Category: government transparency

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The Whys Behind the Whats

UFO, navy, flight, tracking, military, disclosure, secret, conspiracy,

“[H]ow quickly our differences worldwide would vanish,” said Ronald Reagan in 1987, “if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” 

Does that Reaganite talking point give us any hints about the current series of disclosures about Unidentified Flying Objects? 

I noted the most recent story to hit mainstream news on Sunday, about members of the U.S. Senate being briefed on the many repeated Navy encounters around the world with Unexplained Aerial Phenomena — “UAP” being the current euphemism for “UFO.” 

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the bulk of these news stories have been driven by a cadre of former government officials and contractors who have investigated UAP as part of a Pentagon research program. Now members of a non-profit educational corporation, they are on a mission to break the government-imposed silence and compartmentalized lock-up of knowledge about the phenomena. 

This being America, the effort also has a History Channel tie-in.

But much of the buzz appears to be coming from outside that core group, some of it focusing on leaked documents relating to a 2002 meeting between a scientist and a Navy admiral. The subject matter includes a secret program studying actual, hangered examples of ultra-strange flying craft* kept deeply secret — even from current military command — in the corporate wing of the military-industrial complex.

A new threat to unite us all? Or just another excuse to throw taxpayer funds down the Pentagon/military-industrial complex rathole?

The ongoing UFO disclosure might be neither of these yet still not what it seems.

We should keep our minds open, but our suspicions set on high alert.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The technology in question, in this document as well as in the footage disclosed in 2017, purportedly does not use propellers, jets, or rockets to move extremely rapidly, change course immediately, and hover.

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UFO, navy, flight, tracking, military, disclosure, secret, conspiracy,

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Long Gone Rogue

Chuck Schumer, Rachel Maddow, deep state, Donald Trump

Back in the 1990s, we used to talk about “rogue agencies” of the U.S. Government. And for good reason: the Branch Davidian massacre and the Ruby Ridge fiasco were hard to forget.

After 9/11/2001, however, we cut the agencies some slack. Why? Their incompetence and our hope.

But it became obvious from the NSA’s illegal metadata collection program, as revealed by Edward Snowden, the core agencies of the military-industrial complex do not like playing by rules that the American people have a say in.

How bad is it?

On New Year’s Day this year, Sen. Chuck Schumer was talking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about their favorite conspiracy theory. Maddow, as we all know, had gone Full Nutter on this “collusion”/“corruption” story, and Democratic politicians (along with nearly the whole of the mainstream news media) ran with the story for two years. Then, the Mueller report is “no collusion.”

But on that first Tuesday of 2019, Ms. Maddow was talking about Trump’s tweets which she characterized as “taunting” the CIA and other agencies obsessed with the “Russian hacking” angle of the brouhaha. And Schumer’s response? 

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

We should take this as a signal. It is like making prison rape jokes. It says something about the situation: prison rape or Deep State machinations. And about the speaker: leveraging a rogue element as a threat.

No wonder many now think the Russiagate/Mueller investigation was a “Deep State Coup” attempt.

A republic with rogue agencies is hardly a republic at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Chuck Schumer, Rachel Maddow, deep state, Donald Trump

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Put the Public in Public Policy

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, secrecy, transparency, negotiations

“Negotiations are impossible without trust,” wrote Leon Panetta in a Washington Post op-ed.

What with all his experience, Mr. Panetta has some reason to be trusted on his chosen subject, government shutdowns. The California Democrat spent 16 years in the Congress before joining the Clinton Administration as Director of the Office of Management and Budget and later serving as White House Chief of Staff. He was Obama’s first CIA Director and then Secretary of Defense.

But not every one of the sage’s pronouncements passes muster. 

“Never,” he advised, “negotiate in public.” 

He is of course referring to the hilarious chat President Trump had with two Democratic leaders . .  . and a bland, bored, and blank Vice President Pence.

“The talks to avert a shutdown got off to a terrible start,” Panetta argues, “when the president, during an Oval Office meeting with likely incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), began arguing his position in front of White House reporters. . . . In all the negotiations on the budget that I took part in as both House Budget Committee chairman and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, not one took place in front of the media. Public shouting matches usually guarantee failure.”

The implication? That these previous negotiations were “successful.”

To those with careers ensconced in Washington power, they worked out just splendidly, I’m sure. But the aftermath of these private, secretive agreements on the rest of us? It can be quantified: $21 trillion.

In federal debt. 

We do not need more of that “success.”

Let’s put the public back in public policy decisions.  “It’s called transparency,” President Trump said. 

Yes. 

