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Hillary Clinton’s inability to say whether she stands for or against approving the Keystone Pipeline reveals the problem she has running as a candidate of change.
During a New Hampshire town hall broadcast on August 1, she was asked about her position on Keystone.
She replied, “I can’t answer it. … This is likely to be an issue no matter what the president decides. It is likely to be a subject of a lawsuit."
Her opponents jumped on this as another example of Hillary Clinton’s propensity for obfuscation. But it’s worse than that. Clinton’s problem is that she represents the party – and was part of the administration – that has controlled the White House for two terms. Her excuse that she cannot take a stand on Keystone because it might go to court appears weak. There will likely be court cases on Obamacare and immigration, too – both of which she has taken positions on.
As the author of many books on American political history, including the forthcoming Future Right: Forging a New Republican Majority, I’m fascinated by how presidential candidates seeking the nomination after their party has controlled the White House have balanced promising new ideas with defending the past.
Running against the status quo
Successful presidential candidates from the earliest days in American politics ran as outsiders and against the status quo. Trying to balance support for your party’s leader, while claiming to pursue a new agenda, presents a particular dilemma for any candidate following on the heels of a two-term president from one’s own party.
Clinton cannot reject six years of her party’s control of the White House without alienating her party’s base.
On that August day in New Hampshire, Clinton likely knew that recent polls show 41% of Americans supporting Keystone, while 20% of Americans oppose it. Polls also show that Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the building of the pipeline. So when Clinton was directly asked about the pipeline, she decided to equivocate – offending neither her base nor the general American public.
To get elected, Clinton needs to present herself as something more than a continuation of Barack Obama’s administration. John McCain learned the difficulty of following a two-term president, George W Bush, in 2008. McCain’s strained relationship with the Bush administration was quite well-known among Beltway insiders. It did not matter. The Obama campaign painted McCain as a third-term Bush candidate, as detailed by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in their book Game Change.
Take Nixon, for example
Dwight D Eisenhower had held the presidency since 1953, when he won election and reelection in landslides. While Eisenhower remained popular in the 1960s, many voters were looking for change.
Kennedy presented a fresh face and vitality, which contrasted with the ho-hum last years of Eisenhower. Kennedy hammered Nixon on the economy, which had recently suffered a recession; the supposed “missile gap” between the Soviets and the United States, and Eisenhower’s alleged unwillingness to confront a communist takeover in Cuba.
Nixon couldn’t adopt the strategy of distancing himself from Eisenhower. The president was still popular in the general public, and Eisenhower might have even won reelection himself if his party had not passed a constitutional amendment preventing third terms.
Successes and failures
Of course, some two-term presidents have been able to pass on the White House to candidates from their parties.
George Washington did it with John Adams in 1796. Andrew Jackson was succeeded by Martin Van Buren in 1836. Theodore Roosevelt – although not technically a two-term president because he first succeeded to the White House following William McKinley’s assassination in 1901 – to William Howard Taft in 1908. Ronald Reagan was followed by George H W Bush in 1988.
What did these success stories have in common? They all followed presidents who enjoyed high favorability with the general public.
Indeed, Nixon almost followed Eisenhower’s popularity to victory as well. His loss to Kennedy was one of the narrowest in American history, with Kennedy pulling in just 112,827 more votes nationwide. The outcome may have been different if the popular Ike had campaigned for Nixon. Instead, Minnie Eisenhower insisted her husband – who had suffered two heart attacks – stay off the campaign trail.
This history suggests a challenge for Clinton.
While Obama enjoys great popularity in his own party, his unfavorable ratings in the general public hover around 48% to 51%. What’s more, over 60% of voters think American is on the wrong track. This suggests that many voters want to see a change in Washington, and they want the new president, whomever he or she may be, to pursue new directions.
Clinton, while proposing some new policies to address the nation’s problems, is pursuing themes out of Obama’s playbook: restore the middle class, overcome income inequality, restrain Wall Street plutocrats, address problems of racism. These are legitimate issues, but will such themes make good sense to highly polarized, ideologically divided voters?
Recent Pew Research shows that the electorate is more divided than ever. More voters are declaring themselves either as committed “conservatives” or “liberals,” and they stick to their beliefs in the voting booth.
In this polarized environment, Hillary Clinton must figure out a way to distance herself from Obama – without distancing herself from his base. Such a strategy means rallying already aligned party voters to her. The result may be further polarization in the electorate.
