Memo to E. German guards reveals shoot-to-kill orders
Disclosure comes with anniversary of the Berlin Wall

By Judy Dempsey
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

August 13, 2007

According to an article at WELT ONLINE this order was already known to the same archive ten years ago, and was published in a book by Helmut Müller-Enberg, titled "DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten" ("GDR History in Documents") in 1997. It's just an old story revived because of the ongoing discussions whether or not such archives should be closed.

"Such an order would have contradicted East German law"

Wow -Mr. Krenz could tell truth! Of course this order was a clear violation of the East German laws, but the entire Stasi was operating besides the laws. The laws were just a tool for them, and only used when opportune.

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Account frozen...

Wow -Mr. Krenz could tell truth! Of course this order was a clear violation of the East German laws, but the entire Stasi was operating besides the laws. The laws were just a tool for them, and only used when opportune.

Surprise, surprise--the gov't using laws as a matter of convenience. Who would have thought that?

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Nearly 100,000 murdered since Sept. 11, 2001

By Bob Herbert
THE NEW YORK TIMES

August 15, 2007

On Saturday in Newark, N.J., three young friends whose lives and dreams vanished in a nightmarish eruption of gunfire in a rundown schoolyard were buried.

On Sunday in a small town in Missouri, a pastor and two worshippers were murdered by a gunman who opened fire in a church.

Murder, that darkest of American pastimes, celebrated in film and song and fostered by the firearms industry and its apologists, continues unabated.

It has been nearly six years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the nation's consciousness of terror was yanked to new heights. In those six years, nearly 100,000 people – an incredible number – have been murdered in the United States.

No heightening of consciousness has accompanied this slaughter, which had nothing to do with terrorism. The news media and most politicians have hardly bothered to notice.

At the same time that we're diligently confiscating water and toothpaste from air travelers, we're handing over guns and bullets by the trainload to yahoos bent on blowing others into eternity in armed robberies, drug dealing, gang violence, domestic assaults and other criminal acts.

Among those who have noticed the carnage are the nation's police chiefs, and they are alarmed. Surges of homicides and other violent crimes in many cities and towns over the past couple of years have prompted Bill Bratton, the police chief in Los Angeles, to warn of the possibility of a “gathering storm” of criminal violence in the United States.

“Philadelphia and Baltimore are having horrendous problems,” he said in an interview. “You just had that awful shooting in Newark. What we'd like to do is bring this issue of crime back into the national debate in this election year. What you don't want is to let it get out of control like it did in the late '80s and early '90s.”

Bratton is a past president of the Police Executive Research Forum, a group based in Washington, D.C., that is composed of the heads of some of the largest state, county and local law enforcement agencies in the country. The group's report on crime trends in 2005 and 2006 tracked disturbing increases in robberies, aggravated assaults and murder.

The report described violent crime as “making a comeback,” not to the same degree as the crack-propelled violence of the late '80s and early '90s, but in frightening numbers, nevertheless.

Chuck Wexler, the forum's executive director, offered a particularly chilling statistic. The number of cases of aggravated assault with a firearm is about 100,000 a year. In some cases, the gunman misses, but each year roughly 60,000 people are actually shot.

“Over the past five years,” said Wexler, “more than half a million people have been the victim of an aggravated assault with a firearm. We have become numbed in this society.”

Law enforcement officials believe there is something more vicious and cold-blooded, and thus more deadly, about the latest waves of crime moving across the country. Robberies involving juveniles with little regard for the lives of their victims are becoming more prevalent. Individuals with cell phones, iPods and other electronic devices are particular targets.

In the forum's report, Chief Heather Fong of the San Francisco police described a phenomenon called “rat-packing” in which robbers using cell phones call in fellow assailants to surround a victim.

Former Police Chief Nanette Hegerty of Milwaukee noted that in a number of holdups a cooperative victim was shot anyway.

Local authorities need help coping with violent crime. Huge numbers of criminals were locked up over the past 10 or 15 years, and they are leaving prison now by the hundreds of thousands each year. With few jobs or other resources available to them, a return to crime by a large portion of that population is inevitable.

