What Should We Read Into FL-13? Maybe Nothing.

Tonight, votes will be tallied in Florida’s 13th Congressional District special election to replace deceased Congressman Bill Young, a Republican. Here are three basic thoughts on the race:

1. My sense is that the Democratic candidate, former state chief financial officer and 2010 gubernatorial nominee Alex Sink, will probably win. 

Back in mid-January, I was corresponding with a left-of-center analyst about a St. Petersburg Times poll, and I commented that “53-47 Sink is about what I’d predict.” That’s about where I am right now, though I think a narrower Sink win is likely, maybe in the three-to-four point range. 

We’ll discuss this more in bullet point No. 3, but this is a district that has gradually trended Democratic over the past few decades, where Democrats have an unusually strong (though still somewhat flawed) candidate, and where Republicans have a candidate who is average at best. In a swing district, that seems to be a recipe for a Democratic win.

There hasn’t been much independent polling in this race. The Tampa Bay Times and Saint Leo University released polls in early February showing Sink up 7 and 9 points, respectively. A PPP poll conducted the weekend before Election Day for the League of Conservation Voters showed Sink with a smaller, 48-45, advantage.

On top of this, if there were ever a case where we’d expect a massive polling failure, it would be a special election for a legislative seat. Witness the special election to replace Tim Scott in South Carolina, where polls predicted anywhere between a big Democratic win and a close race, but which ended up in a nine-point GOP blowout.  Legislative seats are just difficult to poll in our gerrymandered universe, especially when the unpredictable turnout from a special election is figured in.

But if there’s one thing that seems to tip the scales in Sink’s direction, it’s that Democrats seem to be outperforming their early voting/absentee metrics from 2012.  That race ended up with an Obama victory in the district, albeit a narrow one. Of course, Election Day turnout may drop off if Democrats are simply cannibalizing their regular voters, but for now, things seem to point in Sink’s direction.

2. There is some symbolic importance to this election.

The 13^th District is the lineal descendent of one created in 1952 and won by Republican Bill Cramer.  Cramer was the first Republican from Florida since 1882, when Horatio Bisbee represented a district that spanned the entire eastern half of the Florida Peninsula (it was based in Jacksonville, as Miami wouldn’t be incorporated for another 14 years).  Cramer’s win was the face of the “New Southern Republicanism,” a creation of immigrants from the North who caused sleepy Sun Belt hamlets to explode in population and who transformed the political dynamic in the South.  These sorts of victories were replicated during the ’50s in places like Dallas, Charlotte, N.C., and Arlington, Va., before spreading to the countryside starting in the ’70s and turning swing regions into Republican ones.

Republicans have already lost Tampa and have had to cede most of St. Petersburg proper to that Tampa-based district in order to keep the Pinellas peninsula red.  Losing one of the first Republican redoubts in the South doesn’t mean terribly much in the big picture, but it is a useful reminder that things really do change, sometimes quickly, even in the South.

3. There are very few electoral lessons to be drawn here.

The Hill and USA Today both agree that there is a broader lesson to be learned from this race about the 2014 elections.  I’m much less certain. To begin with, special elections aren’t bellwethers, except when they are. If that doesn’t sound particularly helpful, well, it isn’t meant to.

As we might expect, wave elections are often preceded by surprising wins for the victorious side. In 1974, a number of surprising special election Democratic wins in historically Republican districts were the first signals that things were about to go massively awry for the GOP, and played a role in convincing Richard Nixon to resign. In 1994, Democrats lost historically Democratic districts in Kentucky and Oklahoma.  In 2008, GOP losses in Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana seemingly presaged the rout in the fall.

But sometimes waves aren’t preceded by surprising wins. In 2006, the GOP managed to hang on to a seat with a badly flawed candidate in southern Ohio, and kept a San Diego-based district that many saw as a test of Democrats’ chances in the fall.  In 2010, the GOP lost a special election in southwestern Pennsylvania that had been trumpeted as the only district won by both John Kerry and John McCain.

Of course, there are also special election upsets that herald nothing. Democrats were riding high in 2004 after winning special elections in South Dakota and central Kentucky, but all of that amounted to nothing in the fall.

But even if all that weren’t the case, I’m still not sure what we could read into this particular race.  As mentioned above, this seat is politically marginal, voting near the national margin in two straight elections.  Democrats fielded a reasonably strong candidate in Sink, who had won statewide office, had very nearly won the governorship in a terrible Democratic year (albeit against a damaged opponent), and who carried this district twice in her statewide bids.  This is a profile more commonly found among Senate candidates than House candidates.

Republicans fielded a first-time candidate, David Jolly, who had served as a lobbyist and who faced a competitive primary — indeed a primary that split Young’s family. While Politico’s “airing of grievances” piece should be taken with a grain of salt — jilted/nervous consultants turn on campaigns with regularity — it does serve as a nice compendium for the public mistakes by Team Jolly.

If we must say something, it is this:  If Sink wins, we will know that a strong Democrat without a voting record, who is running in an open swing district, can defeat a middling Republican candidate.  To be honest, that’s actually a somewhat important data point for Democrats, because it wasn’t clear that there was much of anything that they could do to avoid their drop-off problem. Also, some level of support for Obamacare isn’t an automatic kiss of death. But there are very few competitive House races will fit this mold, and none of the competitive Senate races will.

If Jolly wins: Because this is a seat that Sink should win in a neutral year, should she lose despite all her advantages we’ll have another data point that this is not shaping up as a neutral year. But we already intuited this; there are much better data points highlighting the Democrats’ likely midterm blues.

As for my bottom line? I think the Democrat will win this race, but I think there’s a pretty good chance that it will prove as meaningful as their win in southwestern Pennsylvania in 2010.

RealClearPolitics – Articles

What Should We Read Into FL-13? Maybe Nothing.

After the Shutdown, Maybe a Little Equality?

(Image: Business tie via Shutterstock)Executives at private companies with federal contracts are getting rich off our tax dollars — at the expense of their low-wage workers. But we can turn the tables. Here’s how.

The debate over America’s federal budget is getting stale — and getting us nowhere, as the latest government shutdown depressingly reminds us. Political obsession over budget deficits has now morphed into legislative extortion.

Today, more than ever, we need to refocus the federal “tax and spend” debate — from deficits to inequality. Two researchers from the New York think tank Demos are trying. They’ve released a new report that zones in on the no-man’s-land between the public and private sector that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans poor and a lucky few fabulously rich.

This no-man’s-land has expanded enormously over recent years as the federal government has contracted out and privatized one public service after another.

Those janitors who clean the Smithsonian museums? Those cooks at military bases? Those programmers writing software for Medicare? More and more of the workers who keep our government running work for private contractors.

And many of these workers, note Demos analysts Robert Hiltonsmith and Amy Traub, don’t make much at all in the way of compensation. About 560,000 Americans employed by contractors have jobs that pay $ 12 an hour or less.

Meanwhile, the executives who run these companies are doing quite well — thanks to our tax dollars. The federal government reimburses private firms for up to $ 763,039 of the executive compensation they lay out, a figure that will shortly rise to $ 950,000 under the formula current federal law sets out.

Let’s place this $ 763,039 in context. The President of the United States only makes $ 400,000. Our Vice President pulls in $ 230,700.

In other words, our tax dollars are compensating private contractor executives at a level nearly three times higher than Joe Biden’s paycheck.

These dollars add up. In their new Demos study, Underwriting Executive Excess, researchers Hiltonsmith and Traub calculate that the federal government is now spending $ 20.8 to $ 23.9 billion annually, overall, for the compensation of top private contractor executives.

Out of this sizeable stash of tax dollars, the pair estimates, $ 6.97 to $ 7.65 billion is going to private contractor executive pay that exceeds $ 230,700 a year.

In short, Hiltonsmith and Traub note, “we are bankrolling the paychecks of already-wealthy executives instead of supporting more livable wages for American workers struggling to get by.”

We could solve this problem, the two quickly add, quite simply — just by lowering the top contractor pay reimbursement level from the current $ 763,039 to $ 230,700, the current vice-presidential payout.

Taking this course would save enough tax dollars, the new Demos research indicates, to give a $ 6 an hour raise to the 560,000 federal contractor workers who currently make $ 12 or less an hour. Legislation calling for this simple step, the Commonsense Contractor Compensation Act of 2013, is already pending.

But we could go even further to leverage the power of the public purse toward a more equal America. The CEOs of the biggest federal contractors, executives like Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens, don’t take the bulk of their personal pay directly from the federal government. Their subsidy comes indirectly.

The companies these executives run owe their robust profitability to federal contracts. This profitability keeps corporate share prices high. Stock options and other stock awards translate these high share prices into whopping executive windfalls. Lockheed’s Stevens took home $ 23.8 million last year.

The alternative? The federal government could deny contracts — and corporate tax breaks as well  — to companies that pay their top executives over 25 or 50 times the pay of their most typical workers, the corporate pay range from the 1950s through the early 1980s. Our contemporary gap: 354 times.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act already requires America’s corporations to annually disclose the ratio between their CEO and median worker pay. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now taking public comment on a new rule designed to implement this mandate, and, if things go smoothly, this rule will kick into effect sometime next year.

Congress, with annual ratio disclosure in place, could then easily link federal contracts to corporate pay equity.

The federal government, we ought to keep in mind, already denies our tax dollars to companies with employment practices that discriminate on the basis of race or gender. We’ve decided, as a society, not to subsidize racial or gender inequality. Why should we subsidize economic inequality?

Truthout Stories

After the Shutdown, Maybe a Little Equality?

Maybe U.S. public schools don"t stink

The drumbeat is hard to miss: Our schools are failing. Public education is in crisis. Our students are falling further and further behind.

The rhetoric comes from the left and right, from educators and politicians and lobbyists and CEOs and even Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The deep dysfunction of our public schools is said to threaten not only America’s economy but also its national security.

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But a vocal group of contrarians is challenging that conventional wisdom. The latest weapon in their arsenal: A new book out this week by education historian Diane Ravitch, who argues that the biggest crisis facing public education is the relentless message that public education is in crisis.

(Sign up for POLITICO’s Morning Education)

It’s a debate with broad power to shape the nation’s $ 600-billion-a-year investment in public education. Where’s the truth? That’s not always easy to discern. Here’s a look at four key talking points — and the facts (and spin) behind them.

1. China is eating us for lunch

A new video about the failures of public schools making the rounds on social media starts by introducing viewers to “the most important number in all of education…32!”

Why 32?

Well, that’s where the U.S. came out in the PISA international math test, given to 15-year-olds around the world in 2009. Only 32 percent of American kids scored proficient, which put us at 32nd in the world, miles behind perennial powerhouses like Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea — and also far behind nations less frequently thought of as academic superstars, including Estonia, Iceland and Slovenia.

(Also on POLITICO: The Common Core money war)

Sounds grim. And Harvard education professor Paul Peterson argues that it is. “If we’re 32nd in the world, that’s a pretty serious matter,” said Peterson, a co-author of the new book “Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School,” which the video was produced to promote.

Then again, we’re 32nd on just one test. American kids do better relative to the world — though they’re still far from elite — on the PISA science and reading exams.

And they do better as well on a different, equally respected, international math test known as TIMSS.

On the most recent TIMSS test, from 2011, American eighth-graders handily outscored seven nations that had the edge on the U.S. in the 2009 PISA exam, including Great Britain, Australia — and, yes, Slovenia. Fourth-graders rocked the TIMSS test even more: They came out ahead of a dozen countries that had beaten the U.S. on the PISA exam.

(Also on POLITICO: Online courses don’t live up to hype)

As for China, it doesn’t participate as an entire nation; only students from three relatively wealthy regions — Shanghai, Macao and Hong Kong — are tested. That’s important to note because income correlates with success on standardized tests. Finland, often at the top of the global rankings, has a child poverty rate of just 5 percent. In the U.S., it’s 23 percent.

One more point: Any test contains sampling error, so the precision of global rankings is an illusion. On the 2009 PISA reading assessment, for instance, the U.S. officially ranked 15th among the 34 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which sponsors the exam. But an OECD official told POLITICO that the U.S. might actually have been as high as 8th — or as low as 20th.

2. Our kids can’t do math and that’s killing our economy

In her new book “Reign of Error,” Ravitch notes that the U.S. has done poorly on every international math test since the first one was given in the mid-1960s.

The low rankings don’t concern Ravitch. Bad test scores, she points out, haven’t stopped the U.S. from driving major scientific advances decade after decade. American innovation has been so impressive that China’s ministry of education is pushing its schools to stop fixating on standardized tests and embrace a more hands-on model of education — the American model.

“The whole thing about being first in the world is nonsense,” Ravitch said. “I don’t think we should worry that much about Singapore taking over the world.”

Peterson, though, does worry — a great deal. He and his co-authors calculate that if the U.S. could just boost its math scores to the level Canada attained on the 2009 PISA test, our economy would grow stronger over the coming decades. How much stronger? The average income of every worker in the U.S. would be 20 percent higher than if we continued to languish at No. 32 in the world rankings, Peterson said. And that’s achievable just by matching middle-of-the-pack Canada.

“You would think that would be a reasonable goal to have,” Peterson said.

In Peterson’s view, it’s irresponsible to argue that international rankings don’t matter. Sooner or later — and he’s betting sooner — poor math scores will catch up to us, he said, as they signal the population is not well-equipped for the jobs of the future. He’s particularly concerned that just 7 percent of U.S. students (including just 12 percent of students with college-educated parents) scored “advanced” on the PISA math test, compared with 44 percent of students in Shanghai, 30 percent in Singapore and nearly 14 percent in Canada.

The greatest job growth in the U.S. over the next decade is likely to be in service jobs that don’t require advanced math or science, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But those are low-paying jobs. The most lucrative high-growth professions will require strong math and science skills — think software developer, optometrist, bioengineer, veterinarian.

3. We’re spending more, but schools are getting worse

Warnings on this theme are generally accompanied by graphs showing steep growth in per-pupil spending — juxtaposed against a flat line representing academic achievement.

That’s misleading, however, on two fronts.

POLITICO – TOP Stories

Maybe U.S. public schools don"t stink

origins of modern language being pushed back by a factor of ten to maybe 1 million + years ago!!

The study, reported in the journal Frontiers in Language Sciences, pushes back the origins of modern language by a factor of ten – from the often-cited 50,000 years to 500,000 – 1,000,000 years ago – somewhere between the origins of our genus, Homo, some 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis.

This reassessment of the evidence goes against a scenario where a single catastrophic mutation in a single individual would suddenly give rise to language, and suggests that a gradual accumulation of biological and cultural innovations is much more plausible.

www.sci-news.com…

In my way of thinking all pack animals communicate to varying degrees.. Watch dolphins hunt or wolves tracking and killing and tell me they are not communicating in some way…Chimps in the wild

Chimpanzees make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; they have sophisticated hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative and capable of deception; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence;[28] and they are capable of spontaneous planning for a future state or event

The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal language research. Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee, was successfully taught 125 signs during his life, though some disagree on whether this can be constituted as true language. There have been other, more successful animal language projects, such as Kanzi and Koko, as well as some parrots

So to me it is not a stretch at all to assume language of some sort has been with our species since the beginning…Tarzan and Jane seemed to get along just fine with very few words….OK maybe not a great example but you probably get the idea.! Jane was smart in her way and Tarzan was well versed it what they had to do in their habitat to survive; great pair without all the comforts of a modern home…….I am amazed that the study is finally pushing the so called language barrier back so far….Interesting…

I have a little experience in Asia and some of the languages around here are tonal…Which means one simple word can have 9 different meanings (mandarin) or 5 different meaning (Thai) Context kind of makes a different but it is as though they ran out of words and started using descending, flat, rising, rising and falling, and falling tones for the same words…both are very old languages or parts of older languages. Over the last 40 years the Thai language has changed with the times. It used to be a softer language than it is today.. No doubt due to T.V. and everyone trying to make a buck (Baht) has had an effect…Then you add in the slang that has become a normal vocabulary…language is a thing that grows and changes over time… unless it is a dead language…

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origins of modern language being pushed back by a factor of ten to maybe 1 million + years ago!!

Former senior NSA official: Maybe only 30 or 40 agency officials had access to that FISA order that leaked

posted at 2:01 pm on June 11, 2013 by Allahpundit

Normally, this is where I’d say there are only two obvious possibilities: Either I’m right that he conspired with someone higher up the chain who fed him these highly sensitive documents or the guy’s some sort of master hacker who managed to slip past NSA’s internal security to lift top-secret stuff off their servers. But I can’t say that in this case because none of us really has any idea how NSA operates. Could the IT guy have had routine access to bombshell surveillance program data? I … don’t think so, but I … guess, maybe?

Even the intel guys can’t figure it out:

Among the questions is how a contract employee at a distant NSA satellite office was able to obtain a copy of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a highly classified document that would presumably be sealed from most employees and of little use to someone in his position.

A former senior NSA official said that the number of agency officials with access to such court orders is “maybe 30 or maybe 40. Not large numbers.”…

Officials questioned some of Snowden’s assertions in his interview with the Guardian, saying that several of his claims seemed exaggerated. Among them were assertions that he could order wiretaps on anyone from “a federal judge to even the president.”

“When he said he had access to every CIA station around the world, he’s lying,” said a former senior agency official, who added that information is so closely compartmented that only a handful of top-ranking executives at the agency could access it.

“Investigators also need to determine whether anyone else was involved in disclosing the information to reporters,” per WaPo’s sources. That’s one possibility — Snowden in cahoots with a more senior person who wants the information out but doesn’t want his fingerprints on it. In theory, though, security at NSA is so tight that there’s no way to access, let alone remove, information without leaving a cyber-fingerprint of some kind. That’s the whole point of PRISM, right? Finding even the faintest cyber-prints? An agency that can track people’s physical movements based on their use of electronic devices should, one would think, be able to track their own contracted employees’ virtual movements on their premises. And yet here we are, with Snowden safely decamped with the goods to Hong Kong and Glenn Greenwald promising even more revelations.

Theory two, then: Snowden’s a hacking genius who somehow beat NSA’s internal security. Marc Ambinder assesses the degree of difficulty:

According to several current and former officials who’ve worked on NSANet, every keystroke is logged and subject to random audits. “Screengrabs” are prohibited. Documents can be printed with special facilities but that, too, leaves a record. As a mission support specialist, Snowden would have had access as part of his jobs to the physical servers and hard drives that contain material.

If he did not want to leave an audit trail, he might have disconnected a hard drive containing temporarily cached documents, brought them into an area that included desktops and hardware not cleared for such access, connected them, and then printed documents out. It is also possible that he disabled, under the guise of fixing something, access privileges for auditors. He could have temporarily escalated his own access privileges, although this would have raised flags among his superiors.

In theory, this would have alerted NISIRT, the NSA’s Information Systems Incident Response Team, which maintains a 24/7 watch over the backend of NSANet. Operational branches, including Special Source Operations (domestic and compartmented collection programs), Global Access Operations (satellites and other international SIGINT platforms), and Tailored Access Operations (cyber) have their own NISIRT team.

The agency also has a counterspy team that looks at NSA employees — and contractors? — in hopes of anticipating who might be ready to leak. Evidently they missed the Ron-Paul-donating loner who’d apparently been in contact with Glenn Greenwald for months before he skipped town. And if Ambinder’s scenario is correct, they also missed one of their hard drives going offline. Would a powerpoint on PRISM and a FISA order authorizing phone-record harvesting even be on the same hard drive? I.e. did Snowden collect this stuff steadily over time, by accessing different NSA “compartments,” rather than in one grand heist? Because if so, that’s an even more catastrophic internal security breakdown. Could NSA counterspies have missed repeated breaches?

Hopefully we’ll be able to game all of this out as part of the great national debate on NSA spying that Obama supposedly welcomes but won’t lift a finger to actually make possible. (“If President Obama really welcomed a debate, there are all kinds of things he could do in terms of declassification and disclosure to foster it.”) Exit question: Why did Snowden claim he was making $ 200,000 a year if he was only making $ 122,000? Is he including benefits in measuring his compensation? Any lie he tells, however small, will raise doubts about his motives. Seems weird that he’d open himself up to a challenge on something as minor as that.

Tags: data mining, fisa, intelligence, national security, nsa, prism, snowden

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Former senior NSA official: Maybe only 30 or 40 agency officials had access to that FISA order that leaked

Former senior NSA official: Maybe only 30 or 40 agency officials had access to that FISA order that leaked

posted at 2:01 pm on June 11, 2013 by Allahpundit

Normally, this is where I’d say there are only two obvious possibilities: Either I’m right that he conspired with someone higher up the chain who fed him these highly sensitive documents or the guy’s some sort of master hacker who managed to slip past NSA’s internal security to lift top-secret stuff off their servers. But I can’t say that in this case because none of us really has any idea how NSA operates. Could the IT guy have had routine access to bombshell surveillance program data? I … don’t think so, but I … guess, maybe?

Even the intel guys can’t figure it out:

Among the questions is how a contract employee at a distant NSA satellite office was able to obtain a copy of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a highly classified document that would presumably be sealed from most employees and of little use to someone in his position.

A former senior NSA official said that the number of agency officials with access to such court orders is “maybe 30 or maybe 40. Not large numbers.”…

Officials questioned some of Snowden’s assertions in his interview with the Guardian, saying that several of his claims seemed exaggerated. Among them were assertions that he could order wiretaps on anyone from “a federal judge to even the president.”

“When he said he had access to every CIA station around the world, he’s lying,” said a former senior agency official, who added that information is so closely compartmented that only a handful of top-ranking executives at the agency could access it.

“Investigators also need to determine whether anyone else was involved in disclosing the information to reporters,” per WaPo’s sources. That’s one possibility — Snowden in cahoots with a more senior person who wants the information out but doesn’t want his fingerprints on it. In theory, though, security at NSA is so tight that there’s no way to access, let alone remove, information without leaving a cyber-fingerprint of some kind. That’s the whole point of PRISM, right? Finding even the faintest cyber-prints? An agency that can track people’s physical movements based on their use of electronic devices should, one would think, be able to track their own contracted employees’ virtual movements on their premises. And yet here we are, with Snowden safely decamped with the goods to Hong Kong and Glenn Greenwald promising even more revelations.

Theory two, then: Snowden’s a hacking genius who somehow beat NSA’s internal security. Marc Ambinder assesses the degree of difficulty:

According to several current and former officials who’ve worked on NSANet, every keystroke is logged and subject to random audits. “Screengrabs” are prohibited. Documents can be printed with special facilities but that, too, leaves a record. As a mission support specialist, Snowden would have had access as part of his jobs to the physical servers and hard drives that contain material.

If he did not want to leave an audit trail, he might have disconnected a hard drive containing temporarily cached documents, brought them into an area that included desktops and hardware not cleared for such access, connected them, and then printed documents out. It is also possible that he disabled, under the guise of fixing something, access privileges for auditors. He could have temporarily escalated his own access privileges, although this would have raised flags among his superiors.

In theory, this would have alerted NISIRT, the NSA’s Information Systems Incident Response Team, which maintains a 24/7 watch over the backend of NSANet. Operational branches, including Special Source Operations (domestic and compartmented collection programs), Global Access Operations (satellites and other international SIGINT platforms), and Tailored Access Operations (cyber) have their own NISIRT team.

The agency also has a counterspy team that looks at NSA employees — and contractors? — in hopes of anticipating who might be ready to leak. Evidently they missed the Ron-Paul-donating loner who’d apparently been in contact with Glenn Greenwald for months before he skipped town. And if Ambinder’s scenario is correct, they also missed one of their hard drives going offline. Would a powerpoint on PRISM and a FISA order authorizing phone-record harvesting even be on the same hard drive? I.e. did Snowden collect this stuff steadily over time, by accessing different NSA “compartments,” rather than in one grand heist? Because if so, that’s an even more catastrophic internal security breakdown. Could NSA counterspies have missed repeated breaches?

Hopefully we’ll be able to game all of this out as part of the great national debate on NSA spying that Obama supposedly welcomes but won’t lift a finger to actually make possible. (“If President Obama really welcomed a debate, there are all kinds of things he could do in terms of declassification and disclosure to foster it.”) Exit question: Why did Snowden claim he was making $ 200,000 a year if he was only making $ 122,000? Is he including benefits in measuring his compensation? Any lie he tells, however small, will raise doubts about his motives. Seems weird that he’d open himself up to a challenge on something as minor as that.

Tags: data mining, fisa, intelligence, national security, nsa, prism, snowden

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Former senior NSA official: Maybe only 30 or 40 agency officials had access to that FISA order that leaked

Erin go bragh maybe, but no flag for Irish pub in Florida

By Jane Sutton

Fri Mar 8, 2013 1:32pm EST

(Reuters) – The owners of an Irish pub in northeast Florida said they were shocked to receive a citation for flying the Irish flag but have removed it to comply with a local ordinance banning commercial display of non-U.S. flags.

The four sisters who own Culhane’s Irish Pub in Atlantic Beach said Friday they would apply for a temporary permit allowing them to at least fly the green, white and orange Irish flag on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17.

“St. Patrick’s Day is huge for us,” said Aine Culhane, who owns the pub with sisters Mary Jane, Michelle and Lynda.

They showed Reuters a copy of a citation issued by code enforcement officers for the City of Atlantic Beach on February 20, giving them 24 hours to “cease display of flags other than American flag.”

The Culhanes said they had flown an Irish flag and an American flag on the front of their pub for eight years and were unaware of the ordinance.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Aine Culhane said. “We never break the law. We were just shocked and kind of sad that we couldn’t hang the flag … Everybody is upset about it.”

City officials did not immediately return phone and email messages seeking comment. Acting Mayor Maria Mark told television station WTLV that the city council was reconsidering the ordinance but she doubted any changes could be approved before St. Patrick’s Day.

The Culhane sisters are from Shanagolden in County Limerick and have owned the pub since 2005. Michelle and Mary Jane are naturali ed U.S. citi ens and Lynda and Aine are in the United States on visas, they said.

“We’re definitely living the American dream. We love it here. We’re proof that anybody can do it We came here knowing no one,” Aine said.

But being forced to remove the flag of their homeland was an insult, Michelle said.

“The large contingent of Irish immigrants who fought for this country in numerous wars cannot be treated like this,” she said. “Our flag is woven from the fabric of many proud nations and should never be discounted by the pettiness of a few narrow minded council members.”

(Editing by David Adams)

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Reuters: Oddly Enough

Erin go bragh maybe, but no flag for Irish pub in Florida