How NSA Tracks You (Bill Binney)

Anyone who is paying attention knows that the Obama FBI/DOJ used massive government surveillance powers against the Trump team during and after the election. A FISA warrant on Carter Page (and Manafort and others?) was likely used to mine stored communications of other Trump team members. Hundreds of "mysterious" unmasking requests by Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, etc. were probably used to identify US individuals captured in this data.

I think it's entirely possible that Obama et al. thought they were doing the right (moral, patriotic) thing -- they really thought that Trump might be colluding with the Russians. But as a civil libertarian and rule of law kind of guy I want to see it all come to light. I have been against this kind of thing since GWB was president -- see this post from 2005!

My guess is that NSA is intercepting and storing big chunks of, perhaps almost all, US email traffic. They're getting almost all metadata from email and phone traffic, possibly much of the actual voice traffic converted to text using voice recognition. This used to be searchable only by a limited number of NSA people (although that number grew a lot over the years; see 2013 article and LOVEINT below), but now available to many different "intel" agencies in the government thanks to Obama.

Situation in 2013: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=207195207

(Note Title 1 FISA warrant grants capability to look at all associates of target... like the whole Trump team.)

Obama changes in 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us/politics/obama-administration-set-to-expand-sharing-of-data-that-nsa-intercepts.html

NYT: "The new system would permit analysts at other intelligence agencies to obtain direct access to raw information from the N.S.A.’s surveillance to evaluate for themselves. If they pull out phone calls or email to use for their own agency’s work, they would apply the privacy protections masking innocent Americans’ information... ” HA HA HA I guess that's what all the UNmasking was about...

More on NSA capabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT (think how broad their coverage has to be for spooks to be able to spy on their wife or girlfriend)

See also FISA, EO 12333, Bulk Collection, and All That.

Wikipedia: William Edward Binney[3] is a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA)[4] turned whistleblower who resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency.

He was a high-profile critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration, and later criticized the NSA's data collection policies during the Barack Obama administration. 

From the transcript of Binney's talk:

07:45
ways that they basically collect data
07:48
first it's they use the corporations
07:50
that run the fiber-optic lines and they
07:53
get them to allow them to put taps on
07:55
them and I'll show you some of the taps
07:57
where they are and and if that doesn't
07:59
work they use the foreign government to
08:00
go at their own telecommunications
08:02
companies to do the similar thing and if
08:04
that doesn't work they'll tap the line
08:06
anywhere they can get to it and they
08:08
won't even know it you know the
08:09
government's know that communications
08:11
companies will even though they're
08:12
tapped so that's how they get into it
08:14
then I get into fiber lines and this is
08:17
this is a the prism program ...

that was published
08:30
out of the Snowden material and they've
08:32
all focused on prism well prism is
08:36
really the the minor program I mean the
08:40
major program is upstream that's where
08:42
they have the fiber-optic taps on
08:43
hundreds of places around in the world
08:45
that's where they're collecting off the
08:47
fiber lined all the data and storing it

2016 FISC reprimand of Obama administration. The court learned in October 2016 that analysts at the National Security Agency were conducting prohibited database searches “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the court.” The forbidden queries were searches of Upstream Data using US-person identifiers. The report makes clear that as of early 2017 NSA Inspector General did not even have a good handle on all the ways that improper queries could be made to the system. (Imagine Snowden-like sys admins with a variety of tools that can be used to access raw data.) Proposed remedies to the situation circa-2016/17 do not inspire confidence (please read the FISC document).

Obama on AI (video interview)

Has anyone briefed Obama on genomics?

Obama: "Don't do stupid sh*t"

Unlike Hillary, but like Donald Trump and George H.W. Bush, Obama is (mostly) a foreign policy realist.

The Atlantic ... Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2011, [Samantha] Power argued that the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, deserved America’s enthusiastic support. Others noted that the rebels were farmers and doctors and carpenters, comparing these revolutionaries to the men who won America’s war for independence.

Obama flipped this plea on its head. “When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.” The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.) ...

... Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of “credibility”—particularly the sort of credibility purchased with force. The preservation of credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama would argue that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”

... I asked the president how he thought his foreign policy might be understood by historians. He started by describing for me a four-box grid representing the main schools of American foreign-policy thought. One box he called isolationism, which he dismissed out of hand. “The world is ever-shrinking,” he said. “Withdrawal is untenable.” The other boxes he labeled realism, liberal interventionism, and internationalism. “I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery,” he said. “We have to choose where we can make a real impact.” He also noted that he was quite obviously an internationalist, devoted as he is to strengthening multilateral organizations and international norms.

... Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia. He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior. And yet he consistently, and with apparent sincerity, professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice. He is, in a way, a Hobbesian optimist.

... Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. “There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,” he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.”

... The president also gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda, particularly as it relates to rebalancing America’s global priorities. For years, the “pivot to Asia” has been a paramount priority of his. America’s economic future lies in Asia, he believes, and the challenge posed by China’s rise requires constant attention.

... Obama believes, [Ash] Carter said, that Asia “is the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future, and that no president can take his eye off of this.”

... One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism—a force no president can neutralize. Tribalism, made manifest in the reversion to sect, creed, clan, and village by the desperate citizens of failing states, is the source of much of the Muslim Middle East’s problems, and it is another source of his fatalism. Obama has deep respect for the destructive resilience of tribalism—part of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, concerns the way in which tribalism in post-colonial Kenya helped ruin his father’s life—which goes some distance in explaining why he is so fastidious about avoiding entanglements in tribal conflicts.

“It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism,” he told me. “I understand the tribal impulse, and acknowledge the power of tribal division. I’ve been navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, it’s the source of a lot of destructive acts.”

... “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said.

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”

... Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power.

See also The One Sided Clash of Civilizations.

Hail to the Chief

MSU President Simon: Steve's a physicist who also knows genomics. He's doing great things here.

President Obama: He looks like someone who can do great things!

See earlier posts The Presidents and Obama in Oregon.

Obama picked the Spartans to win the NCAA tournament this year :-)

The Presidents

President Obama toured the Michigan Biotechnology Institute today before signing the Farm Bill on the MSU campus. I'll post a photo of us together when I get it from the White House photographer.

I had a brief chat with the soldier carrying the football, and discussed Crossfit with the secret service guys. Favorite film: To Live and Die in LA :-)

MSU President Simon: Steve's a physicist who also knows genomics. He's doing great things here.

President Obama: He looks like someone who can do great things!

The ratchet of power

I voted twice for Obama, and always despised Bush-Cheney. But I can't disagree with Cheney's remarks below.

New Yorker: After Barack Obama was elected to his first term as President but before he took the oath of office, Vice-President Dick Cheney gave an exit interview to Rush Limbaugh. Under George W. Bush, Cheney was the architect, along with his legal counsel, David Addington, of a dramatic expansion of executive authority—a power grab that Obama criticized, fiercely, on the campaign trail, and promised to “reverse.” But when Limbaugh inquired about this criticism Cheney swatted it aside, saying, “My guess is that, once they get here and they’re faced with the same problems we deal with every day, they will appreciate some of the things we’ve put in place.”

See also Making Alberto Gonzales Look Good.

If you can't fix it you've got to stand it

I have to give the Economist editors credit for the cojones to print a Brokeback Mountain cover with Obama and Xi: If you can't fix it you've got to stand it.

Compare the assumptions I made in some 2004 calculations to the widget below.

Obama wins!

At least, according to the quants who performed the mind boggling, incomprehensible, mysterious, nearly impossible task of averaging state poll numbers to estimate likely electoral vote totals.

Pundit and non-quant reactions evidence of Idiocracy. See earlier post Bounded Cognition.

Chronicle: ... While it may not seem likely, poll aggregation is a threat to the supremacy of the punditocracy. In the past week, you could sense that some high-profile media types were being made slightly uncomfortable by the bespectacled quants, with their confusing mathematical models and zippy computer programs. The New York Times columnist David Brooks said pollsters who offered projections were citizens of “sillyland.”

Maybe, but the recent track record in sillyland is awfully solid. In the 2008 presidential election, Silver correctly predicted 49 of 50 states. Wang was off by only one electoral vote. Meanwhile, as Silver writes in his book, numerous pundits confidently predicted a John McCain victory based on little more than intestinal twinges.

... Most journalists are ill equipped to interpret data, he says (and few journalists would disagree), so they view statistics with skepticism and occasionally, in the case of Brooks, disdain. “The data-driven people are going to win in the long run,” Jackman says.

He sees it as part of the rise of what’s being called Big Data—that is, using actual information to make decisions. As Jackman points out, Big Data is already changing sports and business, and it may be that pundits are the equivalents of the baseball scouts in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, caring more about the naturalness of a hitter’s swing than whether he gets on base.

