OH, MERCY: Democrats Retaliate Against Tattooed Cruz Poster! @AdamBaldwin @MelissaTweets #WhatIsSeenCannotBeUnseen pic.twitter.com/XqsZ7iw6za
— Doug Ross (@directorblue) March 18, 2014Related: The Empire Strikes Back
OH, MERCY: Democrats Retaliate Against Tattooed Cruz Poster! @AdamBaldwin @MelissaTweets #WhatIsSeenCannotBeUnseen pic.twitter.com/XqsZ7iw6za
— Doug Ross (@directorblue) March 18, 2014Texas Gov. Rick Perry threw his support behind U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell on Saturday, telling 300 fellow Republicans that the minority leader will win re-election.
McConnell finds himself in a GOP primary fight with wealthy businessman Matt Bevin, who attended the event but wasn’t allowed to speak.
“I love the number six,” Perry told the crowd at the Lincoln Reagan Dinner of West Kentucky. “Sam Houston was 6 foot 6 inches tall. And Mitch McConnell is going to be in his sixth term as United States senator.”
Error 404: U.S. officials plan to relinquish federal control over the administration of the Internet to something called the "global Internet community," which is full of tyrants to whom the free flow of information is a threat.
In the wake of the NSA surveillance scandal, some might not be inclined to defend federal involvement in anything related to the flow of information between individuals.But the decision announced Friday by the Commerce Department to give up next year its oversight of Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to the "global Internet community" is a bad idea.
Under a Commerce Department contract, Icann has issued domain names since 2000. But the Los Angeles-based nonprofit has worked, encouraged by states and groups not necessarily dedicated to free expression, to transform itself into a global organization free of U.S. ties.
Since at least 2004, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has tried repeatedly to wrest power from Icann. During a meeting in Dubai last year, the ITU, the telecom branch of the United Nations, demanded rules governing the Internet be rewritten. It proposed inspection authority that would allow it to monitor and censor otherwise encrypted content on the Internet.
One upon a time everyone got a hearty chuckle when Obama declared, on the very first day of his ascension to the throne, that his administration would be the "most transparent in history." And if they didn't then, they certainly will now following news that it is none other than Obama's own administration - made infamous for spying on everyone who uses electronic communication courtesy of one whistleblower - that it has refused a record number of Freedom of Information (don't laugh) requests on the basis of, drumroll, national security. So between the NSA, whose job is to ensure national security, and all those pesky meddlesome investigators, whose only curiosity is to peek behind the secrecy of the Obama administration, there should be precisely zero acts of terrorism on US soil. Like last year's Boston bombing for example. Oh wait...
From AP:
The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
The administration cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy. Most agencies also took longer to answer records requests, the analysis found.
The government's own figures from 99 federal agencies covering six years show that half way through its second term, the administration has made few meaningful improvements in the way it releases records despite its promises from Day 1 to become the most transparent administration in history...
...Last year, the government denied 6,689 out of 7,818 requests for so-called expedited processing, which moves an urgent request for newsworthy records to the front of the line for a speedy answer, or about 86 percent. It denied only 53 percent of such requests in 2008.
The U.S. spent a record $420 million answering requests plus just over $27 million in legal disputes, and charged people $4.3 million to search and copy documents. The government waived fees about 58 percent of the time that people asked, a 1 percent improvement over the previous year.
Sometimes, the government said it searched and couldn't find what citizens wanted.
And yes, if you were wondering, the government did spend thousands on "How to Google... for Idiots" classes for its employees.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, whose top official has testified to Congress repeatedly about NSA surveillance programs disclosed by contractor Edward Snowden, told the AP it couldn't find any records or emails in its offices asking other federal agencies to be on the lookout for journalists to whom Snowden provided classified materials. British intelligence authorities had detained one reporter's partner for nine hours at Heathrow airport and questioned him under terrorism laws. DNI James Clapper has at least twice publicly described the reporters as "accomplices" to Snowden, who is charged under the U.S. Espionage Act and faces up to 30 years in prison.
Likewise, Cook, departing as the editor at Gawker, was exasperated when the State Department told him it couldn't find any emails between journalists and Philippe Reines, Hillary Clinton's personal spokesman when Clinton was secretary of state. BuzzFeed published a lengthy and profane email exchange about the 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi between Reines and its correspondent, Michael Hastings.
"They said there were no records," Cook said of the State Department.
The snide tone in the AP piece is amusing: it is almost as if the AP thinks it is justified in its berating of America's most totalitarian regime. One would almost think the AP had scores of its phone lines tapped directly by the Department of Justice. Oh wait, we did it again.
QOTD: "If you hate the sexism that comes with women fielding the sorts of questions that men simply don’t even have to confront, then this gif is for you.
Lauren Conrad of past “Laguna Beach” fame (but has since totally made it on her own as a clothing designer and editor of the ever-informative self-named website) totally takes a big step forward for females who are so over society’s inclination towards treating women like sexualized objects, incapable of any additional value.
When asked the question, “What’s your favorite position?” during a radio interview, Conrad barely bats an eye (and certainly doesn’t take the opportunity to treat the Q&A sesh as some ongoing Cosmopolitan quiz).
Instead, she responds: CEO." --Acculturated
In the unusual case of the missing Flight 370, [mapping firm] DigitalGlobe is gathering as much human-created data as possible through the crowdsourcing model.
"On Tomnod.com, any person can go and just look at photos in the grid, and you're supposed to flag anything that looks interesting," Hardman said. "The problem is, humans can see lots of things, but they might not always be the right things. For example, someone may see something they think is unusual, but it's really just some floating garbage or a whitecap wave that may look a little suspicious.
"So what [DigitalGlobe] does is get the input of many thousands of people, run it through big data filters on the back end that say things like: 'Are there areas of the Indian Ocean where a lot of people have flagged an item of interest?' They then do cluster analysis on that. Then, experts in search-and-rescue may say, 'There's a hot spot, go fly over this.'"
As of 2 p.m. Pacific time March 15, the free-to-use Tomnod.com site indicated that 421,338 photos -- each showing an area about 1,000 to 2,000 feet wide of the Indian Ocean -- have been produced and entered into the analytics engine... "I don't know what size grid that ends up being, but it's a wide, wide area of the western side of the search," Hardman said.
As of March 15, the search was still on, with many thousands of human eyes -- and a very high-powered photo/data analytics engine -- trying to solve the mystery of the missing airliner.
...naval strategists have been unraveling lost-at-sea mysteries as far back as the U-boat battles of World War II, and perhaps most dramatically in 1968, when an intelligence team found the submarine Scorpion, which sank in the North Atlantic after losing contact under equally baffling circumstances. "The same approach we used with Scorpion could be applied in this case and should be," says John P. Craven who helped pioneer the use of Bayesian search techniques to locate objects lost at sea.
... forecasters draw on expertise from diverse but relevant areas — in the case of finding a submarine, say, submarine command, ocean salvage, and oceanography experts, as well as physicists and engineers. Each would make an educated guess as to where the ship is, based on different scenarios: the sub was attacked; a torpedo activated onboard; a battery exploded. Craven's work was instrumental in the Navy's search for the missing hydrogen bomb that had been lost in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Spain in 1966 and this is how Craven located the Scorpion. "I knew these guys and I gave probability scores to each scenario they came up with," says Craven. The men bet bottles of Chivas Regal to keep matters interesting, and after some statistical analysis, Craven zeroed in on a point about 400 miles from the Azores, near the Sargasso Sea. The sub was found about 200 yards away.
Ominous: Russian state TV invoking mushroom clouds RT @lauraphylmills pic.twitter.com/EASS9eGa1K #Ukraine
— greg white (@whitegl) March 16, 2014QOTD: "Silly talk and posturing, the making of grand-sounding statements, and drawing erasable "red lines" all have consequences. One, of course, is that Russia is not likely to undo its actions in Crimea. The Russians, furthermore, have sanction-like weapons of their own such as the messing about with US banks and debt noted above, but not limited only to that. They are major suppliers of gas to Europe and in the past have shown a willingness to interrupt supplies for political purposes.
