Happy Holidays and have a great 2015 if you can! Rest up Amazing Democrats as in 2015 we gear up for the 2016 Presidential Elections and the hill we will have to climb will be a hard one but we will do it again as we did in 2008 and 2012. Hope you and your family have a great holiday. Here’s to 2015.

It is time that North Korea is thought a very hard lesson not because over hacking what is meant not to be even a very good comedy (“The Interview”) from people who have viewed it in LA and not because Sony Pictures is Un-American (and now insult us by blaming the cinema chains in the US and flip-flopping all over the shop that is so embarrassing) but because we have to. Not over hacking a major US movie corporation but the editor of this blog had a long talk recently with a South Korean Army lieutenant based on the South-North Korean border and he stated that the American public are not being fully informed by the US mainstream media (what’s new, always takes us bloggers to break the real story and than get no credit for it) about what is really going on there and that North Korea is very close to having a fully operation Nuclear missile. For one who doesn’t agree with war, sometimes it is necessary and this is a case in point now that Iran are somewhat willing to talk and try and find an agreement with the US with their Nuclear program. It is time the President turned his full attention to North Korean and rid that Country for the sake of it’s people of that sickening dictator Kim-Jong-un. China like Russia, when President Clinton bombed Serbia, will toe the line. They have too much to lose if they don’t sticking by this sad sick little excuse of man called Kim-Jong-un. It is just a pity it wasn’t all over a classic movie like The Godfather and not some second rate Hollywood comedy. Sony Pictures don’t deserve the huge profits they will get when they do release it (and trust me they will as money talks as we all well know) as everyone in the World (including Kim-Jong-un) will want to see it but Sony Pictures will forever remain Un-America and should study history and as FDR said “The only thing to fear is fear itself”. Shame on you Sony Pictures, shame on you. – Editor’s note.

Obama Vows a Response to Cyberattack on Sony

By DAVID E. SANGER, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and NICOLE PERLROTH (New York Times)

WASHINGTON — President Obama said on Friday that the United States “will respond proportionally” against North Korea for its destructive cyberattacks on Sony Pictures, but he criticized the Hollywood studio for giving in to intimidation when it withdrew “The Interview,” the satirical movie that provoked the attacks, before it opened.

Deliberately avoiding specific discussion of what kind of steps he was planning against the reclusive nuclear-armed state, Mr. Obama said that the response would come “in a place and time and manner that we choose.” Speaking at a White House news conference before leaving for Hawaii for a two-week vacation, he said American officials “have been working up a range of options” that he said have not yet been presented to him.

A senior official said Mr. Obama would likely be briefed in Hawaii on those options. Mr. Obama’s threat came just hours after the F.B.I. said it had assembled extensive evidence that the North Korean government organized the cyberattack that debilitated the Sony computers.

If he makes good on it, it would be the first time the United States has been known to retaliate for a destructive cyberattack on American soil or to have explicitly accused the leaders of a foreign nation of deliberately damaging American targets, rather than just stealing intellectual property. Until now, the most aggressive response was the largely symbolic indictment of members of a Chinese Army unit this year for stealing intellectual property.

The president’s determination to act was a remarkable turn in what first seemed a story about Hollywood backbiting and gossip as revealed by the release of emails from studio executives and other movie industry figures describing Angelina Jolie as a “spoiled brat” and making racially tinged lists of what they thought would be Mr. Obama’s favorite movies.

But it quickly escalated, and the combination of the destructive nature of the attacks — which wiped out Sony computers — and a new threat this week against theatergoers if the “The Interview,” whose plot revolves an attempt to assassinate the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, opened on Christmas Day turned it into a national security issue. “First it was a game-changer,” one official said. “Then it became a question of what happens if we don’t respond? And the president concluded that’s not an option.”

But as striking as his determination to make North Korea pay a price for its action was his critique of Sony Pictures for its decision to cancel “The Interview.” Mr. Obama argued that the precedent that withdrawing the movie set could be damaging — and that the United States could not give in to intimidation.

“I wish they had spoken to me first,” Mr. Obama said of Sony’s leadership. “I would have told them, ‘Do not get into a pattern in which you’re intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.’ ”

In a clear reference to Mr. Kim, he said, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” That would encourage others to do the same “when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.”

The chief executive of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, immediately defended his decision and said Mr. Obama misunderstood the facts. He argued that when roughly 80 percent of the country’s theaters refused to book the film after the latest threat, “we had no alternative but to not proceed with the theatrical release,” Mr. Lynton told CNN. “We have not caved, we have not given in, we have not backed down.”

In a follow-up statement, Sony said that it “immediately began actively surveying alternatives” to theatrical distribution after theater owners balked. But so far no mainstream cable, satellite or online film distributor was willing to adopt the movie.

Mr. Obama did not pass up the opportunity to take a jab at the insecure North Korean government for worrying about a Hollywood comedy, even a crude one.

The headquarters of Sony Pictures in Culver City, Calif. The F.B.I. said that some of the methods employed in the Sony cyberattack were similar to ones that were used by the North Koreans against South Korean banks. Credit Christopher Polk/Getty Images

“I think it says something about North Korea that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie,” he said, smiling briefly at the ridiculousness of an international confrontation set off by a Hollywood comedy.

The case against North Korea was described by the F.B.I. in somewhat generic terms. It said there were significant “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods and compromised networks” to previous attacks conducted by the North Koreans.

“The F.B.I. also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyberactivity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea,” the bureau said. “For example, the F.B.I. discovered that several Internet protocol addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with I.P. addresses that were hard-coded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.” An Internet protocol address is the closest thing to an identifier of where an attack emanated.

Some of the methods employed in the Sony attack were similar to ones that were used by the North Koreans against South Korean banks and news media outlets in 2013. That was a destructive attack, as was an attack several years ago against Saudi Aramco, later attributed to Iran. While there were common cybertools to the Saudi attack as well, Mr. Obama told reporters on Friday he had seen no evidence that any other nation was involved.

The F.B.I.’s announcement was carefully coordinated with the White House and reflected the intensity of the investigation; just a week ago, a senior F.B.I. official said he could not say whether North Korea was responsible. Administration officials noted that the White House had now described the action against Sony as an “attack,” as opposed to mere theft of intellectual property, and that suggested that Mr. Obama was now looking for a government response, rather than a corporate one.

The F.B.I.’s statements “are based on intelligence sources and other conclusive evidence,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Now the U.S. has to figure out the best way to respond and how much risk they want to take. It’s important that whatever they say publicly signals to anyone considering something similar that they will be handled much more roughly.”

While American officials were circumspect about how they had collected evidence, some has likely been developed from “implants” placed by the National Security Agency. North Korea has proved to be a particularly hard target because it has relatively low Internet connectivity to the rest of the world, and its best computer minds do not move out of the country often, where their machines and USB drives could be accessible targets.

Private security researchers who specialize in tracing attacks said that the government’s conclusions matched their own findings. George Kurtz, a founder of CrowdStrike, a California-based security firm, said that his company had been studying public samples of the Sony malware and had linked them to hackers inside North Korea — the firm internally refers to them as Silent Chollima — who have been conducting attacks since 2006.

 

President John F. Kennedy

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City

April 27, 1961

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.

You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.

You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.

We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the “lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.”

But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.

If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.

I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight “The President and the Press.” Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded “The President Versus the Press.” But those are not my sentiments tonight.

It is true, however, that when a well-known diplomat from another country demanded recently that our State Department repudiate certain newspaper attacks on his colleague it was unnecessary for us to reply that this Administration was not responsible for the press, for the press had already made it clear that it was not responsible for this Administration.

Nevertheless, my purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of Presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.

Nor, finally, are these remarks intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.

If in the last few months your White House reporters and photographers have been attending church services with regularity, that has surely done them no harm.

On the other hand, I realize that your staff and wire service photographers may be complaining that they do not enjoy the same green privileges at the local golf courses that they once did.

It is true that my predecessor did not object as I do to pictures of one’s golfing skill in action. But neither on the other hand did he ever bean a Secret Service man.

My topic tonight is a more sober one of concern to publishers as well as editors.

I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future–for reducing this threat or living with it–there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security–a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President–two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for a far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

I

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of “clear and present danger,” the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.

Today no war has been declared–and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of “clear and present danger,” then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.

It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions–by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.

Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security–and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.

For the facts of the matter are that this nation’s foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery or espionage; that details of this nation’s covert preparations to counter the enemy’s covert operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the location and the nature of our forces and weapons, and our plans and strategy for their use, have all been pinpointed in the press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any foreign power; and that, in at least in one case, the publication of details concerning a secret mechanism whereby satellites were followed required its alteration at the expense of considerable time and money.

The newspapers which printed these stories were loyal, patriotic, responsible and well-meaning. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the tests of journalism and not the tests of national security. And my question tonight is whether additional tests should not now be adopted.

The question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will. But I would be failing in my duty to the nation, in considering all of the responsibilities that we now bear and all of the means at hand to meet those responsibilities, if I did not commend this problem to your attention, and urge its thoughtful consideration.

On many earlier occasions, I have said–and your newspapers have constantly said–that these are times that appeal to every citizen’s sense of sacrifice and self-discipline. They call out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against his obligations to the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who serve in the newspaper business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.

I have no intention of establishing a new Office of War Information to govern the flow of news. I am not suggesting any new forms of censorship or any new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma that I have posed, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to reexamine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.

Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: “Is it news?” All I suggest is that you add the question: “Is it in the interest of the national security?” And I hope that every group in America–unions and businessmen and public officials at every level– will ask the same question of their endeavors, and subject their actions to the same exacting tests.

And should the press of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific new steps or machinery, I can assure you that we will cooperate whole-heartedly with those recommendations.

Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war. In times of peace, any discussion of this subject, and any action that results, are both painful and without precedent. But this is a time of peace and peril which knows no precedent in history.

II

It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation–an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people–to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well–the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face.

No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers–I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed–and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment– the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants”–but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

This means greater coverage and analysis of international news–for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security–and we intend to do it.

III

It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world’s efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.

And so it is to the printing press–to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news–that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

 

But he should go away and be quiet because if he and George W. Bush weren’t in the special President’s club (where they all look out for each other) then Dark Vader and George W. would be facing some real jail time if they were prosecuted (which they should be) but we know they won’t. Reminds us what lays ahead in 2017 if Jeb Bush runs and wins for the Republicans. War again, the CIA back torturing the wrong people and we can say goodbye to the Affordable Care Act. And will anything be done under J. concerning Immigration and Social Security reform in 2017?

Nope, just like his brother W, J will do nothing but talk and talk until we kick the Republicans out of the House and Senate in 2018. All fun and games in Washington and would be funny if it wasn’t our lives they were all playing with.

By Scott Shane (New York Times)

As vice president, Dick Cheney was the most enthusiastic sponsor for the brutal C.I.A.interrogation program used on Al Qaeda suspects, protesting when President George W. Bush scaled it back in his second term. Now that a Senate Intelligence Committee report has declared that the C.I.A.’s methods, later prohibited, violated American values and produced little or no useful intelligence, Mr. Cheney is fiercely defending not just the agency’s record, but his own as well.

“I would do it again in a minute,” Mr. Cheney said in a spirited, emotional appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He denied that waterboarding and related interrogation tactics were torture, noting that three of the last four attorneys general have agreed with his view.

The NBC host, Chuck Todd, pressed Mr. Cheney on what might constitute torture, reading actual episodes from the Senate report: Holding a prisoner in a coffin-sized box for 11 days? Handcuffing a prisoner’s wrists to an overhead bar for 22 hours a day? But Mr. Cheney gave no ground.

“I can’t tell from that specifically whether it was or not,” he replied.

He even declined to criticize C.I.A. practices used on prisoners called “rectal feeding” and “rectal rehydration,” though he noted that “it was not one of the techniques approved” by the Justice Department. “I believe it was done for medical reasons,” he said. The Senate report suggests that it was largely used without medical orders to punish prisoners who refused water or food.

At 73, nearly three years after a heart transplant, Mr. Cheney clearly feels his own legacy is at stake.

In the early months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush delegated the detailed oversight of the campaign against Al Qaeda to his vice president, who embraced the task and urged the harshest measures. Mr. Cheney had long believed that restrictions placed on the intelligence agencies after scandals in the late 1970s were ill-advised, and he relished the chance to take the restraints off the C.I.A.

Mr. Cheney may be running some political risk. For some viewers, his gloves-off comments on “Meet the Press” may recall his many appearances being interviewed on Sunday morning television shows in late 2002 and early 2003 before the invasion of Iraq.

At that time, he repeatedly asserted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, claims that turned out to be false. He also made a famously inaccurate prediction on the same show, “Meet the Press,” on March 16, 2003, that American troops would be “greeted as liberators.”

Continue reading the main storyBut that experience has not deterred him. In the wake of the Senate report, he has only stepped up his defense of the C.I.A., deciding that the best defense is a relentless offense.

Mr. Cheney was also asked on Sunday to answer questions about detainees who had faced lengthy incarceration, and sometimes harsh treatment, even though the C.I.A. concluded they posed no terrorist threat or had been imprisoned by mistake. The Senate report counts at least 26 such “wrongfully detained” prisoners among the 119 detainees who passed through the C.I.A. secret overseas jails.

The former vice president responded that, in his mind, the greater problem was “with the folks that we did release that end up back on the battlefield.”

Asked again whether he was satisfied with a program that erroneously locked up detainees, he replied, “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective.”

The Senate committee’s report makes the case that the wrongful detentions and use of torture were actually counterproductive, citing C.I.A. officers’ own views that harsh tactics had “poisoned the well” in questioning some prisoners.

The 6,000-page Senate study, based on a review of more than six million pages of C.I.A. records, is by far the most ambitious look at the program to date. Its damning conclusions are based strictly on what C.I.A. officers were themselves reporting inside the agency at the time.

The portrait it paints of a program that was not just brutal but incompetent has drawn global comment, most of it highly critical of the C.I.A.’s former tactics. The report has been hailed by the United Nations and human rights groups as a long-delayed step toward accountability, though they say the people who approved and conducted the program must be held responsible for grave violations of law and morality.

The report’s conclusions might have been expected to offer vindication to another Republican stalwart, Senator John McCain, who has long been the leading voice denouncing torture and countering Mr. Cheney on the interrogation question.

But the torture issue has split Congress and the country largely on partisan lines, and Mr. McCain’s commentary on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, where he was asked about Mr. Cheney’s remarks, underscored how lonely his position has become in the Republican Party.

The Senate report was produced solely by the intelligence committee’s Democratic staff members, after the Republicans decided to stop participating, and Republicans have almost universally panned it as a biased and flawed study, noting that its authors relied exclusively on documents and did not interview C.I.A. officials.

Unlike nearly every other politician in the debate, Mr. McCain has personal experience with the topic: as a downed Navy pilot, he was tortured by his North Vietnamese captors as a prisoner of war, an experience that left him with the deep conviction that the United States should never use such tactics. Mr. Cheney, by contrast, received four deferments as a student and a fifth as a new father and never served.

Mr. McCain said some defenders of the C.I.A. program are engaging in a “rewriting of history” and are whitewashing torture. “You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture,” he said. He noted that waterboarding had a gruesome pre-C.I.A. history dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, and that the United States “tried and hung Japanese war criminals for waterboarding Americans in World War II.”

“What we need to do is come clean, we move forward and we vow never to do it again,” Mr. McCain said. “I urge everyone to just read the report.”

Mr. Cheney said he had read “parts” of the report. But the former vice president responded to Mr. Todd, “Go read what the directors of the agency said about the report.”

Indeed, Mr. Cheney’s latest remarks were part of a barrage of commentary attempting to undercut the Senate’s blistering report on the C.I.A. program. Defenders of the program, including a former C.I.A. director, Michael V. Hayden, and the official who actually ran the program, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., outnumbered those criticizing its methods on Sunday morning’s political shows.

Waterboarding was never used, at least with official approval, after 2003. In 2006, against the vice president’s advice, Mr. Bush moved the accused 9/11 conspirators to an American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The secret prisons housed only a handful of additional prisoners before President Obama ordered them closed on his first full day in office in 2009.

Police forces around the country already have implemented the use of body cameras for their Police Officers on duty like the city of San Rafael in California so the President’s announcement yesterday doesn’t go anywhere far enough dealing with the issues we see in Ferguson and the shooting dead of Michael Brown by former Police Officer Wilson. Some Police forces around the country are blue in the face from training. We need a better plan Mr. President and a new code of conduct for our Police Officers. We need a whole new process of investigating citizens complaints against Police Officers. What of the many incidents around the country concerning Police Officers when off duty? Body cameras won’t be of much use in this case and the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice needs a total re-haul as it has proven most ineffective in dealing with citizens complaints against Police Officers. It’s time to take a stand Mr. President and show us how serious you really are as Jon Sopel of the BBC rightly asks: “The uncomfortable question for America is how many other towns and cities across the land have exactly the same cocktail of problems that one spark could ignite?”.

From Jon Sopel (BBC)

The news channels split the TV screen, as they often do. On one side, the president and commander-in-chief of the most powerful army in the world was appealing for calm from protesters and restraint from law enforcement. On the other side, the live shots showed the chaos unfold as Ferguson was blanketed in tear gas and fire. Since the shooting of Michael Brown, America has been enveloped in a wider debate.

Not new questions – anything but – but questions that were pushed into the background with the election of the United States’ first African-American president.

In 2008, those heady days when Mr Obama was first elected, there was the genius slogan that captured the trajectory and history of the civil rights struggle.

“Rosa sat, so that Martin could walk, so that Barack could fly” – to which might be added today -“but people like Michael Brown will still get shot by white police officers.”

The other phrase that was heard again and again was, “So what’s your excuse?”

It was a challenge to the black community from within the black community – to stop making excuses and seize the day, make the most of the myriad opportunities that were ripe for the picking. After all, if an African-American can go all the way to the highest office in the land, what’s stopping you?

America was gripped by the ‘Yes We Can” mantra – and perhaps myth.

For a while, “post-racial” was the watchword. And with it, the debate about disadvantage, discrimination, disaffection (and probably a whole pile of other good sociological words beginning with dis-) seemed to disappear.

Certainly at first, the issue of race was something that Mr Obama preferred not to talk about. His speeches on the topic usually came only after events forced him to address it.

In the last year, Mr Obama has become more vocal about issues facing the black community. His “Brother’s Keeper” initiative seeks to improve outcomes for young black men in America – outcomes like the fate of Michael Brown, shot dead in the street a few days before he was to start college.

Big questions that seemed to be swept under the post-racial rug are being asked once again: Why was an overwhelmingly black area policed by predominantly white officers? Why is there such mistrust among that community of the forces of law and order? Why, if you’re black, are you much more likely to be a victim of crime? Why, if you’re black, are you much more likely to end up in prison? Why are you more likely to be unemployed?

The president engaged in that debate on Monday night, saying that the situation in Ferguson spoke to broader challenges that the US faced. He acknowledged that some of this was the legacy of racial discrimination. He said violence could never be justified, but recognised that the legal system often felt as if it was being applied in a discriminatory fashion.

The violence in Ferguson was as awful as it was predictable. There were those in the crowd who had clearly come dressed for a fight, and would have been disappointed if they had gone home without one.

And there will be those politicians, who will use that violence by the mob as an excuse for inaction. There is nothing easier than to condemn the troublemakers and wilfully ignore the message that the angry but peaceful protesters are trying to send. And – boy – if you could sell anger, you would make a fortune in Ferguson. The fury is genuine.

Some are invoking the Selma marches and Martin Luther King, and saying that the civil rights movement is as relevant today as it was in the last century

Though an infamous race riot in St Louis left dozens of black Americans dead in 1917, modern-day Ferguson wasn’t on many radar screens as a potential flashpoint for racial violence – until the shooting of Michael Brown. It’s in one of the so-called flyover states: a place that many Americans travel above as they fly from east to west or the other way.

The uncomfortable question for America is how many other towns and cities across the land have exactly the same cocktail of problems that one spark could ignite?