“Why,” Jackman wonders, “should political commentary be exempt from this movement?”

... Last week the professional pundit and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough ranted that people like Silver, Wang, Linzer, and Jackman—who think the presidential race is “anything but a tossup”—should be kept away from their computers “because they’re jokes.” Silver responded by challenging Scarborough to bet $1,000 on Romney (in the form of a donation to the American Red Cross) if he was so sure. This led to hand-wringing about whether it was appropriate for someone affiliated with The New York Times to make crass public wagers.

But the bet seemed like an important symbolic moment. The poll aggregators have skin in the game. They’ve made statistical forecasts and published them, not just gut-feeling guesses on Sunday-morning talk shows. And, in Silver’s case, as a former professional poker player, he is willing to back it up with something tangible.

Alex Tabarrok, an economist and blogger for Marginal Revolution, applauded, calling such bets a “tax on bullshit.” ...

Shout out to Sam Wang, Caltech '86 :-)

Obama's way

A glimpse into the inner Obama.

NYTimes: ... On rare occasions, Mr. Obama allows others a glimpse of the history, expectations and hope he carries with him. At the funeral of the civil rights leader Dorothy Height in 2010, he wept openly. Again and again, those close to him say, Mr. Obama is moved by the grace with which other blacks who broke the color barrier behaved under pressure.

When Ruby Bridges Hall went to see the famous Norman Rockwell portrait of her marching into school, which Mr. Obama had hung just outside the Oval Office, the president opened up a bit. The painting shows a 6-year-old Ms. Hall in an immaculate white dress walking calmly into school, a hurled tomato and a racial slur on the wall behind her.

The president asked Ms. Hall, now 58, how she summoned up such courage at that age and said he sometimes found his daughters staring at the portrait. “I really think they see themselves in this little girl,” he said, according to an interview with Ms. Hall.

“Doing the work we do, it gets really lonely,” Ms. Hall said. “I felt like we understood each other because we belong to the same club.”

The Rockwell painting:

Original photo:

I find these images deeply moving, all the more so because I have a 6 year old daughter. Can you imagine your child having to experience this?

Wikipedia: ... Former United States Deputy Marshal Charles Burks later recalled, "She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn't whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we're all very proud of her."

"People ... do not want to think probabilistically"

Highly recommended profile Obama's Way by Michael Lewis:

Vanity Fair: ... “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically. [emphasis mine]

See also Bounded cognition.

Here's a great interview with Michael Lewis, who shadowed Obama off and on over an 8 month period.

The choice

I liked Obama's speech last night -- especially that he actually called for shared sacrifice for the greater good. It didn't quite rise to the level of "Ask not ..." but I suppose that would have been cliche.

... This is the choice we now face. This is what the election comes down to. Over and over, we have been told by our opponents that bigger tax cuts and fewer regulations are the only way; that since government can't do everything, it should do almost nothing. If you can't afford health insurance, hope that you don't get sick. If a company releases toxic pollution into the air your children breathe, well, that's just the price of progress. If you can't afford to start a business or go to college, take my opponent's advice and "borrow money from your parents."

You know what? That's not who we are. That's not what this country's about. As Americans, we believe we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights— rights that no man or government can take away. We insist on personal responsibility and we celebrate individual initiative. We're not entitled to success. We have to earn it. We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system— the greatest engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship— a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.

We believe that when a CEO pays his autoworkers enough to buy the cars that they build, the whole company does better.

We believe that when a family can no longer be tricked into signing a mortgage they can't afford, that family is protected, but so is the value of other people's homes, and so is the entire economy. [[ This was cheap and wrong. Individual families have to take responsibility for the housing bubble. ]]

We believe that a little girl who's offered an escape from poverty by a great teacher or a grant for college could become the founder of the next Google, or the scientist who cures cancer, or the President of the United States— and it's in our power to give her that chance.

We know that churches and charities can often make more of a difference than a poverty program alone. We don't want handouts for people who refuse to help themselves, and we don't want bailouts for banks that break the rules. We don't think government can solve all our problems. But we don't think that government is the source of all our problems— any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we're told to blame for our troubles.

Because we understand that this democracy is ours.

We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.

Confidence Men

A good interview with Ron Suskind about his new book Confidence Men. I believe what Suskind wrote about the Bush administration has been largely vindicated. Suskind comes across as very careful with his sourcing. (So does Joe McInnis in this interview about his Palin bio The Rogue.)

