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Obama is having trouble getting a handle on his many scandals. (See 2 below.)
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This op ed writer is troubled by Obama's latest appointments - Rice and Powers. (See 3 below.)
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It is ironic that Obama castigated GW for everything Obama proceeded to do and in spades.
Whistle blower says more to come.
That said, even if the gathering of information has been legally authorized by a judge, in typical bureaucratic fashion I suspect so much has been collected it will prove useless in preventing terror attacks but might be of some benefit after the fact.
What is dangerous, however, is the precedent being set and where it may ultimately lead regarding crushing our civil rights. There most likely will be other presidents following Obama who will build upon his tyrannical arrogance and slowly the walls of our Republic, built to protect citizens from their government, will crumble endangering both our Republic and cherished freedoms. (See 4 below.)
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Palestinian suffering has mostly been caused by their own corrupt leadership. (See 5 below.)
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By most historical standards the 'heralded recovery' is not up to snuff. (See 6 below.)
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The IRS scandal continues to creep upward. It should be no surprise that Obama knowingly set the tone that anyone who was forming an alliance against him and his hope and change plans should be stopped, investigated, run through the gauntlet of D.C's crushing bureaucracy.
It should also be no surprise that Senators like Schumer, Durben, who already admitted he was involved, and others are so partisan they would sign anything Obama stuck under their noses. So they piled on as well demanding the IRS staffers investigate these 'shadowy' groups.
In time, Congressional investigators and various aggrieved whistle blowers will spill their guts and we will find out the names of the scum bags in the White House who were behind the IRS skulduggery.
D.C. works in layers, so the fingerprints are harder to detect but persistence eventually carries the day. It just takes a long time because stonewallers are so prevalent in Disney East.
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Dick
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1)
Arab World: Is Egypt losing the Nile?
Egyptian politicians are enraged by Ethiopia’s plans to divert the waters of the Nile and some have gone as far as calling for military action.
Egypt is still in shock over Ethiopia’s May 28 announcement, in which it said it was diverting the flow of the Nile River to facilitate the building of a dam on the Blue Nile.
In the fourth century BCE, Greek historian Herodotus proclaimed Egypt the gift of the Nile – and this still resonates today. The mighty river surging from the depths of Africa to the Mediterranean, with its more than 4,000-mile course, is the lifeblood of Egypt and has made a flourishing civilization possible since the dawn of history.
Ninety-five percent of the country is relentless desert, the continuation of the Sahara, and the Nile not only water the lands it passes through, it carries loose soil taken from Africa and deposits it along its banks. In this way, it turns them into a narrow strip of fertile land – inhabiting a mere 40,000 square kilometers, or 4% of a country of 1 million square kilometers.
North of Cairo the river divides into two branches running to the sea, thus creating a delta in which most of Egypt’s agriculture is concentrated.
Altogether, 96% of a population numbering an estimated 85 million people lives in the Nile Valley.
For untold generations, Egypt has been accustomed to seeing the Nile as its own property, only grudgingly allowing Sudan – which was long under Egyptian rule and considered a sister Arab country contributing to its security – to have a small part of the river’s flow.
According to the treaty signed in 1929, at a time when both countries and part of Africa were under British rule, out of the 85 billion cubic meters flowing annually in the river, Egypt received 48 billion and Sudan 4 billion.
Egypt was given full control of the Nile, while African countries were forbidden to build dams on the river or its tributaries; Egypt also had the right to carry out checks to make sure that the treaty was respected. In accordance with the treaty, Egypt still maintains today a permanent delegation of engineers stationed near Lake Victoria, source of the White Nile, to supervise the activities of the countries along the river.
In 1959, the treaty was amended so that Egypt received 55.5 billion cubic meters and Sudan 18.5, for a total of 87% of the annual flow accrued through the rains – leaving a mere 13% to the Upper Nile countries of Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya and Congo.
The amended treaty gave Egypt the right to build the Aswan Dam, and its Lake Nasser reservoir holds 168 billion cubic meters of water. The dam made it possible for Egypt to boost its production of electricity to 2,100 megawatts and to regulate the flow of the river, putting an end to the annual flooding that impacted Cairo and other areas. Lake Nasser is used to provide water for drinking and irrigation, thus increasing usable lands.
In this way, Egypt has remained an agricultural land and cannot envision a future with no free and steady supply of water from the Nile for its multipurpose uses. However, the past 50 years have seen changes in Africa. The growing populations of newly independent states need more and more water – drinking water, water for agriculture and for industry, water to produce electricity. For the past 10 years they have had talks on the subject with Egypt, which stubbornly refused to see the problem and forbade them from taking advantage of the river flowing through their countries. Egypt even exerted pressure on the World Bank to refrain from financing projects along the Nile, and resorted to thinly veiled threats against the countries that were considering such projects.
But the problem would not go away.
In May 2010 at Sharm el-Sheikh, proposals for a new treaty were presented to Egypt by the upstream countries.
The Entebbe Agreement they drafted created a blueprint for cooperation between all Nile River countries, which would supersede all previous agreements and provide for a new partition of the water, to answer the needs of all countries in a more equitable way.
Egypt rejected the agreement on the basis of the treaties of 1929 and 1959.
Upper Nile countries then decided to submit the Entebbe Agreement for signature to all river states so that it could be implemented within a year. Angry debates have been raging ever since.
Neither the Hosni Mubarak regime nor the army regime that followed were ready to enter into discussions with the relevant African states – which nevertheless kept on planning the dams they needed to develop their countries.
The Blue Nile, which provides 85% of the river’s water, has its source in Ethiopia. The country, the largest in the region with a population set to overtake that of Egypt in the coming decades, has begun to build several dams. The best-known is the Grand Renaissance Dam, which is scheduled to hold 200 billion cubic meters in its reservoir and provide 6,000 megawatts of electricity.
Intense pressure from Egypt has not deterred Ethiopia, which insists upon developing its water resources, as Egypt clings to the position that the two treaties granted it the right to control what goes on in the river.
Suddenly, last week – following meetings between Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn – Ethiopia published the communiqué announcing that the river would be diverted to facilitate the completion of the Grand Renaissance Dam. Egyptians are offended at what they perceive as an insult, since Morsi knew nothing of the communiqué. However, on a deeper level, they feel that the very basis of their existence is being threatened.
They have yet to come to terms with the new reality in the region and the needs of other countries.
So far, Ethiopia says that there will be no change to the amount of water reaching Egypt, and that the reservoir will not start functioning until next year and will not be full before 2017.
The Egyptians do not quite believe it and are afraid that their share will be affected, since the Ethiopians will slow the flow of the river in order to fill the dam. This at a time when the individual consumption of water in Egypt has dropped to 759 cubic meters, well below the 1,000 mark recommended by the UN. Cairo is worried. While the president and sundry officials repeat that they will not tolerate attempts on their water, they say it is too early to come to the conclusion that the Grand Renaissance Dam will affect Egypt. Instead, they want to wait for the conclusions of the tripartite commission of experts from Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. The commission submitted its findings last week and they are still being reviewed; further studies may be needed.
Politicians, on the other hand, are not waiting. There have issued calls for a stronger stand against Ethiopia and other Upper Nile countries; some would even want to see military action such as blasting the dam, and Islamist groups are calling for jihad against Ethiopia. Hamdeen Sabahi, leader of the Nasserist movement and a former presidential candidate, wants Ethiopia punished – by, for instance, barring its vessels from crossing the Suez Canal. Furthermore, says Sabahi, a similar measure should be extended to Italy, the US and Israel, since according to him these countries are providing the financing for the dam. It was left to the daughter of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a professor of political science, to point out that according to the Constantinople Convention of 1888, there must be free passage in the canal in times of both war and peace – and any one-sided move by Egypt would harm it and endanger the course of world navigation.
The minister in charge of irrigation has been at pains to stress that Egypt should not resort to force and that there is still time for negotiation. However, he added that there is today a deficit of 7 billion cubic meters of water, which is expected to grow – with an estimated 150 million people living in Egypt by the year 2050, and the deficit reaching 21 billion cubic meters of water. In essence, an agriculture minister would see the building of the dam as akin to using armed force against Egypt.
To make matters worse, Sudan, which Egypt considered its staunchest ally on the Nile issue, has apparently come to the conclusion that it would not be harmed by the dam – though some argue that Sudan wants to take advantage of the situation, to force Egypt to be more accommodating regarding the vast, disputed Halayeb and Shalatan territories on the Red Sea. (While ruled by Egypt, Sudan claims them for its own.) Ultimately, however, the fact is that due to its copious rainfall, Sudan does not lack water, while Egypt is entirely dependent on the Nile.
