To read Mr. Davis’s article, please click here.

To read the full article, please click here

In this piece, Mark Davis and Philip Hughes draw on their White House experience to suggest a “pause and plateau”–a pause in nuclear negotiations, and a plateau at current agreed-upon force levels for five years.

To read the full article in The Hill, please click here.

The call for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate, however, is a positive sign for people who care about privacy and innovation.  While the FCC is notorious for seeking to employ powers it does not statutorily possess, the FTC has a long record of judicious use of its power.  Regulation of some sort is inevitable in the privacy arena.  Best it be a one-stop shop at the FTC.

Facebook is also probably telling the truth when it says that has not stored or used this information.

The fact remains, what can be done, will be done.  The current privacy paradigm is simply not sustainable.

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum is justifiably upset by a Google bomb that links searches for his name to something too disgusting to repeat here.  In demanding that Google take it down, however, Santorum does not seem to understand that all the responsibility—and liability—rests with the webmaster, not the search engine—in a law that passed when he was a member of the Senate.  (Anybody out there know how Senator Santorum voted on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act?)

Santorum, however, does strike at a point.

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” he said.  In fact, something was ‘up there’ about First Lady Michelle Obama, a truly offensive image.  Google did act against one site carrying that image, citing malware concerns, and placed an ad explaining its stance.  Technology companies will need to remain utterly consistent in how they apply these rules—and clear to the public how they operate.  Politicians need to understand the need to play by the rules they themselves have passed.

To learn more about the impact of Section 230 on Google bombs, check out my book, Digital Assassination.

We live in an age when White House speechwriters have been known to tweet their friends, alerting them to their authorship of last night’s well-crafted line.  Ted Sorensen’s life stands in stark rebuke to our credit-hungry age.  He lived for loyalty.  He never took credit for President Kennedy’s words, not even the phrases memorized by school children and etched in stone.

That loyalty extended for life.  Ted’s memoirs are riveting but circumspect.  He was a one man keeper of the eternal flame.

He was also the consummate gentleman.  I had the pleasure of spending two days with him in Maine, where we spent one day with a trade association, another speaking on three panels that covered the better part of a day.

Throughout it all, Ted deferred to me and treated me as an equal, even though he was a much bigger deal than I was.  He had been one of President Kennedy’s top advisors through the sweatiest moments of the Cold War (including the Cuban missile crisis).  And yet Ted never failed to bring his comments back around to me and my experience.

Make no mistake, there were barbs and knives to be thrown at Republicans.  But Ted showed that one could be a very effective partisan without being nasty.  Washington, take note.

At least one other Fortune 500 CEO runs his own blog on which he denounces journalists in the coarsest, most graphic terms possible (accusing them of certain acts with certain financial insiders).  Other executives are also feeling free to speak like Tony Soprano in public.

Is this refreshing candor, or defining deviancy down for CEOs?