: re: Ex-Department of Justice Lawyer Faces Penalties in Leak of N.S.A. Program

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 6:41 PM
Subject: re: Ex-Department of Justice Lawyer Faces Penalties in Leak of N.S.A. Program
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

     The excesses of the Nixon White House provoked the Church Commission to lay bare a pattern of Executive infringements on the civil rights of Americans. The FISA statute of 1978 (as amended in '79) codified the privacy rights that could only be infringed by order of a court so that that should never happen again. In extremis, that could even be a post-facto warrant by the secret FISC.  What Thomas Tamm is accused of revealing is a pattern of criminal activity directed by the Attorney General of the United States (at least) in direct violation of this criminal statute. That revelation was then squelched by the White House for over a year, to be published only after the presidential election cycle.

    What we need Attorney General Loretta Lynch to prosecute are the warrantless wiretaps against American citizens and the cover-up of those crimes. Thomas Tamm is a whistle-blower to grave crimes. He deserves protection and plaudits.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/us/politics/ex-department-of-justice-lawyer-faces-penalties-in-leak-of-nsa-program.html

: re: Bernie Sanders’s Big Turnout Problem: He’s Reliant on Infrequent Voters

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 8:55 AM
Subject: re: Bernie Sanders’s Big Turnout Problem: He’s Reliant on Infrequent Voters
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    A poll such as this article describes that discounts voters who didn't participate in the 2008 caucuses clips off every voter who will be between 18 and 25 yrs old in our coming presidential election, but who was ineligible two rounds ago. That's about 15% of the electorate,and it's a demographic that's overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. With such an omission, a reported edge of 9% for secretary Clinton can't be more than the margin of error.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/upshot/bernie-sanders-is-very-dependent-on-infrequent-voters.html

: re: How Change Happens

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 10:34 AM
Subject: re: How Change Happens
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:
     Professor Krugman astutely observes that Bernie Sanders claims the mantle of candidate Obama, while Hillary Clinton claims the mantle of president Obama. I would add to that that--to get president Obama--we had to vote for candidate Obama.

     The inherited machinery of government will always drag a new president towards policies that further entrench those who already have power. As Acemoglu and Robinson illustrated ("Why Nations Fail") for case after case over the last couple of millenia, that path leads ever downwards.

 Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/opinion/how-change-happens.html

: re: It May Be Time to Resolve the Meaning of ‘Natural Born’

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 10:00 AM
Subject: re: It May Be Time to Resolve the Meaning of ‘Natural Born’
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    It has been established since Marbury v. Madison (1803) that the U.S. constitution means what our Supreme Court says it means. But in two centuries since it was mandated that a president must be a "natural born citizen" of the U.S., no federal court has ruled on what that means.  A strict originalist might lean on Blackstone to disallow anyone born outside the dominion of our union. A Shakespearean might disallow anyone born by caesarean section. If we are to live by the rule of law, it cannot be enough to enact law; we will need a court to tell us what that means.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/us/politics/it-may-be-time-to-resolve-the-meaning-of-natural-born.html

: re: Health Reform Realities

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 8:00 AM
Subject: re: Health Reform Realities
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    It is exactly because "incumbent players have a lot of power" that Thomas Jefferson foresaw we would need a new revolution in each generation.  Three times, under Andrew Jackson, under Teddy Roosevelt and under FDR, the American people have had to seize back power from wealthy elites who proposed to own us.  These three mini-revolutions have--so far--spared the U.S. the upheaval that Jefferson expected. We are over-due for such a reset by anyone's measure. If there is a leader for such a reform in our time, it is Bernie Sanders (or Elizabeth Warren) and not Hillary Clinton.

Barry Haskell Levine

1142 Brown Ave

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/opinion/health-reform-realities.html

    It is exactly because "incumbent players have a lot of power" that Thomas Jefferson foresaw we would need a new revolution in each generation.  Three times, under Andrew Jackson, under Teddy Roosevelt and under FDR, the American people have had to seize back power from wealthy elites who proposed to own us.  These three mini-revolutions have--so far--spared the U.S. the upheaval that Jefferson expected. We are over-due for such a reset by anyone's measure. If there is a leader for such a reform in our time, it is Bernie Sanders (or Elizabeth Warren) and not Hillary Clinton.

