The Best and Worst of 2015

Derek Hunter: As far as years go, 2015 certainly was one of them. The news was not wanting for content, and we columnists were not wanting for material. It was a year of tragedies and triumphs bookended by terrorist attacks in Paris. A reality TV star became the leading candidate of a major political party, “Star Wars” returned, and I got married. Yep, 2015 was quite a year.

I had a health scare that resulted in a pacemaker and a different view on mortality just months after my Dad died.

Not the best of times by far.

Politics:

The Best

Donald Trump. For all his problems, and they are legion, and the bluster, and it is constant, he’s done more than anyone in recent years to get people to pay attention to politics and just how corrupt the media and the Democrats have become. He’s been battering the media since the start, slamming his opponents since and changing how politics is done.

While, I’m still not a full on Trump guy I do like that he makes the Left and the RINOs crazy and just doesn’t give a damn. That really shakes them up.

Trump has been holding a clinic on how to run against Democrats and the media since his announcement. Aside from momentary flashes, none of the rest of the field appears to have learned a thing.

Because they are all stuck in their ways. They can’t see doing it any other way. Especially, Democrats, they have one playbook and they go to it every nanosecond of every day.

Expect all out nuclear war again on the Republicans. No atom will be lest un-nuked, no ethic or moral will not be cr0ssed in the quest for the Coronation of King Barack’s successor Queen Hillary.

The Republican RINOs are just plain lost.

If Trump is the nominee, Democrats may well win, but they will have been so battered and bruised they’d be hard-pressed to govern with any effectiveness. If he isn’t the nominee, whoever is will have learned how to be locked in a box with a rabid spider monkey and survive. The eventual nominee, whoever it ends up being, will be a much more devastating candidate thanks to Trump’s entry into the race.

The Media is still setting up the Coronation of Queen Hillary I like they have for 4 years now. I doubt they are going to change.

But maybe, just maybe, the sleeping stupid will recognize it for what it is.

That,and just maybe, the Republicans will actually run a campaign to WIN this time. Maybe.

 

The Worst

As awful as she is, Hillary Clinton is not the worst person on the national political stage. Until he leaves office, Barack Obama’s head wears the crown.

In a post-9/11, post-Paris, post-San Bernardino world, the president of the United States managed to go 12 months in which he used the words “radical Islamic terrorism” only to chastise others for saying them.

Well, you’re talking about his friends and mentors, the Muslims. They can’t be evil. That’s like Lule finding out Darth Vader is his Father…. 🙂

The economy continues to falter, our enemies are on the march, and the president has improved his short-game. The Obama presidency is a hilarious joke, but sadly it’s not the funny kind of joke.

But the Democrats continue to self-delude themselves that everything is awesome and we just need to get rid of those naybobs negativity.

One more year…

11 Months+ a few days. Don’t make it any longer than it has to be. Though if Queen Hillary wins we’re all doomed and you might as well close up shop and move to Fiji because it’s over.

Lie Of The Year

The “winner” of this category is obvious, which is why it hasn’t won any of these “awards” from the mainstream media: Hillary Clinton’s ever-evolving claims about classified material on her secret, unsecured email server.

Though I think her saying that the Benghazi families who have been ripping her for years about her You Tube cause of the incident are now lying because she never said it was pretty close.

“What Difference Does it Make?”

Her original statement at her press conference at the UN, was, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” High-stakes divorce settlements are less carefully worded.

Note how she specifically said she didn’t send any classified material, and how there “is” nothing classified on her server. She’d wiped it by then, though not thoroughly, so, in using present tense, she was telling her version of the truth.

After that original statement, Hillary’s story “evolved” at least two more times to she never “sent or received anything marked classified at the time.”

After that lie the media lost interest. Why wouldn’t they? Their candidate is ensnared in an FBI investigation that, were it anyone else, already would have led to an indictment and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees by now.

But we aren’t named Clinton; we haven’t been selling, or at least renting, our positions for sums of money that rival the worth of third-world economies, and a president of her party still controls the prosecutors.

No, we’re civilians, bound by truth, and she’s Hillary, utterly unburdened by such trivialities.

As we wind up 2015, I think we’ve dwelled enough on politics. So a few notes on a couple of other things.

Sports

The year started with a great Super Bowl. What a game! But it will be remembered as the game that gave us Deflategate. Tom Brady won – everything. He continues to live a charmed life, and good for him. Unless you bet against him.

And the Seahawks created a blunder for the ages that will be talked about until Liberals outlaw football altogether sometime later in the Century.

 

The Super Bowl was the highlight of the year for New England sports fans, but the rest of the world had to suffer until the World Series. After decades of miserable losing, New England (particularly in Boston) started winning. And their fans, both in baseball and football, became even more miserable to be around during a game. And I say that as someone with many friends who fit this description.

But the highlight of the year was the World Series.

The Kansas City Royals are a lot of fun to watch. They scrap and scrape together runs in a way no other team does.

Arizona Cardinals anyone? Anyone?? 🙂

Movies

I love “Star Wars,” saw it three times the weekend it opened. But it doesn’t win for movie of the year with me. There were a lot of great “art house” movies, and I’m sure one with $48 in box office receipts will win the Oscar. But “The Martian” was the most enjoyable movie of 2015. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor. Even if you don’t care for Matt Damon (and I wouldn’t blame you), you’ll enjoy this movie.

I love “Star Wars” but I still think either Jurassic World or Avengers 2. I never saw “The Martian”.

Television

“The Walking Dead” remains TV’s best drama.

DOCTOR WHO! 🙂

The zombie aspect might turn your off, but it’s much more than that. Moreover, it’s a show that generates true suspense, in which no one knows what’s going to happen from week to week and no character, no matter who they are, is safe.

DOCTOR WHO! 🙂

If you’re a comic book nerd, or if you don’t mind super hero movies, might I also suggest checking out “Jessica Jones” on Netflix. It’s a surprisingly good series with humor, action and a great anti-hero. And, unlike “The Walking Dead,” you can binge-watch it over a weekend.

Haven’t got around to it yet. And that shows you how technology has changed so much.

I’m not sad to see 2015 go, though it does seem like it went fast. With 2016 being an election year, it will fly by as well. While I work and play in the first half of this column, life happens in the rest. Hope you had a great 2015, and I hope you have as much fun as possible in 2016. 

Here’s to 2016. The Hope of the future of our Country rests on your shoulders.

No pressure. 🙂

You Just Might Be A Liberal…

Are you not sure that you’re a liberal? Well, there’s an easy way to find out. You might be a liberal if…

1) ….Your newspaper calls people “bigoted” for being worried about bringing Syrian refugees to America, but you won’t run pictures of Muhammad because you’re afraid Muslims might kill you for it.

2) ….You think every man accused of sexual assault is guilty until proven innocent except Bill Clinton.

3)….You insist that anyone who questions global warming hates science even though you don’t understand any of the science behind it yourself and you say we have to do something about climate change primarily because you want to impress your liberal friends.

4) ….You are terrified that holding terrorists at Guantanamo Bay who are trying to murder Americans might make the other terrorists who are trying to murder Americans mad.

5) ….You believe there’s a “Republican War on Women;” yet you are okay with aborting baby girls for any reason, think any man who says he identifies as a woman should be able to use the women’s bathroom and you want to put Bill Clinton back in the White House.

6) ….You claim to constantly hear Republican “dog whistles” that 99% of the population misses; yet you’d deny you’re racist for insisting that black Americans aren’t competent enough to get an ID to vote.

 

7) …You think there’s a possibility that Obama might be able to have a productive conversation with radical Islamists who want to kill us, but dialogue with the NRA is impossible.

8)….You believe Hillary Clinton is telling the truth. About anything. Ever.

9) ….You simultaneously believe the police are violent trigger-happy racists who shoot people for no good reason and that we should disarm the populace so that only the government has guns.

10) ….You went to a talk given on your campus by a conservative just so you could scream at him for “invading your safe space.”

11) ….You think Chris Kyle was a monster for killing so many enemies of America while Bowe Bergdahl deserves to be treated with respect and compassion after deserting his unit.

12) ….You believe you’re a caring and compassionate person because you advocate giving other people’s money away to people you hope will vote for candidates you like.

13) ….You believe that anyone who dislikes Barack Obama must hate him because he’s a minority, but your hatred of Ted Cruz and Clarence Thomas is perfectly justifiable.

14) ….You think you are a sophisticated person with a deep understanding of complex political issues, but sum up every one with some variation of, “Republicans are evil, racist, and they hate you while liberals like me are nice!”

15) ….You think it’s vitally important to increase the number of Muslim immigrants coming to America so they can inform on all the other Muslims who are planning terrorist attacks.

16) ….You blame the Republicans for the failure of Obamacare even though none of them voted for it.

17) ….Your first response to a terrorist attack committed by radical Islamists who’ve sworn allegiance to ISIS is to try to disarm every law-abiding gun owner in the country.

18) ….You think an unemployed, white factory worker who’s struggling to feed his family has some sort of racial privilege compared to Barack Obama, Melissa Harris Perry or Al Sharpton.

19) ….You say fences don’t work and gun-free zones do, but if Republicans wanted the fence around the White House taken down and demanded that the Secret Service be disarmed, you’d accuse them of trying to get Obama killed.

20) ….You believe Bruce Jenner is a woman, Rachel Dolezal is black and Elizabeth Warren is an Indian.

21)  Food in any way can be a “microagression” based on race, religion, sex, or ethnicity.

22) Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Guns kill people so getting rid of Guns will kill less people.

23) The Power of Life and Death is “Pro-Choice”.

24) Any immigration is good no matter how it was done and anyone opposed to any immigration of any kind is “racist”.

25) A Religion is a Race, unless they are Christians, then they are just bigots.

26) Utter the word “islamophobia” and mean it.

27) Anything with a (D) after their name is ok and can do anything they want because it’s better than they alternative.

28) Democrats Lie, but it’s your fault not theirs.

29) A Tax is a Penalty, even after it’s ruled a Tax it’s still a Penalty.

30) “What Difference Does it Make?”

31) It was the fault of a You Tube Video.

32) That the Media is not biased and that people like Hillary and Barack are “moderates” and any Republican is “extreme”.

Pizza Order 2015

What’s more American than Pizza.

The Federalist: THIS Is What Ordering a Pizza Will Be Like If Big Government Liberals Get their Way

The following reminded me of a 2004 You tube video, amusingly this was made by the ACLU. The irony is almost as tasty as the pizza.

Give the government all your info, and it will use it. 🙂

I wonder if I could get a little Lion on my pizza?

Oh, and when the Leftist Holier-Than-Thou PC Vegans take over, good luck getting any meat at all.

ACLU 2013 article on this “bubbling back up”

At first glance, the video seems laughable. A man calls his favorite pizza place to place an order, and he’s soon roped into a 1984-esque dystopia (with Windows 95-esque graphics) in which everything from his voting and employment history to his health records and library activity are “wired in” to a sinister uber-database, which the pizza place uses to bully him into ordering food he doesn’t want (because it’s better for his health) for an inflated price (delivery costs $20 extra because the customer lives in a high-crime area, according to the pizza place’s records). Uh, I used GrubHub last week and nothing remotely like this happened to me. Ha ha, ACLU #fail! …Right?

Not necessarily, says Lorrie Faith Cranor, a tech privacy expert at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. “It is actually not all that farfetched,” she told me via email. “I’ve shown this video many times in my classes and it is always a good way to start a discussion.”

What the video gets right

“There are companies that do gather most of the information that the pizza shop in the video has. I think it is less likely that information about library books would be available in such a profile, as libraries usually try pretty hard to protect information about what people read. But information about what magazines you subscribe to, travel plans, and clothing sizes is the sort of information that companies are collecting.”

The government also wants to collect everything about you, regardless of how inane it is. Plus after this was produced Facebook came into existence and now you have a whole new database of info, not just the NSA.

What it gets less right

“Companies don’t necessarily want you to know they have all this information about you, because people tend to find it creepy. So I’m not sure a pizza shop would really let on that they know all this. 

The government doesn’t want to let on how much it knows either, but ObamaCare wants all your medical records digitized so they can be found by anyone. 🙂

The video doesn’t anticipate location tracking or information that can be collected through mobile apps. The pizza shop does not know whether the customer is calling from home or work because he calls from his cell phone. It is not too much of a stretch to believe that companies may be able to pinpoint precisely where you are calling from on your cell phone in the future.”

They can know. So can the Government. Oh, and then there’s the Drones…

Privacy as perception: a user-experience design problem

What I find most interesting about Cranor’s comments is the interface-design aspect of privacy. If the pizza place simply didn’t mention everything it was doing behind the scenes to aggregate and interpret the customer’s personal data, and simply offered opt-in recommendations, it might not have seemed so dystopian to the customer. And in fact, this approach is what Google, Facebook, and other “all in the cloud” personal-data-integrators are all about. Don’t show how the data-mining sausage is made; just offer useful functionality.

Precisely. Sausage making is messy. Especially, if you’re the US Government.

A decade after the ACLU made this ham-handed video, a lot of what it depicts has come to pass, and we don’t much mind–because privacy is perception. This works both ways. Remember when Path got lambasted last year for uploading users’ iOS contacts into its database without telling them? Sounds pretty creepy, and the internet freaked out about it… even though apps had been doing this for years already, often for sound technical reasons. Instagram’s Terms-of-Service flap also stemmed from a perception problem. The new TOS sounded more creepy and privacy-violating than it actually was, so Instgram reverted to older legalese that was less emotionally “triggering” but more potentially privacy-violating.

Tech privacy in this decade is a lot weirder than the ACLU could’ve predicted in the last one. Do our privacy tolerances depend more on the subtleties of design and communication than on the brute-force capabilities of the technology itself?

Their is no privacy left and if there were Liberals would take it away from you because you’re a moron and they are so vastly superior in running your life for you.

That’s the irony.

Anyone for some Kale Chips… 🙂

Just Give Up

I passionately disagree with Bill Maher’s Left wing politics. But on the following he nailed it.

BILL MAHER: Now that Americans are getting wise to the dangers of being spied on by the government, they have to start getting more alarmed about spying on each other. Because at the Donald Sterling mess proved anything it’s that there’s a force out there just as powerful as Big Brother — Big Girlfriend.