Careful scrutiny suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top ;-)

Fresh Air: ... Suskind says Summers' style of leadership at the White House was to "control the show" and "lead by fiat."

"A young economist ... [once told me that Larry once said] 'Here's the way it works. ... I can win either side of the argument. That's my genius. That's what I do. And then I win both sides and I think about which side I won more fairly when deciding which is right. Sometimes I decide otherwise,' " says Suskind. "The young economist who recounts the story says, 'Jeez, Larry, that gives you an awful lot of power to shape everything,' and Larry sort of says, 'Yeah, that's the point.' And that's kind of how Larry sees it — the economic policy will be what Larry decides in consultation with a president who has very, very little in the way of training in economic theory or practice." In his book, Suskind quotes Summers as saying, on record, that "Clinton would never have made these mistakes" that the Obama administration made. Summers has denied making those comments. He told The Washington Post last week that "the hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion and words taken out of context. I can't speak to what others have told Mr. Suskind but I have always believed that the president has always led this country with determined, steady and practical leadership."

... Suskind tells Terry Gross that he talked to Summers as the book was going to press about his statements in the book, including the one where he said "Clinton would never have made these mistakes."

"At first Larry blurted out, 'I deny it,' and then I said, 'Look, Larry, lots of people heard you talk about this and say this. This is not something you uttered once to one person. Lots of people remember where they were when they heard it.' ... Then after a few minutes, he came back with his response. He said, 'Look, we had five times as many problems, we didn't have five times as many people. It was an overwhelming time, very difficult for everyone involved.' He lays it on the door of circumstances. ... The Washington walk back has a long history, as anyone who works in this town knows."

Obama got Osama

This is not usually a political blog, but I couldn't resist.





Somehow Bush couldn't get it done. He did save us from Saddam's WMD threat, though. It only cost us a trillion dollars and immeasurable human suffering.

A Nobel for Barry?

Huh? In a few years he might have actually earned one. This just demonstrates the outright political biases of the Nobel Committee. The Nobel citation reads like this (without actually mentioning GWB): "Bush era bad, Obama good. Hope good."

Note I speak as an Obama supporter!

Will pundits on the left have the guts to point out that the emperor has no clothes? This kind of outcome just reinforces the paranoid fantasies of the far-right: that Obama's Harvard magna is fake, that the World Government has been grooming him for leadership since his student days, that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father, etc.

Speaking more broadly, it seems to me that our obsession with prizes (an offshoot of winner-take-all culture) is unhealthy, and that prizes these days are less and less correlated with actual achievement.

While my faith in the Nobel process is shaken (although commenters have already pointed out the Kissinger prize and of course there is always Modigliani-Miller ;-), my confidence in Obama is not -- he reacted properly.

Mr. Obama said he was "surprised and deeply humbled" by the committee’s decision, ... he said he would accept it as “a call to action.”

“To be honest,” the president said “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”

Someone just pointed out to me that this opens the door for a string theorist to win the physics prize ;-)

The Promised Land

Bruce Springsteen

“A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it? What does it mean? ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Badlands,’ I’ve seen people singing those songs back to me all over the world. I’d seen that country on a grass-roots level through the ’80s, since I was a teenager. And I met people who were always working toward the country being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very far away.

“And so on election night it showed its face, for maybe, probably, one of the first times in my adult life,” he said. “I sat there on the couch, and my jaw dropped, and I went, ‘Oh my God, it exists.’ Not just dreaming it. It exists, it’s there, and if this much of it is there, the rest of it’s there. Let’s go get that. Let’s go get it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life. All the songs you wrote are a little truer today than they were a month or two ago.”


Refrain from The Promised Land:

The dogs on main street howl,
'cause they understand,
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man,
And I believe in a promised land.

If you like the Boss, there's an amazing amount of live footage from over the years on YouTube. My favorites are The River on the street in Copenhagen in the 80s and Thunder Road live in 1976.

Hail to the Chief, so long to the thief

Yes, I know, we should look forward, not backwards. Now is the time for unity, to set aside partisan bickering, yada, yada. OK, starting tomorrow...

Obama 08: Never in modern history has an administration squandered American power so recklessly. Never has strategy been so replaced by ideology. Never has extremism so crowded out common sense and fundamental American values. Never has short-term partisan politics so depleted the strength of America’s bipartisan foreign policy. ...

Obama and JFK 1961

Let's see if Obama can live up to this. Does he have a speechwriter as good as Ted Sorensen? (Sorensen on Obama: more like JFK than any politician of our time.)

"Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans … Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."

“Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out …”

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate …”

Note added: I thought Obama's speech was good, not great. There were some echoes of JFK 1961. But Obama's speech had too many lists, details, sub-clauses. It reminded me of a Clinton speech (another law school grad) -- making a case, trying to pack everything in. Sometimes less is more -- a detailed argument seldom rises to the highest level of oratory.

My favorite parts:

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

...

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

...

And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.

...

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

...

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

To those...

(APPLAUSE)

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

...

Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.

...

And God bless the United States of America.

OBAMA!

An Obama victory would be the only positive legacy of George W. Bush's nightmare presidency.

Flickr set of the Obama family on election night.

These are from earlier in the year in Oregon.







From 1963. It's been a long road!

Obama and race

I agree with this. I think political correctness prevented many democrats from thinking clearly about how race would influence the final outcome of the election. Political correctness also prevents us from understanding many other obvious things about society today.

Related discussion here.

WSJ: ...Democrats' fatal blindness to the brute fact of race in America. When, during the primaries, the Clintons seemed to allude to the subject of Sen. Obama's electability in light of his race, they were accused by many of their fellow Democrats of "playing the race card." It is fairly incredible that it was, for the most part, not until this summer that liberals began publicly asking themselves if the country was ready for a black president. That it was not until recently that liberals began wondering with any forcefulness whether people really were telling pollsters the truth about their attitudes toward race. ("Will race influence your vote for president?" "Race?! Me? Are you kidding? Of course not!")

For 18 months, the majority of liberal commentators wrote so rapturously and unskeptically about Sen. Obama's candidacy that you would have thought he was just a white guy with a deep tan. It was as though people were afraid that if they spoke honestly about racism as a stumbling block to his candidacy, they would be taken for racists themselves. Indeed, it was as though by ignoring racist attitudes when writing about Sen. Obama, liberal commentators conferred on themselves the virtuous idealism that they were fantastically attributing to the country as a whole. It is an elementary psychological fact that we sometimes praise to an absurd degree what makes us slightly uncomfortable -- or that we put the source of discomfort in an impossibly ideal light in order to put as much distance as possible between us...and the person we fear we may actually be.

What polls show about racism and voting:

...Some people who are telling pollsters they're for Obama could actually be lying.

Such behavior has been called the "Bradley Effect ," after Tom Bradley, a black mayor of Los Angeles who lost his bid to be California's governor back in 1982. While every poll showed him leading his white opponent, that isn't how the final tally turned out. Things haven't been far different in some other elections involving black candidates. In 1989, David Dinkins was eighteen points ahead in the polls for New York's mayoral election, but ended up winning by only a two-point edge. The same year, Douglas Wilder was projected to win Virginia's governorship by nine points, but squeaked in with one half of one percent of the popular vote. Nor are examples only from the past. In Michigan in 2006, the final polls forecast that the proposal to ban affirmative action would narrowly prevail by 51 percent. In fact, it handily passed with 58 percent. That's a Bradley gap of seven points, which isn't trivial.

Pollsters contend that respondents often change their minds at the last minute, or that conservatives are less willing to cooperate with surveys. Another twist is that more voters are mailing in absentee ballots, and it's not clear how those early decisions are reflected in the polls. Yet the Bradley gap persists after voters have actually cast their ballots. Just out of the booth, we hear them telling white exit pollers that they supported the black candidate, whereas returns from these precincts show far fewer such votes. Thus they lie to interviewers they don't know and will never see again.

Palin, RNC, Romney: the view from Italy

I didn't get to see any of the coverage of the RNC since I'm here in Italy.

Regarding Palin, there is a natural instability in democracy towards anti-elitism. Many voters are attracted to a leader like themselves (a hockey / soccer mom with dysfunctional family and modest IQ), forgetting that they themselves would make a terrible president or vice-president. I do think the Republican base will like / likes Palin, and there is a chance she will appeal to lot of swing voters.

Is Romney the favorite for 2012? I've heard a lot of good things about him, but his RNC speech is pretty thoroughly middlebrow. Not that I disagree with every point, and certainly he had to tailor it to his audience, but I detect no signs of a large brain (unless you normalize to the MBA population).

I know few Americans care, but people in Europe think Palin is a joke. Another thing I've heard is that they don't believe Obama can overcome all the (perhaps hidden) racism to win the election. We will see!

Exciting action photo from Trento: