wedding party in the Caucasus.

Along the way, we are told about U.S. diplomats' ride in Gadzhi's Rolls-Royce Phantom ("the legroom was somewhat constricted by the presence of a Kalashnikov carbine at our feet"), the wedding feast ("the cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room") and the entertainment ("Gadzhi's main act, a Syrian-born singer named Avraam Russo, could not make it because he was shot a few days before the wedding").

The embassy reported to Foggy Bottom that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov "danced clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down in the back of his jeans" and reportedly gave the bride and groom "a five-kilo lump of gold." Ramzan threw $100 bills at the dancers, who "probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones." But things took a dangerous turn when a "colonel sitting next to us, dead drunk, was highly insulted that we would not allow him to add 'cognac' to our wine."

It may have been illegal to leak the cables, but it was a crime to keep "A Caucasus Wedding" hidden from the world. Even now, its authorship remains shrouded in secrecy.

We Americans think we  are wide awake and in rational over here, safely sandwiched as we are between two wide oceans, impervious to the madness of foreigners.  The worst we have to suffer is a little tickle in the butt now and then from Mexican drug dealers, or the ego wounds inflicted by glimpses of Canadians who have a superior, educated, and peaceful culture to our north.  Only when we stray overseas do we get a taste of the real world.  Fully armed, we move through the rest of the world like dreamers believing we're the only ones who know what's what. 

Oops.  A little Wiki tear in the curtain is telling us otherwise.  The American dream may turn out to have been a dream from which we're just beginning to emerge.  People are yelling at us in languages we don't understand.  They, too, are armed.  They have real gold, not just a credit card.

Someone is tossing reality at us and it's as incomprehensible and troubling as those disjointed fragments of boiled cow carcass on the table.