Meet the New Small-Business Owners in Congress

This is cool, at NYT:

In the class of 2008, there were 11. Last Tuesday’s elections will send 33 small-business owners and entrepreneurs to Washington, according to The Agenda’s exhaustive (and exhausting) search. All are Republicans. Two are women.

Fourteen of them have never held elective office before. Most of the rest, though, have served in their state legislatures — and some even led their chambers ...

More here.

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on the 'False Promise of Objectivity'

I'm with Robert Stacy McCain about Olby, "Wow. I Think I Agree With Olbermann." But in an otherwise pompous "Special Comment" (is there any other kind?), I was about to give Obermann the benefit of the doubt until he got to his rant about the "objective" reporting on the "lies" of Iraq. By now the left's "Bush lied people died" meme is so entrenched as to have practically surgically removed the critical thinking of any Democrat-Socialist partisan. Keith Olbermann's scores no points here, albeit after a good college try.

Leaked Body Scans

At Gizmodo:

At the heart of the controversy over "body scanners" is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. These are those images.

A Gizmodo investigation has revealed 100 of the photographs saved by the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner from Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc., obtained by a FOIA request after it was recently revealed that U.S. Marshals operating the machine in the Orlando, Florida courthouse had improperly-perhaps illegally-saved images of the scans of public servants and private citizens.

We understand that it will be controversial to release these photographs. But identifying features have been eliminated. And fortunately for those who walked through the scanner in Florida last year, this mismanaged machine used the less embarrassing imaging technique.

More at the link, and Jawa Report, "We Look Forward To Seeing Your 'Next' Vacation Photos!" (via Memeorandum). Plus, Ann Althouse, "John Tyner, the Young Man Who Resisted the TSA's Groin-Grope, Will Now Be Probed."

PREVIOUSLY:

* "'If You Touch My Junk': Man Ejected From San Diego Airport for Refusing Security Check."

* "Janet Napolitano Defends TSA Full-Body Scans and Pat Downs."

* "Free John Tyner!"

Free John Tyner!

See the story at San Diego Union-Tribune, "TSA to Investigate Body Scan Resister." And at the video, the most compelling discussion is toward the end, with Shepard Smith and attorney Seth Berenzweig:

And previously: "Janet Napolitano Defends TSA Full-Body Scans and Pat Downs."

Greta Van Susteren's Interview with Former President George W. Bush

I'm wading my way through President Bush's memoirs, Decision Points. I know many conservatives lost faith in Bush, especially for the dramatic expansion of government during the administration. Michelle had the best post on this, "Bush Nostalgia: Let's Not Get Carried Away, OK?" I don't disagree with Michelle, although I'd add that while I'm not thrilled with the GOP's leadership in the runaway growth of government, GWB's moral leadership is his saving grace, and will never be forgotten in my case. Frankly, I came of age ideologically during the Bush years. Late bloomer, I guess, but this has been personally monumental. I've spoken so many times on my disgust with the left, and much of it had to do with the extreme toxicity of BDS. And that continues, as told by Doug Powers: "Left Greeting Bookstore Release of Bush’s ‘Decision Points’ With Level of Maturity You Might Expect."

In any case, President Bush is done with his network news interviews and has taken to Fox to finish out the book promotions. I envy Greta. I think meeting and talking with President Bush would be a real highlight. RELATED: From Kill Truck, at POWIP, "Decision Points: Quitting."

American Exceptionalism

From the letters at Los Angeles Times:

People who believe they're part of a great nation represent a problem for those who'd like to tear the house down and start over. Thus the left works tirelessly to persuade other Americans that they're nothing special — that in fact they're so bigoted, backward and selfish, only a fundamental restructuring of society can redeem them.

As a vote-getter, this proposition has obvious limitations. Obama skillfully shrouded it in gauzy platitudes during the 2008 campaign, but issues like Guantanamo, civilian trials for accused terrorists and Arizona's immigration law have since made his government's ideological distance from the mainstream unmistakable.

Most of us see a good country with flaws. The left sees a flawed country with potential — and the last two years as progress.

Michael Smith

And here's the original Jonah Goldberg essay: "The Bashing of American Exceptionalism."

The Reign of Right-Wing Primetime

I love the sound of that, at The Hollywood Reporter.

And Kathy Shaidle has more: "Two Americas -- Even When It Comes to TV Viewing."

RELATED: "Nielsen: 5 Million Watched Palin's TLC Show: 'Sarah Palin's Alaska' premiere Gets 5 Million Viewers, TLC's Best Series Premiere Ever."

Defeated House Dems Cry Me a River

Boo freakin' hoo. At The Hill, "Dejected House Dems Wipe Away Tears as GOP Celebrates Victory." (At Memeorandum.)

