[GardenSirens]

I get people attacking me all the time, calling me stupid or racist when I point out facts. I treat it all as black and white. If anyone tries to defend Obamacare, I will show them the facts and they can choose to believe reality or live in illusion!!! But yeah, I couldn't be liberal, lol. My wife forced me to to save face on here because she didnt' wanna ruin her chance at being a mod (now she runs two boards on here) and then facebook because she didnt' want her family to know...I don't know why.

[sunnykerr]

Matt, Your personal life is your personal life. You're allowed to change your mind whichever way you want and you're allowed to put that change unto your wife or on the need to sell a book if you want.

Of course, none of that is actually discussing the issue, so let's shift back to the topic at hand, shall we?

I've never heard of Jeh Johnson, but he must have some pretty darn relevant experience to Homeland Security from all of his time working for the Pentagon.

Plus, it sounds like he's been involved in some of the big military policy decisions by this administration, so he's probably a good person to shepherd the move towards common-sense immigration reform.

Of course, it sounds like he's got a lot of challenges ahead of him in the confirmation process. Every two-bit opponent will try to get their day in the sun by coming up by the obsure issue that needs to be addressed now and by Mr Johnson specifically.

[GardenSirens]

I never change my mind!

[quaist]

Matt, it's just that for us, it came down to a 'change' of your mind, since we couldn't possibly have known that you were just 'pretending' to be a liberal

[GardenSirens]

[sunnykerr]

^ Matt, as you'll remember, I like it when people stick to the topic being discussed, which is the appointment of Jeh Johnson as the head of Homeland Security right now, so I'm sure you'll understand why I'm getting back to that.

Jeh Johnson: why Obama's left-field DHS pick could be an agent of change Former Pentagon lawyer has little management experience but might reinvigorate a reviled and ridiculed department Jeh Johnson is a former general counsel at the Defense Department Jeh Johnson is a former general counsel at the Defense Department. Photograph: Pete Marovich/Zuma Press/Corbis As a lawyer without much management experience, Jeh Johnson is not an obvious choice to lead the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. His appointment, hailed by Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Friday, may signal a shift for an agency whose value is questioned by many in the US. At the Rose Garden event, Obama said he was nominating Johnson because of his "deep understanding of the threats and challenges facing the United States." He credited Johnson with helping design and implement policies to dismantle the core of al-Qaida overseas and to repeal the ban on openly gay service members in the US military. "He's been there in the Situation Room, at the table in moments of decision," Obama said. Johnson noted that he was in Manhattan on the day when the World Trade Center was struck, and he said he was motivated to do something to help the country in response. But he left government service in 2012 and said he was settling back into private life and work at a law firm. "I was not looking for this opportunity," Johnson said. "But when I received the call, I could not refuse it." Johnson has an extensive legal background in national security circles. Before spending the first four years of the Obama administration as the Pentagon’s top lawyer, he was the air force’s senior civilian counsel during much of Bill Clinton’s second term. Before that he was a federal prosecutor in New York, one of the premier legal venues for security trials. Yet the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is one of the US government’s most sprawling bureaucracies, cobbled together after 9/11 from disparate parts of the federal government and handling tasks as disparate as border security, relief from natural disasters and the protection of airline passengers. It is iconically – and acrimoniously – known as the agency that scans people’s bodies or pats them down at airports. In a tacit reflection of the department’s reputation for incompetence, there are more than a dozen vacancies at senior levels of DHS, including secretary and deputy secretary. Johnson has no management experience of the sort that has guided DHS for the first 10 years of its existence. It has been run by a lawyer before: Michael Chertoff, another former federal prosecutor, was homeland security secretary during George W Bush’s second term. Chertoff, however, previously ran the Justice Department’s criminal division, making him a manager as well as a prosecutor. The other secretaries of homeland security have been successful politicians: Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, was the department's first leader; Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona, its most recent. None of such figures' prior political savvy, however, has allowed DHS to overcome negative public perceptions. On TV dramas, DHS often appears as a jackbooted counterterrorism law enforcement agency, despite it possessing minimal police powers outside matters concerning immigration. Alternatively, DHS is the subject of more public ire than any other US security agency, often because the public’s interaction with the agency is mundane and unpleasant. Chertoff became a national punchline after the failures of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), a DHS component, during disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina. Napolitano faced a groundswell of outrage over the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), another DHS component, for scanners that took imagery of passengers’ nude bodies – particularly after a passenger in 2010 demanded of a TSA agent “Don’t touch my junk”, before uploading a video of the encounter to YouTube. For this, even stalwart defenders of the government’s national security organs show DHS no such loyalty. “This has nothing to do with safety,” the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2010 about the TSA, “95% of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary.” Shortly after after Napolitano announced her resignation, Bloomberg Businessweek published an argument for abolishing DHS outright, describing it as an agency far too bloated for its mandate. “The danger to Americans posed by terrorism remains smaller than that of myriad other threats, from infectious disease to gun violence to drunk driving,” wrote Charles Kenny. However, DHS’s share of US counterterrorism efforts, while central to its existence, is marginal compared to, say, the domestic investigative powers of the FBI, the bulk domestic phone records collection by the National Security Agency, or the overseas drone strikes and raids overseen by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command. None of those agencies have had their existence thrown into question after 9/11.

The article is actually much longer and worthy of a read.

Personally, I figure management experience in government has been rather irrelevant to people's success. I tend to prefer candidates who have some, to be honest, but I think there is no denying that the American are looking for change in that particular agency, so who knows? This may be the right call.

At any rate, something has to happen to save Homeland Security from complete obsolescence.

[GardenSirens]

I didn't know a smiley face was getting off topic! Maybe that was for Jeh Johnson? lol.

[quaist]

Originally Posted by placebobsh (View Post) I didn't know a smiley face was getting off topic! Maybe that was for Jeh Johnson? lol.

There's to hope he deserves a positive smiley, then

As for the need of management experience in the DHW... I don't know. Surely, he's got a number of advisors to his side. And then there's the fact that oftentimes when it comes to public offices, soft skills and other abilities matter far more than the ones that are only there 'on paper' do .

[sunnykerr]

Plus, Johnson's got experience working for government, so that's gotta count for something.

Assuming he's any good, of course.

On paper, he sounds like a great candidate to me, but I don't know anything about his career so far.

[quaist]

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how he's gonna handle things

[quaist]

Meanwhile:

Secret White House Tweeter Loses Anonymity, and Job WASHINGTON — A White House insider in the thick of negotiations over nuclear issues with Iran was fired after he was exposed as the voice of a Twitter feed that over more than two years knocked public figures and colleagues, a White House official confirmed late Tuesday. Jofi Joseph, formerly the director of nuclear nonproliferation issues on the National Security Council staff at the White House, was @NatSecWonk, who took anonymous and often caustic digs at people like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Ben Rhodes, the N.S.C. spokesman; and Representative Darrell R. Issa, Republican of California and a nemesis of the administration as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Administration officials said Mr. Joseph was fired last week after he was unmasked as the Twitter account’s author. The White House official e-mailed to confirm “he no longer works at the White House. Beyond that not going to get into personnel matters.” The firing was first disclosed by the Web site Daily Beast and its reporter Josh Rogin, who was one of the subjects of Mr. Joseph’s tweets. “Just a hunch, but I have the sense lots of people would like to punch @joshrogin in the face,” Mr. Joseph wrote on the social-networking site after news reports that Mr. Rogin had been hit by a comedian at a Washington club. Mr. Joseph was generally respected and popular within the White House, so his secret life took colleagues by surprise. On @NatSecWonk, which has now disappeared, he called himself a “keen observer of the foreign policy and national security scene” who “unapologetically says what everyone else only thinks.” In that self-described spirit, Mr. Joseph made Mrs. Clinton a particular target. As secretary of state in President Obama’s first term, she “had few policy goals and no wins,” he wrote. And he called Mr. Issa “an ass,” then added, “but he’s on to something here with the @HillaryClinton whitewash of accountability for Benghazi,” referring to the terrorist killings in that Libyan city of four Americans, including the ambassador, last year. Mr. Joseph, 40, has a background in foreign policy. While he worked for Democrats — on Capitol Hill before the Obama White House — he also had roots in the neoconservative establishment, including among the foreign policy architects for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Early in the Obama administration, Mr. Joseph was a senior adviser to Ellen Tauscher, the former Democratic congresswoman from California who was Mr. Obama’s under secretary of state for arms control and nonproliferation issues. Before that, he was a foreign policy adviser to Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, and served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was chairman. According to Mr. Joseph’s biography on the Web site of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative group where he was a fellow for 2011, “between his stints on Capitol Hill, Jofi was a senior consultant with a professional services firm, facilitating strategic planning and policy analysis for the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts on critical infrastructure protection.” Among the associates at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies are John Hannah, formerly national security adviser for Mr. Cheney; Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia and the House majority leader; and the conservative syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. Mr. Joseph’s wife, Carolyn Leddy, is on the Republican staff of the Senate Foreign Relations. During the Bush administration, she served at the State Department and on the National Security Council staff; in 2007 she was part of a delegation that visited the Yongbyon nuclear facility in North Korea. Mr. Joseph apologized in remarks to Politico, the politics Web site. “What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and meanspirited comments,” he told the site. “I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted.”

If he's really such an 'insider', he can't be surprised that he's got uncovered, as even the public knows by now how much information agencies like the NSA have.

[quaist]

What do you all think about this story, should Mr Gansler have reported these youngster?

As I'm not living in the US, there's only so much I can say about American students' drinking habits, but I'd assume that not many abide by the law and stay away from alcohol until 21, so... It's obviously unfortunate for Mr Gansler to have been photographed while attending the party. If the party's been cilivized and not an orgy of sorts, I can't imagine any other parent would've reported them. But of course, hence he's running for public office, there are other implications at play as well -- being a role model etc.