So while we gut our military, refuse to buy Canadian oil, or become energy independent and a major supplier of energy to Europe, we prattle on and on about sanctions and international law and solidarity with the Syrian opposition Ukraine. As noted before, we could neutralize Russia's leverage in the world very swiftly, without ever mentioning the word "sanctions." That, however, requires something we do not have, to wit, patriotic, committed, focused, and decisive leadership.
We have Obama." --W. Lewis Amselem
#1 Real disposable income per capita continues to fall. In the fourth quarter of 2012, it was sitting at $37,265. By the time that the fourth quarter of 2013 had come around, it had dropped to $36,941. That means that average Americans have less money to go shopping with than they did previously.
#2 In January, real disposable income in the U.S. experienced the largest year over year decline that we have seen since 1974.
#3 As disposable income decreases, major retailers are closing thousands of stores all over the country. Some are even calling this "a retail apocalypse".
#4 From September 2013 to January 2014, the personal saving rate in the United States dropped by a staggering 16 percent.
QOTD: "For the average person, many folks who don't have health insurance initially, they're going to have to make some choices. And they might end up having to switch doctors, in part because they're saving money." --Barack Obama
Mysterious posters of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) with his face photoshopped onto a tattooed body were plastered around various locations in Los Angeles, like the Beverly Hilton Hotel, late Thursday night.
The title above the image of the Texas Republican gives a March 15 date. The poster goes on to say, "TED CRUZ'S SO - CAL BLACKLISTED & LOVING IT TOUR."
Although the location of the poster says the Hilton, Senator Cruz is expected to be the keynote speaker at the Claremont Institute's annual Winton Churchill dinner on Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
The black-and-white images have appeared in front of popular L.A. clubs: the Viper Room, the Seventh Veil, Whiskey-a-Go-Go, as well as on car windshields and utility poles among other places.
@DefendWallSt @jensan1332 @chris63414391 Have you guys seen this pic before?He likes 2 go 2 Venezuela to beg for $$$ pic.twitter.com/divw61qPF8
— Letvia (@letvia) March 15, 2014This in NOT a demonstration, this is a line to buy food in Venezuela. The result of 15 years of Chavismo.Oh. And:
Venezuelans waiting in line for gas in a country loaded with gas/oil. Absent from photo: Sean Penn pic.twitter.com/G7Id37fjQT
— Bill (@DefendWallSt) March 14, 2014ObamaCare: The administration plans to cut the military pensions of those who served their country while giving public employees a break by exempting their ObamaCare subsidies from sequestration.
On the heels of announcing that Army troop levels will be cut below pre-World War II levels, the Military Times has reported that the Obama administration is planning to reduce military pension costs by 10% by converting part of their retirement to 401(k)-like defined-contribution plans from defined-benefit plans.What makes this interesting is that it affects military retirees and members of the military who are non-union and therefore can't strike or engage in collective bargaining. Public-sector union employees will retain their defined-benefit plans.
So, those who defend this country will be cut while those who feed at the public trough and whose union dues provide a ready supply of campaign cash will not.
To cut the retirement benefits of the military after these genuine heroes have fought with honor and distinction for 13 years in Iraq and Afghanistan is unconscionable. It's particularly despicable to treat American military retirees worse than other public employees.
President Obama has long defended defined-benefit plans, which, yes, do cost the government more and have pushed some cities and states toward bankruptcy. In a defense of public-sector unions and their benefits, Obama spoke forcefully to the National Governors Association at the White House on Feb. 28, 2011:
"I don't think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon."
That cost-saving measures are to be applied only to the military and not to politically favored groups and programs
Iranian Deputy Commander Warns They Are Ready to Annihilate Israel
MEMRI. Org: Speaking at a conference held in Tehran, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Deputy Commander Brigadier-General Hossein Salami said: “We, here, can muster all our energies in order to annihilate the Zionist entity, more than 1,400 kilometers away. We are ready for that moment in the future.”
