It has been some time since I’ve posted a bunch of random photos. If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you’ve probably already seen many of these . . . but I like to post them here, on my site, which is my official Internets of Record. As usual, about half of them involve our two weirdo cats. We also have an example of my pastor’s art skills, an office prank, an Ikea product name, and a Christmas-light overachiever. Enjoy!
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) testified yesterday in a congressional hearing about the September 11, 2012, attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans were killed in that attack, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens—the first U.S. ambassador killed by violence in the line of duty since 1979.
We didn’t really learn anything new. We already knew that President Barack Obama’s (D) media surrogate, Ambassador Susan Rice, went on national television and repeated the official administration talking points that were, at best, misleading. We knew that the administration continued to misrepresent what had happened, characterizing the attack as a spontaneous protest rather than the premeditated act of terror that it was, for weeks after they knew better. We knew that the State Department had rebuffed Stevens’s requests for additional security in Libya before the attack, and that Obama did not order a rescue mission until hours after Stevens was already dead. The whole thing is a debacle, and has been mis-handled by Obama and his administration from the start.
Clinton, to her credit, has been perfectly clear about who is responsible for the government’s mistakes in Benghazi: she is. She has been saying so since at least October. Of course the reality is that the buck stops at the desk of the President of the United States—as President Harry Truman (D) liked to remind us—but Clinton has dutifully made the claim that the president is ‘not involved’ in diplomatic security decisions. That’s probably not true (and if it is, it’s frightening) . . . but Obama, for his part, seems to be willing to sit back and let Clinton take the heat so he doesn’t have to.
Here’s what I found interesting: Buried among repeats of information we already knew, Clinton appears to have (perhaps accidentally) endorsed some amount of civil service reform. In the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, an independent review board was convened to figure out what went wrong. Four federal employees were found to have made poor leadership decisions that contributed to the death of those four Americans, and so were placed on . . . paid administrative leave. It turns out that they can only be fired for a ‘breach of duty,’ and under the law ‘unsatisfactory leadership is not . . . a breach of duty.’ Clinton, like her congressional questioners, thinks this is unacceptable, and says that she has “put forth to the Congress and Senate to fix that problem going forward.”
Those of us who have worked for the government, whether as a federal employee or as a contractor, are well aware that it is nearly impossible to fire a poor-performer in the civil service. Strict laws, and even stricter union rules, ensure that even the most incompetent worker gets his regular promotions and step-increases and keeps moving into positions with more and more power. The many qualified, hard-working federal employees who ought to be rapidly moving up through the ranks instead progress at roughly the same rate as their less-qualified brethren. Many of the best workers, tired of carrying the rest, just give up and leave. (Those who stay, on the other hand, deserve our highest praise . . . and our deepest sympathies.) Many of the worst workers, on the other hand, have little incentive to improve. This is not unlike the situation in our public schools, or in any other employment environment (public or private) where individual merit has little connection to the rate of advancement.
So the fact that these four State Department employees haven’t been fired shouldn’t be surprising. Of course they haven’t been fired. The surprising thing is that a ‘progressive’ politician has come out, albeit quietly (and with precious little media attention), for allowing broader leeway in the firing of federal employees when they don’t do their jobs properly. I doubt she’ll come out in support of any ‘radical’ changes to the civil service—crazy ideas like promotions based on merit—but progress is progress.
President Barack Obama (D) has been sworn-in to a second term as the forty-fourth President of the United States. The Twentieth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that the terms of the president and vice president end, and the terms of a new president and vice president begin, at noon on January 20. The transition was recognized with the president taking the oath of office at the White House. Vice President Joe Biden was sworn-in earlier this morning in a private ceremony at his Naval Observatory residence.
Although the transition formally occurs today (per the Constitutional provision), the inaugural celebration and festivities are scheduled for tomorrow because they are traditionally not held on Sundays. Obama and Biden will both be ceremonially re-sworn tomorrow on the Capitol steps.
President Obama is the first biracial president, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. He is often erroneously identified as simply being ‘African American.’ Vice President Biden is also notable for being the first Catholic vice president. Despite my many political differences with President Obama, I sincerely wish him a safe and successful second term.
Another Battlestar Galactica mashup, this time with the ubiquitous Gangnam Style. Colonel Tigh wasn’t hearing ‘All Along the Watchtower’ when he found out that he was one of the ‘final five’ Cylons.
This video contains material that is owned by the producers of Battlestar Galactica.
It has been produced under the ‘fair use’ provisions of United States copyright law.
It is no secret that some of our most sacred civil liberties have been under attack over the last several decades, and that those attacks have greatly accelerated in the last four years. Lovers of the Bill of Rights keep having to defend ideals that used to be basic, agreed-upon norms of our free civil society. No, the government can’t tell people (or groups of people) what political statements they can and can’t make. No, the government can’t compel people (or groups of people) to violate the tenets of their religion. No, the government cannot infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms. And no, the government cannot subject people to unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution says that, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Of course, there is plenty of ‘wiggle-room’ about what exactly that means. The courts have evaluated and ruled time and time again on what constitutes an ‘unreasonable’ search and what constitutes ‘probable cause.’ But the norms have been pretty well established at this point.
Consider the traffic stop. The police officer who pulls you over has every right to observe anything that is in plain sight in your car, and, if he observes something suspicious or possibly illegal, probable cause has been established and he may now perform a more invasive search. Statements that you make to the officer may also constitute probable cause. However, if nothing suspicious is visible in plain sight, and you don’t give the officer any reason to perform a deeper search, he can’t do it (unless you explicitly give him permission). And those are the restrictions that apply to the car . . . your person has even greater protection. Only if you are being detained as part of an investigation does it became ‘reasonable’ under the Fourth Amendment to perform a basic pat-down. Only if you are being arrested under suspicion of a crime do more invasive searches become ‘reasonable.’
And yet, for some reason, the government—particularly the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)—has declared that you or I wanting to board an airliner is somehow probable cause for a search that would be illegal in any other context unless you had been arrested under suspicion of a crime. Metal detectors are fine, as are any number of other non-invasive scans for weapons or explosives (including explosive-sniffing dogs and even back-scatter x-ray and millimeter-wave scanners that don’t display a nude image of the traveler). Only if one of those detection systems detects something suspicious is probable cause established for a more thorough search. Citizens have the right to perform legal acts—walking down the street, driving a car, or boarding an airplane—without being subjected to being photographed through their clothes.
Despite these well-established limitations, the TSA has regularly employed backscatter x-ray machines that display a nude image of the traveler to TSA agents . . . who, according to some reports, then laugh at and ridicule them. Travelers who choose not to subject themselves to these scans, either for moral reasons or because of concern about the scans’ negative health impacts, are subjected instead to an invasive pat-down that would be blatantly illegal anywhere else (again, unless the citizen had been formally detained or arrested). These pat-downs have been compared to sexual assaults by many of their victims. And all of this for no worse crime than wanting to get on an airliner, which, last I checked, wasn’t actually a crime at all.
Although the TSA wanted to blithely press ahead with the illegal scans, the U.S. Congress—with wide support from Republicans and Democrats alike—ordered that they either move to a ‘generic outline’ scan image (rather than an actual image of the traveler’s naked body) or retire the machines by June of this year. As such, the TSA has announced that the Rapiscan backscatter x-ray machines will be removed from service and replaced with machines that comply with the congressional mandate. It’s a small victory, especially since Congress shouldn’t have to specifically mandate that federal agencies comply with the Bill of Rights in the first place, and the illegal pat-down remains the only option for people who are still concerned about backscatter x-ray health impacts. But it’s nice to know that the Fourth Amendment isn’t dead, even if it is still on life support.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
