Not long ago I read something one of our Founding Fathers said that really struck me. It left me thinking about changes — and humming the David Bowie song for days.

“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” –Benjamin Franklin

It’s happened a few too many times over the past four years. I’ll run into an old acquaintance or meet someone new. They ask what I do for a living. I tell them. They cock their heads to the side and look at me like I’m the lonely neighborhood Blockbuster barely hanging on in a town populated by Netflix subscribers.
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One of the mysteries of the alleged Russian spy ring is why its members were planted in the suburbs, especially if Moscow Center wanted intelligence on nuclear weapons, economic policy and political infighting.

A former U.S. spy suggested to The New York Times, “Maybe I end up next to a guy that is the minority staff director on some committee and we do barbecues, or I coach his kid in Little League? How can you lose?” (more…)

Let me tell you what is wrong with the country today — you know, what’s wrong besides the soaring deficits, the spluttering economy, the bought and sold Congress and the unending foreign wars.

What’s wrong is that politicians and their supporters have lost their narratives. In consequence, many impressionable Americans have no narrative either. (more…)

It was dumb for Russia to spy on us and dumber still to grouse about arrests, but here’s what could be even dumber — expecting too much that is lastingly smart or decent from the people who run that land anytime soon.

Everything about this farce is laughably inane. Apparently not knowing that the Cold War was over, Russia’s intelligence masters decided to have covert agents live in America as ordinary citizens, get in tight with top decision makers and report interesting information. None of them apparently was ever able to find out much.

What they did do was get found out themselves by the FBI, which seems to have learned far more about them over a period of years than they learned about American secrets. (more…)

Gen. Stanley McChrystal didn’t last long enough to become a MacArthuresque “old soldier” who just fades away. He fell through a trap door and vanished from the media stage without even a chance to give his Farewell Address.

But he came close on June 10, although we didn’t realize it at the time.

McChrystal’s de facto benediction for the Afghanistan war he commanded came when he matter-of-factly broke the news to reporters at a NATO meeting that the offensive designed to oust Taliban forces from Kandahar was going much slower than he’d expected. Because: (1) President Hamid Karzai’s government hadn’t delivered the trained troops it promised; and (2) Kandahar’s residents weren’t welcoming U.S./NATO forces as liberators. (more…)

While Americans march against Arizona’s new restrictions on unlawful immigration, hundreds of illegal aliens from countries awash in Muslim terrorists tiptoe across the U.S.-Mexican frontier

According to the federal Enforcement Integrated Database, 125 individuals were apprehended along the border from fiscal year 2009 through April 20, 2010. These deportable aliens included two Syrians, seven Sudanese, and 17 Iranians, all nationals from the three Islamic countries that the U.S. government officially classifies as state sponsors of terrorism.

Federal authorities also track “special interest countries” from which terrorism could be directed against America. Over the aforementioned period, 99 of those nations’ citizens also were nabbed on the border. They were: two Afghans, five Algerians, 13 Iraqis, 10 Lebanese, 22 Nigerians, 28 Pakistanis, two Saudis, 14 Somalis, and three Yemenis. During FY 2007 and FY 2008, federal officials caught 319 people from these same countries traversing America’s southwest border.

Some such characters were confined in Arizona, which recently adopted a controversial law that lets cops ask the citizenship status of those they suspect of other possible violations. WSB-TV recently publicized an April 15, 2010, “population breakdown” of immigrants detained at a facility in Florence, Ariz. Of the 395 males behind bars, 198 were Mexican, 18 hailed from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

Perhaps these gentlemen simply want to pursue the American dream. Worrisome signs suggest, however, that some may have arrived via blistering, cactus-adorned deserts so they could blow Americans to smithereens.

Texas Border Patrol agents discovered, along with Iranian currency and Islamic prayer rugs, an Arabic clothing patch that reads “martyr” and “way to immortality.” Another shows a jet flying into a skyscraper.

“Members of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terrorist organization, have already entered the United States across our southwest border,” declares “A Line in the Sand,” a 2006 report by the House Homeland Security Investigations Subcommittee, then-chaired by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas).

Even more disturbing are the uninvited terrorists and terror suspects that were arrested after entering America through our permeable underbelly:

•Mahmoud Youssef Kourani pleaded guilty in March 2005 to providing material support to terrorists. First, Kourani secured a visa by bribing a Mexican diplomat in Beirut. He and another Middle Easterner then hired a Mexican guide to escort them into America. Finally, Kourani settled in Dearborn, Michigan’s Lebanese-immigrant community, and raised cash for Hezbollah.

•Miguel Alfonso Salinas was caught in New Mexico near the international border in 2006. As The Washington Examiner reported, one week of FBI interrogation exposed Salinas as an Egyptian named Ayman Sulmane Kamal. Evidently, he remains in federal custody.

•Then-National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said that in FY 2006 and FY 2007, at least 30 potentially dangerous Iraqis were found trying to penetrate America via Mexico. As McConnell told the El Paso Times: “There are numerous situations where people are alive today because we caught them.”

•The Department of Homeland Security issued an April 14 intelligence alert regarding a possible border-crossing attempt by a Somali named Mohamed Ali. He is a suspected member of Al-Shabaab, a Somali-based al-Qaida ally tied to the deadly attack on American GIs in 1993’s notorious “Blackhawk Down” incident in Mogadishu.

•Captured in Brownsville, Texas, Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane pleaded not guilty on May 14 to federal charges that he “ran a large-scale smuggling enterprise” designed to sneak East Africans through Mexico into Texas, including “several AIAI-affiliated Somalis into the United States.” Al-Ittihad Al-Islami is yet another Muslim-extremist organization.

•Daniel Joseph Maldonado also has Somali ties. He was picked up in Somalia in 2007 during terrorist training. He was returned to Houston for prosecution. As Rice University’s Joan Neuhas Schaan told KHOU-TV: “They had plans for him to come back to the United States and recruit female suicide bombers.”

All this involves only the bad guys who the authorities nailed. Those who have stayed undetected after crossing the border to murder Americans remain, by definition, invisible.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at Deroy.Murdock@gmail.com.

We Americans proudly spend a lot of time chastising other parts of the world for what we see as human rights abuses and crimes. But given our abuse of farm worker children, especially migrant children, we are hypocrites when we chastise others.

In its recent report, “Fields of Peril: Child Labor in U.S. Agriculture,” Human Rights Watch shows that the United States is not protecting hundreds of thousands of children who work in agriculture.

Agriculture is the most dangerous work open to children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Children risk pesticide poisoning, serious injury and heat illness, and they suffer fatalities at more than four times the rate of children working in other jobs. Some work without even the most basic protective gear, such as shoes or gloves. (more…)

Could something positive come from the disastrous Gulf Oil spill?

How feasible are plans by President Barack Obama and green governors — Arnold Schwarzenegger of California foremost among them — to reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels?

If you listen to the fossil fuel companies, coal is clean and oil is inescapable. There’s a vast difference between reality and these claims.

Regardless, becoming fossil-fuel-free is going to be a very long, costly and painful process. (more…)