Following are excerpts from the speech, which aired on Al-Alam TV on March 11, 2014.
Brigadier-General Hossein Salami: Despite the geographical distance, we are attached to the hearts of the Palestinians. How is it that our slogans and goals are identical to the slogans and causes of the Palestinians? Why do we strive to become martyrs and risk our lives for the Palestinian cause?
The answer is that the religion of Islam has designated this for us – this goal, this motivation, this belief, this energy – so that we, here, can muster all our energies in order to annihilate the Zionist entity, more than 1,400 kilometers away. We are ready for that moment in the future.
House Passes Act Intended to Reign in Obama’s Imperial Presidency: MBQOTD: "I’ve always said leftists are about not compassion or treating people with sensitivity and respect, much less equally, but control and bullying, all with an arrogant, mean-spirited air of superiority.
For Obama, there are at least two aspects to his control-freakishness. He not only pushes policies that give the federal government vastly more control over our lives but also is inordinately dictatorial in the manner in which he ramrods his agenda through, displaying utter contempt for what anyone else thinks, what he might damage with his unilateral actions and, most of all, the Constitution and the rule of law." --David Limbaugh
Sleight of hand and illusion have their role in the entertainment world; but when the same tactics are employed in the real world, the stakes are much greater, and the intent more dubious. David Copperfield has met his match in fabricated magic and illusionary tactics. For as any illusionist knows, in order to avoid letting the spectator see what’s really going on, you distract the spectator’s attention. And none are better at that than those leading the country today.
With the spectacular flop of the Unaffordable Care Act rollout, the moribund economy, disappointing jobs growth, dramatic widening of the income gap, higher poverty rates than the country has seen in 50 years, and an impotence with world leaders on the global scene, the Magician In Chief reached for his magician’s hat. And what did he pull out in an attempt to distract the nation from his colossal failures? A minimum wage increase! Voila! And now on cue, let us all be impressed! On second thought, let’s not be.Let’s look at the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on who is affected by the minimum wage. According to the BLS, 3.6 million of our total civilian workforce of 155 million workers are at or below the minimum wage compensation level. That is 2.5% of all workers in the U.S. Comprising that group of minimum wage earners, 31% are teenagers, and 55% are 25 years old or younger. That means that just slightly more than 1% of the total workforce over the age of 25 is earning minimum wage.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe - The Fourth Turning
“In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” – Frank Church on Meet the Press regarding the NSA – 1975
Ever since Edward Snowden burst onto the worldwide stage in June 2013, I’ve been wondering how he fits into the fabric of this ongoing Fourth Turning. This period of Crisis that arrives like clockwork, 60 to 70 years after the end of the previous Fourth Turning (Civil War – 66 years after American Revolution, Great Depression/World War II – 64 years after Civil War, Global Financial Crisis – 62 years after World War II), arrived in September 2008 with the Federal Reserve created collapse of the global financial system. We are now five and a half years into this Fourth Turning, with its climax not likely until the late-2020’s. At this point in previous Fourth Turnings a regeneracy had unified sides in their cause and a grey champion or champions (Ben Franklin/Samuel Adams, Lincoln/Davis, FDR) had stepped forward to lead. Thus far, no one from the Prophet generation has been able to unify the nation and create a sense of common civic purpose. Societal trust continues to implode, as faith in political, financial, corporate, and religious institutions spirals downward. There is no sign of a unifying regeneracy on the horizon.
The core elements of this Fourth Turning continue to propel this Crisis: debt, civic decay, global disorder. Central bankers, politicians, and government bureaucrats have been able to fashion the illusion of recovery and return to normalcy, but their “solutions” are nothing more than smoke and mirrors exacerbating the next bloodier violent stage of this Fourth Turning. The emergencies will become increasingly dire, triggering unforeseen reactions and unintended consequences. The civic fabric of our society will be torn asunder.