The Atlantic: Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama

The case against casting a ballot for the president -- even if you think he's better than Mitt Romney.

Read it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/why-i-refuse-to-vote-for-barack-obama/262861/

Cato: 9/11 and Its Legacy of Fear

by Gene Healy at http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/911-its-legacy-fear and in the DC Examiner on September 10, 2012.

Today marks the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. What, if anything, have we learned? In a Saturday statement, President Obama struck an upbeat note: "The legacy of 9/11," he said, is "the ability to say with confidence that no adversary and no act of terrorism can change who we are."

Who's he kidding? For us ordinary schlubs who don't own our own planes, a trip to the airport provides less reason for optimism. We shuffle shoeless through the security line, at the end of which government agents will either grope us or look at us naked. And despite his campaign trail promises to "set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers," Obama has forged an expanded "Terror Presidency," with dangerous new powers for all future presidents to wield.

Sept. 11th has changed America radically — and not for the better.

As security analysts John Mueller (a Cato senior fellow) and Mark G. Stewart point out in an important new article in International Security, it's far from clear that any of this was necessary. Though the FBI initially insisted America was riddled with up to 5,000 trained Al Qaeda operatives, an internal agency memorandum, leaked in 2005, admitted that "To date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the US." At a certain point, Mueller and Stewart suggest, the absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence.
Last Thanksgiving, the Department of Homeland Security earned a lot of Twitter snark for its video warning Americans of the dangers of deep-frying turkeys. But turkey fryers kill about five Americans a year; jihadists have killed about 16 here since 9/11.
"In the eleven years since the September 11 attacks, no terrorist has been able to detonate even a primitive bomb in the United States," Mueller and Stewart note.
If you're having trouble with pipe bombs, Weapons of Mass Destruction are almost certainly beyond your competence. Though, as the authors explain, erstwhile "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla once planned a domestic nuclear attack: "His idea about isotope separation was to put uranium into a pail and then to make himself into a human centrifuge by swinging the pail around in great arcs."
Mueller and Stewart quote anthropologist Scott Atran: "Perhaps never in the history of human conflict have so few people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many." And we have erected monuments to that fear — vast bureaucratic pyramids erected in Al Qaeda's honor.
In their 2011 book, "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,"Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin chronicle the growth of the post-9/11 "Intelligence-Industrial Complex": 1,200 agencies occupying three Pentagons' worth of office space. We've spent "hundreds of billions of dollars to turn the machine of government over to defeating terrorism," without seriously examining what we're buying with our money and lost liberty.
Meanwhile, 2008's promises to bring our National Surveillance State under the rule of law have vanished from the 2012 Democratic platform. In the middle of a fiscal crisis, Congress and President Obama have been subsidizing dystopia — using Homeland Security grants to fund the proliferation of surveillance cameras, drones and military ordnance for small-town police departments.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 last year, the conservative Heritage Foundation settled on a theme: "Never Quit." In the accompanying video, Heritage warned that "our continued security is anything but certain ... withholding crucial resources and needlessly slashing defense" would dishonor those who died in the attacks. "We must never forget, and we must never quit."
Say what you will about Barack Obama — he's no quitter.

Cato: Eleven Years after 9/11, Terror Effects Persist

Posted by John Mueller at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/eleven-years-after-911-terror-effects-persist/

A couple of years ago, Cato published a book, Terrorizing Ourselves, that critically examined American counterterrorism efforts.

Since that time, the United States was able to put Osama bin Laden to rest. But even this dramatic and yearned-for development, already the stuff of fable, hasn’t been able to temper the level of self-terrorization in the American public.

I’ve been sorting through poll data about terrorism from 9/11 to the present day. Although there are some temporary bumps and wiggles in reaction to events during the course of those 11 years, there has been very little, if any, decline in the degree to which Americans express anxiety about terrorism.

