Saturday, June 22, 2013

Jay Carney Appreciates Your Questions.........Really

Kudos to the folks over at Yahoo News for providing a rigorous breakdown of the information black hole that is the White House Briefing Room:

"A Yahoo News analysis of the 444 briefings through June 18 that Carney has held since becoming White House press secretary has identified 13 distinct strains in the way he dodges reporters' question. Since Carney held his first daily briefing with reporters in the White House Brady Press Briefing Room on Feb. 16, 2011, for example, he’s used some variation of "I don’t have the answer" more than 1,900 times. In 1,383 cases he referred a question to someone else. But will he at least speculate on hypotheticals? No. In fact, he has refused to do so 525 times."

Friday, June 21, 2013

US Government Officially Charges Edward Snowden with Espionage......

 "Think of the irony here for a moment. Edward Snowden alerts the world that the United States is spying on its own citizens, and, in turn, the Federal Government charges him with spying."  - Poor Richards News


Federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.
Snowden was charged with espionage, theft and conversion of government property, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the case.
The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction where Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered and a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment......."
There was never any doubt that the Justice Department would seek to prosecute Snowden for one of the most significant national security leaks in the country’s history. The Obama administration has shown a particular propensity to go after leakers and has launched more investigations that any previous administration. This White House is responsible for bringing six of the nine total indictments ever brought under the 1917 Espionage Act. Snowden will be the seventh individual when he is formally indicted."
READ MORE 

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Awkward Family Photos: First Family Edition




Photos courtesy of former White House photographer Snitts McLanahan

The Devil at the G8: Nobody Slammed the Door in His Face

By Judi McLeod - CFP
It was pure Saul Alinsky when President Barack Obama went after Catholic schools in a G8 speech in Northern Ireland on Monday. In front of a captive audience of about 2,000 young people—his signature audience that leaves out adults—Obama claimed that Catholic education divides people and blocks peace, according to the Scottish Catholic Observer.

“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation.”  
Spoken like the true son of the Satan-Alinsky cult.
Divisive words from a politician on ground where epic battles between Catholics and Protestants claimed so many lives. This from a politician who has ignored the division and slaughter from madrases and mosques so studiously that there are many who suspect him of being Muslim.
The silence from Obama’s Catholic pals like Cardinal Timothy Dolan, after his statement in Ireland geared to shut down Catholic schools, is downright deafening.
In Ireland, ‘Obama Son of Alinsky’ dropped the mask to show his Marxist roots. Taking mega money from the Catholic Church to jumpstart a career that would take him all the way to the White House and now seeking to shut the schools of the same church that got him there is the real Obama story.
Meanwhile, the devil came to the G8 in Ireland and no one slammed the door in his face.
Read much more HERE

How a CIA-FBI Tech Fiasco Spawned the NSA Scandal

Of all the startling disclosures to emerge from the unfolding NSA data-collection scandal, perhaps the most shocking is this: As the Washington Post reported on June 8, the material collected from Internet company servers is electronically “pushed” to classified FBI computers in Quantico, Virginia, and then “shared with the NSA or other authorized intelligence agencies.”

Wow. Who knew the FBI had computers that could communicate with other agencies?

The last time the topic came up, back in 2007, things didn’t work that way. That’s when we learned that the FBI and CIA had incompatible computer systems that couldn’t interface to share information or even communicate. It caused a flurry of tut-tutting and then disappeared from view.

The story of the computer glitch was contained in a pair of documents released several months apart, scrubbed versions of secret reports by the two agencies’ inspector-generals’ offices, examining the intelligence failures that led up to the September 11 attacks. The FBI report was completed in November 2004 and released in June 2006; the CIA report was completed in June 2005 and released in August 2007.

The computer disconnect was part of a larger problem described in similar terms in both reports: a deep-rooted inability of the CIA and FBI to share information. The result was that they missed clues that would have lit red lights all over Washington, long before the attacks, if somebody had managed to put two and two together. One expert, former CIA staffer Robert Baer, writing in Time magazine in 2007 about the CIA disclosures, called the communication breakdown “the smoking gun” that let the attackers slip through.

Partly the failure was a reflection of radically different organizational cultures. Things that seemed important to one agency didn’t interest the other. As one observer put it, the CIA looked for intelligence, while the FBI gathered evidence. Moreover, the CIA tracked suspects operating overseas, but dropped them when they entered the United States and became the FBI’s problem—without always telling the FBI.


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Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Turd King Addresses Berlin

Today Barack Obama gave a stirring speech before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, but what could have been a speech reassuring the world that the leviathan of American surveillance isn't smothering them turned into a greatest hits speech. He spoke about ending the "perpetual" war on terror, closing Guantanamo, ending gender inequality, equal rights for the LGBT community, and climate change. But why didn't we feel good about it? 
Even the German people, know around the world for their love of Obama, went silent when the balance between privacy and security was brought up. Many of them, no doubt remember what it is like to live in surveillance state. This comes in the wake of German politician Markus Ferber, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's sister party, directly comparing Obama's surveillance programs with those of the Stasi, the vicious Soviet controlled police that terrorized the people of East Berlin.
Twenty-six years and exactly seven days ago, Ronald Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and challenged the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall. The wall represented everything  everything Cold-War America imagined it was not: authoritarian, paranoid, influence-hungry, imperial, and unsympathetic to national sovereignty.
John F. Kennedy also declared in the his allegiance with the German people as they stood in between the Soviet Union and the Western World. In 1963 he said,
Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum ["I am a Roman citizen"]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner!"... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

Uh Oh.....They're On To Me