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Sie holen sich Heiratswillige aus den Armentafeln und besetzten Häusern in Rom. Ein Flugbillett nach Ägypten und ein paar tausend Euro: schon wird ein Syrer mit einer Italienerin nach koptischem oder katrholischem Ritus verheiratet, manchmal auch eine Araberin mit einem Italiener.
Nach Registrierung der Ehe in Ägypten und über das (kürzlich bombardierte) Konsulat auch in Italien, wird nach einigen Monaten die langfristige Aufenthaltsbewilligung in Italien zwecks Familien-Zusammenführung gewährt und, viel später, kann auch die Einbürgerung erfolgen. Meist sind die Neuvermählten jedoch nicht an Italien, sondern am Schengen-Raum interessiert.
Wie ANSA berichtete, kümmert sich eine italienisch geleitete Agentur um das Arrangement und die bürokratische Abwicklung der Scheinehen zu Gesamtkosten von 9000 Euro je Fall. Das Geschäft fiel der Antiterrorismus- Behörde auf, als sie zwei Tage nach dem Attentat auf das Konsulat ein Gespräch abhörte, in dem zwei Personen dringend eine Heirat forderten und den doppelten Tarif boten. Man befürchtet, dass die Scheinehen es Terroristen ermöglichen sollen, nach Italien einzureisen.
Dank Beschleunigung der Prozeduren in Ägypten durch die Agentur können die Italienerinnen oder Italiener schon nach zwei Wochen mitsamt Honorar nachhause fliegen.
Benedikt Brenner
This story was originally published by ProPublica
A Trail of Evidence Leading to AT&T’s Partnership with the NSA
Documents provided by Edward Snowden mention a special relationship between the National Security Agency and an unnamed telecommunications company. Here’s how we figured out that’s AT&T.
August 15, 2015
TODAY WE REPORTED that the National Security Agency’s ability to capture Internet traffic on United States soil has relied on its extraordinary, decadeslong partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.
While it has long been known that American telecommunications companies workclosely with the spy agency, the documents we’ve published show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative” and another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”
By following breadcrumbs we found throughout the trove of documents released by Snowden, we were able to prove that a program called Fairview was the cover term for the agency’s partnership with AT&T. We also found evidence that Verizon participates in the agency’s smaller Stormbrew program.
Fairview Defined
We started with the basics. A slide deck called “Fairview Overview” described the partnership between NSA’s Special Source Operations unit and a corporate partner
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We inferred from this that the Fairview partner was a single big U.S. telecom. There are only a handful American operators at this scale: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and Internet backbone providers such as CenturyLink, Cogent Communications and Level 3 Communications.
The Cable Cut
Our best clue came from an internal NSA newsletter, which contained an update about how data collection was restored after the Japanese earthquake of 2011:
On 5 Aug 2011, collection of DNR and DNI traffic at the FAIRVIEW CLIFFSIDE trans-pacific cable site resumed, after being down for approximately five months. Collection operations at CLIFFSIDE had been down since 11 March 2011, due to the cable damage as a result of the earthquake off of the coast of Japan.
Several submarine cables near Japan were damaged after the earthquake. However, only one of them was restored on August 5, 2011, according to Satoru Taira, vice president in the Crisis Management Planning Office at NTT Communications, the Japanese telecom that operates the Japan landing station for the cable. That restored cable is the northern leg of the Japan-US cable that is operated by AT&T in the United States, according to Federal Communications Commission filings.
Although there are many partners in the consortium that share ownership of the Japan-U.S. cable, AT&T is the primary network operator of the cable and owns the Manchester, California cable landing point for the U.S-Japan cable, according to FCC filings.
AT&T-Specific Jargon
Our next clue was some jargon we found in an NSA glossary.
Even the NSA has a hard time keeping track of all its code words, so it has a dictionary of terms. Inside that dictionary, we found an entry that described a Fairview program using terminology we hadn’t heard before: “SNRC.”
SAGURA - DNI access from FAIRVIEW’s Partner’s DNI backbone which includes OC-192 and 10GE peering circuits. The Partner has provided a current view of the forecasted and equipped 10GE and OC-192 peering circuits at the eight SNRCs as of March 2009.