Always pathetic. Reminds me of crybaby Julián Tavárez bawling his eyes out after the Atlanta Braves beat the Cleveland Indians in the 1995 World Series. Disgraceful. Sometimes you gotta suck it up. Democrats. Losers.

George W. Bush on Hannity

I've got President Bush's interview with Greta Van Susteren scheduled for early morning, but this clip is short, and it's interesting to see some of the top administration advisers in the audience:

'Are IPE Journals Becoming Boring?'

Dr. Benjamin J. Cohen, my former professor at UCSB, argues that the formalization of international political economy, and the field's envy with the discipline of economics, and made for increasingly rigorous and sophisticated scholarship, but boring:

Many reasons have been suggested for American IPE’s love affair with scientific method – editorial control of journals, the standards applied in tenure or promotion cases, the way we teach our graduate students. But these are more symptom than cause. Underlying them all is a deeper issue, involving us and our peers in the economics profession. To be blunt: political scientists in the United States appear to have an inferiority complex when it comes to economics – what I have elsewhere described as a case of peer-us envy (Cohen 2009). The parsimonious reductionism of mainstream economics has come to set the standard for what passes for professionalism in our field. If today the most highly rated work in the American school tends to mimic the economist’s demanding hard-science model, it seems in large part to demonstrate that the field, for all the ambiguities of the political process, is no less capable of theoretical elegance and formal rigor. IPE scholars want respect, too. A kind of “creeping economism” has come to define what constitutes the legitimate study of our subject.

Not everyone agrees that this is a problem. For many, the trend represents progress – all part of the “maturing” of the field, as David Lake (2006) puts it. The more IPE scholars agree on a common epistemology, the more their work approaches the respectability of “normal” science. In Lake’s words (2009: 49), “cacophony” yields to “Kuhnian normalcy.” But at what cost? To my mind, such a happy assessment is altogether too kind, since it ignores all that is lost as a result. The price of this kind of “progress” is measured by how much now gets left out of what we have available to read.

In effect, the creep of economism has tended to shrink the horizons of scholarship. To a significant extent, this is because of the practical requirements of empiricism. By definition, a hard science model depends on the availability of reliable data. Research, accordingly, tends to become data-driven, diverted away from issues that lack the requisite numbers. In effect, the approach plays a key role in defining what can be studied, automatically marginalizing broader questions that cannot be reduced to a manageable set of regressions or structured case-study analysis.

RTWT at the link.

iTunes Store to Carry the Beatles

At WSJ, "Apple Finally Snares Beatles" (via Memeorandum):

Steve Jobs is nearing the end of his long and winding pursuit of the Beatles catalog.

Apple Inc. is preparing to disclose that its iTunes Store will soon start carrying music by the Beatles, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that would fill a glaring gap in the collection of the world's largest music retailer.

The deal resulted from talks that were taking place as recently as last week among executives of Apple, representatives of the Beatles and their record label, EMI Group Ltd., according to these people. These people cautioned that Apple could change plans at the last minute.

Spokesmen for Apple and EMI declined to comment.

Apple on Monday posted a notice on the home page of its iTunes Store that it would make "an exciting announcement" Tuesday morning.

Terms of the deal that brought the Beatles music to iTunes couldn't be learned, and it was unclear whether other online music services would gain access to the catalog too. However, Apple maintains a roughly 90% market share in the online music business.

More at the link, and also Media Gazer.

I heard "Back in the U.S.S.R." during afternoon drive time today, on The Sound L.A. Wikipedia's entry is here.

Newsweek: Is the Presidency Too Big a Job?

Is this a Tina Brown production? I wasn't holding my breath, but sheesh. This Daily Beast merger's got to do something for Newsweek (via Glenn Reynolds):

On the spring day that Obama signed his health-care-reform law, for instance, he also had an economic briefing on unemployment, discussions about financial reform, a meeting at the Department of the Interior, a quick lunch, a meeting with senior advisers and then with Senate leaders on ratification of a new nuclear-nonproliferation treaty with Russia, and an Oval Office summit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on devising a model for Middle East peace. On cable TV, meanwhile, pundits offered nonstop analysis of the holes in the new reform package, while Sarah Palin renewed accusations of Obama’s “government takeover” of health care. A new poll showed that, for the first time, more of the country disapproved than approved of his job performance. In an interview with 60 Minutes that week, the president joked, “If you had said to us a year ago that the least of my problems would be Iraq...I don’t think anybody would have believed it.” Then he laughed. Steve Kroft, the interviewer, asked if he was “punch-drunk.”