As is always the case with Egypt, Israel is accused of a variety of sins: inciting Ethiopia against Egypt, and even granting agricultural assistance to Ethiopia and thus increasing that country’s need for water. Of course, Egyptians are conveniently forgetting that they themselves were the recipients of Israel’s technology in the ’80s and ’90s, and that it was thanks to that help that they were able to grow crops in the light desert soil. Egyptian agriculture today is based on such Israeli techniques as drip irrigation, and on Israeli varieties of fruits and vegetables. Thousands of young Egyptians trained at Kibbutz Bror Hayil, where they learned how to cultivate the soil and save precious water.
The fact is that the writing was on the wall. Egypt had years and years during the Mubarak regime to enter into discussions with Upper Nile states with a view toward reaching an agreement. Both Egypt and the Nile states needed increasing amounts of water for their development, and cooperation and a change in the existing treaties were needed. Unfortunately, the press was not free to publish studies on the subject, which would have been considered detrimental to Egypt.
Yet, while some 1,600 billion cubic meters of rain fall annually on the Nile Basin area, a mere 85 billion eventually reach the river; some of the water evaporates as swampy areas appear and slow the flow. A concerted effort of all neighboring countries financed by the World Bank would considerably increase the amount of water in the river. Thus far, however, nothing has been done and Egypt is still in a state of denial, with Egyptian diplomacy suffering a serious blow.
The questions remain: Can the troubled country, threatened by a potential agricultural disaster and widespread famine, understand that now is the time to enter into serious negotiations? Has it understood that only a fair and equitable solution, taking into consideration the legitimate needs of all Nile countries, will end the crisis in time?
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2)Scandalzapoppin
By Clarice Feldman
With serious and demonstrable charges of administration wrongdoing popping up every day, conservatives are rightfully angry at the desultory treatment they get from the media.
At Just One Minute, the poster known as "daddy" summarizes that feeling well:
Worth mentioning how the NY Times and the WaPo and Andrea Mitchell and ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN etc, were all so interested in Sarah Palin's Emails, that they recruited volunteers across the nation to help them pore thru them.
Yet when Lisa Jackson specifically uses false email aliases like "Richard Windsor" (unethically and probably illegally) to conduct Government business, and Sebelius today is discovered to have pretty much done the same thing, it is all met by yawns from the suddenly incurious Journalists mentioned above."
Darwin central has much the same complaint:
Friedersdorf also mocks conservatives for finding media bias in coverage of conservative icons who apparently are not worthy of unbiased reporting, mentioning Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann by name. Omitted is any mention of the unbiased AP assignment of eleven reporters to fact check Sarah Palin's autobiography. Perhaps that caused the paucity of personnel available to cover Fast 'n' Furious. Oh, those pesky, silly coincidences kept another story from ever reaching the American public.[snip]Compare and contrast the coverage of the Valerie Plame scandal (body count, zero, for those keeping score), with the coverage of Benghazi. Alternatively, consider l'affaire Plame (body count zero), with the protracted somnolence -- it never rose to the level of reporting -- produced by the DOJ's Fast 'n' Furious embarrassment. At last count, over two hundred people lost their lives as a result of Fast 'n' Furious, one of them being United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Ho-hum. Got something snarky about the Tea Party?
Young cons.com noted the entertainment industry is just as guilty of using double standards and diversionary tactics as is the press: "With all these Obama scandals piling up the next episode of SNL will have some great George Bush and Sarah Palin jokes."
I'm not sure what the answer is. I suppose we could leak that Sarah Palin was with Obama on the night of the Benghazi massacre. I mean after all, no one knows where he was so it's not impossible. That might get their attention. Maybe we could send Soros-funded Media Matters a picture of Palin outside the IRS headquarters slipping Lois Lerner the instructions on how to keep the Tea Party from getting the tax status they sought.
I mean, how else besides bias and ignorance can the media fail to follow up on stories that seem as easy to get to as Jack Horner's plum fished from a pie?
Here are just two examples of the seemingly inexhaustible mound of evidence of pervasive administration lawlessness that are turning up daily.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I suppose we could leak that Sarah Palin was with Obama on the night of the Benghazi massacre. I mean after all, no one knows where he was so it's not impossible. That might get their attention. Maybe we could send Soros-funded Media Matters a picture of Palin outside the IRS headquarters slipping Lois Lerner the instructions on how to keep the Tea Party from getting the tax status they sought.
I mean, how else besides bias and ignorance can the media fail to follow up on stories that seem as easy to get to as Jack Horner's plum fished from a pie?
Here are just two examples of the seemingly inexhaustible mound of evidence of pervasive administration lawlessness that are turning up daily.
The first involves the almost daily revelations that the IRS officials' Congressional testimony was utterly false.
A misfired email from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee in Cincinnati alerted a number of Washington IRS officials that extra scrutiny was being placed on conservative groups in July 2010, a year earlier than previously acknowledged, according to interviews with IRS workers by congressional investigators.Transcripts of the interviews, reviewed by Reuters on Thursday, provided new details about Washington managers' awareness of the heightened scrutiny applied by front-line IRS agents in Cincinnati to applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups with words like "Tea Party" in their names.A political furor over the practice has engulfed the tax agency for nearly a month since a senior IRS official publicly apologized for it at a conference. Since then, the IRS' chief has been fired by President Barack Obama, the FBI has mounted an investigation and Congress has held numerous hearings.The transcripts show that in July 2010, Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who was coordinating "emerging issues" for the agency's tax-exempt unit, was corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull. She was asked to summarize her initial findings in a spreadsheet and notify a small group of colleagues, including some staff in the Washington tax-exempt unit. However, she sent her email to a larger number of people in Washington by accident."Everybody in DC got it by mistake," Hofacre said in the transcripts. She later clarified that she did not mean all officials but those in the IRS Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements unit.
Secondly, more and more information is surfacing about cases where Romney donors or applicants for 501 (c) (3) or (4) were audited by more than just the IRS -- something increasingly likely to have been the result of interagency coordination and White House involvement. Still, these revelations seem to be from the targets coming forward often to the new media, not the establishment press seeking out victims.
The Internal Revenue Service's political targeting might not have been limited to a few "rogue Cincinnati agents" or even organizations seeking nonprofit status. A major Mitt Romney fundraiser and campaign official -- along with her husband and three other family members -- all got a visit from the taxman in 2012.
In an interview with The Daily Caller, Kit Moncrief, a big-money fundraiser and state chair in Texas for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, recounted an unusual telephone call she received from an IRS agent on her personal cell phone in the spring of last year."The first place [the agent] called me was on my cell phone," Moncrief said, explaining that she believed the only place the agent could have accessed the number was from a Romney list. "The number is listed under my husband's name. She wouldn't have been able to be able to have my cell phone number because on the IRS form it shows the office number.[snip]according to Moncrief, the agent explained that her call was due to an "administration directive."[snip]Moncrief said the process was "strange" on two levels. "It was just very strange, number one that she called me for the family business. The tax returns would have said to call the office. And number two she probably said something that she shouldn't have said, that this was a directive from the administration," she added.According to Kit Moncrief the agent was very interested in her, asking Moncrief's employees specific questions about her activities.Kit and her husband Charles Moncrief were not the only Moncriefs the IRS visited.
Charles Moncrief told The DC his daughter Gloria Holmsten and brothers Bill and Richard Moncrief were also audited by the IRS in that same 2012 timeframe, all by different agents.Bill Moncrief's audit lasted from May to July 2012, Richard Moncrief's audit lasted from June to December 2012, and Gloria and her husband Erich Holmsten's audit lasted from April to June 2012.
[snip]The IRS audit of Kit and Charles Moncriefs lasted from April to June 2012, and according to the family, everything was found to be in order.[snip]Indeed the Moncriefs are not the only Romney supporters who have spoken out about their experience with the IRS.In an interview with The DC in May, Mitt Romney super PAC donor Frank VanderSloot explained how he was audited twice by the IRS after being attacked by the Obama campaign as one of eight "wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records." In that interview the billionaire businessman and former national co-chair of the Romney campaign's finance committee said that he was "not the only one" on that list had received a visit from the IRS.
With all this bubbling up, I viewed with some suspicion reports of a wide-net NSA spying program first reported in Britain's leftwing paper, the Guardian, by the notorious Glenn Greenwald, known most famously for creating numerous sock puppets to tout his own work online.
Shortly afterward, the Washington Post picked up the story, initially claiming despite their denials that the government's top-secret PRISM program had accessed servers from large firms with their cooperation. The Post has since retracted that claim:
Shortly afterward, the Washington Post picked up the story, initially claiming despite their denials that the government's top-secret PRISM program had accessed servers from large firms with their cooperation. The Post has since retracted that claim:
The Post previously claimed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple "participate knowingly". The phrase that stood out in the report (it has been repurposed by numerous tech blogs and news sites across the Web) since it suggested that US firms willingly agreed to a process that -- at best -- could violate the rights of millions in the US if their data is accidentally monitored by the NSA.Hours after the news broke, and every company bar PalTalk and AOL denied any knowledge of the program and allegations of their involvement, the Post has changed its stance.