Barry Haskell Levine

1142 Brown Ave

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/opinion/health-reform-realities.html

: re: Clinton Allies have Regrets over Strategy

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 8:39 AM
Subject: re: Clinton Allies have Regrets over Strategy
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  That Hillary and her team could be "unnerved...by the possibility [of] a large wave of first-time voters" tells me all I need to know about her vision of the Democratic party and of our democracy. For half a century, it has been the American Republican party that relied on Americans not participating in our republic, while our Democratic party toiled to register and engage ever more voters.  As senator Clinton jettisons our party's past, I wonder why we should trust her with its future.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/us/politics/hillary-clinton-regrets-not-attacking-bernie-sanders-earlier-her-allies-say.html

: re: Pakistan Arrests Jaish Militants Over Attack on Indian Air Base

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 9:30 AM
Subject: re: Pakistan Arrests Jaish Militants Over Attack on Indian Air Base
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   While it is never possible to strictly prove causality in historic matters, I note that progress against raiders across the Pakistan-Indian border correlates with the removal of Ashfaq Kayyani from power. First as head of ISI, later as head of Armed Forces (and de facto ruler of Pakistan) he sheltered, succored and funded these terrorists.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/world/asia/pakistan-india-pathankot-jaish-muhammad.html

: re: Hillary Clinton Confronts Bernie Sanders as Polls Show Her Lead in Iowa Narrowing Photo

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 9:15 AM
Subject: re: Hillary Clinton Confronts Bernie Sanders as Polls Show Her Lead in Iowa Narrowing Photo
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Secretary Clinton has picked an uphill fight in arguing that senator Sanders' health care plan is unaffordable; neither facts nor logic support her.  The current American system, including the ACA, requires that Americans support not only our healthcare providers from drug research to hospital construction to salaries for doctors, nurses, therapists etc. but adds to that the superstructure of insurers. Every dollar an insurer reports as profits, and every dollar an insurer pays in salaries and every building an insurer builds is a dollar Americans spend but for which we get no healthcare delivered. Dozens of countries have cut these insurers out by implementing some version of SinglePayer; none of them pay as much for healthcare as America does. Some of them nonetheless have better health outcome to show for it. In a world of finite resources, we need to choose rationally how to spend our money. Sometimes that requires changing the way we have done thing.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/11/hillary-clinton-confronts-bernie-sanders-as-polls-show-her-lead-in-iowa-narrowing/

: re: Saudis Applaud a Tougher Line Against Tehran

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 9:23 AM
Subject: re: Saudis Applaud a Tougher Line Against Tehran
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
  Long before Osama bin Laden set his sights on attacking the U.S., he
was bent on the overthrow of the House of Saud and of the Mullah's in
Iran.  Indeed--until president Bush stupidly called for a
"crusade"--Tehran and Riyadh were active partners with us in pursuit
of the  perpetrators of the attacks of 9/11.  It is therefore a cause
for wonderment that this newspaper cites allegations that Iran
harbored members of al-Qaeda as "fact". If that can be substantiated,
it would be a far bigger news story than one more execution among
many.
Barry Haskell Levine



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/world/middleeast/saudis-applaud-a-tougher-line-against-tehran.html

: re: F.D.A. Regulator, Widowed by Cancer, Helps Speed Drug Approval

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 4:59 PM
Subject: re: F.D.A. Regulator, Widowed by Cancer, Helps Speed Drug Approval
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   For decades, because the treatment options were so draconian, the
best practice in cancer treatment was to do nothing until the cancer
was far-developed and plainly life-threatening.  The exceptions were
growths on the skin and on the gut that could be found and excised
with little risk.  Great progress has been made in cancer research in
the last dozen years, but treatment has lagged. Even therapies that
are well-tolerated are not even tried except in a clinical population
that's  on death's door. Therapies that might stop a cancer driven by
one mutation aren't even tried except on patients that are already
dying because their cancers have accumulated many mutations. This was
demonstrated for those who have eyes to see in the case of Gleevec,
but--although is spurred a great deal of research and many new drug
candidates--it has not yet changed how drugs are tested or approved.
    Until we start treating pre-cancerous conditions in the rest of
the body as aggressively as we do in skin and gut, we will go on
wasting the results of most of our cancer research.
Barry Haskell Levine




http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/us/politics/fda-regulator-widowed-by-cancer-helps-speed-drug-approval.html?_r=0

: re: More Hillary Clinton Emails Are Released, but State Department Falls Short

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 8:41 AM
Subject: re: More Hillary Clinton Emails Are Released, but State Department Falls Short
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   The minority of readers who persevere through to the article's end
learn that--contrary to secretary Clinton's assurances--" more than
1,200 messages [of those on her private server] have been found to
contain classified information".  To get to that news, however, one
must dig through the foregoing paragraphs of Babel. Since this paper's
reporters and editors are neither stupid nor incompetent, I am left to
consider that this lead was buried deliberately, and to ask why.
Barry Haskell Levine



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/us/politics/state-department-hillary-clinton-email.html