Should Doug Gansler have done more about underage drinking party? Critics piled on Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler this week after a photo surfaced of him at a party in a Delaware beach house, surrounded by underage young people drinking alcohol. Gansler, a Democrat who's also running for governor, said he was only stopping by the party to check on his son, who was attending. But the attorney general didn't help his case by initially denying it was his responsibility to stop the underage drinking, before eventually conceding that he made a "mistake" in neglecting to curb the raucous party. "There could be Kool-Aid in the red cups," he said at a Thursday press conference, taking an awkward stab at damage control. "But there's probably beer in the red cups." "In hindsight, I probably should have assumed there was drinking and talked to the chaperones about what they thought was appropriate," he explained. The equivocating explanation did little to quell the mounting outrage. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a high-profile national group, released a statement saying the organization was "disheartened" to hear that Gansler "may have attended an underage drinking party." "As a member of the executive committee of the National Association of Attorneys General and former chair of the organization's Youth Access to Alcohol Committee, he serves as a leader on this issue," the statement explained. Indeed, Gansler has carved out a public role for himself as a crusader against underage drinking and drunk driving. In 2002, he was awarded the MADD "Hero Award" for his advocacy against drunk driving. He also appeared in a 2012 video for the Century Council, an organization that combats teen drinking. "Parents, you're the leading influence on your teen's decision not to drink," he said in the video. "It's never too early to talk with your kids about smart ways to say no." Despite the disappointment and umbrage from some quarters, Gansler is also drawing defenders. Some have cited the ground rules laid down by the chaperones of the party to argue that Gansler and the other parents who chipped in to rent the beach house made a good-faith effort at responsible parenting. The parents, for example, arranged for two fathers to chaperone the party on each night, according to planning documents obtained by the Baltimore Sun. They explicitly barred the boys from driving, having girls behind closed doors, or drinking hard alcohol. Gansler has said he did not help write the rules, but he was at a meeting during which the parents discussed them. And the regimen they set up, some say, is exactly the kind of realistic but responsible parenting that others would be well-served to emulate. "If his explanation is accurate, the plain fact is that Gansler and the other parents who helped organize their kids' trip to the Eastern Shore were being entirely sensible," wrote Slate's Dan Kois. "A group of parents rented a house for their sons the week after high school graduation--Beach Week, in Maryland schools parlance--and laid out an extremely well-thought-out set of rules for the boys." "There is of course a 100 percent chance that teenagers at Beach Week are going to drink and be idiots," Kois explained. "As a parent, there are three ways to handle this situation: You can, understandably, forbid your children from attending at all. On the other side of the scale, you can just send your children off to Ocean City and hope their common sense will keep them out of trouble. Or you can make the tactical decision to oversee the festivities and keep things from getting out of hand: keep kids off the road, keep them out of each other's pants, and keep them from doing shots. Would that all parents of teens were so 'permissive'!" The Baltimore Sun's editorial team offered a similarly nuanced take. "Perhaps it would have been wise as a gubernatorial candidate for Mr. Gansler to forbid his son from going to beach week altogether, but any parent of a teen-ager will tell you that's easier said than done," the paper said. "In the context of what many, many Maryland parents do, though, the approach Mr. Gansler and the other parents took is relatively reasonable." "Mr. Gansler may no longer be a perfect messenger on the subject of underage drinking, but he has the potential to be a very human one," the paper added.

[sunnykerr]

I'm not familiar with the letter of the law either in the United States, but surely there is some consideration for "underage" drinking when adults are present?

I suppose it depends on how under age these individuals were.

To be honest, I've always been mistified by the U.S. laws on that front. You can drive a car, go off to war, move out of the house to attend university, own a car, pay rent, hold a job... do all sorts of things that one would consider to involve a certain level of maturity and/or responsibility way before the age of 21.

But you can't have a drop of alcohol legally.

It's not just preposterous, it is dangerous, too.

I have a friend who studied in the United States and, in her experience, a lot of students suffered severe damage from alcohol poisoning (up to and including death) because their friends wouldn't call for help, for fear of being arrested for underage drinking.

In my own experience, I've seen very dangerous behaviour from American students who come up here for university and simply lose their mind over the access to alcohol.

[quaist]

Around here, you're allowed to drink wine and beer at age 16, which sets the practical starting age about 13 or 14. And yet we still don't have a 'lost youth' of sorts

[sunnykerr]

I believe the legal drinking age here is 18, but it's the same thing. People start much earlier and it's not nearly as taboo as it seems to be in the United States.

My mum bought me my first beer when I was 14. Basically, her approach was always "I'd rather know what you're doing if you're going to be drinking" and "you can always call me, no matter what happens."

And, of course, a lot of people drank a lot when I was young. Part of that teenage rebellion phase or whatever. Not all of it was responsible behaviour.

But no one was afraid to call the cops or ask for help if something went wrong.