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Last week’s newsletter on finding a new, more appropriate name for modern cell phones certainly provoked a tremendous response. The video has gotten more than 240,000 views on YouTube in just six days.

We received thousands of suggestions — some thoughtful, some funny, and some sarcastic.

A lot of people wrote in to say the device already has a name — the “smartphone”. Of course, we often call our iPhones and Androids “smartphones”, but does this term really capture the essence of the device?

What led us to ask this question was the observation that these devices are not just smart phones. They are so much more, something entirely different. Calling them “smartphones” feels a little like calling laptops “smart typewriters”.

Among the suggestions for alternative names, the most popular without a doubt was “communicator” or “com” for short, a reference to the Star Trek technology by the same name which allowed characters to communicate remotely. Also popular with Trekkies was the term “tricorder”. These readers have a point: If you have seen how doctors are using their phones today — see this video of Dr. Eric Topol for example — it gets pretty close to the fictional Star Trek device.

Many people wrote that they liked the German term for smartphones: “handy”. Variations of that included “handle,” “hand portal” and “handlink”.

Others focused on how these devices are becoming virtual extensions of our brains, suggesting “handbrain,” “xMind”, “extellignece,” “pocket brain,” “social processor,” and even “implant”.

A few people offered retro terms like “Personal Digital Assistant” (PDA) which in a way seem newly appropriate with conversational search services like Siri and Google Now becoming part of our mobile devices.

Someone else wanted to call it a “communications egg,” which was definitely a new one to us. Keeping with the breakfast theme, we also heard “Everything Bagel”.

One person even argued “cell” was exactly the right term because everyone seems to be thoroughly trapped in their digital devices.

There is some merit to this complaint, but the possibilities this technology opens up will be enormous and liberating. My friend John Mauldin writes a very interesting newsletter on economics that I read regularly. In one of his recent letters on employment he commented:

“I concluded my final formal education efforts in late 1974, in the midst of a stagflationary recession, so it was not the best of times to be looking for work. It turned out that I had a far different future ahead of me than I envisioned then. But I would trade places with any of those kids who graduated today, as my vision of the next 40 years is actually very optimistic. With all the advances in healthcare, technology, and communications that have come and will come, they will get to embrace a world full of opportunity; and yet, this generation is starting out with more than just a minor economic handicap.” (You can read the rest of John’s newsletter here.)

John’s sentiment is exactly right: despite all of the economic challenges we’re facing right now, the opportunities young Americans will have in the next few decades are going to be unbelievable. They will be living in a world we can only begin to imagine.

We are already experiencing the earliest stages of this technological change — change so fundamental that we lack adequate words to describe the new things being created.

We are still interested to hear your ideas of alternative names for the “cellphones” that have become so important in our lives. You can submit your own suggestions in the comments here.

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Newt joins Sean Hannity on Hannity on Fox News Channel to discuss the IRS scandal, its links to Obamacare, and Benghazi.

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When I started writing this it was called “three scandals”.

There was the Benghazi Scandal, the IRS Scandal, and the little covered but equally alarming Secretary Sebelius scandal.

Then as I was writing we learned that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months worth of phone call records for more than 100 Associated Press reporters. This is the largest violation of the First Amendment in modern times and so we now have four scandals in the Obama Administration.

The White House wants Americans to believe the four scandals are all, in one way or another, the rogue acts of insignificant subordinates.

They want us to believe that a few misguided but well-meaning IRS agents in regional offices took the initiative to persecute and harass conservatives in an election year.

They want us to believe that repeated requests for more security at the Benghazi compound were ignored by fourth-tier bureaucrats at the State Department, never making it to the Department’s leadership. That the talking points were altered by unknown analysts at the CIA, rather than senior administration officials as evidence suggests. That the explosive allegations of a senior diplomat are really just the ramblings of a disgruntled employee.

They want us to believe that the White House was completely unaware that the Department of Justice secretly grabbed two months of phone records from Associated Press reporters who cover the administration, in an effort to identify their sources.

And no doubt we will soon discover that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s shakedown of insurance companies for money which Congress refused to appropriate was really the initiative of some unfortunate functionary deep in the bowels of the Department.

But in truth, these scandals are not the random acts of a few bureaucrats who got out of hand.

These scandals are in fact the natural manifestations of Obamaism.

Unaccountable power, untethered from law or the Constitution, and employed for political gain is standard operating procedure in an administration which seeks to make government bigger and bigger. It is the Chicago machine transplanted to the federal government.

And they continue without shame, lying about what they’ve done, then lying about lying, and finally lying about the people who are telling the truth until everyone forgets what they lied about in the first place.

When the President blamed the terrorist attacks in Benghazi on a protest that never happened, anyone who dared challenge the official story was smeared as a crazy extremist or a bitter partisan.

When the Secretary of State vowed to prosecute the creator of an obscure anti-Islam Internet video, those who doubted the explanation were intolerant.

When the U.N. ambassador said on five Sunday talk shows that the violence arose from a spontaneous demonstration against the video, people who questioned the claim were politicizing a tragedy.

It is now obvious to everyone that the Obama Administration was deliberately dishonest. And so the White House tells Americans to forget about it, “Benghazi happened a long time ago.”

The subordinates have been punished. The whistleblowers have been demoted. Move along, nothing to see here.

The administration took the same approach to the IRS scandal. Apparently beginning in 2010, the IRS singled out groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name (presumably assuming that groups on the Left don’t describe themselves as “patriotic”), as well as organizations “involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement[s],” or making statements which “criticize how the country is being run.”

The IRS asked many of these groups to provide lists of their donors, the amount of each donation, and lots of details about the organizations’ activities. Here is an example of one appalling letter from the IRS to a Tea Party group which was targeted.

When the IRS confessed to some of this on Friday in advance of an investigation made public yesterday, it tried to blame low level IRS employees in a Cincinnati office. But it is already being widely reported that senior IRS officials in Washington knew for almost two years that the agency was targeting conservative organizations, even though they testified before Congress more than a year ago and claimed the IRS was doing no such thing.

So they lied to Congress, then lied to the press when caught, and now once again they’re lying about lying. This is the agency which is integral to implementing Obamacare.

How would you like the IRS bureaucrats deciding your health treatments?

Chilling isn’t it?

Meanwhile, the White House maintains it had no idea the IRS was abusing power to target the administration’s political enemies, although the Presidential spokesman, Jay Carney, has admitted some people in the White House knew something at a recent press briefing.

Carney’s comment begins to move toward Senator Howard Baker’s famous Watergate question, “What did you know and when did you know it?”

Speaking of abuses of power, the White House also says it was unaware the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months worth of phone records for more than 100 Associated Press reporters, many of whom cover the Obama administration.

The DOJ is trying to discover the source of unauthorized and damaging national security leaks which informed an AP story on al Qaeda last year.

That is in contrast with the damaging national security leaks which supported the President’s reelection last year: they have not shown much interest in discovering who told the New York Times about President Obama’s “kill list” or his administration’s work on the Stuxnet virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program, or who granted Hollywood filmmakers unprecedented access to officials who divulged details of the bin Laden raid.

Of course, two months worth of phone records are likely to reveal communications with AP sources on hundreds of other stories about the administration in that period of time. But the White House says it is not involved.

Finally, we learned this week that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has been shaking down the health care companies for donations to fund implementation of Obamacare. When Congress refused to appropriate more money to set up the health insurance exchanges, Secretary Sebelius began asking these companies to contribute to Enroll America, a nonprofit organization created to promote Obamacare. It is headed by a former White House official.

As Senator Lamar Alexander said, “Such private fundraising circumvents the constitutional requirement that only Congress may appropriate funds. If the secretary or others in her department are closely coordinating the activities of Enroll America…then those actions may be in violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act.”

Senator Alexander points out the Secretary’s activities are functionally no different from those which led to the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the executive branch attempted to continue supporting a program Congress had not authorized using private donations. Fourteen officials were indicted in Iran-Contra.

Among all these lies and abuses of power from senior administration officials, how can the White House credibly continue to blame low level subordinates? And if he’s not responsible for the State Department, the Department of Justice, the IRS, or the Department of Health and Human Services (all of which were carrying on activities transparently to his political advantage) is President Obama responsible for anything at all in the executive branch?

P.S.
One of our country’s best Civil War scholars, Allen Guelzo, has published an extraordinary new book on the Battle of Gettysburg, out this week. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion is a work of incredible scholarship combined with a lifetime of judgement about historic events. I highly recommend it whether you have read one book about Gettysburg or 50.

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich slammed the Obama administration on Monday for the Internal Revenue Service’s political profiling of nonprofit groups.

“This is an administration which will not profile terrorists, but profiled patriots? But profiled constitutional groups?” Gingrich asked incredulously. “This is almost madness.”
Gingrich said the president should “open it up totally” and “fire everyone he can legally fire,” he said on Monday’s Morning Joe.

IRS officials apologized on Friday for targeting groups with “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their titles for nonprofit status audits, but senior agency leaders knew the groups were being flagged as early as 2011, according to an Associated Press report.

Some on the right have compared the issue to the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal; Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah and the ranking member of the Finance Committee, vowed a thorough investigation and compared it to “the Nixon years.”

But on Monday, Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal, pushed back.

“In the Nixon White House, we heard the president of the United States on tape saying ‘Use the IRS to get back on our enemies,’” said Bernstein. “We know a lot about President Obama, and I think the idea that he would want the IRS used for retribution—we have no evidence of any such thing.”

Gingrich claimed the president’s problem is bigger than it seems, and steered the conversation to the GOP’s favorite punching bag: Obamacare.

“Why would you trust the bureaucracy with your health, if you can’t trust the bureaucracy with your politics?” Gingrich said.

Bernstein pushed back against the former House speaker.

“Let’s say we have a huge problem with the IRS,” Bernstein said “There ought to be an investigation, there ought to be a criminal investigation if it’s warranted, and that’s it. But to start making these global pronouncements about where it goes and it affects Obamacare, Newt, to me, is part of the problem.”

Newt Gingrich is “really puzzled.” No, not about whether he will run for office again — he’s got fairly clear answers to that — but about cell phones. Well, not about the devices themselves, he is more puzzled about what to call them now that the devices do much more than make a phone call.

The former House speaker and 2012 GOP presidential candidate took to the Gingrich Productions YouTube channel late last week to ask his viewers and fans what the modern-day cellphone should be called.

“Think about it. If it is taking pictures, it’s not a cellphone. If it has a McDonald’s app to tell you where McDonald’s is based on your GPS location — that’s not a cellphone. If you can get Wikipedia or go to Google — that’s not a cellphone. If you can watch YouTube — that’s not a cellphone. Or Netflix,” Gingrich says in the video as he holds up his iPhone. “This device is something new and different. I have been calling it a handheld computer.”

However, Gingrich decides that that’s not the right word and that the term is misleading. “Its real power is not internal computation, its real power is networking,” he says.

Gingrich doesn’t once refer to the term “smartphone” — the popular term for modern-day cell phones with touchscreens and app-based operating systems — in the video or post on the Gingrich Productions website. Commenters on the site and on the video have suggested that that the term “smartphone” is already the commonly agreed upon name. ABC News did not hear back from Gingrich Productions after several attempts to ask about the “smartphone” term and if Gingrich still thinks there should be an additional term.

Gingrich is no stranger to modern technology and has been a proponent of pushing forward innovations in health and manufacturing technology. “The development of 3D printing is revolutionary. The impact of regenerative medicine will be extraordinary. The potential of drones and robots is close to science fiction,” Gingrich wrote in an article on Human Events in March.

In the cell phone video he stressed the social, educational and economic impact of the should-be-named device. “What would you call this? So we can explain to people that they carry in their hand literally the potential to have a dramatic revolution in how we get things done, in how we take care of our own health, in how we interact with our government and in how we are productive.”

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We’re really puzzled.

We’ve been focusing lately on the incredible degree of change that is occurring which will give every American the opportunity for a dramatically better future. As one example of this change, we’ve been trying for days to come up with the right name for something that has evolved faster than our ability to describe it: the cell phone.

Take out your cell phone — that is, if you’re not already reading this newsletter on it. Chances are, the object in your hand bears almost no resemblance to your home phone, or even to your first “cell phone,” which was probably a brick of a device with a tiny black and white screen.

In fact, what you still call your “cell phone” is not primarily a phone at all. Today’s cell phones have roughly the same computing power as a 2003 laptop. So for a time we were calling the device in your pocket a “handheld computer.”

But then it occurred to us that this term wasn’t quite right either. Your iPhone or Android device is really even more than a handheld computer, since it doesn’t simply “compute.” Today you can do things with your “phone” that were completely impossible using even the best laptops 10 years ago.

You have access to a world of information and communication that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.

For example, you can instantly call up any of the 3 million entries on Wikipedia, for free.

You can navigate roads, sidewalks and metro systems and discover the nearest deli to wherever you happen to be.

You can hold a 10 person video chat from virtually anywhere in the world.

You can read books, learn another language, watch YouTube videos, and even take a college course.

You can verbally ask your phone questions like “How do I get home” or “Where did President Obama go to college?” and have it reply with the correct answers.

It can even tell you when to leave for your next appointment given current traffic conditions.

To call this a “cell phone” or a “handheld computer” fails to capture the change that has taken place. It is a change in kind, not just a change in scale, and just as drivers of the earliest cars called them “horseless carriages”, our language has not caught up.

So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a “cell phone,” we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we’ll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.

More Questions About Benghazi

As more information that comes out about Benghazi the stranger the Administration’s reaction seems. This piece by Peter Wehner in Commentary describes the very good reasons to think the administration has been deliberately dishonest with the American people. The ABC News report this morning, confirming the Weekly Standard’s reporting that administration officials scrubbed the CIA talking points of references to terror, certainly reinforces that appearance.

The story quotes an email from Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson saying early drafts didn’t “resolve all of my issues or those of my building’s leadership.” Is this a reference to Secretary Clinton? I’m guessing will depend on what the meaning of the “building’s leadership” is.

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