Big Government Incompetence
Friday we told you about the Chinese cyberattack that breached databases at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The hackers reportedly accessed the personal information of millions of government employees in "nearly every government agency."
It was the second cyberattack on OPM in less than a year, and it never should have happened. As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial yesterday, the hack speaks volumes about big government's incompetence. Consider these excerpts:
"The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) lost background-check data to the Chinese nine months before this breach and still hadn't locked the cyber front door. OPM's inspector general issued a damning report last November that parts of its network should be shut down because they were riddled with weaknesses that 'could potentially have national security implications.' You can't ring the alarm much louder than that, but the failure to take basic precautions continued. . . .
"Despite years of warnings, and after the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden debacles, the federal bureaucracy can't protect its most basic data from hackers. Private companies like Target are pilloried, not least by politicians, for their data leaks. But the feds have $4 trillion to spend each year plus access to the most advanced encryption systems. Will anyone in government take responsibility for this fiasco?
"Speaking of Snowden, bipartisan Washington has been congratulating itself this month for supposedly protecting American privacy from the potential abuse of National Security Agency collection of metadata -- that is, phone logs but not the content of calls. In the case of OPM we have an actual data breach of Social Security numbers and other records by malevolent foreign actors. Which do you worry more about? . . .
"The best cyberdefense is a good offense. U.S. intelligence services and the Pentagon will have to demonstrate the ability to punish Chinese institutions that continue to steal American secrets. . . . The U.S. is already in a cyber war. The problem is that the Obama Administration doesn't want to admit it."
Good News: More Women Choosing Life
The Associated Press reports that the number of abortions performed in America has declined 12% since 2010. That significant drop comes in spite of the best efforts of the left to promote abortion in virtually every aspect of public policy.
Explanations for why more women are choosing life vary. Some credit the pro-life movement for making ultrasound technology more available, shining a spotlight on the humanity of the unborn by providing women a window into the womb.
Others attribute the decline in abortions to new pro-life laws advanced at the state level after the 2010 elections. The AP notes that "267 abortion restrictions have been enacted in 31 states since 2011." Some resulted in the "closure of about 70 abortion clinics in a dozen states since 2010."
Some on the left suggest that the increased availability of contraception explains the decline. Whatever the explanation, there is still a lot of work for the pro-life movement to do. Data indicate that there were more than one million abortions performed in America in 2011. Perhaps we are below one million abortions a year now.
Polls show that there is a consistent pro-life majority in America. As we reported last week, 37 Gallup polls conducted over the past 20 years show that at least 54% of Americans oppose most abortions. But so far only 11 states have passed laws protecting the lives of unborn babies in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
Obama's Amnesty Plans Stopped -- For Now
The administration has halted further implementation of President Obama's latest executive orders granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
After failing to convince an appeals court to lift the injunction against his executive amnesty, the Obama White House decided not to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. As a result, the programs are essentially shut down until the courts rule definitively on the constitutionality of his orders.
This is going to save the taxpayers some serious money. Obama's amnesty programs were estimated to cost more than $480 million per year. What was all that money for? More bureaucracy, of course.
The Department of Homeland Security had taken out a lease on an 11-story, 280,000 square-foot office building in northern Virginia. The building was going to house more than 3,000 new federal workers who would be processing applications.
Obama's amnesty expansion may be on hold, but other programs are in overdrive, like those that bring in massive numbers of refugees we know next to nothing about.
Erdogan Loses, Turkey Wins
Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suffered a major defeat in parliamentary elections this weekend. His ruling Justice and Development Party had controlled Turkey for the past 13 years. In that time, he has routinely undermined democracy in Turkey.
Erdogan was hoping to gain super-majority control of the parliament in order to amend Turkey's constitution to dramatically expand his own power. Hoping to rally his Islamist base, Erdogan delivered a bizarre speech days before the election that seemingly called for a return of the Ottoman Empire and for "hoisting the Islamic flag over Jerusalem again."
Thankfully, Turkish voters rejected this belligerence. With the results in, Erdogan's party won just 41% of the vote.
By the way, this is the man Obama once said gives him advice on raising his daughters. "He has two daughters that are a little older than mine -- they've turned out very well, so I'm always interested in his perspective on raising girls," Obama said. What other advice is Obama taking from this anti-Israel Islamist?