More often, Obama projects a demeanor of unruffled cool: he can handle the pressures and demands of the job just fine (how could he suggest otherwise?), and he didn’t run for office “to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation.” But the issue is not Obama, it’s the office. Aides to George W. Bush make similar complaints about the demands on the executive. “It was a much different place than even during the Bush Sr. administration,” says Joe Hagin, Bush 43’s deputy chief of staff, who also worked for Reagan and Bush 41. “There was much less time [under the second Bush] to catch your breath during the day.” He recalls the constant juggling of issues—from the wars to Katrina—often all at the same time. “There’s only so much bandwidth in the organization,” he says.

Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency? Obama has looked to many models of leadership, including FDR and Abraham Lincoln, two transformative presidents who governed during times of upheaval. But what’s lost in those historical comparisons is that both men ran slim bureaucracies rooted in relative simplicity. Neither had secretaries of education, transportation, health and human services, veterans’ affairs, energy, or homeland security, nor czars for pollution or drug abuse, nor televisions in the West Wing constantly tuned to yammering pundits. They had bigger issues to grapple with, but far less managing to do. “Lincoln had time to think,” says Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. “That kind of downtime just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Among a handful of presidential historians NEWSWEEK contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated. “The growth is exponential in these last 50 years, especially the number of things that are expected of the president,” says presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who had dinner with Obama and a handful of other historians last summer. Obama aides speaking on background say that the president’s inner circle can become stretched by the constant number of things labeled “crises” that land on his desk—many of which, like the mistaken firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod in Georgia or the intricacies of the oil cleanup in the gulf, could easily be handled by lower-level staff. “Some days around here, it can almost be hard to breathe,” says one White House official who didn’t want to go on the record portraying his boss as overwhelmed. Another senior adviser says that sometimes the only way to bring the president important news is to stake out his office and “walk and talk” through the hall.

The growth of the presidency has been a sort of Catch-22. Most presidents after Roosevelt, at least until the Vietnam era, got by with only a few dozen advisers. Ted Sorensen, the Kennedy speechwriter who died last month, was actually hired as a domestic-policy counselor, one of only a handful (he wrote speeches in his spare time). Today there are more than 35 staffers devoted to domestic policy, plus more who parachute in on particular issues, like health care or energy. Yet as the president’s responsibilities have grown, the instinct has been to hire more people to help manage the work, including the flow of information. “That’s wrong; the more people you have in the White House, the more problems are sucked into it,” says James Pfiffner, a George Mason University professor of public policy whose 2007 book, The Modern Presidency, examined the enormous growth of the office. Other historians point to the changing role of cabinet secretaries. While Obama has more department leaders than ever before—15, compared with Gerald Ford’s 11 and Lincoln’s 7—many of them have less power and influence, which has required minor decisions about trade, energy, and economic strategy to be handled by White House staffers.

Political scientist Thomas Cronin once credited the period between World War II and Watergate as the “swelling of the presidency.” It was during the Eisenhower administration that historians first asked if the president simply had too many demands. But those were far less cluttered times. “We had a lot to do, and many people were asking questions, but we were never overwhelmed,” says Harry McPherson, who served as counsel, then special counsel, to Lyndon Johnson. Such memories sound quaint to current White House staffers. “There is never a day we come in and there are only a few things we need to do,” says Bill Burton, Obama’s deputy press secretary.

Interesting how the piece assumes that the crises of the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s were cakewalks compared to what Obama's facing today. Of course, we had a Great Depression, World War II, Korea, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in those days, and that's not counting Truman's seizure of the steel mills, Eisenhower's intervention in Little Rock, and Kennedy's promise to "pay any price, bear any burden ... in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." I just don't think Obama's up for it, as Glenn points out, "Is the Presidency too big for one man? Nope. Just for the inexperienced guy with no management experience that we elected. As Jay Cost wrote a while back “America is not ungovernable. Her President has simply not been up to the job”..."

More at the link.

Janet Napolitano Defends TSA Full-Body Scans and Pat Downs

From Janet "The System Worked" Napolitano: "Scanners Are Safe, Pat-Downs Discreet":

Nearly a year after a thwarted terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas Day, the recent attempt by terrorists to conceal and ship explosive devices aboard aircraft bound for the United States reminds us that al-Qaeda and those inspired by its ideology are determined to strike our global aviation system and are constantly adapting their tactics for doing so.

Our best defense against such threats remains a risk-based, layered security approach that utilizes a range of measures, both seen and unseen, including law enforcement, advanced technology, intelligence, watch-list checks and international collaboration.

This layered approach to aviation security is only as strong as the partnerships upon which it is built ...