The federal government played a big role in the effort that reduced crime substantially in the 1990s. But much of that federal support has since vanished, in part because of the tremendous attention and resources directed toward anti-terror initiatives, and in part because the Bush administration and much of the Republican Party have held fast to the ideological notion that crime is a local problem.

A similarly rigid ideological stance is undermining the effort to control the flow of guns and ammunition into the hands of criminals.

We have not returned to the bad old days of the late '80s and early '90s, but the trends are ominous. “We have to get the feds back into this game,” Bratton said. “They have the resources. They can help us.”

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me@rescam.org

We have not returned to the bad old days of the late '80s and early '90s

Where do they get this stuff from? Back then I wasn't even locking my car nor my house, nowadays, I have locks and alarms on everything... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

Addressing America's biggest issues

DAVID S. BRODER
THE WASHINGTON POST

August 16, 2007

When Fred Thompson makes his long-delayed entrance into the Republican presidential race, he will not tiptoe quietly. Instead, he will try to shake up the establishment candidates of both parties by depicting a nation in peril from fiscal and security threats – and prescribing tough cures he says others shrink from offering.

In a two-hour conversation over coffee at a restaurant near his Virginia headquarters, the former senator from Tennessee said that when he joins the battle next month, he “will take some risks that others are not willing to take, in terms of forcing a dialogue on our entitlement situation, our military situation and what it's going to cost” to assure the nation's future.

After spending most of the last few years on TV's “Law and Order,” and starting a new family with two children under 4, the 65-year-old lawyer says he finds himself motivated for the first time to seek the White House.

“There's no reason for me to run just to be president,” he said. “I don't desire the emoluments of the office. I don't want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there – different, more far-reaching ideas – that is worth doing.”

Thompson, like many of the others running, has caught a strong whiff of the public disillusionment with both parties in Washington – and the partisanship that has infected Congress, helping to speed his own departure from the Senate.

But he says he thinks that the public is looking for a different kind of leadership. “I think a president could go to the American people and say, 'Here's what we need to be doing, and I'm willing to go half-way.' Now you have to make them (the opposition) go half-way.”

The approach Thompson says he's contemplating is one that would step on many sensitive political toes. When he says “we're getting a free ride” fighting a necessary war in Iraq with an undersized military establishment, “wearing out our people and equipment,” it sounds like a criticism of the president and the Pentagon.

When he says he would have opposed adding the prescription drug benefit to Medicare, “a $17 trillion add-on to a program that's going bankrupt,” he is fighting the bipartisan judgment of the last Congress.

When he says the FBI is perhaps incapable of morphing itself into the smart domestic security agency the country needs, he is attacking another sacred cow.

Thompson repeatedly cites two texts as fueling his concern about the country's future. One is “Government at the Brink,” a two-volume report he issued as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and handed to the new president's budget director as a checklist of urgent management problems in Washington.

The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain today, Thompson said, and increasingly “threaten national security.”

His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Governmental Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending “unsustainable,” and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government's fiscal ledger – spending and revenues – the next generation will suffer.

“Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it,” Thompson said. “So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges.”

Thompson readily concedes that he does not know “where all those chips are going to fall” when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could assure a better future for their children.

But these issues – national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath care costs – “are worth a portion of a man's life. If I can't get elected talking that way, I probably don't deserve to be elected.”

Thompson says “I feel free to do it” his own way, and that freedom may just be enough to shake up the presidential race.

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me@rescam.org

350 light-years? In astrophysics, some truths can't be grasped

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

August 18, 2007

Some facts – hard, incontestable facts proven by science – are simply beyond human comprehension. Such elusive truths dominate the realm of theoretical physics and the enigmatic properties of the universe.

Consider the recent discovery of a large star in its death throes about 350 light-years from Earth. To be honest, there is no way for humans, bound as we are to this planet, to grasp the meaning of 350 light-years.

Sure, we can be told a light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in 365 days. But this really is of no help, because we cannot possibly envision a number as large as 6 trillion; it simply is too far outside the limits of human experience.