More of that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, secrecy, transparency, negotiations

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Full Frontal Negotiations

Pence, Vice President, sleeping, transparency, negotiations

Last week’s political circus reached a new level of Big Top.

Or three rings, as President Donald Trump hosted two Democratic leaders in the White House, debating border security and government shutdown — in public. House Minority Leader, soon-to-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) were somewhat uncomfortable with Donald Trump’s decision to hash out their differences in front of the cameras and the American people.

It was quite the comedy. Yet Vice President Mike Pence all but snored. While many pundits once again expressed their frustrations with a lack of solemn decorum from Trump, Pence provided not solemnity but somnolence.

The idea of government negotiations being done out in the open isn’t new. Transparency is good, if rarely practiced. But it did not take long for Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer to express alarm at this foray into Reality TV. 

“We’re here to have a conversation the careful way,” Pelosi informed the president, “so I don’t think we should have a debate in front of the press on this.”

Once upon a time, Dems promised transparency. Barack Obama campaigned on negotiating health care reform on C-SPAN — only to renege on that pledge when the negotiations got going.

In olden days, Democrat President Grover Cleveland practiced political transparency when he was governor of New York (1883-1885), pointedly leaving the door to his office open whenever discussing any subject whatsoever with anyone.*

And let’s tip the hat to Mike Pence. Ridiculed when it came out that he would not meet in private with any woman not his wife, upon the arrival of #MeToo and the Kavanaugh hearings, Pence appeared genius.

If a sleepy one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Cleveland was not so transparent when, during a crisis in his second presidency, he secretly had his jaw operated upon in a boat in international waters.

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government transparency too much government

Fill Up the Swamp Some More

drain, swamp, Trump, Donald Trump, Washington DC

Donald Trump’s “drain the Swamp” promise was good rhetoric, great politics — because nearly everybody knows that the federal government just cannot restrain, constrain, or re-train itself.

So it would have to take an outside force.

Along comes said Outside Force — the current president — yet the Swamp remains.

Unfortunately, too few of the president’s most ardent supporters see the deepest part of the Swamp.

That is, the Department of Defense.

“Less than a week after calling the Pentagon’s $716 billion budget ‘crazy’ and indicating that he wanted to trim it, President Donald Trump is reportedly proposing to push America’s military spending to greater heights,” writes Eric Boehm at Reason. “Trump told Mattis to submit a $750 billion budget request for next year — well in excess of the $733 billion level that had been previously planned.”

And he does this despite the fact that just recently this military establishment failed to give a competent accounting of its spending.

Sadly, poor accounting is rigged into the Department of Defense, as demonstrated in an important exposé last month.

“For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud,” The Nation explains, “deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity.”

Even the imperiled Social Security juggernaut is not run as badly as the Pentagon. We at least know where its funds go and have gone.*

It may be that a real leader — with substantive ideas, reliable information, and a sense of the enormity of governmental carelessness — will inspire Americans and challenge the Deep Swamp, er, State, before catastrophe.

Unfortunately, Trump is looking less and less like that drainer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* One recipient of Social Security “contributions” has been, in fact, the Pentagon, since budget deficits have been at least partially covered by congressional borrowing from Social Security’s “surpluses.”

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Photo credit: Puck, 1909

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ballot access government transparency Popular

The Rank Reality of Math

Maine, Ranked Choice Voting, black box, elections, democracy

U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine) doesn’t like Ranked Choice Voting.

Last week, I suggested that’s because he lost his re-election to Congress in his state’s first use of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Perhaps I spoke too quickly? Congressman Poliquin argues that RCV is a “black-box voting system.”

“We heard from countless Maine voters who were confused and even frightened their votes did not count due to computer-engineered rank voting,” read a campaign statement.

Who wants frightened voters?

The “voting system utilized by the Secretary of State is secret,” Poliquin’s campaign spokesman further complained. “No one is able to review the software or computer algorithm used by a computer to determine elections. This artificial intelligence is not transparent.”

Computer-engineered elections? Artificial intelligence? Oh, my!

“I think it’s time that we have real ballots, counted by real people,” the congressman told reporters. “. . . instead of this black box that computes who wins and who loses.”

By all means, yes.

Nathan Tefft is a professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and claims to be “a real person.” With a PhD in economics. He got all the election data and replicated the ranked -choice process used by the Maine Secretary of State in conducting the count, confirming the state’s results.

“The Maine secretary of state’s office has published all the election results on its website — every ballot, every ranking in every town,” the Bangor Daily News informed. “It’s all there in massive data files that can be inspected and downloaded.”

Wait a second . . . what about the black-box, the secrecy, the dreaded use of AI?

All a fable.

“Yeah,” Dr. Tefft noted, “it’s just math.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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