Last week, when President Obama was asked about the Sterling episode, he said, ‘When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, just let them talk.’ But Sterling didn’t advertise, he was bugged. And while he may not be worth defending, the Fourth Amendment is. That’s the one that says we have the right to be secure in our person, in our homes, in our property. Well, not if bitching to your girlfriend in your home loses you your property. Well, not if bitching to your girlfriend in your home loses you your property.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Kathleen Parker offered one way with dealing the modern world’s ubiquitous invasions of privacy: give up. She wrote: ‘If you don’t want your words broadcast in the public square, don’t say them.’ Really? Even at home? We have to talk like a White House press spokesman?

That’s Orwell’s Thought Police, Newspeak, and Crimethink.
She then looked on the bright side by saying, ‘Such potential exposure forces us to more carefully select our words and edit our thoughts.’ Always editing? I rather be a Mormon. And that’s what we all would be — Mitt Romney. I would listen to a hundred horrific Cliven Bundy rants if that was the price of living in a world where I could also hear interesting and funny people talk without a filter.

Welcome to 1984, for real. Where 249th pick of the NFL Draft is a star because he’s gay and Tim Tebow, a First Round Pick is a “distraction” because he’s a Christian!

Christopher Hitchens said “Islamophobic is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

Perhaps most chilling of all, Parker said, ‘Speaking one’s mind isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be.’ Which is quite a statement, since her job is speaking her mind. It’s like mailman telling you that letters are stupid.

You can speak your mind, as long as the Thought Police approve of what you’re saying. If not…well…. 🙂

So let me get this straight. We should concede that there is no such thing anymore as a private conversation, so therefore remember to lawyer everything you say before you say it, and, hey, speaking your mind is overrated anyway, so you won’t miss it. Well, I’ll miss it, I’ll miss it a lot. And for the record, speaking my mind is absolutely everything it is cracked up to be.

AMEN!

So many things have let me down in life: the iPod Nano, the Spiderman musical, Al Gore for president, M. Night Shyamalan movies, the entire 80s, Lance Armstrong, my scout leader. But speaking my mind? Priceless. Does anyone really want there to be no place where we can let our hair down and not worry if the bad angel in our head occasionally grabs the mic?

Yes, Politically Correct Liberals.

After all, one of there Queens Rachel Maddow points out that while some red state governors are suffering harsh budgetary consequences for reckless tax-cut policies, President Obama is showing continued success at reducing the deficit faster than at any time since World War Two.

But the debt has gone up $7 1/2 TRILLION Dollars in 5 1/2 years. But don’t mind me I’m just a “hater” and I need to be “re-educated” or at the very least have my thoughts corrected so I don’t cause a fuss with bad information.

I have impure thoughts and I should just edit myself before I say them or type them.

He’s Overspending Less every year so we should celebrate his greatness you “racist” hater you!!  🙂

What about the bathroom? Not a public bathroom, of course I expect to be taped and photographed in there. But my bathroom at home. Would it be okay if that was kind of a cone of silence where I can invite friends in to speak freely? Who wants to live in a world where the only privacy you have is inside your head? That’s what life in East Germany was like, that’s why we fought the Cold War, remember? So we never have to live in some awful limbo, where you never knew who, even among your friends, was an informer. And now we are doing it to ourselves. Well don’t. Don’t be a part of the problem.

That’s 1984 for you. You don’t know who’s working for the Ministry so you have to guard your thoughts, thus control your thoughts 24/7/365 for your entire life. Doesn’t that sound like freedom? 🙂

If this was a campaign ad, I’d say, ‘Call Kathleen Parker and tell her you’re not ready to edit what you say in private.’ And just to fuck with her head, tell her you have an audio of a book party she gave at home with 5 close female friends, all of whom had way too much wine. Because I’m sure there has been that night, and she wouldn’t want that tape to come out. Who would? Because we’re humans, we’re not that good.

But sanctimonious Liberals want to exploit it.

We’re not ready to live in a world where everything has to come out perfectly in the first take. There’s a reason houses have doors on them and windows have shades. And if I want to sit in the privacy of my living room and say I think The Little Mermaid is hot and I want to bang her, or I don’t like watching two men kiss, or I think tattoos look terrible on black people, I should be able to, even if you think it makes me an asshole. Now, do I really believe those things? I’m not telling you because you’re not in my living room!

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”-Gandhi

And Liberals believe they are superior to you, so they condescend to you, then they want to control you for your own good, and they habitually think nothing of you and they value on their continued superiority and their authoritarian destiny where they rule all that they survey and everyone bows down to them and no impure thoughts escape.

Welcome, Citizen to the Liberal Utopia. 🙂

P.s.

But if you read the article it’s not quite so drastic and somewhat passive aggressive Liberalism, funny that. 🙂

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-cliven-bundys-and-donald-sterlings-sobering-message/2014/04/29/66863b9e-cfcf-11e3-a6b1-45c4dffb85a6_story.html

You decide, in your own head. 🙂

 

Because they are out to get YOU….

WASHINGTON — The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.

The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years  of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.

In a sign of how the use of such technologies can be developed for one use but then expanded to another, the BOSS research began as an effort to help the military detect potential suicide bombers and other terrorists overseas at “outdoor polling places in Afghanistan and Iraq,” among other sites, the documents show. But in 2010, the effort was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security to be developed for use instead by the police in the United States. (WP)

The National Security Agency’s surveillance network has the capacity to spy on 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

Citing current and former NSA officials for the 75 percent figure, the paper reported that the agency can observe more of Americans’ online communications than officials have publicly acknowledged. 

The NSA’s system of programs that filter communications, achieved with the help of telecommunications companies, is designed to look for communications that either start or end abroad, or happen to pass through the U.S. between foreign countries. However, the officials told the Journal that the system’s reach is so broad, that it is more likely that purely domestic communications will be intercepted as a byproduct of the hunt for foreign ones. 

The system works by using algorithms that act as filters, designed to let high-value information through amid more benign chatter. However, after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, a former to intelligence official told the Journal that the government changed its definition of “reasonable” intelligence collection, enabling the NSA to widen the holes in the “filtering” system. 

The details are the latest to emerge about the NSA’s operations and capabilities, as authorities in the U.S. and other countries try to stop the release of more information about the elaborate surveillance network. Members of Congress on the intelligence committees, as well as past intelligence officials, recently have spoken up in defense of the agency, particularly after a report showing the agency had broken privacy rules and overstepped its authority thousands of times. 

The NSA programs described by the Journal differ from the programs described by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in a series of leaks earlier this summer. Snowden described a program to acquire Americans’ phone records, as well as another program, known as PRISM, that made requests from Internet companies for stored data. By contrast, the Internet monitoring systems have the capability to track almost any online activity, so long as it is covered by a broad court order. 

The NSA programs are overseen and approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. An NSA spokeswoman told the Journal that its actions were both legal and respectful of Americans’ privacy. In a statement made to Reuters, the NSA repeated the assertion, saying, “We defend the United States from such threats while fiercely working to protect the privacy rights of U.S. persons.”

”It’s not either/or. It’s both.” (FOX)

http://video.foxnews.com/v/2619420894001/how-desperate-is-new-obamacare-sales-pitch/?playlist_id=928378949001

 

No Escape

The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership

By Bruce Schneier Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones.

National ID Card: Social Security

National Health Card: ObamaCare

If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook Inc. (FB) If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our e-mail to Google Inc. (GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), AT&T Inc. (T) and Sprint Corp. (S); and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter Inc., Facebook, LinkedIn (LNKD) Corp. or whatever other site is hosting them.

The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.

Computers and networks inherently produce data, and our constant interactions with them allow corporations to collect an enormous amount of intensely personal data about us as we go about our daily lives. Sometimes we produce this data inadvertently simply by using our phones, credit cards, computers and other devices. Sometimes we give corporations this data directly on Google, Facebook, Apple Inc.’s iCloud and so on in exchange for whatever free or cheap service we receive from the Internet in return.

The NSA is also in the business of spying on everyone, and it has realized it’s far easier to collect all the data from these corporations rather than from us directly. In some cases, the NSA asks for this data nicely. In other cases, it makes use of subtle threats or overt pressure. If that doesn’t work, it uses tools like national security letters.

The Partnership

The result is a corporate-government surveillance partnership, one that allows both the government and corporations to get away with things they couldn’t otherwise.

There are two types of laws in the U.S., each designed to constrain a different type of power: constitutional law, which places limitations on government, and regulatory law, which constrains corporations. Historically, these two areas have largely remained separate, but today each group has learned how to use the other’s laws to bypass their own restrictions. The government uses corporations to get around its limits, and corporations use the government to get around their limits.

This partnership manifests itself in various ways. The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.

Here’s an example: It would be reasonable for our government to debate the circumstances under which corporations can collect and use our data, and to provide for protections against misuse. But if the government is using that very data for its own surveillance purposes, it has an incentive to oppose any laws to limit data collection. And because corporations see no need to give consumers any choice in this matter — because it would only reduce their profits — the market isn’t going to protect consumers, either.

Our elected officials are often supported, endorsed and funded by these corporations as well, setting up an incestuous relationship between corporations, lawmakers and the intelligence community.

The losers are us, the people, who are left with no one to stand up for our interests. Our elected government, which is supposed to be responsible to us, is not. And corporations, which in a market economy are supposed to be responsive to our needs, are not. What we have now is death to privacy — and that’s very dangerous to democracy and liberty.

Challenging Power

The simple answer is to blame consumers, who shouldn’t use mobile phones, credit cards, banks or the Internet if they don’t want to be tracked. But that argument deliberately ignores the reality of today’s world. Everything we do involves computers, even if we’re not using them directly. And by their nature, computers produce tracking data. We can’t go back to a world where we don’t use computers, the Internet or social networking. We have no choice but to share our personal information with these corporations, because that’s how our world works today.

Curbing the power of the corporate-private surveillance partnership requires limitations on both what corporations can do with the data we choose to give them and restrictions on how and when the government can demand access to that data. Because both of these changes go against the interests of corporations and the government, we have to demand them as citizens and voters. We can lobby our government to operate more transparently — disclosing the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would be a good start — and hold our lawmakers accountable when it doesn’t. But it’s not going to be easy. There are strong interests doing their best to ensure that the steady stream of data keeps flowing. (Bloomberg)

FBI ALLOWS CRIME

The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.

The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.

Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.

“It sounds like a lot, but you have to keep it in context,” said Shawn Henry, who supervised criminal investigations for the FBI until he retired last year. “This is not done in a vacuum. It’s not done randomly. It’s not taken lightly.”

A spokeswoman for the FBI, Denise Ballew, declined to answer questions about the report, saying only that the circumstances in which its informants are allowed to break the law are “situational, tightly controlled,” and subject to Justice Department policy.(USA Today)

But cavalierly, yes. All while they are watching us. And suing states, and trying to control voter registration, and harassing citizens for their own agenda.

DEA TRACKING YOU

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Now, it’s combating YOU. 🙂

So you want to commit crime, do it FOR the FBI and NSA.

Gee, that makes me feel better…

Be Seeing You

“There’s no expectation of privacy” for a vehicle driving on a public road or parked in a public place, said Lt. Bill Hedgpeth, a spokesman for the Mesquite Police Department in Texas, which has records stretching back to 2008, although the city plans next month to begin deleting files older than two years. “It’s just a vehicle. It’s just a license plate.”

Number Six: What do you want?

Number Two: Information.

Number Six: Whose side are you on?

Number Two: That would be telling. We want information… information… in formation.

Number Six: You won’t get it.

Number Two: By hook or by crook, we will.

Number Six: Who are you?

Number Two: The new Number Two.

Number Six: Who is Number One?

Number Two: You are Number Six.

Number Six: I am not a number! I am a free man!

Number Two: [laughs]

Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.

As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners assemble what it calls a “single, high-resolution image of our lives.”

“There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the ACLU. The civil rights group is proposing that police departments immediately delete any records of cars not linked to a crime.

Law enforcement officials said the scanners can be crucial to tracking suspicious cars, aiding drug busts and finding abducted children. License plate scanners also can be efficient. The state of Maryland told the ACLU that troopers could “maintain a normal patrol stance” while capturing up to 7,000 license plate images in a single eight hour shift. (FOX)

Larry Elder: Someone did an experiment to test an old tale — that a frog placed in a pot of cool water, which is then slowly and continuously heated, will be boiled to death. By contrast, if thrown directly into scalding hot water, the frog jumps out. But it turns out that, no, once the water got hot enough, the critter hopped out of Dodge.

This raises a question. At what point does the continuous growth and intrusiveness of government make people wake up? This is not just a matter of theory or philosophy. People are hurting — as a direct result of President Barack Obama, his party, and the inability of the GOP to make the case for a smaller, less expensive and less intrusive government.

For five years, we have watched as President Barack Obama successfully pushed the following “redistributionist” agenda for building an economy: Take from the most productive to stimulate the economy by redistributing money, often with political consideration involved or attached; allow bureaucrats to pick winners and losers in the market; issue feel-good, top-down regulations that cost jobs and do little to improve conditions; and dictate the terms of health care with ObamaCare, a monstrosity that places one-seventh of our economy under the control of the federal government.

The results are in.

This is the worst economic recovery since World War II. Unemployment remains high. So many able-bodied people are dropping out of the labor force that the “labor force participation rate” remains near a 30-year low.

In 1900, government at all three levels took about 10 percent of our income. Today, government takes nearly 50 percent, or twice as much as people say government should. Yet when pollsters ask Americans how much money should government, at all three levels — state, local and federal — take from them, their answer has been consistent for decades: 25 percent.

Why, then, aren’t politicians in Washington, D.C., cowering under their desks, as angry constituents pound on their doors?

People, in the abstract, talk about freedom and liberty. But government dependency is so widespread that we accept the benefits — unaware that the costs are much higher than we think.

Nearly half of the federal budget goes to the three major entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. All of these programs address problems that the Constitution never intended. How do we know? Earlier presidents, citing constitutional reasons, rejected congressional attempts at growing the government.

In 1822, James Monroe, our fifth president, cast his only veto in rejecting an expansion of the Cumberland Road, even through it stood to economically benefit his home state of Virginia.

According to Monroe’s biography on the University of Virginia’s americanpresident.org: “Although Monroe personally supported the idea of internal improvements, he balked at the federal government’s role in the American System being proposed by Congressmen Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. They wanted a series of federally financed projects designed to improve and update the nation’s roads, bridges, and canals. Monroe worried, however, that federal payments for such internal improvements would expand even further the power of the federal government at the sake of state power. Where would the limits be drawn?”