A little sleuthing revealed a 1996 article in the publication Network World in which AT&T described its Internet hubs as Service Node Routing Complexes, or SNRCs. Former AT&T employees Jennifer Rexford, who is now a professor at Princeton University, and Joel Gottlieb, who now runs his own consulting service, confirmed for us that SNRC was AT&T-specific jargon. We also found that AT&T had included the term SNRC in aglossary of technical terms it submitted with a government contract.
Elsewhere, in a diagram of Fairview data flows, the term Common Backbone, or CBB is used to describe the Fairview partner’s Internet backbone. The term CBB is also specific to AT&T, according to Rexford and Steven Bellovin, another former AT&T employee, now a professor at Columbia University.
A network map of Fairview shows eight “Peering Link Router Complexes” A 2009 AT&Tnetwork map shows eight “Backbone Node with Peering” at roughly those same locations.
UN Ring
In April 2012, an internal NSA newsletter boasted about a successful operation in which NSA spied on the United Nations headquarters in New York City with the help of its Fairview and Blarney programs. Blarney is a program that undertakes surveillance that is authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
FAIRVIEW and BLARNEY engineers collaborated to enable the delivery of 700Mbps of paired packet switched traffic (DNI) traffic from access to an OC192 ring serving the United Nations mission in New York … FAIRVIEW engineers and the partner worked to provide the correct mapping, and BLARNEY worked with the partner to correct data quality issues so the data could be handed off to BLARNEY engineers to enable processing of the DNI traffic.
We found historical records showing that AT&T was paid $1 million a year to operate the U.N.’s fiber optic provider in 2011 and 2012. A spokesman for the U.N. secretary general confirmed that the organization “has a current contract with AT&T” to operate the fiber optic network at the U.N. headquarters in New York.
Cable Landing Stations
Internal NSA maps of Fairview’s backbone network show the partner company’s nine cable landing stations on the East and West coasts of the United States. Those positions correspond to cable landing stations owned by AT&T, documented by the company in regulatory filings to the FCC
The internal NSA slide below shows the locations of Fairview’s cable stations and other program locations. The map shows AT&T stations where submarine cables enter the United States.
"Company A”
A 2009 working draft of an NSA inspector general report about President Bush’s Stellar Wind warrantless wiretapping program, which was previously released by The Guardian, referred to the helpful cooperation of two companies — Company A and Company B, which provided “two of the most productive SIGINT collaborations that the NSA has with the private sector.”
Company A was described as having “access to 39% of international calls into and out of the United States” while Company B had access to 28 percent of international calls. At the time, AT&T had 39 percent and MCI had 28 percent of the international message telephone traffic, according to a 1999 FCC report.
Stormbrew Includes Verizon
We were also curious about the NSA’s next-biggest corporate partnership after Fairview, described in the documents as Stormbrew.
We found a 2013 presentation in the documents that showed a map of a Stormbrew submarine cable connecting the West Coast of the United States to five Asian cities: Chongming and Qingdao in China, Keoje and Shin-Maruyama in Japan, and Tanshui in Taiwan. Those landing points match exactly with the landing points of the Trans-Pacific Express submarine cable that is operated by Verizon.
In an internal NSA newsletter, we found a reference to the construction of the Stormbrew cable landing station:
Stormbrew has completed SCIF construction and also received security certification for BRECKENRIDGE, its latest collection site on 11 September 2009. The 10,000 square foot facility is equipped with the necessary power, communications and equipment racks to support the planned near-term deployment of 15 TURMOIL systems, providing 150G of processing against the newly acquired ••••••••••••••••.
Initial collection system deployments are scheduled for 2nd quarter 2010. The BRECKENRIDGE/••••••• effort commenced in February 2007 and is the first “cable-head” collection effort conducted under STORMBREW.
The date that the effort started — February 2007— is also when Verizon filed its initial request for “a license to construct, land and operate the TPE cable,” according to FCC filings.
Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010.
Jeff Larson is the Data Editor at ProPublica. He is a winner of the Livingston Award for the 2011 series Redistricting: How Powerful Interests are Drawing You Out of a Vote. Jeff’s public key can be found here.
Ukraine Mustn’t Count on Changes in Russia Soon But Instead Be Prepared to Fight On, Borovoy Says
In an interview given to Ukrainska Pravda, Borovoy, who came to Kyiv during the Maidan, opposed the Crimean Anschluss, and encouraged the US to provide financial and military help to Ukraine, was as outspoken in his comments as his late friend Valeriya Novodvorskaya.
