Politics
There are 1,056 posts filed in Politics (this is page 39 of 106).
My NSA job rejection letter
I was reminded I had this scrap of paper today after reading week after week about the NSA. It’s a polite job rejection letter I got from the NSA in 2001, after I offered to dust off my security clearance and help catch some bad guys. I find it amusing now, now knowing just how far off the mission the NSA has wandered since then.
Frank Eaton films Hallie
Frank is an expert videographer and a fun guy to be around. He really connected with the kids, too, making it a fun experience.
The video came out beautifully and Hallie’s climate change rally is quickly generating attention. We hope the momentum continues to build through 28th!
If you’d like to know more, check out the IMatter Youth NC website. And if you’d like to look good on camera, check out Frank’s Bully Documentary Company.
This month, the Raleigh Parks, Recreation, and Greenway Advisory Board (PRGAB) votes on a proposed ordinance prohibiting dogs from certain areas of parks. There are plenty of proponents and opponents for this new ordinance and it’s been difficult finding the right balance.
One of the PRGAB’s committees, the Greenways and Urban Trees Committee (GWUT), is recommending the ordinance be passed in its entirety. Dog owners have pleaded to continue being able to use athletic fields to exercise their dogs.
Everyone agrees that Raleigh has a shortage of dog parks. Until we can add more, I think it’s fair to make allowances for dog owners who have no other place to go. Therefore, rather than recommend restricting dogs from certain areas of all city parks, I will recommend the board allow for staff to allow dogs on fields where posted signs specifically allow it. As the city phases in more dog parks, we can move dogs to those parks and off athletic fields.
Incidentally, I had forgotten the extent of the role I played in bringing this about. A friend in the Oakwood neighborhood had a frightening encounter with an unleashed dog in Oakwood mini-park in April 2012 and it was I who brought it to the attention of Parks staff, who promptly added it to our work plan:
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I sure do wish the News and Observer would let the Raleigh City Council do its due diligence in hiring a city manager. Saturday’s front-page teaser about a closed session last week made me mad:
McFarlane holds closed City Council session
Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane presides over a non-public session that raises questions about compliance with the state’s open meetings law.
Um, no it doesn’t. It pertained to the city manager hiring process and the mayor was correct in calling for a closed session.
I’ll say it again: making job candidates public puts them in a precarious position with their current employers. Raleigh has had dozens of candidates respond to the city manager listing. Each of them might be fired from their current job if word got out that they were looking.
I’ll say another thing again: if the media expects city officials to respect the parts of Open Meetings that benefit them, they must also respect the parts of Open Meetings which allows city officials to conduct their personnel procedures in private.
Hiring a city manager is the most important decision a city council can make. The city manager is only one of two direct reports to the council. Why can’t the News and Observer leave the city council alone and let them pursue the best person for the job?
I heard an alarming story last week. A teacher was discussing recent interviews she had conducted of potential new teachers. When asked “why would you like to teach at our school,” the job candidates could only muster lame responses such as “because it’s close to my house!” The teacher was dumbfounded that these people couldn’t even come up with a useful, halfway-convincing response.
What seems to be happening is that the good teachers are heading out the door after one or two years, discovering they can get paid twice a teacher’s salary in the private sector. Taking their place are often teachers who aren’t as bright or as capable. Where does that leave the education of our children?
If our governor and legislative leaders like to harp about running government like a business, they should remember the first rule of hiring: if you want top talent you have to pay for top talent. If our state leaders want North Carolina to be competitive, we should pay our teachers a competitive wage and not have our teacher salaries near the lowest in the nation.
The future prosperity of our state rests on the education we provide to our children. The mistakes we are making now will haunt us in the years to come.
America & Not America. This sums it up.
Congress and the President are having a tough time drumming up support for bombing Syria. Locally, an informal Triangle Business Journal poll had 79% opposing war to just 21% supporting it.
One of my Facebook friends noted this:
Interesting that adamant left- and right leaning friends are posting the SAME photos & links regarding Syrian intervention. Refreshing change to see harmony! Wonder what impetus is bringing us together – is it expense, not wanting to intervene in another country, more pressing issues at home, or…?
I think a decade of never-ending war in the Middle East kind of sapped Americans’ enjoyment of the thing. I think we as a country are starting to question the utility and effectiveness of bombing as a foreign policy. Seeing Americans from both sides of the political spectrum reach this conclusion gives me hope that maybe we have turned the corner on the all-war-all-the-time mentality that has gripped this country for the last 25 years.
Shocking, or long suspected?
The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”.
via US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet | World news | The Guardian.
Two things seemingly unrelated captured my attention last week. One was the threat of war with Syria, the other was a parent encountering a child who had shown up to school with an empty stomach.
President Eisenhower once called military arms a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Sixty years later we have yet to heed his words. When will our country stop feeding the war machine and start feeding the needy among us?
I hope those advocating for war in the name of Syria’s children will consider the needs of our children first.
I’m a member of a Facebook group called United States Navy Cryptologic Technicians. Last week a member authored a post which questioned why NSA leaker Edward Snowden wasn’t being hunted down with all available resources. It spawned a very lively debate amongst ex-spooks about Snowden’s motives and those of the NSA, a debate which continues as I post this. There are many former spooks like myself who find the NSA’s new reach to be quite alarming, while others seem to be comfortable with Americans’ almost complete lack of online privacy. Several point out that Snowden took an oath to protect this information and broke his oath.
I took a similar oath when gained my security clearance. Like every other servicemember, however, the first oath I took was support and defend the Constitution of the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” To the extent that the latter conflicts with the former, the former (being the law of the land) always takes precedence. In addition, it was drilled into us as sailors that it was our duty to disobey an unlawful order. In hindsight this is far easier to say than do, as in practice disobeying a lawful order would most likely put you in a world of hurt. At least the government would come out looking good during your court-martial.
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This is great news. I’ve said it before but I hope North Carolina’s leaders will become enlightened and the guns will disappear from Raleigh’s streets. Yeah, that’s asking a lot but this is a huge step in the right direction.
The Justice Department said it would refocus marijuana enforcement nationwide by bringing criminal charges only in eight defined areas – such as distribution to minors – and giving breathing room to users, growers and related businesses that have feared prosecution.
The decisions end nearly a year of deliberation inside President Barack Obama’s administration about how to react to the growing movement for relaxed U.S. marijuana laws.
Advocates for legalization welcomed the announcement as a major step toward ending what they called “marijuana prohibition.”
via U.S. allows states to legalize recreational marijuana within limits | Reuters.