Economist Walter Williams writes of Presidents James Madison, Franklin Pierce and Grover Cleveland, and how they quoted the Constitution to turn away congressional attempts to spend money because, they argued, the federal government is unauthorized to do so.

Fast forward to ObamaCare and the Supreme Court. Twenty-six states sued over the law, arguing that the individual insurance mandate — which requires every citizen in the country to purchase health care insurance or face a fine starting in 2014 — was unconstitutional. But the court, citing Congress’ authority to tax, let the mandate stand. In their dissent, Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said, “The entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety.” Further, they wrote, there is a “mountain of evidence” that the mandate is not a tax. “To say that the individual mandate merely imposes a tax,” wrote Scalia, “is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it.”

In the end, of course, we get the government we vote for. Given that information gets filtered out through the Axis of Indoctrination — Hollywood, academia, and media — how much hope is there that people will wake up?

The smart, the well-connected, and the well-educated will be fine. Their previously depressed stock portfolios have returned, as companies learn to do more with fewer workers. High-end real estate is back, and the top 1 percent has regained the wealth lost during the recession — and then some.

The very people whom the left says it cares about are hurting. But rest assured, these elites care about them. They just have a strange way of showing it.

 

 

The Final Arbiters

Thomas Jefferson: When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated …. — Letter to C. Hammond, July 1821

The Health and Human Services Department earlier this year exposed just how vast the government’s data collection efforts will be on millions of Americans as a result of ObamaCare.

Big Brother will be watching you! And he will know everything…. (and the Supreme Court is the final arbiter -see later farther down)

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., asked HHS to provide “a complete list of agencies that will interact with the Federal Data Services Hub.” The Hub is a central feature of ObamaCare, since it will be used by the new insurance exchanges to determine eligibility for benefits, exemptions from the federal mandate, and how much to grant in federal insurance subsidies.

In response, the HHS said the ObamaCare data hub will “interact” with seven other federal agencies: Social Security Administration, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Veterans Administration, Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Defense and — believe it or not — the Peace Corps. Plus the Hub will plug into state Medicaid databases.

And what sort of data will be “routed through” the Hub? Social Security numbers, income, family size, citizenship and immigration status, incarceration status, and enrollment status in other health plans, according to the HHS.

“The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic,” noted Stephen Parente, a University of Minnesota finance professor.

Not to worry, says the Obama administration. “The hub will not store consumer information, but will securely transmit data between state and federal systems to verify consumer application information,” it claimed in an online fact sheet .

And no one will steal or hack anything. 🙂 No Wiki-Snowden… 🙂

But a regulatory notice filed by the administration in February tells a different story.

That filing describes a new “system of records” that will store names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, taxpayer status, gender, ethnicity, email addresses, telephone numbers on the millions of people expected to apply for coverage at the ObamaCare exchanges, as well as “tax return information from the IRS, income information from the Social Security Administration, and financial information from other third-party sources.”

They will also store data from businesses buying coverage through an exchange, including a “list of qualified employees and their tax ID numbers,” and keep it all on file for 10 years.

In addition, the filing says the federal government can disclose this information “without the consent of the individual” to a wide range of people, including “agency contractors, consultants, or grantees” who “need to have access to the records” to help run ObamaCare, as well as law enforcement officials to “investigate potential fraud.”

Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., complained that just months before ObamaCare officially starts, the Obama administration still hasn’t answered “even the most basic questions about the Data Hub,” such as who will have access to what information, or what training and clearances will be required.

Beyond these concerns is the government’s rather sorry record in protecting confidential information.

Late last year, for example, a hacker was able to gain access to a South Carolina database that contained Social Security numbers and bank account data on 3.6 million people.

A Government Accountability Office report found that weaknesses in IRS security systems “continue to jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the financial and sensitive taxpayer information.”

A separate inspector general audit found that the IRS inadvertently disclosed information on thousands of taxpayers between 2009 and 2010. In 2011, the Social Security Administration accidentally released names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of Americans.

If these government agencies can’t protect data kept on their own servers, how much more vulnerable will these databases be when they’re constantly getting tapped by the ObamaCare Data Hub?

In any case, creating even richer and more comprehensive databases on Americans will create a powerful incentive to abuse them among those looking to score political points by revealing private information or criminals who want to steal identities.

A recent CNN poll found that 62% of Americans say “government is so large and powerful that it threatens the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans.”

What will the public think once ObamaCare and its vast data machine is in full force? (IBD)

More likely, what will they be allowed to think?

The Imperial Judiciary

A House, Senate and president together defending traditional marriage is ruled unconstitutional. Can a Roe v. Wade-like “right” to same-sex marriage — pulverizing religious liberty — be far behind?

Under ObamaCare, the Obama administration is already trying to force religious institutions to violate their precepts and fund abortions, or be found in violation of law. There is little, if any, distance between that kind of disregard for religious freedom and forcing churches to marry same-sex couples — a new kind of “shotgun wedding” for the 21st century.

That is where the imperial judiciary quite clearly intends to take us, running over anything standing in the way. As Justice Scalia’s scathing dissent in Wednesday’s 5-to-4 U.S. v. Windsor ruling observes: “In the majority’s telling, this story is black-and-white: Hate your neighbor or come along with us.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy — Ronald Reagan’s biggest, longest-lasting mistake — joined with the high court’s four liberals, charging in his decision that large majorities of both houses of Congress, not to mention President Bill Clinton, in 1996 chose “to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage” today.

The court declared Congress “cannot deny the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” It takes the judicial elite to construe the Bill of Rights’ safeguard against being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” as a license to keep elected officials from acting to protect man’s oldest institution from being revolutionized.

As Scalia noted, the court was “eager — hungry — to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case” — so much so that it, unprecedentedly, took on a case in which the five justices actually “agree that the court below got it right.”

The result is “a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere ‘primary’ in its role.”

“The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control” Judget Bork 1996 (!)

Thomas Jefferson: If [as the Federalists say] “the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government,” … , then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de so. … The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they may please. It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law … — Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Nov. 1819

Thomas Jefferson: You seem to consider the judges the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges … and their power [are] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and are not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves … . When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from that is quite dangerous enough. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves. …. — Letter to Mr. Jarvis, Sept, 1820

“The Teahouse of the August Moon”. Glenn Ford plays an American officer attempting to explain democracy to the Japanese after World War II. He says, “democracy is where the people have the right to make the wrong decisions.” The statement is the essence of democracy. If elected officials make the wrong decision on behalf of the people voters can rectify the situation by electing replacement officials to make the right decisions. If non-elected officials make the wrong decisions the people have no recourse other than overthrowing the government.

People don’t become infallible just because they hold a high government office even if they are absolute monarchs who have supposedly been chosen by their deities to run the government. Those of us who are familiar with the history of the Supreme Court known that it is extremely fallible. The Supreme Court has made some extremely bad decisions, particularly.when it has gotten involved in social issues with decisions involving social theories rather than law.

The decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford is easily the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court. The Court attempted to use the case to deal with the divisive social issue of slavery. Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling inflamed northern public opinion against slavery which many northerners regarded as immoral. The decision insured that slavery would be a major issue in the 1860 presidential election. The decision didn’t cause the Civil War, but provided the catalyst to turn the controversy over slavery and broader economic issues into a war.

The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision is the Court’s second worst decision. The Court’s acceptance of the questionable social concept of “separate but equal” condemned generations of black southerners to mistreatment including rape and murder. The Court refused to admit that “separate but equal” was nonsense until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

“Separate but equal’ wasn’t the only nonsense theory the Court accepted in the late 19th Century. The Court prevented state government from protecting workers from exploitive employers by accepting a nonsense theory called “freedom of contract”. Under this theory, government protection of workers supposedly prevented their “free” ability to contract with employers. The Court ignored the fact that workers weren’t in a position to negotiate. They had to accept bad working conditions or risk possible starvation. (Free Republic)

So with the trend of making the Supreme Court the final arbiter of everything makes them supremely powerful and that is a very dangerous game.

After all, the people Boo-ing and Hissing the Supreme Court the day before on the Voting Rights Acts are the ones dancing in the street and celebrating the next day!

And Vice  Versa.

If that doesn’t mean the whole thing is unstable what does?

 

 

Higher and Deeper

Ann Coulter: The IRS leaked the donor list of The National Organization for Marriage to their political opponents, the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. This is not idle speculation: The documents had an internal IRS stamp on them. The list of names was then published on a number of liberal websites and NOW’s donors were harassed.

The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer meetings.

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. — who was ordered by the D.C. Circuit Court to pay more than $1 million to John Boehner in 2008 for the sleazy maneuver of publishing an illegally taped private conversation — blamed the conservative groups themselves. “Each of your groups was highly political,” he lectured them, noting that they wouldn’t have been asked any questions if they hadn’t requested tax-exempt status.

Even a fair-minded person — not to be confused with Jim McDermott — might hear about the IRS’s harassment of groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “liberty” in their names and think: “How do we know the IRS wasn’t equally hard on left-wing groups?”

What might be more helpful than clips of IRS staff line-dancing would be for reporters, say at Fox News, to mention a few examples of the wildly partisan left-wing groups that the IRS has certified as tax-exempt.

Among the many left-wing groups with tax-exempt status are:

– ACORN (now renamed as other organizations, but all still tax-exempt), “community organizers” who engage in profanity-laced protests at private homes, dump garbage in front of public buildings and disrupt bankers’ dinners in order to get more people on welfare in order to destroy the capitalist system and incite revolution;

– Occupy Wall Street, which — in its first month alone — was responsible for more than a dozen sexual assaults; at least half a dozen deaths by overdose, suicide or murder; and millions of dollars in property damage;

– Media Matters for America, a media “watchdog” group that has never noticed one iota of pro-Obama bias in the media;

– Moveon.org, which ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler under its 501(c)(4) arm;

– The Center for American Progress, an auxiliary of the Democratic National Committee funded by George Soros and staffed by former Clinton and Obama aides to promote the Democratic agenda;

– The Tides Foundation, which funnels money to communist and terrorist-supporting organizations;

– The Ford Foundation, which has never found a criminal law that isn’t “racist.”

These groups are regarded by the IRS as nonpartisan community groups, merely educational, while dozens of patriotic, constitutional, Christian or tea party groups are still waiting for their tax exemptions.

That’s to say nothing of Planned Parenthood, PBS and innumerable other Democratic front-groups that not only have tax exemptions, but get direct funding from the government.

Or unions…

By contrast, the conservative groups being raked over the coals by the IRS actually were nonpartisan. The tea party forced sitting Republican senators off the ticket in Alaska and Indiana, and toppled “establishment” Republicans in Utah, Delaware, Nevada, Florida and Texas. Far from being a secretly pro-Republican group, the tea party has been a nightmare for Republicans.

Show me one instance where the Center for American Progress was more of a problem for Democrats than Republicans.

It is obviously in the interest of the left to show us liberal groups also harassed by the IRS, so it’s striking that they haven’t been able to produce one yet.

Instead, they hearken back to the Bush years to claim that the IRS once audited the NAACP, which is treated as ipso facto political harassment.

First of all, the NAACP doesn’t exactly have a sterling record of rectitude when it comes to organization funds. In the 1990s, the NAACP used tax-exempt contributions to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars of hush money to the mistress of then-executive director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. — as detailed in enraged columns by Carl Rowan at the time.

Find a tea party organization that’s done that, and we’ll understand the IRS conducting a three-year proctology exam on the group.

Second, the Bush-era audit of the NAACP was prompted by a blindingly partisan speech given by NAACP chairman Julian Bond at an organization meeting in Philadelphia in July 2004. Bond attacked a slew of elected Republicans by name, denouncing the entire party as one whose “idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side.”

That’s what we call “black-letter law” on improper activity for a tax-exempt organization. As a 501(c)(3) group, the NAACP is prohibited from supporting or opposing any candidate for elective office.

The NAACP responded to the IRS’s letter by screaming from the rooftops that it was political payback. Consequently, Bush’s IRS commissioner requested that Treasury’s inspector general investigate the IRS’s tax-exempt unit for political bias. The IG’s report found no politics in the NAACP audit and — to the contrary — that more “pro-Republican” groups (18) than “pro-Democratic” groups (12) had been audited.

Nonetheless, the NAACP simply refused to cooperate with the IRS. There was nothing the Bush administration could do. No Republican was going to allow the NAACP’s tax-exempt status to be revoked on its watch. Two years later, the IRS simply issued a letter clearing the group.

Today, the NAACP openly engages in partisan activity, such as a current weeks-long protest of Republican legislators in North Carolina.

Finally, a tip to the Democrats trying to defend the IRS: As a devoted true-crime TV viewer, I can tell you that when you’re caught red-handed, it’s never a good defense to say, “Why would I be so stupid to kill my wife right after taking out a huge life insurance policy on her?”

You were that stupid and you got caught.

But don’t worry, it wasn’t their fault! 🙂

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.” Obama added that the National Security agents behind the surveillance programs “cherish our Constitution…You can shout Big Brother or program run amok, but if you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance,” he explained.

“You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he continued. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”  I agree, but candidate Obama was a persistent critic of his predecessor’s wrestling match between security and liberty, frequently labeling it a “false choice.”  Now he’s fully adopted the “choice” paradigm, and is defending it vigorously.- Obama. (Townhall)

That was then this is now. 🙂

One month ago yesterday, President Obama admonished Ohio State graduates to “reject” the “cynical” voices who warn of government tyranny.

Oh, the irony of it all…

Two weeks ago, the president gave a “major address” about overhauling US counter-terrorism policies.  He outlined a more restrained and targeted law-and-order style approach, arguing that the global war on terrorism is effectively over, and that “large-scale” attacks on the homeland are a thing of the past.  He spoke of the diminished “scale” of threats, and why our posture should adjust accordingly. 

Virtually this exact same practice occurred under the Bush administration, as exposed by USA Today in 2006.  Many Republicans defended it.  Many Democrats angrily denounced it.  Flashback to Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont:  ”Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaeda? These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything … Where does it stop?  Shame on us for being so far behind and being so willing to rubber stamp anything this administration does,” he thundered. 

The NSA revelation feeds a potent and growing sense among Americans that an overbearing, unaccountable, ever-growing, over-powerful federal government is out of control.  They’re manipulating intelligence to cover-up the full story on a deadly terrorist attack.  They’re targeting one side of the political spectrum for abuse and harassment.  They’re secretly spying on journalists.  They’re spending our money on wildly expensive parties for themselves and losing the receipts.  And they’re secretly culling our phone records by the millions, day in and day out.  No one has answers.  No one takes responsibility.  No one knows anything.  No one is punished.  This is toxic. (Guy Benson)

Now the EPA joins in…

A bipartisan group of senators is calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to answer for leaking the personal data of about 80,000 farmers and ranchers to left-wing environmental groups.

“The EPA’s disclosure of personal information is not the first time sensitive data has been leaked to outside organizations under the Obama administration,” said South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune.

Thune joined a bipartisan group of senators in sending a letter to acting EPA administrator Bob Perciasepe, asking the agency to answer for its actions.

In April, the EPA admitted to leaking farmers and ranchers’ personal data to environmentalists, and has since redacted some of the sensitive records and asked environmental groups to return the released documents to the agency.

Senators slammed the agency, sending a letter in April criticizing the agency’s actions and questioning whether or not the EPA had violated the Privacy Act. However, Thune said the EPA has yet to respond to issues raised in the first letter he and other senators sent to the agency.

“These leaks provide further evidence of the growing credibility gap between the Obama administration and the American public,” Thune added. “This troubling pattern of unauthorized release of government-obtained personal information is unacceptable political intimidation. Americans deserve transparency and accountability.”

The EPA leaked personal data — including names, personal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses — as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request made by the groups Earth Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pew Charitable Trust. According to Fox News, Pew returned the information to the EPA.

However, the EPA said that much of the information was already publicly available on state databases, on federal and state permits, or is required to be released by federal and state law. The agency still redacted information from 10 of the 29 states that had personal data.

“It is inexcusable for the EPA to release the personal information of American families and then call for it back, knowing full well that the erroneously released information will never be fully returned,” said Thune in a statement to FoxNews.com. (DC)

Many Americans, Fourier writes, now view the federal government as “intrusive, Orwellian, incompetent, corrupt, heartless, secretive, and not to be trusted.”  Indeed. The events of the last month have been a nonstop real-time advertisement in favor of limited, smarter, more restrained federal power.

But that would be against the Liberal need for authoritarianism.

So we’ll just get more of it, spying, and BS spin about it happening.

The Prism of Big Brother

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5dmf5xZJu0

The scale of America’s surveillance state was laid bare on Thursday as senior politicians revealed that the US counter-terrorism effort had swept up swaths of personal data from the phone calls of millions of citizens for years.

After the revelation by the Guardian of a sweeping secret court order that authorised the FBI to seize all call records from a subsidiary of Verizon, the Obama administration sought to defuse mounting anger over what critics described as the broadest surveillance ruling ever issued.

A White House spokesman said that laws governing such orders “are something that have been in place for a number of years now” and were vital for protecting national security. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the Verizon court order had been in place for seven years. “People want the homeland kept safe,” Feinstein said.

BUT Obama himself prior to  his re-coronation declared the War on Terror won.

“The war on terror is over,” a senior official in the State Department official tells the National Journal. “Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.”

This new outlook has, in the words of the National Journal, come from a belief among administration officials that “It is no longer the case, in other words, that every Islamist is seen as a potential accessory to terrorists.”

“Now that we have killed most of al Qaida,” the source said, “now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.”

So who’s he keeping it “safe” from then? 🙂

The White House sought to defend what it called “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats”. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Fisa orders were used to “support important and highly sensitive intelligence collection operations” on which members of Congress were fully briefed.

“The intelligence community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the intelligence community in both houses of Congress,” Earnest said.

Or are we talking about Janet Napolitano’s “domestic Terrorists”, aka The Tea Party. 🙂

History: http://governmentagainstthepeople.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/senator-barack-obama-on-illegal-domestic-surveillance/

“This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises …”

Barack Obama, May 23

Nice thought. But much as Obama would like to close his eyes, click his heels three times and declare the war on terror over, war is a two-way street.

That’s what history advises: Two sides to fight it, two to end it. By surrender (World War II), by armistice (Korea and Vietnam) or when the enemy simply disappears from the field (the Cold War).

Obama says enough is enough. He doesn’t want us on “a perpetual wartime footing.” Well, the Cold War lasted 45 years. The war on terror, 12 so far. By Obama’s calculus, we should have declared the Cold War over in 1958 and left Western Europe, our Pacific allies, the entire free world to fend for itself – and consigned Eastern Europe to endless darkness. (Charles Krauthammer)

With Al Qaeda’s core now “on the path to defeat,” he argued, the nation must adapt.

But “adapt” to what?

Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple.

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Which, of course, make all of this George Bush’s fault! He;s the one responsible for invading your every waking moment technologically! Not Big Brother Obama and his cronies! 🙂

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

In a statement, Google said: “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.”

Several senior tech executives insisted that they had no knowledge of PRISM or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a program. “If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge,” one said.

An Apple spokesman said it had “never heard” of PRISM.

It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.

Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes. (WP)

The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012.

Which according to the left makes all of this spying Bush’s fault! 🙂

The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.

It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.

Disclosure of the PRISM program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers.

The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

Some of the world’s largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan “Your privacy is our priority” – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks. (UK Guardian)

In a statement issue late Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats. The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

But the War on Terror was won, so who are you afraid of? 🙂

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

So, a Note to the NSA computer that is reading my blog and listening to my phone: I HOPE YOU CHOKE ON IT M*F*!

Thank you.

 

Fear & Loathing

Politically Correct Left Update:

The principal of a Brooklyn, N.Y. elementary school has reportedly pulled the song “God Bless the USA” from a kindergarten graduation ceremony so as not to offend other cultures, according to the New York Post.

The kindergartners had spent several months learning the song, which was set to close out the program, until P.S. 90 principal Greta Hawkins came into a recent rehearsal and told teachers to scrap it.

“We don’t want to offend other cultures,” teachers quoted Hawkins as saying, according to the Post.

Teachers and parents were reportedly shocked by Hawkins’ decision, particularly because the Lee Greenwood song has been sung at school events in the past — and because a rendition of Justin Bieber’s song “Baby” was kept in the program.

Kindergarten mother Luz Lozada told the Post “God Bless the USA” got a standing ovation at last year’s fifth-grade graduation, and that the school’s immigrant parents, including those from Pakistan, Mexico and Ecuador, “love it.”

But New York’s Department of Education gave the Post a different reason for pulling the song: Hawkins thought the lyrics were “too grown up” for 5-year-olds to sing — though Bieber’s were apparently fine.

According to the Post, the Education Department is supporting Hawkins’ decision.

“The lyrics are not age-appropriate,” spokeswoman Jessica Scaperotti said.

It’s not the first time “God Bless the USA” has attracted controversy: In April, a Massachusetts elementary school made headlines after students were taught to sing “We love the U.S.A.“ instead of ”God bless” before ultimately backing down. (The Blaze)

Another one: Last year, a sixth-grader from Fremont, Nebraska, was banned from wearing her rosary-like necklace at school. Now, months later, another religious flap is unfolding in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, where 15-year-old Jake Balthazor has been told that he cannot wear the rosary he purchased to support his cancer-stricken grandmother. In both instances, school officials’ fears that the necklaces would indicate gang membership were cited as the basis for the bans.

The school district’s policy forbids any “apparel, jewelry, accessories or matter of grooming which by virtue of its color arrangement, trademark or any other attribute denotes membership in an organized gang,” Mary Olson, director of communication for the Anoka-Hennepin School District, told FoxNews.com.

Meaning they can capriciously ban anything at anytime with this as the excuse whether it’s true or not.

School Liaison Officer: “I’m not Catholic, but I have been educated by friends that are and the rosary is not appropriate to use as jewelry or dress.”

Well, neither is the offender apparently. But don’t let lame excuses get in the way of Political Correctness.

What we really need is for Gangs to buy up the Obama T-shirts and use the “O” Logo as a gang sign. Then watch the little twerps squirm.

********

Self-Avowed Communist and Former Obama “Czar” Van Jones at annual Looney Left Convention, Netroots: “If the Tea Party is allowed to score a trifecta, their ideas already are corrupting the Supreme Court, you see that with Scalia’s antics, they already have half of the Congress. If they get the rest…and the White House…if the Tea Party governs America — if this time next year, you are living in a government run by the Tea Party — let me suggest to you that they might use power a little bit differently than we did. When they get power, they use it to decimate us…”

Decimating Communists and Orwellian Thought Police doesn’t sound so bad. 🙂

Jones also charged the Tea Party with “decapitating” unions. In the end, he went on to encourage progressives to push their values and to set their sights on December, when important budget issues will be under consideration.

That would Taxmageddon that occurs in January 2013. After all, the only solution is to raise Taxes (aka “revenues”). Cutting Spending is now apparently “decapitation”.

“The last election was a hope election,” he said. “This one might be a fear election. They’re scared of us. We should be terrified of them. When they get power they use it to decimate us. Look at what they did in the state houses. They didn’t run on destroying the unions. … They decapitated our unions.”

Van Jones, on ABC today, said the GOP 1) is rooting for failure and pain for America so they can capitalize on it, and 2) the GOP won’t pass their own bills to help America right now. (Townhall)

And if we want to talk about parties not passing their own bills, what about the Obama budget, which failed in the Democrat Senate two years running.

Remember, Republicans passing bills that the Democrats don’t like is “obstructing” the process. 🙂

“Obama’s a lifeguard trying to help people drowning. These guys are sitting back on the rock, hoping more people drown.“- Van Jones

Hope and Change, my friends. New Tone. Civility. Hope and Change. Forward… 🙂

The al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia has mocked the new $33 million bounty on its top leaders heads by offering its own bounty for President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – 10 camels for Obama and 20 chickens for Clinton.

“Anyone who helps the Mujahideen find the whereabouts of Obama and Hillary Clinton will be rewarded with 10 Camels to the information leading to Obama and 10 hens and 10 cocks for Hillary,” said senior Shabaab commander Fuad Mohamed Khalaf in a statement reported on numerous websites.

Earlier this week, the U.S. offered a total of $33 million through the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program for information leading to the capture of seven different Shabaab leaders, including Khalaf. (KFYI)

What to do with those Camels. Show them off on Google…

Spy planes able to photograph sunbathers in their back gardens are being deployed by Google and Apple.

The U.S. technology giants are racing to produce aerial maps so detailed they can show up objects just four inches wide.

But campaigners say the technology is a sinister development that brings the surveillance society a step closer.

Google admits it has already sent planes over cities while Apple has acquired a firm using spy-in-the-sky technology that has been tested on at least 20 locations, including London.

Apple’s military-grade cameras are understood to be so powerful they could potentially see into homes through skylights and windows. The technology is similar to that used by intelligence agencies in identifying terrorist targets in Afghanistan.

Drone attack on the rosary-wearing gang member… 🙂

Tea Party “terrorists” in sight….

Google will use its spy planes to help create 3D maps with much more detail than its satellite-derived Google Earth images.

Apple hopes its rumoured mapping service for the iPhone and iPad will overtake the hugely popular Google Maps

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, warned that privacy risked being sacrificed in a commercial ‘race to the bottom’.

‘The next generation of maps is taking us over the garden fence,’ he warned. ‘You won’t be able to sunbathe in your garden without worrying about an Apple or Google plane buzzing overhead taking pictures.’

He said householders should be asked for their consent before images of their homes go online. Apple is expected to unveil its new mapping applications for its iPhone and other devices today – along with privacy safeguards. Its 3D maps will reportedly show for the first time the sides of tall buildings, such as the Big Ben clock tower.

Google expects by the end of the year to have 3D coverage of towns and cities with a combined population of 300million. It has not revealed any locations so far.

Current 3D mapping technology relies on aerial images taken at a much lower resolution than the technology Apple is thought to be using. This means that when users ‘zoom in’, details tend to be lost because of the poor image quality.

Google ran into trouble when it emerged that its Street View cars, which gathered ground-level panoramic photographs for Google Maps, had also harvested personal data from household wifi networks.

Emails, text messages, photographs and documents were taken from unsecured wifi networks all around Britain.

MILITARY TECHNOLOGY

Apple’s spy planes are believed to be equipped with technology developed by defence agencies to guide missile strikes.

Each plane is equipped with multiple cameras taking high-resolution photographs of buildings and landmarks from every possible angle, which are then compiled to make three-dimensional images.

The military-grade images are taken at a height of around 1,600ft, meaning people below are very unlikely to realise they are being photographed.

The cameras can be installed on planes, helicopters or even unmanned drones, although there are safety restrictions about the use of the latter in Britain.

A small plane carrying the cameras can photograph up to 100 square kilometres (38.6 square miles) every hour.

 

 

Google claimed it was a mistake even though a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the extra information was being captured. Around one in four home networks is thought to be unsecured because they lack password protection.

Little has been revealed about the technology involved in the spy planes used to capture the aerial images.

But they are thought to be able to photograph around 40 square miles every hour, suggesting they would be flying too quickly and at too great a height to access domestic wifi networks.
Like Google Maps, the resulting images would not be streamed live to computers but would provide a snapshot image of the moment the camera passed by.

Google pixellates faces and car number plates but faced criticism after its service showed one recognisable man leaving a sex shop and another being sick in the street.

Amie Stepanovich, of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in America, said she believed Apple and Google would be forced to blur out homes in the same way Street View pixellates faces.

She said: ‘With satellite images, privacy is built in because you can’t zoom down into a garden. Homeowners need to be asked to opt in to show their property in high definition – otherwise it should be blurred out.’

Apple has previously used Google for its mapping services but last year it emerged it had bought C3 Technologies, a 3D mapping company that uses technology developed by Saab AB, the aerospace and defence company.

At the time C3 had already mapped 20 cities and it is believed to have added more with Apple’s backing. Its photographs have been shot from 1,600ft and one C3 executive described it as ‘Google on steroids’.

There are already 3D maps available online for most big city centres, but the images are often low resolution, meaning they are of little use for navigation and users cannot zoom in on detail.
Critics have argued that Apple and Google will face a backlash if they offer detailed 3D mapping of residential areas in suburbs and rural locations. (UK Daily Mail)

So Smile for the Candid Camera!

NOT SPECIAL

For those of you who have long since gotten sick of the trend among education experts toward “self esteem” rather than actual learning, this story will be extremely cathartic.

Wellesley High School teacher David McCullough, Jr. (son of historian David McCullough) had apparently had enough of feeding blithering platitudes to his students and decided to tell the truth. The result sparked controversy among the parents, who didn’t like hearing their children accused of being cosseted and pampered little brats who believed they were special for no reason. But sometimes the truth hurts. Read the greatest hits below:You are not special.  You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped.  Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again.  You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored.  You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie.  Yes, you have.  And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs.  Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet.  Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman!  [Editor’s upgrade: Or The Swellesley Report!] And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…

But do not get the idea you’re anything special.  Because you’re not.[…]

“But, Dave,” you cry, “Walt Whitman tells me I’m my own version of perfection!  Epictetus tells me I have the spark of Zeus!”  And I don’t disagree.  So that makes 6.8 billion examples of perfection, 6.8 billion sparks of Zeus.  You see, if everyone is special, then no one is.  If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.  In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another-which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality – we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.  We have come to see them as the point – and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.  No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it…  Now it’s “So what does this get me?”  As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans.  It’s an epidemic – and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune… one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School… where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement.  And I hope you caught me when I said “one of the best.”  I said “one of the best” so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition.  But the phrase defies logic.  By definition there can be only one best.  You‘re it or you’re not. (The Blaze)

You mean life isn’t “fair” and I’m “entitled”? Said it ain’t so! 🙂

 

 

They are Watching You

“It’s all about the data this year and Obama has that. When a race is as close as this one promises to be, any small advantage could absolutely make the difference,” says Andrew Rasiej, a technology strategist and publisher of TechPresident. “More and more accurate data means more insight, more money, more message distribution, and more votes.”

“They are way ahead of Romney micro-targeting and it’s a level of precision we haven’t seen before,” says Darrell M. West, a leading scholar on technology innovation at the Brookings Institution. “[The Obama campaign has] been able to work on it under the radar during the Republican primary season.”

“More than 40 percent of all our donors are new, and a lot of them are coming in because of things like this,” says Messina. “Call up our website and try to donate on your phone and then do Romney’s. … Those things are important, because people are busy and people want to help us and they think about — ‘Oh, yeah, I saw the president on TV. I want to give them money. How hard is it?’ ”

Adds Nicco Mele, a Harvard professor and social media guru: “The fabric of our public and political space is shifting. If the Obama campaign can combine its data efforts with the way people now live their lives online, a new kind of political engagement — and political persuasion — is possible.” (Politico)

*******

Washington Post: A federal department ruled last week that the Forest Service violated a Spanish-speaking woman’s civil rights by calling the Border Patrol to help translate during a routine stop, saying it was “humiliating” to Hispanics and an illicit backdoor way to capture more illegal immigrants.

The ruling by the Agriculture Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights could change policies nationwide as law enforcement agencies grapple with how far they can go in trying to help the Border Patrol while not running afoul of racial profiling standards.

Assistant Secretary Joe Leonard Jr. said calling the Border Patrol automatically “escalates” encounters between Hispanics and law enforcement. He ruled that the Forest Service cannot routinely summon the Border Patrol for assistance and said the agency now must document suspected racial profiling nationwide.

“Given the increased risk of being questioned about immigration status during an interaction with [Border Patrol], the policy of using BP for interpretation assistance is problematic in all situations because it places a burden on [limited English proficient] individuals that non-LEP individuals do not experience,” Mr. Leonard ruled.

The case stems from a 2011 incident in Olympic National Forest in Washington in which a Forest Service officer encountered a Hispanic couple who he said appeared to be illegally harvesting plants on the federal lands.

The couple didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak fluent Spanish and, anticipating that situation, he called the Border Patrol for backup and translating.

But when a Border Patrol agent arrived, the couple fled. The woman was apprehended, but the man jumped into a river to try to escape and drowned. The Border Patrol took the woman into custody but released her several days later, reportedly on humanitarian grounds.

The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project complained to the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, and last week’s ruling was the result.

Matt Adams, legal director of the project, said the Border Patrol has been expanding its reach in the Northwest and that has meant more encounters well away from the border.

“They’ve got nothing to do out there as far as their traditional mission, that is enforcing people coming through the border. So in order to justify those expanded numbers, they utilize these other tactics,” Mr. Adams said. “At the end of the day, they can drag in bigger numbers, but it’s not focused on the border.”

His group is challenging other federal agencies’ use of the Border Patrol for translation services, and has filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act seeking logs for how often agents are used for translation.

Last week’s ruling relies in part on an executive order issued during the Clinton administration that says language is interchangeable with national origin, which is protected by federal law.

Groups that push for English-language policies in the U.S. called the new ruling illegal and said the government appeared to be granting special language rights to illegal immigrants.

“The ACLU and illegal alien rights groups are well aware that American courts have never upheld their argument that language and national origin are equal, so they battle out these disputes in private between the agencies in order to come to a settlement where both the courts and the taxpayers are absent from the table,” said Suzanne Bibby, director of government relations for ProEnglish. “This is their new strategy because they know they will lose in the courts.”

A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, said the agency is reviewing the ruling but is committed to civil rights.

The union that represents Forest Service employees didn’t return a call seeking comment.

In the proceedings, the Forest Service fought on behalf of its officer. It pointed to an operational memo with the Border Patrol that said they are allowed to back up each other. Since Forest Service employees generally are not trained in Spanish, Border Patrol agents are particularly helpful in backing up encounters with Hispanics, the agency said.

Mr. Leonard’s 40-page ruling underscored deep mutual distrust on both sides in the town of Forks, in northwestern Washington.

Town residents who told the review board that the Forest Service officer involved in the 2011 stop was known for harassing Hispanics and for working with the Border Patrol.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service officer said he felt like the Hispanic community had been “tracing” his movements.

Mr. Leonard was skeptical of the officer’s reasoning and said he found the complaints from the community more convincing.

The ruling doesn’t reveal the names of those involved.

Underpinning the ruling were some key legal arguments: First, that the complainant was entitled to visit the national forest; second, that a law enforcement stop affects the availability of the service provided by the national forest; and third, that the Forest Service must take steps to protect those with limited English, including making them not feel unduly threatened.

“A policy that causes individuals to actually flee from the service being provided does not provide meaningful access,” Mr. Leonard wrote.

************

Judge Andrew Napolitano:

…Nevertheless, what Jeffersonians are among us today? When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? Jefferson understood that when the government assaults our privacy and dignity, it is the moral equivalent of violence against us. Folks who hear about this, who either laugh or groan, cannot find it humorous or boring that their every move will be monitored and photographed by the government.

Don’t believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the “recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function” in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel insidetheUnitedStates and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them “to collect information about U.S. persons.”

It gets worse. If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or “military commander” for permission to conduct a physical search of the private property that intrigues them. Any “incidentally acquired information” can be retained or turned over to local law enforcement. What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the United States?

The quoted phrases above are extracted from a now-public 30-page memorandum issued by President Obama’s secretary of the Air Force on April 23. The purpose of the memorandum is stated as “balancing … obtaining intelligence information … and protecting individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.” Note the primacy of intelligence-gathering over protection of freedom, and note the peculiar use of the word “balancing.”

When liberty and safety clash, do we really expect the government to balance those values? Of course not. The government cannot be trusted to restrain itself in the face of individual choices to pursue happiness. That’s why we have a Constitution and a life-tenured judiciary: to protect the minority from the liberty-stealing impulses of the majority. And that’s why the Air Force memo has its priorities reversed – intelligence-gathering first, protecting freedom second – and the mechanism of reconciling the two – balancing them – constitutionally incorrect.

Everyone who works for the government swears to uphold the Constitution. It was written to define and restrain the government. According to the Declaration of Independence, the government’s powers come from the consent of the governed. The government in America was not created by a powerful king reluctantly granting liberty to his subjects. It was created by free people willingly granting limited power to their government – and retaining that which they did not delegate.

The Declaration also defines our liberties as coming from our Creator, as integral to our humanity and inseparable from us, unless we give them up by violating someone else’s liberties. Hence, the Jeffersonian and constitutional beef with the word “balancing” when it comes to government power versus individual liberty.

The Judeo-Christian and constitutionally mandated relationship between government power and individual liberty is not balance. It is bias – a bias in favor of liberty. All presumptions should favor the natural rights of individuals, not the delegated and seized powers of the government. Individual liberty, not government power, is the default position because persons are immortal and created in God’s image, and governments are temporary and based on force.

Hence my outrage at the coming use of drones – some as small as golf balls – to watch us, listen to us and record us. Did you consent to the government having that power? Did you consent to the American military spying on Americans in America? I don’t know a single person who has, but I know only a few who are complaining.

If we remain silent when our popularly elected government violates the laws it has sworn to uphold and steals the freedoms we elected it to protect, we will have only ourselves to blame when Big Brother is everywhere. Somehow, I doubt my father’s generation fought the Nazis in World War II only to permit a totalitarian government to flourish here.

Is President Obama prepared to defend this? Is Mitt Romney prepared to challenge it? Are you prepared for its consequences?

 

The Future’s So Bright…

NASA astronaut and “the first mother to fly in space” Dr. Anna Fisher took a veiled shot at President Obamaand his space policies Tuesday during an interview with a local anchor at Dulles International Airport where Discovery was making its last flight before being retired at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The local anchor Kristin Fisher pulled a little boy named Ethan out of the crowd who was dressed up as a NASA pilot and asked him if he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, which he answered in the affirmative.

“Any advice for Ethan, an aspiring astronaut?” she asked her mom.

“Study Russian,” Fisher quipped, to laughter. (Mediaite)

Or Chinese. 🙂

There is truth in comedy.

*************

A bill already passed by the Senate and set to be rubber stamped by the House would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to be fitted with black box data recorders from 2015 onwards.

Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 (known as MAP-21), calls for “Mandatory Event Data Recorders” to be installed in all new automobiles and legislates for civil penalties to be imposed against individuals for failing to do so.

“Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall revise part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, to require, beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder that meets the requirements under that part,” states the bill.

Although the text of legislation states that such data would remain the property of the owner of the vehicle, the government would have the power to access it in a number of circumstances, including by court order, if the owner consents to make it available, and pursuant to an investigation or inspection conducted by the Secretary of Transportation.

Given the innumerable examples of both government and industry illegally using supposedly privacy-protected information to spy on individuals, this represents the slippery slope to total Big Brother surveillance of every American’s transport habits and location data.

The legislation, which has been given the Orwellian title ‘Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act’, sailed through the Senate after being heavily promoted by Democrats Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and is also expected to pass the Republican-controlled House.

Given the fact that the same bill also includes a controversial provision that would empower the IRS to revoke passports of citizens merely accused of owing over $50,000 in back taxes, stripping them of their mobility rights, could the mandatory black boxes or a similar technology be used for the same purpose?

Biometric face-recognition and transdermol sensor technology that prevents an inebriated person from driving a car by disabling the automobile has already been developed, in addition to systems that refuse to allow the vehicle to start if the driver is deemed to be overtired.

The ultimate Big Brother scenario would be a system whereby every driver had to get de facto permission from the state to drive each time they get behind the wheel, once it had been determined from an iris scan that they were good citizens who have paid all their taxes and not misbehaved.

The push to pressure car manufacturers to install black box tracking devices in all new cars has been ongoing for over a decade. In 2006, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration encouraged but did not require automobile manufacturers to install the systems.

However, in February last year NHTSA administrator David Strickland said the government was considering making the technology mandatory in the wake of recalls of millions of Toyota vehicles.

Earlier this year it was reported that the NHTSA would soon formally announce that all new cars would be mandated to have the devices fitted by law, which has now been codified into the MAP-21 bill.

And now 10 years later what is there argument, “it would take 10 years”…Funny how that worked out.

• There would be no production out of [ANWR] for at least 7 years.” -Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.)
• “Oil extracted from [ANWR] would not reach refineries for seven to ten years.” -Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
• “No oil will flow from ANWR…until from 7 to 10 years from now.” -Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
• “Oil exploration in ANWR will not actually start producing oil for as many as 10 years.” -Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
• “Even if we started drilling [in ANWR] tomorrow, the first barrel of crude oil would not make it to the market for at least 10 years.” -Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)

Ten years later, oil and gas production on federal lands is at a nine-year low, a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline costs an average $3.90, and the president is busy blaming “speculators” for high oil prices – a scapegoat that even a former Democratic Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner rejects.

1086 Days later!

What you’re looking at is a view of today’s Senate Budget Committee meeting, at which Chairman Kent Conrad conducted a faux “markup” of his party’s FY 2013 budget resolution.  The near side of the table is where Democrats were supposed to sit.  Granted, this entire exercise was somewhat academic because its resulting product would receive neither a vote in this committee, nor in the Senate at large.  Details!  Throughout much of the session, all 11 Republican members were present to, you know, do their jobs.  Of the 12 committee Democrats, no more than 3 or 4 were in attendance at any given time, according to sources inside the meeting.  “[The Democrats] showed absolutely no interest in discussing our big picture problems or offering solutions,” a GOP budget aide tells Townhall. “Those who were there showed up only to make a brief statement for the record, then took off.  The photo speaks for itself.”  That it does.  In fact, in this particular photo, every single Democrat seat is vacant, except for that of Chairman Conrad.  What to make of this?  On one hand, why bother participating in a total farce?  On the other, these Dems could have at least feigned interest in a requirement of their own public service.  Senate Democrats have effectively renounced all pretense of responsible governance.  They have done so in an attempt to avoid losing their precious majority — the very purpose of which, I thought, was to govern.  We face a debt crisis that threatens to obliterate the America we know and love, yet an entire American political team has willfully and deliberately decided to eschew productive solutions in favor of sitting on the sidelines and shouting insults at their opponents. 

“Give it a rest, Guy,” I can practically hear you saying, “you’ve been beating this dead horse for months.”  Yes.  Guilty as charged.  This is a disgrace, and I’ll keep flogging this story every chance I get — especially as the MSM largely shrugs and offers its preferred party a pass.  Here we have an entire house of Congress intentionally ignoring the law for political gain, as our nation approaches a terrifying solvency rubicon.  Conservatives cannot, and will not, shut up about this.  Parting thoughts:  (1) Since the year 2009, not one single Democrat or Democrat-aligned member of the United States Senate has voted “yes” on any budget.  They’ve refused to present their own ideas, of course, but they’ve also unanimously voted down every last alternative, from both Republicans and their own party’s president.  Think about that.  (2) Here the Democrats on the upper house’s Budget Committee, other than its retiring chairman.  Name ’em and shame ’em:
 

(1) DSCC Chair Patty Murray (D-WA)
(2) Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has at least worked with Paul Ryan on a solid Medicare reform plan.
(3) Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who is in a tough 2012 re-election fight.
(4) Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), who also faces re-election this year.
(5) Sen. Ben Cardin (D- MD)
(6) Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
(7) “Moderate” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
(8) Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
(9) “Moderate” Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK)
(10) Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE)

(11) Last but not least, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who did manage to find the time to blather on behalf of the defeated “Buffett Rule” on the Senate floor this week.  During his speech, Whitehouse all but conceded that the measure serves no practical purpose beyond electoral positioning and “fairness:”

“The Senate Republican Leader has described the bill as yet another proposal from the White House that won’t create a single job or lower the price at the pump by a penny. Well, the Minority Leader is absolutely right that the aim of this bill is not to lower the unemployment rate or the price of gasoline.”
Party of ideas Folks!  (townhall.com)

The Future’s so bright I have to wear Blinders! 🙂

The Audacity of Dishonesty

1. Announcing a massive $26 billion mortgage deal with “abusive” banks, the president blamed everybody for record foreclosures except the party most culpable: government.

Speaking Thursday from the White House, Obama scolded “irresponsible” and “reckless” lenders, who “sold homes to people who couldn’t afford them.”

Yeah, they dragged people into it, held them down and forced them to do it!

And the people came in and demanded it first!

Back in 2003, as the Examiner’s Philip Klein points out, <Barney> Frank said that the government-sponsored entities were not in any sort of crisis. “The more people exaggerate these problems,” Frank told the New York Times, “the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

For the most part, private firms such as Countrywide Financial were issuing “nontraditional” mortgages in order to package them off to Wall Street and make money, not to please Barney Frank. Like most policymakers, Frank didn’t appear to see the housing bubble or looming subprime crisis before it was too late. (WP)

He <Obama> also cited buyers who bought homes bigger than their budgets, and Wall Street bankers who packaged the shaky mortgages and traded them for “profit.”

“It was wrong,” he asserted. And now the nation’s “biggest banks will be required to right these wrongs.”

Obama acts as if the private sector bears all the responsibility for the mortgage mess. But he and his attorney general know it’s merely a scapegoat for the reckless government housing policies they and their ilk drafted and enforced in the run-up to the crisis.

Starting in the mid-1990s — in a historic first — it became federal regulatory policy to force all U.S. lenders to scrap traditional lending standards for home loans on the grounds they were “racially discriminatory.”

President Clinton fretted that blacks and other minorities could not qualify for mortgages at nearly the same rates as whites and Asians. So Clinton codified more “flexible” underwriting standards in a “Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending,” and entered it into the Federal Register.

At the same time, he set up a little-known federal body made up of 10 regulatory agencies — the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending — to enforce the looser standards. It threatened lenders to either ease credit for low-income borrowers or face investigations for lending discrimination and suffer the related bad publicity. It also threatened to deny them expansion plans and access to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“The agencies will not tolerate lending discrimination in any form,” the 20-page document warned financial institutions. The task force enforced these policies throughout the Bush administration.

According to Peter Ferrara, senior fellow at the Carleson Center for Public Policy:

“This overregulation reached the point of forcing lenders to discount bad credit history, no credit history, no savings, lack of steady employment, a high ratio of mortgage obligations to income, undocumented income, and inability to finance down payment and closing costs, while counting unemployment benefits and even welfare as income in qualifying for a mortgage.

“This” he said, “turned into government-sanctioned looting of the banks.”

The Justice Department — along with HUD, which regulated Fannie and Freddie — proved the most aggressive members of the fair-lending task force. Eric Holder, then acting as deputy AG, ordered lenders to actually “target” African-Americans for home mortgages they couldn’t otherwise afford. Obama cheered Holder on as an inner-city community organizer who also pressured banks to ease credit for home borrowers.

In other words, the same two officials now leading the charge to punish “abusive” lenders had egged them on before the crisis.(IBD)

2. The Obama administration is now telling liberals that it is not backing down on its new health-care mandate, even as it coos of compromise to religious groups appalled by it. These messages may seem to be contradictory, but actually the administration has been quite consistent: Nothing it has ever said on this issue has been trustworthy.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has been the leading misleader. The administration, recall, has decided that almost all employers must cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance plans — even if those employers are religious universities, hospitals, and charities that reject those practices.

So she has tried to make the mandate seem more moderate than it is. In USA Today, she writes that “in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith.” Taken at face value, this statement would seem to imply that Notre Dame could escape the mandate if it fired its non-Catholic employees. That policy would be outrageous: What gives the federal government the legitimate authority to tell a religious institution how it should structure its mission? But in fact the administration would make the university jump through several more hoops. It would also have to expel its non-Catholic students. And even these changes would not be enough, since the university would continue to do much more than attempt to inculcate religious beliefs in its students — which is another test the administration requires for the exemption to apply.

Sebelius says that three states have religious exemptions as narrow as the one the federal government has adopted. The notion that the federal government is imposing the model of three very liberal states — New York, Oregon, and Vermont — on the entire country is not comforting. But even in those states, some employers have been able to sidestep the mandates by, for example, organizing their insurance under federal regulation, which until now has not overridden conscience. The new mandate eliminates that escape route.

Joel Hunter, one of Obama’s pet pastors, says “this policy can be nuanced.” (“I have come to bring nuance,” as Matthew 10:34 does not say.) He is wrong. Either the administration will back off, and allow religious organizations to follow their consciences, or it will not. If it chooses the former course, it may still find a way to increase access to contraception — which is not especially scarce, by the way — but it will have to replace its current policy, not just “nuance” it. (NR)

“Nuance” is the new Orwellian phrase for LYING. 🙂

It’s “complicated” 🙂

But the assurances were greeted Tuesday with skepticism from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has been leading the opposition to the new requirement.

“So far, ‘work this thing through’ is just the sugar-coated version of ‘force you to comply,’ ” Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel for the conference, said in an e-mail.

Remember, compromise with a Liberal means that you compromise your principles to do what THEY want you to do.

3. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked to respond to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comment that the lack of a budget creates “uncertainty” which is “negative for growth.”

Carney responded: “I have no opinion; the White House has no opinion on Chairman Bernanke’s assessment of how the Senate ought to do its business.”

1,017 Days and Counting!

4. EPIC <The Electronic Privacy Information Center >director Ginger McCall notes that monitoring what people are saying about government policies goes too far and has a chilling effect on free speech.

“The Department of Homeland Security’s monitoring of political dissent has no legal basis and is contrary to core First Amendment principles,” she said.

“The language in the documents makes it quite clear that they are looking for media reports that are critical of the agency and the U.S. government more broadly,” said McCall. “This is entirely outside of the bounds of the agency’s statutory duties.”

DHS officials have admitted that monitoring of social networks for negative opinion was undertaken by the agency, but claim that the operation was a one off test and was quickly dropped as it did not meet “operational requirements or privacy standards,” which “expressly prohibit reporting on individuals’ First Amendment activities.”

EPIC argues otherwise and has presented evidence that suggests the practice is being held up by the DHS an an example that should be emulated.

“They are completely out of bounds here,” McCall said. “The idea that the government is constantly peering over your shoulder and listening to what you are saying creates a very chilling effect to legitimate dissent.(Info Wars)

5. Mexican cartel suspects targeted in the troubled gun-trafficking probe known as Operation Fast and Furious were actually working as FBI informants at the time, according to a congressional memo that describes the case’s mission as a “failure.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has acknowledged that guns were allowed into the hands of Mexican criminals for more than a year in the hope of catching “big fish.”

The memorandum from staffers with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform says the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration were investigating a drug-trafficking organization and had identified cartel associates a year before the ATF even learned who they were. At some point before the ATF’s Fast and Furious investigation progressed — congressional investigators don’t know when — the cartel members became FBI informants.

“These were the ‘big fish,’ ” says the memo, written on behalf of Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “DEA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had jointly opened a separate investigation targeting these two cartel associates. … Yet, ATF spent the next year engaging in the reckless tactics of Fast and Furious in attempting to identify them.”

According to Issa and Grassley, the cartel suspects, whose names were not released, were regarded by FBI as “national-security assets.” One pleaded guilty to a minor offense. The other was not charged. “Both became FBI informants and are now considered unindictable,” the memo says. “This means that the entire goal of Fast and Furious — to target these two individuals and bring them to justice — was a failure.”

Representatives with the Justice Department and its subagencies declined to comment.

6. Deputy Attorney General James Cole had informed the committee in a letter last week that it would be “impossible” to comply with the document request by Issa’s deadline.

At issue are thousands of pages of internal Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) documents from last year which the Justice Department has provided to the investigating Justice Inspector General, but which the Justice Department initially indicated are not subject to congressional review because of the constitutional separation of powers.

7. Last Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to answer questions about his role in the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. However, instead of answers, Congress got more defiance, more arrogance, and more wasted time with an attorney general who clearly feels no sense of obligation to the American people or our rule of law. …

In a rash attempt to deflect attention away from himself and his own irresponsibility, Holder let Congress know that the Obama administration is still working toward the day when it can reinstate former President Bill Clinton’s so-called “assault weapons” ban. According to Holder:

“This administration has consistently favored the reinstitution of the assault weapons ban. It is something that we think was useful in the past with regard to the reduction that we’ve seen in crime, and certainly would have a positive impact on our relationship and the crime situation in Mexico.”

It’s difficult to follow Holder’s logic here, but it goes something like this …

The Obama administration — particularly Eric Holder’s Justice Department — oversaw an epic scandal whereby our own federal government illegally funneled thousands of firearms into the hands of Mexican drug lords. This contributed to the death of one U.S. Border Patrol agent and hundreds of Mexicans.

Despite being head of the Justice Department and our nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Eric Holder claims he doesn’t know how or why this scandal occurred, or even who under his charge may have authorized it. He also refuses to turn over critical documents to congressional investigators that could help prevent something this tragic and corrupt from ever happening again.

Therefore, Obama and Holder are confident that if they can ban a large number of the legal firearms that law-abiding Americans use every day for self-defense, hunting, and recreational and competitive target shooting, it will help solve Mexico’s crime problem.

Now don’t you feel better… 🙂

Ve Vill Crush You!

The announcement that Americans are set to be bombarded with mandatory government propaganda via their cellphones represents a shocking lurch forward in the Obama administration’s bid to launch a total takeover of all communications as part of a wider move towards controlling the Internet, developing an omnipresent wiretap system, and creating a constant environment of suspicion and distrust by enlisting citizens to spy on each other.

So, what elese can these chips be used for? The government-mandated chips would also help achieve the Department of Transportation’s aim of <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40418794/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/t/govt-evaluating-cell-phone-blocking-tech-cars/>blocking all cellphone use in cars. The chip would allow authorities to prevent use of the phone by measuring the speed you are traveling via GPS technology and shutting down the handset.

The system is also wide open for abuse in more prosaic terms, with some fearing that the messages could include PR talking points and political electioneering

No, Obama is above such crass things! 🙂

And of course, tracking everything you buy and tracking everywhere you go and what you do is nothing to be worried about! 🙂

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face – forever.”– George Orwell

And just to add insult to lethal injury to your freedom:

The government’s Consumer Price Index recently announced that inflation over the last 12 months <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm> has been 2.7 percent

Well, one expert says actual inflation, dollars and cents that consumers have to pay to cover their living expenses, food, clothing, utilities and such – actually are well above 8 percent, not 2.7 percent.

John Williams of Shadowstats.com says that since 1980, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates the Consumer Price Index – in order to account for the substitution of products, improvements in quality and other things.

Recalculating the data without the methodological changes BLS began in 1990 reveals inflation getting worse.

The Producer Price Index increased 0.7 percent last month, which equates to an 8.4 percent annual wholesale inflation in the pipeline for consumers.

Inflation data last month confirms that the cost of living is rising much faster than wages. We are on a trajectory to crush the middle class within five years unless urgent, decisive action is taken now. The traditional safety net of home equity today no longer exists.

And in what society is there only the Rich and the Poor and no actual middle class? Where their are only apparatchiks and everyone else (peasants).

Communism, Socialism, Marxism…. TA DA! 🙂

But don’t worry, Obama is a likeable guy. There is no harm. He’s a good guy at heart…

In search of Hispanic votes and a long-shot immigration overhaul, President Barack Obama on Tuesday stood at the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time since winning the White House and declared it more secure than ever. He mocked Republican lawmakers for blocking immigration over border security alone, saying they won’t be happy until they get a moat with alligators along the border.

“They’ll never be satisfied,” he said.

“Maybe they’ll need a moat,” he said derisively to laughter from the crowd. “Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat.”

I’m for the moat! 🙂

The approach also allowed the president to make clear that it’s Republicans — not him — standing in the way of immigration legislation. As his re-election campaign approaches it’s a message he wants broadcast loud and clear to Latino voters who don’t like his administration’s heavy deportations and feel he never made good on his promise to prioritize immigration legislation during his first year in office.

“I am asking you to add your voices to this,” Obama said. “We need Washington to know that there is a movement for reform gathering strength from coast to coast. That’s how we’ll get this done.”

Politically, Obama sought to have it both ways.

He said he would lead a “constructive and civil debate” on the issue but publicly questioned the motives of Republicans and their ability to keep their word.

And it remained unclear how mocking Republican calls for border security would get Obama any closer to his goal of bipartisan legislation.

Given Republican opposition the bills likely won’t get far, but Obama will try to make certain voters know who to blame.

Divide and Conquer! 🙂  Classic Liberal tactic.

In full campaign mode, he’s been deploying his administrative agencies to do favors for his big contributors, to the detriment of ordinary Americans.

Last week, Obama made the gutsy call to threaten public schools that are asking students for proof of residency. The memorandum warned school districts that it’s illegal to ask students for proof of citizenship or legal residency status.

Obama’s wealthy donors need illegals so they can get cheap nannies, cooks and pool boys.

On the other hand, illegals being paid off the books are not helping Americans find jobs.

According to a May 4, 2011, report from the (liberal) Pew Research Center for the People

& the Press, 76 percent of “hard-pressed Democrats” — defined as “religious, financially

struggling” — agree with the statement: “Immigrants today … are a burden on our country

because they take our jobs, housing and health care.”

As Kausfiles observes, maybe financially struggling Democrats believe immigrants

“take our jobs” because, in fact, they do.

How many illegal servants do Obama’s friends need? Another million? How about 10 million? Then will Obama start enforcing immigration laws? And isn’t it his job to enforce the law, irrespective of whether his campaign contributors need slave labor?  (Ann Coulter)

And he can count on the Ministry Of Truth Media to back him up.

The trip had a more overtly political component too. From El Paso, the president headed to the relatively liberal bastion of Austin to raise money for the Democratic National Committee at two events. A total of about 800 people paid $44 to $35,800 to attend.(Newsmax)

There was the REAL reason! $$$$$$$ Gotta raise that Billion Dollars to buy the election.

After all, it’s really all about HIM.

What are Americans supposed to do to earn money? Obama doesn’t care: Ordinary Americans are irrelevant to the Democrats’ electoral ambitions — they exist only to justify the hiring of more government workers.

The Democrats have now officially abandoned working-class Americans.

Obama is doing what’s in his and his party’s self-interest, rather than concerning himself with the mass of American citizens. He is using his executive authority to reward gays, illegal aliens, do-nothing government employees, far-left union bosses, abortion industry executives and global warming kooks.

Are you on that list of Obama’s friends?

Democrats blithely act as if big labor, pro-illegal-immigration, pro-government union policies combined with massive government red tape and huge socialist programs will have no effect on jobs.

They incessantly repeat “gutsy call” for “you’d have to have been brain-dead not to make the call to kill bin Laden,” hoping the Democratic Party will suddenly seem macho.

Then, after a few weeks of robotically chanting “gutsy call,” they can get back to their true passion — destroying jobs — at which point they will robotically chant Bush’s name to explain why millions of Americans have lost their jobs under Obama.

How gutsy. (Ann Coulter)

Has he been Deified yet? 🙂

The Punch Line at The Gas Line

8/4/2009:

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year…

— which includes a 98 percent of small-business owners, you will not see your taxes increase one single dime under my plan.

Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains tax, no tax. We don’t need to raise taxes on the middle class!

You will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat, not one single dime.

Fast Forward…

The Obama administration has floated a transportation authorization bill that would require the study and implementation of a plan to tax automobile drivers based on how many miles they drive.

I guess as long as it was more than a dime… 🙂

Oh, and I have harped on this one before. And it still keeps coming up.

https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/government-awesomeness/\

Stick around, there’s a punch line at the end.

The plan is a part of the administration’s Transportation Opportunities Act, an undated draft of which was obtained this week by Transportation Weekly.

Needless to say, the White House immediately showered the VMT section of the Transportation Opportunities Act with gasoline and threw matches all over it. 

The White House, however, said the bill is only an early draft that was not formally circulated within the administration.

“This is not an administration proposal,” White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said. “This is not a bill supported by the administration. This was an early working draft proposal that was never formally circulated within the administration, does not taken into account the advice of the president’s senior advisers, economic team or Cabinet officials, and does not represent the views of the president.”

Methinks they doest protest too much. 🙂

Especially for a well just “trade it in” President who hates Oil companies anyhow.

News of the draft follows a March Congressional Budget Office report that supported the idea of taxing drivers based on miles driven.

Among other things, CBO suggested that a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax could be tracked by installing electronic equipment on each car to determine how many miles were driven; payment could take place electronically at filling stations.

“In the past, the efficiency costs of implementing a system of VMT charges — particularly the costs of users’ time for slowing and queuing at tollbooths — would clearly have outweighed the potential benefits from more efficient use of highway capacity,” CBO wrote. “Now, electronic metering and billing are making per-mile charges a practical option.”

The CBO report was requested by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who has proposed taxing cars by the mile as a way to increase federal highway revenues.

The proposal seems to follow up on that idea in section 2218 of the draft bill. That section would create, within the Federal Highway Administration, a Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office. It would be tasked with creating a “study framework that defines the functionality of a mileage-based user fee system and other systems.”

The department seemed to be aware of the need to prepare the public for what would likely be a controversial change to the way highway funds are collected. For example, the office is called on to serve a public-relations function, as the draft says it should “increase public awareness regarding the need for an alternative funding source for surface transportation programs and provide information on possible approaches.”

The draft bill says the “study framework” for the project and a public awareness communications plan should be established within two years of creating the office, and that field tests should begin within four years.

The office would be required to consider four factors in field trials: the capability of states to enforce payment, the reliability of technology, administrative costs and “user acceptance.” The draft does not specify where field trials should begin.

The new office would be funded a total of $300 million through fiscal 2017 for the project.

But here’s the funny part:

“Do we do gas tax?”  Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), asked. “Do we move to some kind of an assessment that is based on how many miles vehicles go, so that we capture revenue from those who are going to be using the roads who aren’t going to be paying any gas tax, or very little, with hybrids and electric cars?“

Get it?

The government wants to force you into an electric car or a hybrid, but that will lower the tax revenue for gasoline usage, so they then want to tax you for your miles driven (in addition) to make up for the difference that their desire to force you into will cause!

The government will cause the revenue problem then tax you even more to make up for it!! 🙂

Not only that, but they get to put a tracker in your car that will track you everywhere you go!

TA DA!! 🙂

Now, Isn’t that special! 🙂

Ponder this…

Has the Liberal media deified Obama yet over the kiling of Bin Laden?

Just asking… 🙂

Osama bin Laden’s Identity Confirmed With Biometrics Technology. You’re Next

The Associated Press, among others, is reporting that the United States used multiple methods to positively identify the remains of Osama bin Laden. In addition to traditional genetic (DNA) testing, which revealed a perfect match with bin Laden’s family, NBC News reports “that the CIA’s facial recognition system also identified bin Laden’s face with 95 percent certainty.” The use of biometrics  to resolve any possible doubt as to the identity of the terrorist’s remains is no doubt comforting in this particular case. With the patent for automated iris-recognition technology expiring this year, at least 20 firms around the world will compete for a market expected to soar to $10.9 billion in 2017 from $3.6 billion in 2010. Iris-recognition technology is hardly the stuff of fiction. Rather, it is used in the following manner, for starters:

To screen travelers at London’s Heathrow Airport and Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

Police departments across the country, including the New York Police Department, which received $500,000 from the Department of Homeland Security, use iris scanning to reduce the number of prisoners freed as a result of fraud (e.g., by posing as someone facing lesser charges).

At border crossings by The United Arab Emirates.

To secure access to highly secure corporate and government facilities in the United States and around the world.

The Mexican government announced last week that it will be the first country to integrate iris scanning as part of its national identity card.

Iris-recognition technology already has evolved to the point where authorities can very quickly scan members of a crowd from a distance of 10 feet, a figure expected to increase dramatically. That means that they can scan your eyes without your consent. Forget about Apple tracking your iPhone or the government infringing your Fourth Amendment rights with GPS technology. Iris tracking allows authorities to track you with extraordinary precision.

Just in case you were feeling all squishy about our Dear Leader:

It turns out that the Obama Administration halted the deportation of 34,448 illegal immigrants last year, according to Homeland Security figures obtained independently by a Senator (Charles Grassley of Iowa) who sits on the Judiciary Committee.

This includes delaying deportation indefinitely (“deferred action”), granting green cards, allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. indefinitely while they seek legal status (known as “parole in place”) and expanding the definition of “extreme hardships” so any illegal alien could meet the criteria and remain in the country.

Political Correctness Update:

Calling animals ‘pets’ is insulting, academics claim

Animal lovers should stop calling their furry or feathered friends “pets” because the term is insulting, leading academics claim.

Domestic dogs, cats, hamsters or budgerigars should be rebranded as “companion animals” while owners should be known as “human carers”, they insist.

Even terms such as wildlife are dismissed as insulting to the animals concerned – who should instead be known as “free-living”, the academics including an Oxford professor suggest.

The call comes from the editors of then Journal of Animal Ethics, a new academic publication devoted to the issue.

In its first editorial, the journal – jointly published by Prof Linzey’s centre and the University of Illinois in the US – condemns the use of terms such as “critters” and “beasts”.

Prof Linzey and his co-editor Professor Priscilla Cohn, of Penn State University in the US, also hope to see some of the more colourful terms in the English language stamped out.

Phrases such as “sly as a fox, “eat like a pig” or “drunk as a skunk” are all unfair to animals, they claim.

Don’t you feel better now. I know I do! 🙂

One Small Detail….

Political Correctness hits Comics

Superman tired of “Truth, Justice and the American Way”

…Superman announces that he is going to give up his U.S. citizenship. Despite very literally being an alien immigrant, Superman has long been seen as a patriotic symbol of “truth, justice, and the American way,” from his embrace of traditional American ideals to the iconic red and blue of his costume. What it means to stand for the “American way” is an increasingly complicated thing, however, both in the real world and in superhero comics, whose storylines have increasingly seemed to mirror current events and deal with moral and political complexities rather than simple black and white morality.

This would be another reason why I gave up comics and stay away.

Next thing you know, he’ll be for Amnesty and call Americans racists and imperalists…

An “instrument of US Policy!” Are you f*cking kidding me!

It’s F*ucking Superman for god’s sake not the Real F*cking State Department!!

It’s a F*cking Comic book!!! Not The Huffington Post! or MSNBC!!

From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government. (Comics Alliance)

Time change that big red S to a Multi-cultural inclusive UN symbol.

If an American Icon doesn’t believe in American anymore….

Even a child’s icon is not safe from the Left.

So how long before Superman cartoons of old are banned as “insensitive” or even “racist”??

Not long enough I suspect.

In a blog post at The Weekly Standard, senior writer Jonathan Last questioned Superman’s beliefs, now that he seems to have rejected the United States.

“Does he believe in British interventionism or Swiss neutrality?” Last wrote. “You see where I’m going with this: If Superman doesn’t believe in America, then he doesn’t believe in anything.”

Sounds like the Left to me. 😦

So naturally when the Leftist who came up with this crap get heat for it, they downplay it as not such a big deal (which is what the Left always does) so peshaw…“In a short story in Action Comics 900, Superman announces his intention to put a global focus on his never ending battle, but he remains, as always, committed to his adopted home and his roots as a Kansas farm boy from Smallville,” they said.(Reuters)

They came for our School Boards and we said nothing.

They came for a our Mayors and we said nothing.

They came for our Cities and we said nothing.

They came for our courts and we said nothing.

They came for our food and we said nothing.

They came for our newspapers and we said nothing.

They came for our social media and we said nothing.

Now they want our childhood Icons…

If Superman is no longer on our side the only reasonable government response is to make sure he cannot harm the United States. The Defense Department should embark on a program to harness the power of kryptonite in various forms to provide a robust series of options should Superman decide that something the United States is up to does not pass his new rarefied sense of internationalist propriety. Perhaps Lex Luthor, wherever he is, would be interested in an amnesty deal in exchange for some of the anti-Superman technologies he has developed over the years. The government should also stockpile whatever types of kryptonite are available, and issue a statement to the supervillains of the universe that the United States is no longer responsible for Superman’s actions. Clark Kent’s new tax status will have to be determined by the IRS.

So long Superman, you illegal alien ingrate. (Washington Times)

One Small Detail:

A few months after the Obama Administration bragged about enacting “sweeping” legislation to protect the nation’s food supply, experts at a federal symposium reveal that half of what Americans eat comes from foreign countries not covered by the measure.

This leaves the nation vulnerable to bioterrorism via tainted food, according to experts participating in the FBI’s International Symposium on Agroterrorism http://www.fbi-isa.org/(X(1)S(l42untmfulwen2ud5kp3ycmf))/default.aspx?MenuItemID=73&MenuGroup=Home+Left+Menu&&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 The annual event, taking place in Kansas City this week, aims to protect the world’s food supply from terrorism through information-sharing and collaboration among governments, the private sector and academia.

The world-renowned agroterrorism experts attending this year’s symposium have some rather worrisome news for Americans, despite the president’s political horn-tooting. Because it’s nearly impossible to know where 50% of our food comes from, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to protect consumers from tainted supplies as well as intentional bioterrorism attacks.

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Satellite navigation system maker TomTom indirectly sells details of motorists’ driving behaviour to the police for use in determining where speed traps should be placed, the AD reports on Wednesday. Almost half the country’s police forces use this method of deciding where to put cameras and speed checks, the paper says. This is over in the Netherlands, but would anyone care to bet whether Google and Apple, for example, sell their Satnav data? You do realize that your pretty GPS in the car is well-aware of exactly how fast you’re driving at any given point in time, right? And that this information is their data, not yours, right? Just like driving with a video camera in your car pointing right at the speedometer along where an exact location at all times. In fact, that’s exactly what you just let the cops do. Welcome to the police state, where your “convenience” becomes their ability to hand you a $500 ticket. (Freedomphoenix)

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Facebook’s current feature uses facial recognition technology to pick out faces in your photos. Once you’ve uploaded your album, Facebook will take you to a new screen where you can enter the name of each person below their face. Sometimes (depending on your privacy settings and the clarity of the photo), Facebook will go a step further: If a face matches one you previously tagged in another album, Facebook may suggest that person’s name for you. Facebook quietly added the feature to the Privacy Settings, allowing users to disable the peppy-sounding ‘Suggest photos of me to friends’ option.

It’s just one small detail…We’re so doomed…

Government Awesomeness

This is one of the single funniest videos EVER:

 

My Prediction on Obama’s Speech tonight: Orwell says “Mission Accomplished” 🙂

I won’t see the speech. I will be working to pay my bills and the bills of the 48% of people who don’t pay any. 😦

Not that the word “war” will pass his lips, most likely. In press briefings last week, our Libyan campaign was euphemized into a “kinetic military action” and a “time-limited, scope-limited military action.” (The online parodies were merciless: “Make love, not time-limited, scope-limited military actions!” “Let slip the muzzled canine unit of kinetic military action!”) Advertising tonight’s address, the White House opted for “the situation in Libya,” which sounds less like a military intervention than a spin-off vehicle for the famous musclehead from MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” (Ross Douthat)

Gotta love Orwellian gibberish. 🙂

President Obama is proud of how he put together the Libyan operation. A model of international cooperation. All the necessary paperwork. Arab League backing. A Security Council resolution. (Everything but a resolution from the Congress of the United States, a minor inconvenience for a citizen of the world.)

It’s war as designed by an Ivy League professor. True, it took three weeks to put this together, during which time Moammar Gadhafi went from besieged, delusional thug losing support by the hour to resurgent tyrant who marshaled his forces, marched them to the gates of Benghazi and had the U.S. director of national intelligence predicting that “the regime will prevail.” (Charles Krauthammer).

They will protect civilians by not going after the guy who will kill them, Qaddafi! 🙂

And the reports that Al-Qaeda is supporting “the rebels”. No big deal. Qaddafi is evil. We just won’t do anything about him.

Obama is hoping the rebels will kill him so he doesn’t have to do it himself. But the rebels wouldn’t have this opportunity without the air strikes authored by him.