That is, for the most part there has been little change since late 2001 in the numbers who say they are worried that they will become a victim of terrorism, consider another major attack in the near future to be likely, are willing to trade civil liberties for security, have confidence in the government’s ability to prevent or to protect them from further terrorism, or think the United States is winning in the war on terrorism.

I have written a fuller account here in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer. And there are some more extensive ruminations on what I call the “terrorism delusion” in the current International Security. That article deals with the exaggerations of the threat presented by terrorism and with the distortions of perspective these exaggerations have inspired—distortions that have in turn inspired a determined and expensive quest to ferret out, and even to create, the nearly nonexistent. It also supplies a quantitative assessment of the costs of the terrorism delusion.

Several of the poll trends I use for my conclusions are posted here.

As the Inquirer piece points out, the lack of change is quite remarkable given that no Islamist terrorist has been able to detonate even the simplest of bombs in the United States, there has been no sizable attack in the country, bin Laden is dead, alarmist hype coming out of Washington has declined (though Harvard continues to give it the old college try), and an American’s chance of being killed by a terrorist is about one in 3.5 million per year.

I conclude in the Inquirer piece that it seems to suggest that the public is

likely to continue uncritically to support extravagant counterterrorism expenditures including incessant security checks, civil liberties intrusions, expanded police powers, harassment at airports, and militarized forays overseas if they can convincingly be associated with the quest to stamp out terrorism.

Both pieces use a quote from anthropologist Scott Atran: “Perhaps never in the history of human conflict have so few people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many.” Much of that fright, it appears, has proven to be perpetual.

Cato: What 9/11 Should Teach Us

Posted by Malou Innocent at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/what-911-should-teach-us/

As a fan of comedian Dennis Miller, I was astonished to discover that he became a supporter of U.S. government policies in fighting terrorism after the September 11th attacks. Perhaps I am in the minority on this issue, but the 9/11 attacks were what helped to erode my faith in government.

Few people bring this up, but in 2004, a CIA Inspector General report found a number of weaknesses in the Intelligence Community’s pre-9/11 counterterrorism practices, many of which “contributed to performance lapses related to the handling of materials concerning individuals who were to become the 9/11 hijackers.” Two al Qaeda terrorists who later became 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, had attended a meeting of suspected terrorists in Malaysia in early 2000. The Inspector General probe uncovered that the CIA had learned that one of the operatives had a U.S. visa, and the other had flown from Bangkok to Los Angeles.

Yet, the Agency failed to forward that relevant information by “entering the names of suspected al-Qa’ida terrorists on the ‘watchlist’ of the Department of State and providing information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in proper channels.” Some 50 to 60 individuals—including Headquarters personnel, overseas officers, managers, and junior employees—had read the cables containing the travel information on al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

The report said in a stark assessment, “The consequences of the failures to share information and perform proper operational follow-through on these terrorists were potentially significant.” Indeed. Had the names been passed to the FBI and the State Department through proper channels, the operatives could have been watchlisted and surveilled. In theory, those steps could have yielded information on financing, flight training, and other details vital to unraveling the 9/11 plot.

Corroborating these findings was a Joint Inquiry Report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It found “persistent problems” with the “lack of collaboration between Intelligence Community agencies.” About the FBI in particular, the report went so far as to say as late as December 2002 that “…the Bureau–-as a law enforcement organization–-is fundamentally incapable, in its present form, of providing Americans with the security they require against foreign terrorist and intelligence threats.” Now that is a ringing endorsement of our government’s ability to protect us.

We often hear that the failure of 9/11 was government-wide. But few observers delve into why it failed, especially on 9/11 anniversaries, when, one would think, such explanations would be most helpful. A number of structural factors impede effective collaboration. For instance, many intelligence agencies operate under different legal authorities. Many of them have distinct customers and cultures, and jealously guard their turf, budgets, sources, and methods. Individuals within various agencies also share information by relying on trust and personal relationships.