Nor does it help to know that the speed of light is 186,282.397 miles per second. Our brains can't wrap themselves around such a figure. In the case of the newly discovered star, named Mira, the light from its surface recently detected by NASA's orbiting telescope is actually a glimpse of the star in 1657, when Spanish galleons roamed the Atlantic. To reach Earth, the light from Mira traveled 186,282.397 miles per second for 350 years. To try your best to grasp such a distance, consider that the moon's reflected light reaches Earth in a mere 1.2 seconds.

Even more unimaginable is the scientific fact that our Milky Way galaxy spans 100,000 light-years and contains about 100 billion stars. Yet, impossible though it is to picture, there are 100 billion such galaxies of 100 billion stars each in the observable universe.

Mira is a so-called “red giant,” which means it is near the end of its very long life. Our own sun is expected similarly to run its course and burn out in about 5 billion years, another number so huge that it is beyond human understanding – which is just as well, considering it's impossible to imagine human life without the sun.

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me@rescam.org

350 light-years? In astrophysics, some truths can't be grasped

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

August 18, 2007

Some facts – hard, incontestable facts proven by science – are simply beyond human comprehension. Such elusive truths dominate the realm of theoretical physics and the enigmatic properties of the universe.

Consider the recent discovery of a large star in its death throes about 350 light-years from Earth. To be honest, there is no way for humans, bound as we are to this planet, to grasp the meaning of 350 light-years.

Sure, we can be told a light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in 365 days. But this really is of no help, because we cannot possibly envision a number as large as 6 trillion; it simply is too far outside the limits of human experience.

Nor does it help to know that the speed of light is 186,282.397 miles per second. Our brains can't wrap themselves around such a figure. In the case of the newly discovered star, named Mira, the light from its surface recently detected by NASA's orbiting telescope is actually a glimpse of the star in 1657, when Spanish galleons roamed the Atlantic. To reach Earth, the light from Mira traveled 186,282.397 miles per second for 350 years. To try your best to grasp such a distance, consider that the moon's reflected light reaches Earth in a mere 1.2 seconds.

Even more unimaginable is the scientific fact that our Milky Way galaxy spans 100,000 light-years and contains about 100 billion stars. Yet, impossible though it is to picture, there are 100 billion such galaxies of 100 billion stars each in the observable universe.

Mira is a so-called “red giant,” which means it is near the end of its very long life. Our own sun is expected similarly to run its course and burn out in about 5 billion years, another number so huge that it is beyond human understanding – which is just as well, considering it's impossible to imagine human life without the sun.

This is too political...

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Account frozen...

Sure, we can be told a light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in 365 days. But this really is of no help, because we cannot possibly envision a number as large as 6 trillion; it simply is too far outside the limits of human experience.

The national debt is debt owed by the federal government. It is made up of debt obligations such as Treasury bills, Treasury notes and Treasury bonds.

U.S. national debt is $8,944,194,725,770

A increase of $63,401,535,251

Your share of the federal debt is $29,553.71

Envision those numbers.

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me@rescam.org

Sure, we can be told a light-year is 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in 365 days. But this really is of no help, because we cannot possibly envision a number as large as 6 trillion; it simply is too far outside the limits of human experience.

The national debt is debt owed by the federal government. It is made up of debt obligations such as Treasury bills, Treasury notes and Treasury bonds.

U.S. national debt is $8,944,194,725,770

A increase of $63,401,535,251

Your share of the federal debt is $29,553.71

Envision those numbers.

And China has bought a huge chunck of our treasury bonds...pretty soon we'll be singing The East is Red. Now, that's political.

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Account frozen...

Made in China

India at 60 - from helping to invent the third world to potential superpower

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me@rescam.org

Thompson puts needed focus on entitlements

Union-Tribune editorial

August 20, 2007

Fred Thompson's long-delayed entrance into the presidential race has been eagerly anticipated by millions of Republicans unhappy with their present choices. If the former Tennessee senator and “Law and Order” TV star lives up to the promises he made in a recent interview with columnist David Broder, his anticipated September entry is good news for an even-larger group: those who worry about the future of this country. That's because Thompson vows to focus on a huge but routinely ignored problem: the enormous financial strain facing the federal government when 77 million baby boomers start to retire five months from now.

