Your morning jolt: Sam Olens on the hidden hand behind left-leaning GSU students

Parents of Georgia State University students beware. Attorney General Sam Olens thinks a hidden hand may be manipulating your children – at least the left-leaning ones.

Attorney General Sam Olens. Curtis Compton, ccompton@ajc.com

Last night, Channel 2 Action News reported on the origins of HB 261, legislation passed this spring to place some law enforcement training records off-limits to the public.

The legislation was motivated by a GSU student’s request for information regarding the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, a GSU program that sends local officers abroad to learn from international officers, including Israelis, about fighting terrorism.

The open records request submitted by Tim Dalton and other members of GSU’s Progressive Student Alliance sought the names of officers, the locales of their training, and information about the techniques of their training.

“I’m not a terrorist. I’m a student. I’m a student that is concerned about programs in my community, which is the Georgia State community,” said Dalton. “”We wanted to know the nature of the program because we want to be able to say whether or not it should be on our campus or not.”

Legislation passed by the General Assembly – drawn up, Olens said, with the help of the Georgia Press Association – immediately closed off the information.

Olens suggested someone was using the students. Who?

“I’m not going to speculate,” replied Olens.

“But do you think it’s somebody bigger?” asked Channel 2’s John Bachman. Said Olens:

“Absolutely. Students don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I wonder where the Dunwoody police officers are receiving training in Israel on terrorism. I wonder where the bus starts from and goes to on day four of the program.’ I don’t think that is something a student group comes up with.”

The report noted that Cox Enterprises, the parent company of WSB-TV and this newspaper, is a sponsor of the GILEE program.

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U.S. Rep. John Barrow, D-Savannah, walked a fine line on Tuesday when he addressed Georgia’s new illegal immigration law. From WSAV-TV:

“I’m personally concerned about states trying to go it on their own hook, because if one state’s going to try and do this while surrounding states are not…the people in that state are going to be competing at a disadvantage, vis a vis the employers and businesses in the states surrounding them – that aren’t going to be trying to do the job in the absence of any effective action on the federal level.”

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Herman Cain’s close-up continues. AJC’s Politifact Georgia today examines the GOP presidential candidate’s claim that the U.S. Constitution promises the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

And the Atlantic has posted a Q&A with Cain that tackles national security. A quick summary:

He expressed uncertainty about whether we should still be in Afghanistan, said he’d be comfortable with intelligence agencies spying on Americans without a warrant for the purposes of counter-terrorism, and insisted that a warrant should be necessary for police to enter an American’s home.

Cain expressed support for the PATRIOT Act, and suggested that if 90 percent of a counter-terrorism law is sound we shouldn’t worry about the other ten percent. Finally, he said that the TSA lacks common sense, and that harsher laws may be the answer in the war on drugs.

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When Gov. Nathan Deal goes to Washington next week, he’ll chat with the state’s House Republicans about Medicare. Tuesday’s results in New York are likely to come up. From the Associated Press:

Buffalo, N.Y. — Kathy Hochul told her supporters they had picked the right issue to fight a Republican on long-held Republican turf.

The Democrat rode a wave of voter discontent over the national GOP’s plan to change Medicare and overcame decades of GOP dominance here to capture Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District.

Hochul defeated Republican state Assemblywoman Jane Corwin on Tuesday night, capturing 47 percent of the vote to 43 percent for Corwin, to win the seat vacated by disgraced Republican Chris Lee. A wealthy tea party candidate, Jack Davis, took 9 percent.

The special election that became a referendum on the health care plan for the nation’s seniors may serve as a warning shot to further GOP efforts to cut popular entitlement programs.

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And while the topic of conspiracies is fresh on everyone’s mind, let’s take note that Tiger Woods’ secret effort to overthrow a certain Communist regime in the Caribbean has finally taken root. From the New York Times:

One of Fidel Castro’s first acts upon taking power was to get rid of Cuba’s golf courses, seeking to stamp out a sport he and other socialist revolutionaries saw as the epitome of bourgeois excess.

Now, 50 years later, foreign developers say the Cuban government has swung in nearly the opposite direction, giving preliminary approval in recent weeks for four large luxury golf resorts on the island, the first in an expected wave of more than a dozen that the government anticipates will lure free-spending tourists to a nation hungry for cash.

- By Jim Galloway, Political Insider

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