Many Ukrainians, he suggests, now place their hopes for the future in some dramatic change from below: a palace coup, a successful challenge to the Kremlin by the opposition, or a social explosion that would spark a revolution. But none of these things are likely, according to Borovoy.
Putin does not face a challenge from within his entourage. Instead, he has promoted the idea of competition within it to increase his own power. The Kremlin leader does not face a challenge from what is called the Russian opposition because almost all those who call themselves that have been coopted or are controlled to one extent or another.
And he does not face a social revolution either, Borovoy argues. Whatever some Ukrainians think, “there are no poor frozen Russians” who are ready to demand change. The situation “is still worse than you think” because as far as Ukrainians are concerned, Russia is “an enemy,” and “one should not expect anything positive from such an enemy camp.”
Borovoy says he participated in politics at the end of Soviet times and at the beginning of post-Soviet ones when he “was certain that Russia would become a democratic state.” But he agree with his interviewer that Russian society “has been transformed into a society of consumers who haven’t noticed that they are in a concentration camp.”
He dates “the beginning of the [current] imperial project” to 1994-1995, the time of Yeltsin’s conflict with Tatarstan over whether Russia would be a federation or a confederation. “then in 1994 was issued a secret decree about the preparation for the suppression of an anti-constitutional putsch.”
In that decree, Borovoy says, it was specified that Moscow would introduce forces into the non-Russian republics if their presidents issued a joint declaration on the issue. “This was July 1994.” At the end of the year, he says, this project began to be carried out. This was an imperial project” which did not kill democracy in Russia but put its future at risk.
Turning to Ukraine, he says that Russia will continue the war, now stepping up the pressure and now lowering it to keep everyone off guard. Ukrainians must be prepared to “fight and fight with enormous losses” because “there are no other options” available if they want to control their own future.
“Ukraine today is defending not just its own national values or will defend them if it actively takes part in this war but those of European and Western civilization,” Borovoy says. That should be a source of enormous pride. And it should prompt Europe and the West to come to its aid more than they have.
Instead, many in Europe have become cynics, with some even asserting that yes, Ukraine is losing 7,000 combat deaths a year but it is giving birth to “more than 7,000” and so the whole thing doesn’t matter as long as the war doesn’t spread. But with that attitude, Putin can attack and convert Ukraine into a zone of war without clear battle lines, a disaster for Ukrainians.
In that event, Borovoy concludes, “Ukraine would be converted into a copy of Moldova” and its people could look forward to only “a slow death.” Fighting the Russian enemy is a better option.
Die neuen Flüchtlingsgesetze in Ungarn umfassen als zentralen Punkt die Ermächtung der Regierung, "sichere Staaten zu identifizieren". Das werden, außer der Ukraine, alle Nachbarländer Ungarns sein. Flüchtlinge, die aus diesen Ländern nach Ungarn kommen, dürfen in Ungarn keine Asylverfahren durchführen.
Fidesz-Vizechef Kósa fasste die neue "Strategie" so zusammen: "Flüchtlinge müssen jetzt am ersten Ort gestoppt werden, wo ihr Leben nicht mehr in Gefahr ist." Praktisch bedeutet das: alle aufgegriffenen Flüchtlinge werden verhaftet und eingesperrt, binnen 48 Stunden soll in einem Schnellverfahren über ihren Status entschieden werden und dann unmittelbar die Rückschiebung vorgenommen werden. Ein missverständlicher Passus im Gesetz lässt auch Raum für unmittelbare Rückbringungen an der Grenze, ohne jedes rechtliche Gehör zu. Das ist nicht weniger als die angekündigte Abschaffung von Asylverfahren in Ungarn und damit ein offener Verstoß gegen die Genfer Flüchtlingskonvention, gegen EU-Regularien ohnehin, auch über Dublin-III hinaus.
Update
Ungarische Polizisten als Schleuser - Verhaftungen: Am Montag wurden fünf Personen ungarischer Staatsbürgerschaft wegen des Verdachts des Menschenschmuggels verhaftet. Unter ihnen befinden sich drei aktive Polizisten, darunter ein Offizier. Ihnen wird vorgeworfen, den Schleusern gegen Geld Zeiten und Routen von Patrouillen verraten zu haben und sie durch Grenzkontrollen geschleust zu haben. Medienrecherchen ergaben, dass die Fünf nur ein Teil eines regelrechten Schleusernetzwerks sind, das vor allem seit der Ankündigung des Zaunbaus zu Serbien besonders aktiv wurde.