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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (18510)	12/3/2003 3:52:32 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793908

Arnold is so smart to use talk radio as much as he does. Other candidates across the country should learn from him. He will get nothing but grief if he caters to the Print Media in California. Hugh Hewitt's Blog: The Los Angeles Times carries a pretty good account of Governor Arnold's barnstorming of the state yesterday, and even correctly note that AS appeared on the four radio talk shows that make up the afternoon A-list throughout the state: Rodger Hedgecock, John & Ken, Sean Hannity and me. Sean and I are syndicated across the country but can spend some time focused exclusively on California because of the Governor's national appeal; Roger and John & Ken have large slices of the San Diego and Los Angeles markets, respectively. Arnold stayed on message --which is to encourage voters to demand that their legislators act by the Friday deadline to place Arnold's ballot initiatives vefore the voters in March. When I tried to get him into the verbal arena against little Phil Angelides --the state's Democratic treasurer who is trying to put roadblocks in Arnold's way because of Phil's desire to run for Gov in '06-- or to discuss a ballot initiative changing the legislature to a part-time body, the Gov demurred. He is giving the Dems a chance to work with him, and as the Times account points out, many of the less crazy Dems understand this. The state does need the recovery plan, and I can't imagine the Dems are stupid enough to cross swords with the Gov. If they don't act by Friday, I expect the blowback to come in the form of some sort of inititiative "reforming" the legislature, perhaps even my favorite: reducing it to a part-time body, with appropriately lowered pay and perks. That scares the more than half of the bodies in Sacramento that couldn't hold down a real job if their lives depended upon it. Arnold knows he has the upper hand, and he has played the Dems into a corner. If they choose to block him, every cut that follows will be on their heads. If they go along, Arnold rings up a third major victory in as many weeks. Very nicely done. The Times seems bitter that Arnold is using radio to communicate, writing that the "friendly hosts have become essential communication arms of [Arnold's] government.". Slowly it is dawning on some of the state's elites that the radio world presents an alternative means of communicating with millions of Golden State voters. The newspapers are the dinosaurs; the radio shows have become fast paced and mobile. The newspapers pile up unread. The radio shows provide instant impact with large audiences. Howard Dean and the rest of the Democratic wannabees should take note of Arnold's understanding: Radio shows combine large audiencesof potential voters with an opportunity to communicate directly with them. The Dems cower from the prospect of mixing it up with the center-right hosts, but there is only gain to be had if they know what they are doing. (Dean probably has to stay away from radio given his tendency to fly off the handle. Radio doesn't help the unstable.) Arnold uses good humor and repitition to get his points across. He put on four clinics yesterday. Let's see if other pols were listening. hughhewitt.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (18510)	12/3/2003 4:21:25 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793908

There is never any "good news" out of the FBI. "Reason." The Knowledge Gap The only network the FBI ignores is its own Jeff Taylor Last month, at just about the same instant the FBI was granted yet more power to snoop around on the private lives of citizens, the watchdog arm of Congress reported that the Bureau has yet to patch up its own information infrastructure. The General Accounting Office wound up its latest look at the FBI's much-delayed computer upgrade and found it still a mess. The cost of this deficiency is difficult, if not impossible, to measure. After all, if you don't know what you are missing, you don't know what you are missing. But it is safe to infer that data remains locked up in walled-off crannies of the Bureau, out of the reach of investigators trying to piece together related info. In effect, Osama bin Laden's last known Tora Bora mailing address could reside on some forgotten disk drive with no way to find it. This sad state is nothing new. Back in September 2000 the GAO found that "the FBI had over 13,000 desktop computers that were four to eight years old and could not run basic software packages." In December 2001 a Department of Justice review found 234 isolated, "stove-piped" applications on 187 different servers. The GAO observes that each of these servers "had its own unique databases and did not share information with other applications or with other government agencies." In June 2002 the GAO was back to report that the FBI's information technology remained backward, lacking even a "fully functional E-mail system." This led the GAO to conclude that "these deficiencies served to significantly hamper the FBI's ability to share important and time-sensitive information internally and externally with other intelligence and law enforcement agencies." And just about a year ago the FBI's computer missteps were again chronicled by the Justice Department's Inspector General. The IG found transition to the Trilogy data-sharing system hamstrung by a lack of Microsoft Word macros. Microsoft Word macros? The crux of the problem seems to the Bureau's inability or refusal to come up with what is known as an enterprise architecture. Scratch any multinational operation with thousands of employees and you'll hit EA. This roadmap for computer systems lays out just what it is computers try to accomplish in the operation, and supplies the framework for who will do it and how it will be done. Big enterprises need such a blueprint to keep from duplicating functions, to ensure interoperability, and to make sure that the mission fits the master. You wouldn't want your great widget-demand forecasting software to allow your widget-factory managers access to your corporate payroll, as an absurd example. Yet despite the obvious need to come up with some sort of plan for a 27,000-strong, 450-office enterprise, the Bureau seems steadfast in its swaggering Alfonso Bedoya stance: "Plan? We don't need no stinking plan!" The GAO notes that the FBI has just now, 32 months into the current "reform," begun to populate the architecting effort with warm bodies. The GAO calls the foot-dragging an indication of a failure to make EA an "institutional management priority." That's bureaucrat-speak for nobody cares. A sure sign of low regard is that the FBI is still developing its "as-is" architectural descriptions. This is another way of saying that the FBI does not even have a firm grasp of what it spends $800 million a year on now, let alone what it would like to do in the future. More ominously, the GAO found that what little EA work is being done lacks input from the counterterrorism and counterintelligence fiefdoms within the Bureau. Both of those units no doubt house some of the Bureau's most nifty black boxes, so it might seem that trying to tie them to the rest of the enterprise is like hitching racehorse to an oxcart. But this would be shortsighted in the extreme. As the flight training school fiasco demonstrated, with the FBI unable to act on tips generated across the country, it is not enough just to have a handful of incident reports sitting in file cabinets while Washington calls the tune. There must be a way for field offices to pull data together and easily share it, a peer-to-peer network for G-men. This is the opposite of what the Bureau's default architecture assumes. A few specialized outfits in D.C. are being tasked with hunting down a list of known bad guys in near real-time. Such a top-down approach is almost sure to fail while subjecting millions of Americans to needless invasions of their privacy. Better to step back and do the decidedly unglamorous, sure to frustrate, and downright boring job of making all the existing boxes work before employing sexy new subpoena powers to fill up shiny new boxes with gigs of fresh data. Jeff Taylor has all his servers stove-piped. reason.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (18510)	12/3/2003 5:58:37 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793908