So far, Democratic presidential candidates have chosen demagoguery on the issue, trotting out the usual scare tactics about nonexistent GOP plans to scrap Social Security. For the most part, prominent Republicans have chosen to ignore the issue for fear of offending anyone. The media also have been abysmal, writing 10 times as much about earmarks – an ugly, ongoing scandal, but not a fundamental threat to our way of life.

That's not an overstatement of the seriousness of the entitlements problem. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid now consume about 44 percent of the budget. Unless something changes the status quo, boomers' mass retirement will drive up the cost of these three entitlement programs to 75 percent of an equivalent budget in 2030.

Unless we want to wreck the economy, something's got to give. If we borrow more to cover the multitrillion-dollar annual deficits, we face a scenario in which a quarter or more of federal revenue goes just to pay interest on debt. If we raise taxes sharply, watch for an exodus of jobs and industries to China, India and other low-tax suitors without historical parallel.

Thompson understands that change is mandatory. He quotes a Government Accountability Office warning that the status quo is “unsustainable” and laments that Congress and the White House made matters far worse by giving seniors a Medicare prescription-drug benefit – “a $17 trillion add-on to a program that's going bankrupt,” awarded to a group that already for the most part had such benefits from other sources.

The sooner he hits the campaign trial pointing out the dire straits we are in, the better – because the longer we wait to address the problem, the worse it will be. We know the options – raising the retirement age; adopting an annual benefit-increase formula based on inflation, not wages; raising the amount of income subject to the Social Security tax; reducing benefits for the millions of affluent elderly; etc. So let's finally start the great debate.

If we keep ducking the issue, the toll will include more than just a ruined economy. As we move from a nation in which there are four people working for every person relying on a government check to a nation in which the ratio is two to one, watch for the rise of a bitter intergenerational conflict. The workers will resent the retirees who rely on them – and with good reason.

Fred Thompson wants to avoid this fate. So should everyone.

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me@rescam.org

Saying you are a creep isn't illegal

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me@rescam.org

Clearly wrong - Elvira Arellano pushed her case too far

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

August 22, 2007

The immigration debate needs a dose of compassion – but not at the expense of common sense.

Let us be clear. We take no pleasure in breaking up families. Nor do we believe the United States can deport its way out of its immigration woes, which are self-created, anyway, because of our thirst for cheap labor. And we still insist that what we really need is comprehensive immigration reform that combines tougher border and workplace enforcement with a path to earned legal status for some of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

Having said that, the law is also clear, and the case of 32-year-old Elvira Arellano is not as difficult as some on the left are making it out to be. For one thing, the facts are not in dispute: Here you have a Mexican national who entered the country not once but twice in violation of U.S. immigration laws, who brazenly defied a federal deportation order by seeking refuge in a Chicago church, and who left the church only to lead a national crusade for the rights of illegal immigrants, along with her U.S.-born son SaÚl, 8, before she was arrested on Sunday in Los Angeles and deported.

If you're having trouble digesting that phrase – “rights of illegal immigrants” – you're not alone. Many illegal immigrants seem to have forgotten that they're here illegally, and think themselves entitled to the same benefits as legal residents. When they make the mistake of assuming that, it falls to federal agents to show them the error of their ways.

Arellano made her share of mistakes. She made the first in 1997 when she entered the country illegally. She made another when, after being detected and deported, she re-entered and was convicted in 2002 of using a fake Social Security card to find work. She made another mistake when, after being slated for deportation, she sought refuge in a church rather than accept her punishment. And she made her final mistake when she left the confines of that sanctuary so she could go on tour to draw public attention to the plight of all illegal immigrants.

Arellano must have thought this was nothing but a game. But she's the one who lost. Her young son now faces the impossible choice of going to live in Mexico with his mother or staying here without her.

This isn't about family values. It's about our national values. Family reunification is an admirable goal, and it should continue to play a role in our national immigration policy and what are often hard choices about who is allowed to come to the country legally and who isn't. But if this family splits apart, it won't be the fault of the U.S. government but of a desperate woman who pushed this drama too far and got what she deserved.

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me@rescam.org

Is the Bush presidency a failure?

