Jimmy Fallon"s Thank You Notes For Target, A-Rod And "Behind the Candelabra" Will Make You LOL

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Jimmy Fallon"s Thank You Notes For Target, A-Rod And "Behind the Candelabra" Will Make You LOL

2013 Thank You to Online Activists

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2013 Thank You to Online Activists

Does de Blasio have Weiner to thank?

As New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio prepares to take office in a few days, a panel on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday debated whether he has fellow Democrat Anthony Weiner to thank for his victory.

“I believe you could argue we have Bill de Blasio as the mayor because of Anthony Weiner,” said conservative commentator S.E. Cupp. “He really sucked a lot of oxygen out of Christine Quinn’s race and allowed Bill de Blasio to come up.”

The president of the liberal Center for American Progress disagreed.

“Yeah, he took momentum, but he took momentum from everybody,” Neera Tanden said. “I don’t think he had a political effect. I think he just took a huge amount of attention and moved away.”

Weiner’s mayoral bid was an attempted comeback from the explicit-photo scandal that forced him to resign from Congress in 2011. With new revelations this year, he ultimately took just 5 percent of the vote in the Democratic mayoral primary.

Meanwhile, de Blasio managed to knock off onetime frontrunner Quinn, the Democratic city council speaker and ally of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and went on to a landslide win in the general election.

Read more about: Anthony Weiner, New York, Elections, Bill De Blasio, 2013 Elections

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Does de Blasio have Weiner to thank?

Thank You, Graham Family

WASHINGTON — Thank you, Eugene Meyer. Thank you, Philip Graham, Katharine Graham, Donald Graham and Katharine Weymouth. Thank you for building and sustaining one of the world’s greatest newspapers — and, when the time came, letting it go.

Thank you, Mr. Meyer, for spending $ 825,000 to buy The Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale. That was a lot of money in 1933, but you could afford it. You were a wealthy financier who could have retired to a life of leisure.

You chose to own a newspaper, which is the opposite of leisure.

Thank you for writing your “Seven Principles for the Conduct of a Newspaper” — the commandments by which we try our best to live. I hope your words, outlining our mission and responsibilities, are always displayed in the Post’s lobby, as they have been for the 33 years I’ve worked here. I won’t quote them all, just the one that seems most relevant this week:

“The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owner.”

Thank you, Philip Graham, for your ambition. When you took over from your father-in-law, the Post was hardly a dominant journalistic force nationally or even locally. You changed that.

Thank you for buying the competing morning paper, the Times-Herald, which allowed the Post to eventually overtake the once-dominant Evening Star in both circulation and advertising. Thank you for buying the company’s first radio and television stations. And thanks especially for buying Newsweek. The magazine has different owners now and is pretty much on life support, but for decades it gave haughty Time a run for its money.

Thank you, Katharine Graham, for … I don’t even know where to begin. How about this: Thank you for being one of the most important newspaper publishers in history.

Thank you for hiring Ben Bradlee as your executive editor. Thank you for recognizing that this handsome, swashbuckling Bostonian possessed both a first-class mind and the nerves of a gunslinger. You stood by Ben during the Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, when the newspaper’s future was at stake. You stood by him during Watergate, when the nation’s future was at stake. Ultimately, you made the crucial decisions — and they were the right ones.

Thank you, Mrs. Graham — you said to call you Kay, but I never could — for your ability to sound like a prim and proper patrician one minute and swear like a sailor the next. Thank you for your ferocity in defense of the newsroom. I remember one luncheon in your office suite at which you tore into some bureaucrat from the Chinese Embassy over a visa problem our correspondent in Beijing was having. You were genteel but utterly relentless, and by the time dessert was served the poor man looked about to cry.

Thank you also for your graciousness. When I was editor of the Style section, my wife Avis and I decided to host a party for leaders of the local arts community who felt unappreciated by the newspaper. I was delighted when you agreed to stop by for a minute and say hello; I was amazed when you stayed all evening, charming our star-struck guests — and proving that this great, gray, intimidating institution really did care.

Thank you, Don Graham, for propelling the Post to its greatest glory — so far. Len Downie was your Ben Bradlee, the ideal partner. Outsiders think of the Kay-and-Ben era as the Post’s golden age, but it was in the Don-and-Len era that the paper hit its peak in terms of circulation, advertising, the number of journalists in the newsroom, the number of foreign bureaus — just about any measure you can think of. Under Downie, the Post won 25 Pulitzer Prizes — by far the most any paper has won under a single editor.

Thank you, Don, for treating every one of us like family. I’m going to sound mushy here, but it’s true. Your kindness when anyone at the Post suffered a personal crisis was unlimited. You shared our sorrow at moments of grief and our joy at moments of triumph. I am so proud to call you my friend.

Thank you, Katharine Weymouth, for joining your uncle Don in the thankless task of downsizing the Post without stripping it of its greatness. Thank you for helping him make the wrenching decision to sell. And thank you for staying as publisher after the paper changes hands — ensuring that the remarkable work of a remarkable family goes on. 

RealClearPolitics – Articles

Thank You, Graham Family

We Should Thank Edward Snowden

WASHINGTON — Edward Snowden’s renegade decision to reveal the jaw-dropping scope of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance is being vindicated — even as Snowden himself is being vilified.

Intelligence officials in the Obama administration and their allies on Capitol Hill paint the fugitive analyst as nothing but a traitor who wants to harm the United States. Many of those same officials grudgingly acknowledge, however, that public debate about the NSA’s domestic snooping is now unavoidable.

This would be impossible if Snowden — or someone like him — hadn’t spilled the beans. We wouldn’t know that the NSA is keeping a database of all our phone calls. We wouldn’t know that the government gets the authority to keep track of our private communications — even if we are not suspected of terrorist activity or associations — from secret judicial orders issued by a secret court based on secret interpretations of the law.

Snowden, of course, is hardly receiving the thanks of a grateful nation. He has spent the last five weeks trapped in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow. Russian officials, who won’t send him home for prosecution, wish he would move along. But he fears that if he takes off for one of the South American countries that have offered asylum, he risks being intercepted en route and extradited. It’s a tough situation, and time is not on his side.

You can cheer Snowden’s predicament or you can bemoan it. But even some of the NSA’s fiercest defenders have admitted, if not in so many words, that Snowden performed a valuable public service.

Less than two weeks ago, the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement to announce that the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court has renewed the government’s authority to collect “metadata” about our phone calls. This was being disclosed “in light of the significant and continuing public interest in the … collection program.”

Isn’t that rich? If the spooks had their way, there would be no “continuing public interest” in the program. We wouldn’t know it exists.

The new position espoused by President Obama and those who kept the NSA’s domestic surveillance a deep, dark secret is that of course we should have a wide-ranging national debate about balancing the imperatives of privacy and security. But they don’t mean it.

I know this because when an actual debate erupted in Congress last week, the intelligence cognoscenti freaked out.

An attempt to cut off funding for the NSA’s collection of phone data, sponsored by an unlikely pair of allies in the House — Justin Amash, a conservative Republican, and John Conyers, a liberal Democrat, both from Michigan — suffered a surprisingly narrow defeat, 217-205. The measure was denounced by the White House and the congressional leadership of both parties, yet it received bipartisan support from 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats.

The Amash-Conyers amendment was in no danger of becoming law — the Senate would have killed it and, if all else failed, President Obama would have vetoed it. But it put the intelligence establishment on notice: The spooks don’t decide how far is too far. We do.

A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that three out of four Americans believe the vacuum-cleaner collection of phone call data by the NSA intrudes on our privacy rights. At the same time, nearly three-fifths of those surveyed said it was “more important right now” to investigate possible terrorist threats than to respect privacy. A contradiction, perhaps? Not necessarily.

It is possible to endorse sweeping and intrusive measures in the course of a specific investigation but reject those same measures as part of a fishing expedition. At the heart of the Fourth Amendment is the concept that a search must be justified by suspicion. Yet how many of those whose phone call information is being logged are suspected of being terrorists? One in a million?

Equally antithetical to the idea of a free society, in my view, is the government’s position that we are not even permitted to know how the secret intelligence court interprets our laws and the Constitution. The order that Snowden leaked — compelling a Verizon unit to cough up data on the phone calls it handled — was one of only a few to come to light in the court’s three decades of existence. Now there are voices calling for all the court’s rulings to be released.

We’re talking about these issues. You can wish Edward Snowden well or wish him a lifetime in prison. Either way, you should thank him. 

RealClearPolitics – Articles

We Should Thank Edward Snowden