Yet, dispersed knowledge made it so that there was no single person or “silver bullet” that could have enabled intelligence agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks. As the CIA Inspector General report made clear, neither the U.S. government nor the Intelligence Community had a comprehensive strategic plan to guide counterterrorism efforts. Amid the pre-9/11 flurry ofwarnings, intelligence cables, and briefing materials on al Qaeda’s plot to hijack airliners and ram them into our buildings, a significant failure, concluded the 9/11 Commission, was one ofimagination.

After 9/11, many Americans were quick to cede yet more power to government. While much has changed in eleven years, with agencies less reluctant to share critical data, a February 2011 Government Accountability Office report noted that the government “does not yet have a fully-functioning Information Sharing Environment,” that is, “an approach that facilitates the sharing of terrorism and homeland security information”:

GAO found that the government had begun to implement some initiatives that improved sharing but did not yet have a comprehensive approach that was guided by an overall plan and measures to help gauge progress and achieve desired results.

Over the decade, while our government focused narrowly on the problem of terrorism, it also embraced ambitious, wasteful, and counterproductive programs and policies that drained us economically and spread our resources thin. After 9/11, excluding the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, American taxpayers have shelled out over $1 trillion dollars for their sprawling counterterrorism-industrial-complex, replete with its thousands of federal, state, and local government organizations and the private companies that work with them.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that our government expanded after an attack that called into question its primary constitutional function: protecting our country. What is more remarkable is that the public continues to accept humiliating pat-downs and invasive full-body scans for airline travel, costly grant programs rolled out by the Department of Homeland Security, and reckless politicians who advocate endless wars against predominately-Muslim states that play directly into al Qaeda’s hands.

Now, many Americans ask: Are we safer? Certainly, but marginal increases in safety have come at an exceptionally high cost, have far exceeded the point of diminished returns, and have encouraged a terrorized public to exalt a government that failed them.

Remember Remember

Remember, remember that day in September
Radical attack and plot
I see no reason why the death without reason
should ever be forgot

Religion was taken
twisted and bent
And formed into a hammer
of hate

Peace and love
were shoved aside
A martyrs death
there would be

The planes were boarded
taken and flown
The towers came crashing
down

A people stood tall
connected in sorrow
The whole world
stood still

That sorrow was taken
forged to revenge
The war was now
begun

A country was taken
and then another
But no peace
would there be

Everything sliding
out of control
The world seems
to be ending

Twenty survived
thousands died
But no end is yet
in sight

What should we do
I frankly don't know
But the least we can do
is remember

Cato: Ryan and the Janesville Plant: the Fact that Matters

Posted by Tad DeHaven at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/ryan-and-the-janesville-plant-the-fact-that-matters/

The latest conflagration over the media’s attempt to “fact-check” campaigning politicians centers on comments Paul Ryan made in his speech last night about a shuttered GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin:

President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis, as he has reminded us a time or two.  Those were very tough days, and any fair measure of his record has to take that into account.  My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year.  It is locked up and empty to this day.  And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

A number of “fact checkers” cried foul. The left was pleased. The right was not pleased and has been crying foul on the left and the fact checkers. If you’re unfamiliar with the claims and counter-claims, you can Google the controversy if you’d like because I’m not going bother hyperlinking to all the back-and-forth.

I’m not going to bother because lost in all the predictable haggling between the left and the right over veracity of Ryan’s claim is the fact that really matters: Paul Ryan voted for the federal government’s bailout of the auto industry. In fact, he was 1 of only 32 Republicans to do so.

But it gets worse. Following his comments on the Janesville plant, here’s what Ryan had to say about the president’s failed stimulus package:

The first troubling sign came with the stimulus. It was President Obama’s first and best shot at fixing the economy, at a time when he got everything he wanted under one-party rule. It cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government.

It went to companies like Solyndra, with their gold-plated connections, subsidized jobs, and make-believe markets. The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.

If you replace “Solyndra” with “General Motors” the story is essentially the same: “a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism.” The only real difference that I can see is that Solyndra didn’t have a plant in Ryan’s backyard.

