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.


Read More


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


Tuesday, June 18, 2013

The Immigration Debate Misses the Point

DiploMad 2.0
I have been trying to follow the immigration debate in Congress and the media, but with little real success. It is almost impossible to figure out what exactly is being proposed, opposed, and modified. The one thing that does come through, however, is the burning desire to reward people who have broken our laws and heavily strained our public assistance budgets. This idiocy must stop. Under the Reagan Administration we went through an almost identical debate which produced the "one-time-only-never-again" amnesty that would solve the illegal alien problem for all time. It failed, otherwise why are we having this debate again?
 Amnesty is not the answer. Sappy, historically and economically ignorant speeches by our extraordinarily ignorant President are not what we need. A better border defense is part of the answer but not the whole enchilada of reform that we need. I am very sorry to see Senator Rubio, for whom I have a great deal of respect, getting himself tricked and trapped by the Democrats and politically hurt by his apparently well-intentioned but naive effort at immigration reform.
 I do not hear discussion about whether we need none, little, some, or a lot of immigration, and if we do, what type of immigration we should seek. Do we need millions more of semi and unskilled people from Mexico and other poor countries? Absent widespread elimination or reduction in minimum wage, taxation, public assistance, and zoning laws, how will these people contribute to the economic growth of our country? This is not nineteenth century America with small factories and workshops on every street corner, and belching smokestack industries eager for cheap workers. This is the America of EPA regulations, OSHA bureaucrats, job killing minimum wage and health insurance laws, outsourcing, and of a growing ethos that sees single parents living on the public dole as an honorable existence. It is also the America of multiculturalism whereby immigrants are encouraged never to become Americans.
 The rubbish being put out by Obama and others on the taxes that these new immigrants will pay is just that - rubbish. They will draw public assistance and not pay taxes. What impact will this continuing flood of poor migrants have on the job and advancement prospects of struggling poor and middle class black, white and brown Americans? I haven't heard much said about that, but I predict it won't be good.
 Is our immigration law going to continue based on the idea of family reunification? Will adults be able to petititon for their adult sublings and those siblings families? Will we continue to ignore promises that the new immigrants will not become a public assistance burden? If so, we are in for an endless cascade of new immigrants petitioning for their relatives and on and on and on. Yes, sure, technically we will have solved the "illegal alien" problem by making them all legal. Is that what is best for our country, I stress for our country not for the Democratic party?
 I know, I know. Anybody who says this stuff is instantly accused of being a racist. Rubbish.  Immigrants built whole industries, e.g., Hollywood, and made invaluable contributions to American arts, sciences, letters, etc. But is that the sort of immigrants we will be getting today? Is America's culture and society not worth defending from the immigrants of the sort who planted the bombs in Boston, who run the violent gangs in Los Angeles, who provide the Democratic party its foot soldiers for its campaigns of electoral fraud?
The country deserves better than what we are getting from our politicians and "leaders."

Monday, June 17, 2013

NSA Overwhelmed by Father's Day Messages

Middle Finger News Service

N.S.A. director General Keith B. Alexander
The NSA announced today that they were once again overwhelmed by the email and telephone traffic this Father's Day Weekend. "Tracking over 110 million messages taxed our limits of capacity for information gathering while adding to our normal load of domestic taps", said  N.S.A. director General Keith B. Alexander Monday. 

While General Alexander added the amount of traffic intercepted falls short of the 130 million Mother’s Day messages collected by the N.S.A. in May, the NSA has a backlog of unread messages still to be read.  He added " we also collected in the neighborhood of two to three million such e-mails from angry mothers this year who failed to hear from their children."

The N.S.A. director stated while the agency had not foiled any terror plots over the weekend they did uncover between twenty and thirty thousand extramarital relationships.