President Obama has announced that he's nominating Jeh Johnson
to fill the role of head of the Department of Homeland Security
since it was left vacant in September by Janet
Napolitano.
Frankly, I was expecting someone really bad to be appointed.
There may be a ray of hope with this nomination. Obama may have
selected Johnson, who served as the top lawyer-- ie., General
Counsel, for the Pentagon, during his first term in office-- as the
person who may be able to transition the US from a war on terror to
a law enforcement effort against individuals. His pentagon
connections may enable him to get the generals at the Pentagon to
allow their hands to be pried off of the terrorism trigger (thank
you former NRA spokesman Charlton Heston for the words.)
"...at the Oxford Union in England in November 2012,
shortly before his resignation, Johnson delivered a widely noted
address entitled "The conflict against al Qaeda and its affiliates:
how will it end?"in which he predicted a "tipping point" at which
the U.S. government's efforts against al Qaeda should no longer be
considered an armed conflict, but a more traditional law
enforcement effort against individual terrorists. Johnson stated:
- ""War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and
unnatural state of affairs. War permits one man -- if he is a
"privileged belligerent," consistent with the laws of war -- to
kill another. War violates the natural order of things, in which
children bury their parents; in war parents bury their children. In
its 12th year, we must not accept the current conflict, and all
that it entails, as the "new normal.' Peace must be regarded as the
norm toward which the human race continually strives."
From a lefty/progressive standpoint, Johnson is far from perfect.
He's helped Obama refine his legal position on the use of drones--
not good. But he also played a key role in ending the ban on gays
and on the "Don't ask, Don't Tell," policy in the military.
This is still breaking news and I'm justing letting my inner
optimist find a ray of hope. Meanwhile, please consider this an
open thread and add your observations, research and comments on
this news.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
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