I can understand what the people in Geneva are up to. What I cannot understand is what Powell is up to. And why Bush is letting him do it. The Public utterances between Powell and Sharon yesterday were downright outrageous. 'PEACE' PERFIDY NY POST Eric Fettman December 3, 2003 -- SUPPOSE that back in 1980, while President Jimmy Carter was trying to end the Iranian hostage crisis, private citizen Ronald Reagan suddenly announced that, on his own initiative, he had negotiated an agreement that offered the mullahs major U.S. concessions? Or what if, five years ago, just as President Bill Clinton was threatening military action against Saddam Hussein, Bob Dole - who'd lost the last election to Clinton - suddenly popped up in a foreign capital to sign an accord he'd negotiated with the Iraqi foreign minister that undercut Clinton's efforts? Carter, Clinton and their allies would have yelled "treason" - and justifiably so. Which makes you wonder why both former presidents enthusiastically endorsed the so-called Geneva Initiative for the Middle East that was signed amid much hoopla Tuesday in a ceremony emceed by that renowned international diplomat, Richard Dreyfuss. For over two centuries, America has had on its books the Logan Act, which expressly forbids private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. Even though no violator has ever been prosecuted, it's an important reminder that foreign policy should be conducted by the nation's elected leaders. The "accord" unveiled in Geneva was the handiwork of a group of Israeli leftists, one of whom - Amram Mitzna - recently suffered the worst electoral defeat in the nation's history. Like principal negotiator Yossi Beilin (whom the late Yitzhak Rabin used to deride as a "poodle"), he is a private citizen, with no authority to negotiate an agreement, let alone sign one. Any fantasy that this is a "peace" agreement was dispelled by the signing ceremony itself, which was little more than an unremitting bash-Israel spectacle, featuring longtime Israeli foes. Only Israel was held to blame for the stalemate in negotiations. And the agreement's backers, say those who know better, blatantly lied about what it truly says. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak - no right-winger - charged that "this accord is rewarding terror. It will not save lives. It will lead to more deaths." Despite claims otherwise, "the issue of the [Palestinian] right of return into Israel is not solved. . . . Contrary to what Jimmy Carter said tonight, there is no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Not even this simplest demand is met." Indeed, the Geneva document is more than a rehash of the failed Oslo Accords, of which Beilin was a chief architect. Under Oslo, difficult issues like Jerusalem were put off until the very end, in expectation that, having come so far, the two sides would have to reach agreement. Geneva addresses the issues that Oslo left unresolved. But it instead refuses to seriously address a key issue on which even Oslo offered specifics: Terrorism. Yes, it calls for an end to terror. But it neither defines terrorism - the Palestinians consider suicide bombings "legitimate resistance" - nor does it spell out how it should be ended. Most importantly, ending terrorism is not deemed a prerequisite for any final agreement. This document, in other words, would obligate Israel to undertake far-reaching territorial concessions in return for non-recognition of its status as a Jewish state, an open-ended "right" of Arabs to resettle in Israel and no guarantee that terrorism will be halted. The whole point of the Geneva document is to handcuff Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and undermine his government in a blatant attempt to reverse the last two elections, which Sharon won resoundingly. It's no accident that those behind this scheme are those who were defeated at the polls. The Israeli leftists and their allies have once again emboldened Arafat - who almost certainly will insist on Geneva's Israeli concessions as the starting point for any future talks. Forgotten will be Sharon's insistence that an end to terrorism must precede substantive negotiations - and his reminder that Arafat has refused to fulfill his signed commitment to "undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere." Which is why it's especially painful that Secretary of State Colin Powell has encouraged the Geneva efforts and plans to meet with its authors this week in what amounts to an official endorsement. If it is his intention to force Sharon's hand, it is profoundly misguided. If those delusional world leaders who applauded the Geneva circus really want to pressure Sharon, there's a simple way to do so: Press Arafat to comply with his repeatedly signed commitment to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. Once the Palestinians demonstrate unequivocally that they are serious about ending terrorism, Sharon will have little alternative but to offer further concessions. Indeed, he's already made clear his willingness to do so. If Carter & Co. are so convinced that it's just a bluff, why don't they try calling him on it? nypost.com