Daily Archives: June 8, 2012

Oh, yeah? They looking for anyone over 55?

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This just in from Ad Age:

The Central Intelligence Agency is looking for a few good men and women, and what’s more, it wants the next generation of spies to be more diverse.

The highly secretive organization has reached out to big shops on Madison Avenue to evaluate whether they may be suited for working with the CIA down the road on its recruitment advertising campaigns. According to an unclassified document obtained by Ad Age: “The Central Intelligence Agency seeks to build on its existing brand identity and be positioned as the No. 1 employer of choice for a variety of career paths by reaching and engaging with prospective employees.” The document added, the CIA “seeks to optimize its marketability to this audience by focusing on creative and innovative advertising.”

Responses to what the CIA is calling a “market survey” are due back this week. Depending on the answers the agencies provide, it could lead to an official request for proposal.

One key goal of the CIA’s recruiting messages seems to be attempting to attract a more diverse workforce. The document sent to agencies said the CIA is focused on “increasing the percentage of officers from ethic and minority backgrounds, as well as those with relevant foreign languages.”…

I’ve gotta think that there’s nothing new in the CIA looking for “diversity” in its recruiting. The job requirements have always called for it. Yeah, I think I once read that in the postwar period it was kind of heavy on Irish Catholics (or was that the FBI?), but it seems I’ve also heard that field officers tend to be people who had spent extensive time in their youths in foreign cultures.

Or have I gotten the wrong impression?

There was a time when I might have been a good prospect — but I let my Spanish slide after living in South America in my youth.

At one point when we lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, my parents considered the possibility of sending me to the local school for German expatriates, at which all classes were taught in that language. I didn’t much like the idea then, but that would have been awesome — a working fluency with German at the same time that my day-to-day life was making Spanish second nature to me. I thought and dreamed in Spanish in those days. No more. (Although I suspect it would come flooding back with total immersion, I don’t know that.)

I’ve wondered what course my life would have taken if I’d seized that opportunity to be trilingual.

Oh, well. Even if I had the languages, they’d really have to embrace diversity to hire me. As in, accept trainees over the age of 55…

A bad idea (electing judges) gets worse in NC

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The popular election of judges has always been a terrible idea. But now, thanks to Citizens United, it’s worse:

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition is a new tax-exempt organization, known as a super PAC, supported by wealthy conservative Republicans who are determined to make this year’s race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court ideological and expensive.

This kind of influence in judicial elections is a direct result of the Citizens United decision, which allows corporations and unions to make unlimited so-called independent expenditures in campaigns. In adissent in that case, Justice John Paul Stevens predicted that such spending would overwhelm state court races, which would be especially harmful since judges must not only be independent but be seen to be independent as well. North Carolina is proving him right…

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition was set up to re-elect state Justice Paul Newby, who has opposed adoptions by same-sex couples and disallowed a lawsuit challenging alleged predatory lending. He gives conservatives a 4-to-3 advantage over liberals on the State Supreme Court and is being challenged by the more liberal state appellate judge, Sam Ervin IV, a grandson of the senator and son of a federal appeals judge…

Go read the whole editorial. Yep, it was always a bad idea — nothing like picking justices on the basis of Kulturkampf issues — but now it’s expensive, too.

Report: Myers says JAKE left the Scotch in his car

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Image from videotape, at WISTV.com.

At least, that was his first story, according to this report from WIS. Then, he blamed it on “that lady”:

LEXINGTON COUNTY, SC (WIS) – Eleventh Circuit Solicitor Donnie Myers finds himself facing new alcohol charges after a South Carolina Highway Patrolman stopped the elected official last month on suspicions of driving under the influence…

“When you pulled out in front of me over here on before we got to Old Cherokee, you were swerve — you were driving down the middle of the road,” Alveshire told Myers.

“You know why?” Myers asks the trooper, “Because I was listening to the Carolina game and it’s good stuff,” Myers said.

“You had anything to drink?” the trooper asks. “Yeah, I had a few,” Myers responds.

The trooper tells Myers to walk to the back of his car when he spots a cup inside the car. Alveshire asks the solicitor what’s in the cup, and Myers responds that it’s some scotch that state Sen. Jake Knotts left in the car.

“Hang on a second,” the trooper tells Myers as he pulls out his radio and calls for backup. “Can I get one of y’all down here to Old Cherokee and Old Chapin?”…

Myers spends several minutes leaning on the back of his car as the trooper sits inside his vehicle working on the case. Myers changes his story as to whom the open container of alcohol belongs to. “That was her drink,” Myers yells to the trooper, referring to a woman who pulls up behind the trooper out of view of the camera…

Sounds a bit like that old Maxwell Smart routine: “No? Well, would you believe…?”

I assume there will be “film at 11.” Or videotape, anyway.

Corey’s graphic novel about Alvin Greene

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I’m cleaning out my IN box, and I run across a 10-day-old message from Corey Hutchins saying that his graphic novel about Alvin Greene is available for iPhone and iPad — and probably on paper, by now (yes, it is!). This is from altweeklies.com:

Columbia Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins and former alt-weekly writer David Axe released iPhone and iPad versions of a 100-page graphic novel that traces the stranger-than-fiction U.S Senate campaign of one of American’s most enigmatic political figures, Alvin Greene.

Readers can purchase iPhone and iPad versions of the book, The Accidental Candidate, for $4.99 prior to its release in hard copy.

“Some of my friends don’t read books,” said Hutchins, a political reporter who chronicled the story of Avlin Greene for Free Times. “But they’re on their iPhones all the time. We thought it was a way to reach an audience that’s not so much into the tree-slaying aspect of literature. Tweet that.”

If you’ll recall, Corey was the only reporter in the universe (to my knowledge, so I guess I should say, “in the known ‘verse”) who actually interviewed Greene prior to his becoming the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Torture memo guy marvels at Obama’s ruthlessness

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Looking at Foreign Policy‘s recommendation of a book titled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” I’m reminded of something I read in the WSJ this morning.

It was an op-ed piece by John Yoo. You know, the Torture Memos guy.

It says in part:

The administration has made little secret of its near-total reliance on drone operations to fight the war on terror. The ironies abound. Candidate Obama campaigned on narrowing presidential wartime power, closing Guantanamo Bay, trying terrorists in civilian courts, ending enhanced interrogation, and moving away from a wartime approach to terrorism toward a criminal-justice approach. Mr. Obama has avoided these vexing detention issues simply by depriving terrorists of all of their rights—by killing them…

This is kind of like Luca Brasi saying that Michael’s even tougher than the old Don. He should know.

Of course, he goes on to criticize, likening Obama’s personal selection of enemies to kill to LBJ’s micromanagement of bombing targets in Vietnam. He also accuses the administration of politically motivated intelligence leaks way worse than those laid at Scooter Libby’s feet.

So he didn’t mean it in a nice way.