So now that NATO (which primarily US) has taken over, “Mission Accomplished”!!

Ta Da! Isn’t he awesome! 🙂

NEW TAX IDEA: Tax Driving!

Not feeling Taxed enough. You’re a Liberal who wants to stick it to the people. Well, the CBO has a new tax scheme for you.

And, of course, most importantly, it’s “fair”! 🙂

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has a suggestion for raising money to fix the nation’s highways: tax drivers based on how many miles they drive each year.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) this week released a report that said taxing people based on how many miles they drive is a possible option for raising new revenues and that these taxes could be used to offset the costs of highway maintenance at a time when federal funds are short.

The report discussed the proposal in great detail, including the development of technology that would allow total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) to be tracked, reported and taxed, as well as the pros and cons of mandating the installation of this technology in all vehicles.

CBO’s report stressed it was making no recommendations but seemed to support a VMT tax as a more accurate way of having drivers pay for the costs of highway maintenance. The report said miles driven is a larger factor in highway repairs than fuel consumption and suggested that having drivers pay for the real costs of highways “would involve imposing a combination of fuel taxes and per-mile charges.”

“About 25 percent of the nation’s highways, which carry about 85 percent of all road traffic, are paid for in part by the federal government….” reads the opening line of the paper. In other words, why should the federal government, already so strapped for cash, keeping paying so much for the highway while those who use them get a free ride?

The rest of the lead paragraph is just as baneful:

Federal spending on highways is funded primarily by taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, but those and other taxes paid by highway users do not yield enough revenue to support either current federal spending on highways or the higher levels of spending that have been proposed by some observers. Although raising those taxes would bring in a larger amount of revenue, a more fundamental issue would remain: By themselves, fuel taxes cannot provide a strong incentive for people to avoid overusing highways — that is, to forgo trips for which the costs to themselves and others exceed the benefits. This study examines broad alternatives for federal funding of highways, focusing on fuel taxes and on taxes that could be assessed on the basis of the number of miles that vehicles travel.

As usual, the bureaucrats’ tactic is to create a problem (too many people “overusing highways”) then propose a solution (higher fuel taxes and taxes “assessed on the basis of the number of miles that vehicles travel”).

Just to be fair, the CBO assures the Senate that it (the CBO) isn’t alone in reckoning that taxing drivers for miles traveled is the most equitable method of closing the highway funding gap. They’ve got an impressive chorus backing up their taxing tune.

A consensus view of many transportation experts and economists is that a system of taxes on vehicle-miles traveled should be viewed as the leading alternative to fuel taxes as a source of funding for highways.

See? Lots of people (a “consensus”) agrees with the plan so it can’t be all bad.

And we all know it’s important to have “consensus” of “experts” before it crammed up your ass and down your throat for “your own good”.

It will be “fair”. 🙂

One possibility discusses by the CBO is the “pay at the pump” option for collecting the tax.

Implementation costs of a VMT system would depend heavily on its scope and scale but also would be affected by some choices about specific technologies. For example, initial capital costs might be higher but operational costs might be lower if the VMT taxes were collected “at the pump,” the method tested in the Portland pilot study and already used for collecting fuel taxes, rather than through periodic invoicing from a central office to individual users, the approach tested in the Puget Sound study. If VMT taxes were collected at the pump, each time fuel was purchased, information would be sent from a device in the vehicle to a device at the filling station. The data would identify the accumulated charges themselves or list miles traveled (identified if necessary by times and locations) since the previous purchase. The appropriate amount of taxes would be collected as part of the fuel- purchasing transaction.

Basically, “a device in the vehicle” would send data to the gas station, then onto, one assumes, the appropriate taxing agency, and the cost per gallon would be increased according to the VMT data collected.

Check your mail for the time and place of your appointment to have your car retrofitted with the government-approved VMT monitor.

Just Like ObamaCare, it’s for your own good!

To be fair (equitable), if you want smooth roads and you want to do the right thing and pay your fair share of the maintenance,  then the least you can do is surrender your privacy and let the government strap a VMT measuring device on your car. It’s the right thing. (New American-KFYI)

Now don’t you feel better. 🙂

Don’t worry about the trucking industry and all those goods that are transported across the country. It won’t impact your grocery bill and other products at all!

And will this go for jet fuel next? Imagine those thousands of gallons…

THE BORDER HAS NEVER BEEN SAFER

So with that Big Sis, Homeland Insecurity Secretary Janet Napalitano:

The Obama Administration has dedicated historic levels of manpower, technology, and infrastructure to the Southwest border to ensure the safety of border communities, and these resources have made a significant impact. Some of America’s safest communities are in the Southwest border region, with border city crime rates staying steady or dropping over the past decade. 

The security of our border communities strengthens the prosperity of the region. From San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas, hundreds of billions of dollars of commerce come across the border each year, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs. Thanks in part to the administration’s major investments to improve border infrastructure at our land ports of entry, the value of the trade crossing the Southwest border increased 22 percent in fiscal year 2010 alone.

Yet, local leaders in border communities say misinformation about the safety of the Southwest border is hurting their communities, driving potential visitors away and hurting local businesses.

The reality is that the Southwest border is open for business. El Paso, Texas is one of the best examples. Not only have crime statistics shown it to be one of the safest big cities in the country, but the value of imports crossing into the United States through El Paso has risen 40 percent just in the last year.

In fact, today I was in El Paso to meet with local officials and business leaders to discuss ways that we can help strengthen trade and travel in the region and help set the record straight about the safety and economic opportunities in their communities.

We all agree that the challenges at the border are real – but so is the progress we’ve made over the last two years. I’m proud to join with our border communities in spreading the word that the Southwest border is, indeed, open for business.

Janet Napolitano (DHS website)

Now is that special! 🙂

I know I feel better about government.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face – forever.”– George Orwell

Feel Good Stories

Baby Joseph Update: St. Louis, MO (KSDK) – A 13-month-old baby at the center of a worldwide debate was brought to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center overnight. The baby was flown in from Ontario, Canada. The family’s story has stirred the end-of-life debate.

Canadian doctors say baby Joseph Marraachli’s condition is fatal. There was a court order in Canada to remove life support, but baby Joseph’s father said “no.” The New York-based Priests for Life group heard the family’s cry for help and flew the baby to a hospital that would agree to accept him: Cardinal Glennon. This is after several hospitals declined to treat him.

The government lost this one. Even if the child dies in 6 months, he dies on the parents terms not the Canadian Governments.

My previous blogs: https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/the-future-of-obamacare/

https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/feeling-the-heat/

BEWARE THE EIDES OF MARCH!!!

HUG-A-THUG 🙂

To create “racial reconciliation,” the city that protected an illegal immigrant child rapist who massacred three youths is offering its most violent criminals therapy, education and jobs in lieu of prison.

Known as “hug-a-thug,”  the goal is to rehab vicious gangbangers with tender loving care rather than the harsh punishment that they probably deserve. The program has failed miserably in two cities—Stockton, California and Cincinnati—yet officials in Newark will launch it this month, according to a local newspaper report.

A sanctuary for illegal immigrants, Newark made worldwide headlines a few years ago for shielding an illegal immigrant gangbanger who murdered, execution-style, three college-bound students at a schoolyard. A fourth student survived but was seriously wounded by the gunman. The assailant, a Peruvian national named Jose Carranza, had a lengthy record when he committed the gruesome crimes but the city’s sanctuary policies protected him from deportation.
He was free on a $150,000 bond when he shot the four youths at a schoolyard in 2007 because the Newark Police Department has a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy when it comes to inquiring about a defendant’s immigration status. (Judical watch)

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TSA Update

The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.
The TSA says that the records reflect math mistakes and that all the machines are safe.
The tests will be finished by the end of the month, and the results will be released “as they are completed,” the agency said on its website.

That just inspires confidence doesn’t it. 🙂

BIG BROTHER UPDATE

It seems that there’s just no escape from ‘Big Brother’ seeing into our lives.

Now police in Miami, Florida, have unveiled their latest crime-fighting tool that is literally an ‘eye in the sky’.

Their state-of-the art ‘Micro Air Vehicle’ is a remote controlled flying drone fitted with cameras that can capture images from heights.

Surveillance: Police in Miami spent $50,000 on the remote controlled drown which will can see inside people’s homes if it flies low enough 

Police will be able to control the flying surveillance camera while real-time pictures are relayed to the officer on the ground.

Similar devices are currently used by the military to check dangerous areas such as empty buildings or areas of suspected land mines before the enter.

But with the possibility that the device will be used on civilians it has raised concerns about privacy.

‘What happens when they fly over backyards and they see something without a warrant that they want to take against,’ the American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Howard Simon told CBS Miami.

Miami police used a $50,000 grant to buy one of the machines which stand around 40cm high on four thin legs.

The devices are able to fly straight up and manoeuvre in different directions. They can also hover like a helicopter.

Police admitted the MAV has the ability if flown low enough to look into people’s home but they claim that is not its intended purpose.

Miami-Dade Sgt. Andrew Cohen said drone will be used to gather real time information in situations which may be too dangerous for officers.

This includes riots or stand-offs with dangerous criminals. It could even be used to chase criminals who are on the run from police.

‘If an SRT (Special Response Team) has to go into an area they don’t know what’s there, we don’t know what is in the backyard,’ said Cohen.

‘They want to know if there are dogs in the backyard, if there is a shed, things that could be a threat to us.

‘If this thing is deployed, it’s only going to be used in situations where we already have an ongoing police scene.

‘They are going to know we are there because we will have tactical teams, SRT teams, we’re going to have a perimeter, it’s going to be secure.’

The police have submitted an application to the Federal Aviation Authority use the machine but the approval process can take up to six months. (UK Daily Mail)

So that buzzing you hear outside your window may be Big Brother looking at you.

SMILE, YOU’RE ON CANDID CAMERA!

Enjoy! 🙂

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Only 26 percent of Americans in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’re optimistic about “our system of government and how well it works,” down 7 points since October to the fewest in surveys dating to 1974. Almost as many, 23 percent, are pessimistic, the closest these measures ever have come. The rest, a record high, are “uncertain” about the system.

But don’t worry, the media will pump up Obama because he’s their man.

And the Unions will give very generously of taxpayers money to make sure he wins.

Just remember, to a pessimist if things don’t go horribly wrong they are pleasantly surprised. 🙂

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“It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” Mark Twain

At Friday’s news conference, President Obama tried to connect with the common man coping with rising gasoline prices. Instead, the president left little doubt that he is clueless about cars.

“You may want to buy a fuel-efficient car,” quoth Obama, “but you may not be able to afford it. And so you’re stuck with the old clunker that’s getting 8 or 10 miles a gallon.”

Eight to 10 mpg? Which clunker would that be? I wondered. An old Hummer? Your father’s father’s Oldsmobile? A late-model Lamborghini? It takes a luxury brand, a boat-sized machine and/or a few decades to approach those dismal mileage numbers.

An 11-year-old Pontiac minivan, for example, gets 17 mpg in the city, 24 mpg on the highway.

You have to go back to the Carter administration years or earlier to find Obama’s idea of a gas-guzzling family car — and even that vehicle would have been a van, light truck/SUV or luxury model. And yet he is behind the wheel of Washington’s energy policy.

Can you blame me for believing Team Obama was pushing the pedal to the metal in a rush for higher gas prices?

On March 11, Obamaland pushed back against the perception that its anti-drilling policies — implemented in the wake of the April 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout — have contributed to high prices at the pump. The cost of filling one’s gas tank has risen uncomfortably close to $4 per gallon in the Bay Area of California.

The administration rightly notes that domestic oil and natural gas production have increased since 2008, while imports have decreased.

OK, but: Erik Milito of the American Petroleum Institute told Environment & Energy Publishing, “The increased production levels in 2010 are a credit to the vision of previous administrations.” Milito credited the 1995 Deepwater Royalty Relief Act signed by Bill Clinton and passed by a GOP-controlled Congress.

To his credit, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had supported offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But after an oil platform explosion left 11 workers dead and coated beaches with oil, he reacted. Then Salazar overreacted.

Democrats like Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana saw their home states suffer first from the oil spill, and then the oil-job shutoff. Landrieu came to vigorously oppose what had evolved into a de facto moratorium on drilling permits.

Clinton himself lamented “ridiculous delays in permitting when our economy doesn’t need it.” The administration didn’t issue a permit since the blowout until last month — and then only after a federal judge’s prompting.

Not to mention the steady job-killing creep of climbing gasoline prices.

There always has been a corner of Obamaland that doesn’t appreciate the job-creating properties of cheap fuel. Now-Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Chu said that in September 2008 — and still Obama picked him for the slot.

Then again, if you think there are a lot of Americans cruising Main Street in gas-guzzling monstrosities, you probably wouldn’t even notice the high price of gasoline — until your approval ratings started to approach, well, Jimmy Carter levels. (Townhall.com)

OBAMA 2008 WANTED HIGH GAS PRICES
During the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Obama commented on the gas crisis and indicated he preferred higher gas prices. Well, I guess he is happy now.

Sen. OBAMA: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers, then I think ultimately, we can come out of this stronger and have a more efficient energy policy than we do right now.

OBAMA 2008: HIS PLAN MAKES ELECTRICITY RATES SKYROCKET
In 2008, then-candidate Obama said, “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

So what’s the obvious solution? Well, increasing domestic oil production comes to mind. But the administration has done just the opposite — to the direct detriment of the American people.

Both Chu and White House press secretary Jay Carney have insisted that the remedy is to develop alternative energy sources to decrease our dependency on foreign oil. That’s just peachy in theory and something to continue to explore for the long run. But in the short run, it is a reckless, quixotic fantasy — a tilting at windmills.

Windmills, incidentally, are not the answer. Heritage experts argue that wind and solar energy sources are miniscule and “entirely irrelevant to gasoline supply in the transportation sector.” The administration’s other alternative sources of energy, such as corn and electric cars, “won’t help a bit.” Corn-based ethanol produces less energy than gasoline, “contributes to food price increases, costs taxpayers $4 billion to produce 2 percent of the total gasoline supply, and has dubious environmental effects.” Electric cars are “prohibitively costly and environmentally suspect.”

Wake up, folks. Regardless of Obama’s intentions, his energy policies are, at best, grossly negligent and irrefutably damaging to Americans and our economy. (Fact Real, Heritage Foundation)

But it make Liberals “feel good” and you know what they say about Hell and good intentions…