And we ask the American people to play an important part of our layered defense. We ask for cooperation, patience and a commitment to vigilance in the face of a determined enemy.

As part of our layered approach, we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures.

AIT machines are safe, efficient, and protect passenger privacy. They have been independently evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who have all affirmed their safety. And the weapons and other dangerous and prohibited items we've found during AIT screenings have illustrated their security value time and again.

Rigorous privacy safeguards are also in place to protect the traveling public ...

RTWT at the link.

Napolitano indicates that the "officer assisting the passenger never sees the image" of hot naked travellers, and those pat down techniques are "conducted by same-gender officers," heterosexual, of course.

And Secretary Napolitano stresses repeatedly that we "face a determined enemy." Right. This is the same cabinet secretary and Obama crony who claimed there was no evidence that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's bombing attempt was "part of anything larger."

That said, conservatives and libertarians are demanding what? No more pre-flight screening procedures? Yeah, I know. We're combatting the last terrorist attack. But still? Unless we start racial profiling we're gonna have these searches Or, well, maybe not. See, Art Carden, "Full Frontal Nudity Doesn’t Make Us Safer: Abolish the TSA" (at Memeorandum). And Reason.TV:

RELATED: "Hey, Hey, TSA, guess what? We won't fly."

IMAGE CREDIT: Voting Female.

VIDEO: Charlie Rangel Walks Out of Ethics Trial

The story's at Politics Daily, but see New York Times, "Ethics Hearing Goes Ahead After Rangel Walks Out" (and Memeorandum).

Paul Krugman Was Against Death Panels Before He Was For Them

The first thing I noticed was that Robert Kagan was in the house, one of my favorite writers on foreign policy. But secondly was the hilarious moment at about 1:30 minutes when George Will shakes his head at Paul Krugman's babblings. When George Will shakes his head people stand up and take notice! And that's before Krugman even got to his hypocritical blather about "death panels." Krugman-in-Wonderland has the story. And no, it's not that Krugman's way too sophisticated for "right-wingers" to comprehend. It's that Krugman's confirming that "right-wingers" were right all along. ObamaCare would contain costs by rationing services. More on this at Memeorandum.

Newly Released Intelligence Report Says Hardline Islamists Want to Build a 'Parallel Society' in Canada

At National Post, "Document: Islamist extremists and the promotion of a parallel society."

Remembrance Sunday Pictures

At London's Telegraph: "In pictures: The Queen leads tributes to Britain's war dead on Remembrance Sunday."

The Middle East Problem in a Nutshell

Awesome clip, from Dennis Prager (via Theo Spark):

Facebook's 'Koobface' Security Challenge

At NYT, "Attacker That Sharpened Facebook’s Defenses." I've seen these a couple of times. Don't click 'em if you see 'em:

A friend on Facebook suggests that you watch an amazing or funny or sexy video. The link may seem innocuous enough. But with a few simple clicks, you could end up infecting your PC with the Koobface worm.

Koobface, whose name is an anagram for its preferred social network, is a malicious program that has plagued Facebook for more than two years, ensnaring hundreds of thousands of people and keeping the site’s security team on the defense.

The worm was Facebook’s first major security challenge and remains the most persistent threat on the site. As such, Koobface has played a big role in shaping Facebook’s approach to combating malicious software, or malware, and propelled the development of increasingly elaborate defenses.

Yet the worm continues to be a thorn in the side of Facebook’s in-house investigators, who say they are on the trail of the organized criminal group that created it but, so far, have been denied the satisfaction of arrests.

Koobface, which spreads only on social networks, appeared on Facebook in May 2008 and has hit nearly every major social network since then. While not the first or only worm to strike social sites, it is notable for the way it has relentlessly returned again and again, particularly to Facebook.

There have been 136 versions of Koobface’s main component alone, said Ryan R. Flores, a senior threat researcher at the security software company Trend Micro. By continually adapting to obstacles set up by Facebook and the security industry, “Koobface is the one that made it big,” he said.

The attacks have pushed Facebook to expand its security team, to develop a sophisticated apparatus for quickly detecting and stopping malicious activity, to create tools for talking with its users about security and to build relationships within the security industry. And the company continues to gather evidence that could help law enforcement arrest and prosecute those responsible ...

Nart Villeneuve, the report’s lead researcher, estimated that the group earned more than $2 million from June 2009 to June 2010 by delivering the victims of its worm to unscrupulous marketers and makers of fake antivirus software. He said the release of the report coincided with a multiweek effort to dismantle the group’s infrastructure and take down its “botnet,” or network of Koobface-infected PCs, though he conceded it was likely to be rebuilt.

Mt. Everest

At Michael Yon's: