David Brooks: The Next Scapegoat

Op-Ed Columnist
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 13, 2013

Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.

Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.

The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.

It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.

Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.

The next day, Nuland held a background press briefing, a transcript of which is available on the State Department’s Web site. She had two main points. There’s a lot we don’t know. The attack was conducted by Libyan extremists. She made no claim that it was set off by an anti-Muslim video or arose spontaneously from demonstrations.

On Friday, Sept. 14, David Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., gave a classified briefing to lawmakers in Congress. The lawmakers asked him to provide talking points so they could discuss the event in the news media.

C.I.A. analysts began work on the talking points. Early drafts, available on Jonathan Karl’s ABC News Web site, reflect the confused and fragmented state of knowledge. The first draft, like every subsequent one, said the Benghazi attacks were spontaneously inspired by protests in Cairo. It also said that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda participated.

The C.I.A. analysts quickly scrubbed references to Al Qaeda from the key part of the draft, investigators on Capitol Hill now tell me.

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why the C.I.A. was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. She also noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Nuland didn’t seek to rewrite the talking points. In fact, if you look at the drafts that were written while she was sending e-mails, the drafts don’t change much from one to the next. She was just kicking the process up to the policy-maker level.

At this point, Nuland’s participation in the whole affair ends.

On Saturday morning, what’s called a deputies committee meeting was held at the White House. I’m told the talking points barely came up at that meeting. Instead, the C.I.A. representative said he would take proactive measures to streamline them. That day, the agency reduced the talking points to the bare nub Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was given before going on the Sunday talk shows.

Several things were apparently happening. Each of the different players had their hands on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking points that everybody couldn’t agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions, possibly overlearning the lessons from the Bush years. Third, as the memos moved up the C.I.A. management chain, the higher officials made them more tepid (this is apparently typical). Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points gravitated toward the least politically problematic story, blaming the anti-Muslim video and the Cairo demonstrations.

Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations against her are bogus.

New York Times Op-Ed

villager4ever

 

 

On Mother’s Day

Today as we honor our mothers and mothers in our life, a lot of emotions pour out. I remember growing up when there was not much to share with material things – no money for cards, flowers and gifts. Our greeting cards were made from paper where we drew, painted and did the best we could to have something to take our mother. Those who can afford went to the big city. We honored our mothers by wearing a white flower, either a lei of pikake, a gardenia and whatever came in white.

When I came to the U.S. fifty years ago, I saw the significance of this day from the young and not so young. Statistics even showed that on Mother’s Day, phone companies regarded this as a heavy day for long distance calls. Cards and flower shops and restaurants enjoyed huge profits. The selection of cards, by category, were wide and got even wider every year – there are cards for ‘Mothers in your Life’ even fathers who are raising their children all his own have a card.

Admittedly, I get caught up by Mother’s Day based on the cards I send out to relatives and friends, year by year. When I had to leave for a family emergency a week before Mother’s Day last year, I failed to send my cards out and in haste did not tell Bob to mail them. When I returned weeks later, I mailed the card to my 90-year old aunt in Oregon, explaining why it was late.  A short time later, I ran into one of my friends who expressed some disappointment for not receiving the card.

Those un-mailed cards were tucked in a box and were mailed last week. Sadly, one of the regular recipients of my card-sending spree, my aunt in Oregon, passed away last December. At the funeral her daughter, cousin Elizabeth, told me how my cards were cherished and saved.

My aunt will have a special place in this spree, for her love of writing back to me on how happy she was for the cards. My aunt’s name remains on the list if not to send a card but as a part of the memory. In her honor, her daughter Elizabeth has been put on the list.  Even though I don’t hear back from many who received those cards, I know in some way the gladness is there. I wonder, though, will they miss the cards if they stop coming? Well this I know, my Hallmark points will decrease. Until then, Happy Mother’s Day!
Normita
P.S. Share your Mother’s Day memories.

Don’t Cry for Thatcher’s Children

Posted: 04/17/2013

Imogen Lloyd Webber

The period between a death and a funeral is one of reflection, and it has certainly been so for my home country of Great Britain as Margaret Thatcher is laid to rest today.

Between the vitriol posted by a number of my Facebook “friends” over Thatcher’s passing, it was the words of one of my closest pals from Cambridge University, who was born and bred in the North of England, that stood out most. She wrote:

[I] grew up under a female prime minister. As a result, as a girl, it never occurred to me that there were areas of influence that might be closed to me because I was female. Whether I agreed with her policies or not, Margaret Thatcher put a generation of women on a more equal footing.

No American female has yet had the opportunity to grow up with the example of a woman in charge. Even if Hillary Clinton wins in 2016, she is a former First Lady — Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter who did it on her own. This week has reminded me how lucky I am to be of a generation known as “Thatcher’s children.” Would I be the person I am today without Thatcher? Would I have worked as hard as I did at school, not flinch when debating a roomful of men — or a Fox News host live on air — without “The Iron Lady” as an example? I doubt it.

Thatcher once said: “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.” She was tougher than those around her, but perhaps that was because she had to be? The nature of trailblazing?

There weren’t exactly contemporary examples for Thatcher to follow. In 1975, when Thatcher became leader of the British opposition, the U.S. Senate contained no women. My Dad co-wrote the musical “Evita” and tells a fascinating story of Thatcher before she was Prime Minister. The then-leader of the opposition apparently used to turn up and stand at the back of the show for the end of the first act and the beginning of the second. So, she stayed for the big, conquering numbers — “A New Argentina,” “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” (the balcony scene with the arms) and “Rainbow High.”

The tale may now be in part urban legend, and is of course deeply ironic, bearing in mind the Falklands crisis a few years later. However, what is certainly true is that Thatcher had an innate understanding of the theatricality of politics. She embraced the supposedly derogatory term she was nicknamed by the Soviets in 1976, “The Iron Lady.” Every day, the persona of the housewife-politician went into battle with her armor — the hand bag, the hair and the power suits.

Americans are to an extent puzzled by the polarizing force Thatcher was in her own country. But remember that Obama is far more popular internationally than he is in the U.S.. Americans didn’t have to deal with “The Iron Lady” on a partisan, day-to-day basis. On the world stage, despite some difficulties in the wings, her “special relationship” with Reagan helped end the Cold War. It is to Thatcher’s immense credit that she identified Gorbachev early on as a man she could “do business with.”

For all the controversies that Thatcher caused, the venom displayed on social media and at street parties since her death, it is worth remembering this: Thatcher never lost a general election, winning three concurrently. The British people, when given the chance, on balance, did not reject her. In the end, it was her own party that committed political matricide.

For the first time since Churchill’s, the Queen attended a former Prime Minister’s funeral today. Margaret Thatcher was the longest-serving British prime minister of the twentieth century. The woman who is expected to be Britain’s longest reigning monarch, recognizes history when she sees it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/imogen-lloyd-webber/dont-cry-for-thatchers-children_b_3100091.html

Here is a biographical article about her life:  http://www.biography.com/people/margaret-thatcher-9504796

Obama Administration Pushes Banks to Make Home Loans to People with Weaker Credit

The Washington Post Published: April 2

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession

In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps.

Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to do more to make sure more Americans can enjoy the benefits of the housing recovery, but critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars.

“If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from,” said Ed Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former top executive at mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

Administration officials say they are looking only to allay unnecessary hesi­ta­tion among banks and encourage safe lending to borrowers who have the financial wherewithal to pay.

“There’s always a tension that you have to take seriously between providing clarity and rules of the road and not giving any opportunity to restart the kind of irresponsible lending that we saw in the mid-2000s,” said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record.

The administration’s efforts come in the midst of a housing market that has been surging for the past year but that has been delivering most of the benefits to established homeowners with high credit scores or to investors who have been behind a significant number of new purchases.

“If you were going to tell people in low-income and moderate-income communities and communities of color there was a housing recovery, they would look at you as if you had two heads,” said John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit housing organization. “It is very difficult for people of low and moderate incomes to refinance or buy homes.”administration’s efforts in trying to help homeowners and bring the nation out of its housing slump.

Before the crisis, about 40 percent of home buyers were first-time purchasers. That’s down to 30 percent, according to the National Association of Realtors.

From 2007 through 2012, new-home purchases fell 30 percent for people with credit scores above 780 (out of 800), according to Federal Reserve Governor Elizabeth Duke. But they declined 90 percent for people with scores between 680 and 620 — historically a respectable range for a credit score.
“If the only people who can get a loan have near-perfect credit and are putting down 25 percent, you’re leaving out of the market an entire population of creditworthy folks, which constrains demand and slows the recovery,” said Jim Parrott, who until January was the senior adviser on housing for the White House’s National Economic Council.

One reason, according to policymakers, is that as young people move out of their parents’ homes and start their own households, they will be forced to rent rather than buy, meaning less construction and housing activity. Given housing’s role in building up a family’s wealth, that could have long-lasting consequences.

“I think the ability of newly formed households, which are more likely to have lower incomes or weaker credit scores, to access the mortgage market will make a big difference in the shape of the recovery,” Duke said last month. “Economic improvement will cause household formation to increase, but if credit is hard to get, these will be rental rather than owner-occupied households.”

Deciding which borrowers get loans might seem like something that should be left up to the private market. But since the financial crisis in 2008, the government has shaped most of the housing market, insuring between 80 percent and 90 percent of all new loans, according to the industry publication Inside Mortgage Finance. It has done so primarily through the Federal Housing Administration, which is part of the executive branch, and taxpayer-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, run by an independent regulator.

The FHA historically has been dedicated to making homeownership affordable for people of moderate means. Under FHA terms, a borrower can get a home loan with a credit score as low as 500 or a down payment as small as 3.5 percent. If borrowers with FHA loans default on their payments, taxpayers are on the line — a guarantee that should provide confidence to banks to lend.

But banks are largely rejecting the lower end of the scale, and the average credit score on FHA loans has stood at about 700. After years of intensifying investigations into wrongdoing in mortgage lending, banks are concerned that they will be held responsible if borrowers cannot pay. Under some circumstances, the FHA can retract its insurance or take other legal action to penalize banks when loans default.

“The financial risk of just one mistake has just become so high that lenders are playing it very, very safe, and many qualified borrowers are paying the price,” said David Stevens, Obama’s former FHA commissioner and now the chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The FHA, in coordination with the White House, is working to develop new policies to make clear to banks that they will not lose their guarantees or face other legal action if loans that conform to the program’s standards later default. Officials hope the FHA’s actions will then spur Fannie and Freddie to do the same.

The effort requires sign-on by the Justice Department and the inspector general of Department of Housing and Urban Development, agencies that investigate wrongdoing in mortgage lending.

“We need to align as much as possible with IG and the DOJ moving forward,” FHA Commissioner Carol Galante said. The HUD inspector general and Justice Department declined to comment.

The effort to provide more certainty to banks is just one of several policies the administration is undertaking. The FHA is also urging lenders to take what officials call “compensating factors” into account and use more subjective judgment when deciding whether to make a loan — such as looking at a borrower’s overall savings.

“My view is that there are lots of creditworthy borrowers that are below 720 or 700 — all the way down the credit-score spectrum,” Galante said. “It’s important you look at the totality of that borrower’s ability to pay.”

Posted by Mary Puma

FIELDS: Pricking the academic bloat

Is a university degree still worth the trouble?

The last of the college applications have been rewritten, tweaked and polished and at last entrusted to the tender mercies of the U.S. mail or the Internet. Fretting over deadlines morphs into waiting, and yearning, wishing and praying for coveted letters of acceptance. This is the annual crisis in thousands of homes with ambitious high school seniors — the high school seniors and their parents who still believe that college is the route to the American Dream.

But wait. While they play the conventional game of aspiration, certain scholars, economists and hundreds of thousands of “concerned citizens” have initiated a different debate, and the debate is growing. They’re talking about the changes in university life and whether we should continue up the garden path worn bare over the decades. The debate is over the “higher education bubble,” a phrase popularized by Glenn Reynolds, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee, who compares what’s happening in higher education to what happened when housing became a feverish exercise in speculation.

“Bubbles form when too many people expect values to go up forever,” Mr. Reynolds says. “Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them. And there are signs that this is beginning to happen already where education is concerned.” With so much fat in the system, the knowledge protein may not be enough to produce the intellectual muscle needed for a prosperous life in the 21st century. Like fast food and high energy drinks, empty education calories offer only temporary highs.

“The college presidents with their $1 million-plus salaries, and bloated administrative staffs, the whole system of tenure has turned out to be as much a recipe for intellectual conformity as it is a fiscal nightmare,” observes the New Criterion, a magazine that closely follows the politicization of the university. In the decade after 2001, the number of administrators grew 50 times faster than the number of instructors, according to the U.S. Department of Education. A decline in the hours spent in teaching by tenured professors coincides with sharply increasing tuition fees to pay for luxury dorms, dining halls and gyms that have little to do with actual learning but everything to do with bulking up the academic bureaucracy.

With tightening family budgets, the high debt that accompanies students to college and an increasing public reckoning of diminishing value, college becomes a risky investment. Hundreds of parents are concluding that it may not be worth it. Moody’s Investors Service, the credit rating firm, finds that students are “increasingly attending more affordable community colleges, studying part time, or electing to enter the work force without the benefit of a college education.” Total student debt now approaches a trillion dollars.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that new technology offers less expensive access to information, providing quality goods at lower cost.

In prophesying the end of the university as we know it, Nathan Harden, author of “Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad,” finds a silver lining in the crisis, an innovative challenge that goes beyond avoiding the pitfalls in the long title of his book. Students seeking knowledge could pay a fraction of what they do now to get an education, often a better education, as streaming videos replace live lectures, and professors and students employ the Internet to exchange papers and exams, and join in conversations over the course work.

“If a faster, cheaper way of sharing information emerges, history shows us that it will quickly supplant what came before,” writes Mr. Harden in American Interest magazine.

Textbooks are already less expensive in the ebook edition. Students can read out-of-copyright books free on the Internet’s Project Gutenberg. If the best professors and universities participate, the virtual classroom can reach millions of students. When computer-guided learning is combined with traditional classroom discussion, students learn faster. High tech plus human contact forges a powerful union.

There are obstacles aplenty to improving higher education for less money, but the trends inspire optimism. One professor of computer science at Stanford discovered he could reach as many online students in one year as it would take to reach in 250 years in a college classroom. Harvard and MIT now offer a credentialed certificate for students who complete their online courses and can show a mastery of the material.

The monks who salvaged the classics, recording them with painful diligence on papyrus, nevertheless lost their jobs with Johann Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type. If there’s a phoenix to rise from the ashes of university excess, then bandwidth, RAM and gigabytes must assist its flight. When fleet-footed Hermes is reincarnated as a courier of fast-forward high tech, the university bubble may burst in many directions, accelerating the delivery of information.

There’s a caution (as there always is). The speed with which information is delivered has little to do with the achievement of wisdom. As the Bard would say, “Aye, there’s the rub.”

Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/17/pricking-the-academic-bloat-is-a-university-degree/

A Bill and Hill year: why Clintons are Americans’ favorite politicians

A recent poll showed that Hillary and Bill Clinton are the most popular politicians in America. How did America’s top political couple come to have such high-flying ratings?

By Howard LaFranchi | Christian Science Monitor – Sat, Jan 5, 2013

Though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s return to work next week will be brief, given President Obama’s nomination of John Kerry to replace her as secretary of State, it comes amid an aura of national popularity, respect, and even fascination.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in December found that Secretary Clinton and her husband, the former President Clinton, are America’s two most popular politicians. At the same time, a Bloomberg poll found that 70 percent of Americans view Secretary Clinton favorably – an astounding number given the country’s hyperpartisan divide.

What explains the high-flying ratings enjoyed by Bill and Hill, as Washington columnists prefer to call them?

Some pundits speculate that Secretary Clinton’s “relegation” to the relatively noncontroversial global stage of international issues has allowed her to win approving nods from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Others say it’s simply because the Clintons are so ubiquitous, with Secretary Clinton traveling up a storm representing America to the world and Mr. Clinton holding court during this past election cycle – first at the Democratic National Convention, then on the stump – on behalf of Mr. Obama.

But as The Washington Post noted recently as it marveled over the “good year” the Clintons have enjoyed: “[U]biquity usually breeds fatigue from the public, not more excitement.”

So why doesn’t America have Clinton fatigue?

In Secretary Clinton’s case, Americans appear to admire her work ethic and her ability to reinvent herself – and not just to make do with the hand dealt her, but to employ it with a flourish.

In announcing Clinton’s imminent return after being hospitalized for a blood clot, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the secretary is “raring to go.” It may have sounded corny, but it also rang true. Anyone who kept a close eye on Clinton’s daily calendar over the past four years could not help but believe it.

It also sounded right when Ms. Nuland added that Clinton remained “committed to testifying” to Congress on the Benghazi attack, which occurred on her watch and cost the lives of four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

And then there is the matter of personal reinvention.

When Secretary Clinton emerged Wednesday from a New York hospital, husband and daughter Chelsea at her side, she smiled behind dark glasses – the same dark glasses, it seems, as the ones she wore in the now-famous photo of her on a military plane looking over her BlackBerry. It was a reminder of the considerable distance traveled from the frumpy pantsuits of her unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign to the “cool Hillary” of 2012 Internet memes.

More substantial, is how she picked herself up from the 2008 defeat and effectively – and cheerfully – put herself at the service of the man who dealt her that blow, in the role of the nation’s top diplomat.

As she visited (and in some cases revisited) the world’s emerging democracies, Clinton must have told a thousand times the story of how, after battling and then losing to then-Senator Obama, she now worked for him – and how overcoming political rivalries for the national good was an essential ingredient of a successful democracy.

That ability to turn her largest political defeat into an asset – the lemons-to-lemonade analogy, to use an old phrase – may be the trait that impresses one most about Clinton.

Source: Yahoo News

Posted by villager4ever

A Christmas letter: From our home to yours

By Normita Fenn
Posted Dec. 24, 2012

2012 was filled with many happy and sad moments! We spent two weeks in Hawaii in January for Bob’s golf marshal at the Sony Open and visited with friends and co-workers at HECO. Many new faces greeted us there but with the same Aloha spirit as before.

Our hearts felt so empty over the loss of our dearest Lanz, so in March we welcomed a 10-week old pure-bred schnauzer from a breeder in Santa Rosa. We named him Harper , a very handsome, smart, lively guy. He turns one on December 21.

Normita has completed her journalism studies. In her final article she writes, “ At last my lifelong dream to become a journalist will be written, the unpaved and smooth road revealed. How does one put into words precious lifelong experiences toward the path of fulfillment? Where does one begin? Tough questions for someone who came from a big, close-knit family, the youngest of 12, always dreaming, always writing, always in front of the class ready to recite and sing at a moment’s cue – why hide all the beautiful poems and love songs  that fill the heart, she asks. “  With this ending, “The piercing sadness and the broken heart of the 16-year old are but a memory. Dreams are fulfilled. And now it’s time to build new dreams. This is destiny.”

A lot of sadness this year. Normita’s two nephews passed away unexpectedly, two weeks apart, leaving the family with so much grief. A Golden Gate University colleague and a close friend of Normita succumbed from breast cancer a few weeks ago. As I start writing this newsletter last week, the shocking event in Newtown, Connecticut, happened. No words can describe the loss of 20 children and six adults all in a single moment. In this Season of Christmas, let us pray for them and that their families may find Hope, Peace and Joy, that the memories of the Love lost embrace them forever.

Kaitlin and Ryan, children of Mike and Kristen, are both involved in a number of school sports. Avery and Conner, children of Dave and Laura, are much younger and also involved in sports programs at their school.   All of the kids are also doing very well in their studies,  we hope that with the academics and the sports that they will be able to attend great colleges, like Cal!

Bob continues to volunteer at the local library.  We still attend Cal football (bad year) and basketball games  and enjoy the experience.

From our home to yours, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
The Fenns—Bob, Normita and Harper
Visit Normita’s blog at: http://normitasnotebook.com/

Normita Fenn