Cato: Liberating the Liberal Arts—and Making Higher Education Affordable

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/liberating-the-liberal-arts-and-making-higher-education-affordable/

If you wanted a liberal arts education in 1499, you were probably out of luck. But, if you happened to be a 0.01 percenter, you might have been able to saddle up the horse and ride to Oxford or Cambridge. Because that’s where the books were. Books didn’t generally come to you, you had to go to them.

Today, every one of us has more works of art, philosophy, literature, and history at our fingertips than existed, worldwide, half-a-millennium ago. We can call them up, free or for a nominal charge, on electronic gadgets that cost little to own and operate. Despite that fact, we’re still captives to the idea that a liberal arts education must be dispensed by colleges and must be acquired between the ages of 19 and 22.

But the liberal arts can be studied without granite buildings, frat houses, or sports venues. Discussions about great works of literature can be held just as easily in coffee shops as in stadium-riser classrooms—perhaps more easily. Nor is there any reason to believe that there is some great advantage to concentrating the study of those works in the few years immediately after high school—or that our study of them must engage us full-time. The traditional association of liberal arts education and four-year colleges was already becoming an anachronism before the rise of the World Wide Web. It is now a crumbling fossil.

Handing colleges tens of thousands of dollars—worse yet, hundreds of thousands—for an education that can be obtained independently at little cost, would be tragically wasteful even if the college education were effective. In many cases, it is not. Research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksareveals that almost half of all college students make no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or written communication after two full years of study. Those are skills that any liberal arts education should cultivate. Even among the subset of students who linger for four years at college, fully one-third make no significant gains in those areas.

And yet, instead of recognizing the incredible democratization of access to the liberal arts that modern technology has permitted, and the consequent moribundity of this role of colleges, public policy remains mired in a medieval conception of higher education. Politicians compete to promise what they think young people want to hear: more and larger subsidies for college fees. Even if perpetuating a 15th century approach to higher education were in students’ interests—which it clearly is not—increased government subsidies for college tuition would not achieve that goal. We have tripled student aid in real, inflation-adjusted dollars since 1980, to roughly $14,000 per student, and yet student debt recently hit an all-time high of roughly $1 trillion. And barely half of students at four-year public colleges even complete their studies in six years. Aid to colleges is good for colleges, but it is an outlandish waste of resources if the goal is to improve the educational options available to young people.

These same realities apply, to an only slightly lesser extent, to the sciences and engineering. In those areas, colleges sometimes have equipment and facilities of instructional value that students could not independently afford. But even in the sciences and engineering, such cases are limited. It is perfectly feasible for an avid computer geek to learn everything he or she needs to know to work in software engineering by doing individual and group projects with inexpensive consumer hardware and software. This was even possible before the rise of the Web. My first direct supervisor at Microsoft was a brilliant software architect hired right out of high school… in the 1980s.

Though most politicians have been slow on the uptake, the public seems increasingly aware of all this. A Pew Research survey finds that 57 percent Americans no longer think college is worth the money. So why are they still sending their kids there? Habit is no doubt part of the picture, but so is signaling. People realize that colleges are instructionally inefficient, but being accepted to and graduating from an academically selective one signals ability and assiduity to potential employers.

So what’s the solution? Alternative signaling options and better hiring practices would be a good start. Anyone who studies hard for the SAT, ACT, GRE, or the like, and scores well, can send the academic ability signal. But in the end, employers want more than academic ability. What they really want are subject area expertise, a good work ethic, an ability to work smoothly with a variety of people, and, for management, leadership ability. Any institution that develops good metrics for these attributes, and issues certifications accordingly, will provide an incredibly valuable service for employers. Students would then be free to study independently, occasionally paying for instruction where necessary, and then seek a certification signaling what they’ve learned. In the meantime, job candidates can create a portfolio of work on the Web showing what they know and can do (a“savoir faire”)—which would be more useful to employers than most resumes.

What is certainly not useful is raising taxes still further in a time of economic difficulty in order to pad the budgets of colleges and encourage students to take on yet more college debt.