MORTON KONDRACKE
ROLL CALL

August 22, 2007

Democrats, liberal historians and even a majority of U.S. voters already consider George W. Bush a “failed” or “poor” president – in fact, perhaps, “the worst president in American history.” Only a thin line of loyal Republicans, led by Bush's departing top political aide, Karl Rove, thinks Bush will be vindicated in the end, both historically and politically.

Which is it? I think the jury is still out – and ought to be – because Bush's place in history will depend on the outcome of the Iraq war, Bush's signature undertaking. If the war proves to be a catastrophe, Bush will have to be considered a failure, even if it's Democrats in Congress who deny him the victory that his backers now believe is possible.

My Fox News commentary partner, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, claims that Bush should be likened to the much-reviled Abraham Lincoln of 1863, before the Union began winning victories in the Civil War. In this vision, the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is a figure parallel to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who developed the strategy that defeated the Confederacy.

It's conceivable, but only barely, that Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy could undermine the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and pave the way for a political reconciliation that produces a stable, American-allied semi-democracy in Iraq. If this great turnaround occurs – and if the consequence is a restoration of America's standing in the world – then Bush could yet go down in history as a near-great president on the order of Harry S. Truman, who was as disrespected in his time as Bush is now.

Many historians now place Truman among the near-greats – along with Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, who stole the Southwest from Mexico – because he launched the Marshall Plan after World War II and developed the containment strategy that ultimately won the Cold War.

Rove, in his interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, predicted that Bush's strategies for the global war on Islamic terrorism will be similarly vindicated, as will his decision to go to war in Iraq.

Unfortunately for Bush, another scenario is more likely – a Vietnam-like scenario in which, despite late victories on the battlefield, the United States suffers defeat because its public and politicians lack the will to sustain the effort. As Rove pointed out, even though Democrats forced the United States out of Vietnam, they suffered long-term political defeat and were branded as a party that could not be trusted to mount a strong foreign policy. Bush will deserve “failed” status even if Congress precipitates failure because it's a president's responsibility, if he launches an enterprise as consequential as war, to execute his policy well enough to maintain public backing.

On other fronts, Bush has few accomplishments that would offset disaster in Iraq and give him a place in history above “failed.” His only lasting legacy, it appears, will be a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives.

Rove, a genuine genius as a political strategist and tactician, nearly produced another legacy – lasting domination of U.S. politics by the Republican Party. GOP congressional victories in 2002 and 2004 were historic. But it all fell apart in 2006, and Democrats are again ascendant, though not yet dominant. The causes were two portfolios that Rove had little to do with – Iraq and White House communications.

Bush and Rove had some grand domestic policy visions – topped by an “ownership society” and education and immigration reform – that failed or may fail because the White House could not convince the public and Congress of their virtues.

Rove still thinks Bush will be vindicated on Social Security reform and health savings accounts – plans whereby individuals own their benefit plans and carry them as they change jobs. But Bush failed to sell them as “compassionate conservative” ideas. Instead, Democrats succeeded with their caricature of Bush as the president of rich America determined to make it richer by divesting ordinary workers of guaranteed social benefits.

Bush's tax cuts, favoring the rich, were designed to increase the nation's overall wealth. Economic growth has been decent, but it hasn't been widely shared. And Bush has done nothing to get control of the impending fiscal crisis brought on by the retirement of baby boomers.

And even though he helped keep Republicans in power, Bush could not persuade them to side with him on immigration reform, which could have won the loyalty of Latinos, the fastest-growing population group. Congress may even fail to renew Bush's No Child Left Behind education program, a truly compassionate initiative designed to rescue poor children from failing schools, which has lost both Democratic and GOP support.

Many of Bush's problems stem from the same source – his failure to be a “uniter, not a divider,” as he promised in 2000. As I've written before, he should go down in history as “the great polarizer.”

So Bush is on the cusp of failure, but he is not there yet. Even Democrats who hate Bush should hope he avoids that status by pulling out a victory in Iraq – simply because all of us will suffer the consequences of defeat.

As to being “the worst president in history” – as charged by many Democrats – Bush does not match James Buchanan, who encouraged Southern secession, or corruption-stained presidents such as Richard Nixon and Warren Harding. It would take a true catastrophe in the Middle East or another terrorist attack on American soil to put him in that category. Pray that it doesn't happen.

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me@rescam.org