BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

By Larry Johnson Last night’s arrest of a U.S. citizen who thought he was spying for Israel is going to unleash a fascinating dynamic. The Washington Post reported this morning : Stewart D. Nozette, 52, was arrested on a charge of attempted espionage and is being held pending an initial appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, authorities said. Authorities said the charges stemmed an undercover sting operation in which an FBI agent posed as an Israeli spy. Nozette allegedly passed the agent sensitive information through a “dead drop” at a D.C. post office in recent weeks, authorities said. Nozette worked for the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1990 through 1999, prosecutors said. He was credited with helping develop a radar in 1994 that suggested ice on the south pole of the moon. He was president of the Alliance for Competitive Technology, a nonprofit group he founded in 1990. He has held security clearances as high as top secret and...

ACORN targets a weakness in democracy To end the many obstacles Southern states put up before African-American voters as late as the 1960s, Congress worked for decades to make voting much easier. These efforts had a hugely positive effect – until the 1993 “motor voter” law. This measure and some related laws made registration so easy – and so difficult to verify because of a lack of resources and time – that they created nothing less than a structural weakness in American democracy. This election year, we're seeing a determined, well-funded effort to exploit this weakness, led by ACORN – the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Using corporate, partisan and taxpayer grants, the nonprofit group has spent $35 million this year to register 1.3 million people in 21 states. But it's highly likely that hundreds of thousands of these registrations are bogus. That's because ACORN relies on canvassers who appear to be paid based on how many signatures they get – an...

by Nora Ephron 1. In order to foil a terrorist plot, you must first find a terrorist plot. This is not easy. 2. Not just anyone can find and then foil a terrorist plot. You must have an incentive. The best incentive is to be an accused felon, looking at a long prison term. Under such circumstances, your lawyer will explain to you, you may be able to reduce your sentence by acting as an informant in a criminal case, preferably one involving terrorists. 3. The fact that you do not know any actual terrorists should not in any way deter you. Necessity is the mother of invention: if you can find the right raw material -- a sad, sick, lonely, drunk, deranged, disgruntled or just plain anti-American Muslim somewhere in the United States -- you can make your very own terrorist. 4. Now the good part begins. Money! The FBI will give you lots of money to take your very own terrorist out to lots of dinners where you, wearing a wire, can record yourself making recommendations to him about possible ...

THE MARX BROTHERS & THE FBI Very interesting reading. Excerpt below. Click the link at the bottom for the whole article! The FBI spied on the Marx Brothers by Margie Burns Way back in the 1990s, it occurred to me that given the tendencies of late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau might well have been intrigued by the Marx Brothers’ last name, so I checked with the FBI and sure enough, it had indeed kept a file on that family comedy team, the Marx Brothers – Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, Chico – which in due course I received. I still have the dossier. The FBI kept a careful eye on these popular malcontents or subversives from the 1930s into the 1960s. Julius Marx (Groucho), the most articulate and erudite member of the family and the one who most successfully handled the transition from movies to television, has a file of 186 pages. Herbert Marx (Zeppo) has a file of 48 pages, mostly a mimeographed copy of a comedy routine he and Groucho had been accused of stealing. Even Leonard ...