Senators Feinstein and Chambliss, leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, confirm there is nothing new about the program and various reputable conservative reporters including John Podhoretz, James Taranto, and Andrew McCarthy have asserted there is no scandal in this and it does not involve wiretapping of all of our communications, although most sensible commentators do or, I think, would, concede the administration's credibility is so low at this point, it is not paranoia to question the possible misuse of this program by Obama and his appointees.
My guess is that this was leaked to Greenwald and the Post by those (White House insiders or Chinese hackers) who either wish to distract from real scandals -- look what the evil Bush made Obama do -- or to put the administration on the defensive about its criticisms of Chinese hacking.
Professor Orin Kerr describes the program for those whose hair might be on fire at this latest bit of news:
My guess is that this was leaked to Greenwald and the Post by those (White House insiders or Chinese hackers) who either wish to distract from real scandals -- look what the evil Bush made Obama do -- or to put the administration on the defensive about its criticisms of Chinese hacking.
Professor Orin Kerr describes the program for those whose hair might be on fire at this latest bit of news:
The leaked news about the PRISM surveillance program has been the big news story today. The details are murky, but one question that we should be asking is whether the program is legal. From what I've seen so far, it sounds like the program is the way the government is implementing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and the Protect America Act of 2007, which were enacted in response to the 2005 disclosure of the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Here's what I wrote about the PAA of 2007 when it was going through Congress:So what does the legislation do? A. . . The first change is a clarification that FISA warrants are not needed for "surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States." That is, if the government is monitoring someone outside the United States from a telecom switch in the U.S., it can listen in on the person's calls and read their e-mails without obtaining a FISA warrant first. The Fourth Amendment may still require reasonableness in this setting when one or more people on the call of e-mail are inside the U.S. or are United States citizens, but there is no statutory warrant requirement.The second change is a requirement of a formal authorization of a program to do such monitoring. The Director of National Intelligence and the AG have to approve a program (for up to one year) reasonably designed to be limited to the monitoring of persons outside the United States. Those procedures have to be submitted to the FISA court, which then reviews whether the Executive's conclusion that the procedures are reasonably designed to only pick up the communications of people reasonably believed to be outside the U.S. is "clearly erroneous." If the conclusion is clearly erroneous, the court sends them back and tells the Executive to try again. The government can also appeal that determination to the FISA Court of Review and if needed the Supreme Court. I'm not exactly sure, but my sense is that this is a one-size-fits-all order; that is, the one authorization covers all the providers.It sounds like the PRISM program is the way of implementing the statute, now codified at 50 U.S.C. 1881a. Recall this detail from the original Post story:Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in "selectors," or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target's "foreignness." That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, "but it's nothing to worry about."Presumably the bit about "selectors" that are "designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target's foreignness" are ones that have been approved by the DNI and AG and then approved by the FISA court to implement the authority to target "persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information." 50 U.S.C. 1881a(a).Anyway, maybe this is obvious to everyone, but I thought I would add it just in case it wasn't.
While it might be tempting to do to this administration what its backers in and out of the media did to the prior administration -- conjure up scandal where there isn't any -- I think it can only be a distraction that weakens the credibility of those who want to pursue real White House wrongdoing.
In any event, the week ended on one up note, the president, unaccountably praised by the media for so long as a great orator, was rendered speechless when he stood at a podium in San Jose without a ghostwritten script.
In any event, the week ended on one up note, the president, unaccountably praised by the media for so long as a great orator, was rendered speechless when he stood at a podium in San Jose without a ghostwritten script.
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3)Obama makes two troubling decisions about his foreign policy tea
By David Limbaugh
Just try to wrap your arms around the magnitude of defiance and chutzpah that led to and accompanied President Obama's appointment of the discredited Susan Rice as national security adviser. But don't let this outrage distract you from his equally disturbing appointment of leftist Samantha Power to replace Rice as UN ambassador.
Though Democrats and their supporting liberal media, with a few notable exceptions, have aggressively downplayed the multifaceted Benghazi scandal, none of them has laid a glove on the irrefutable claim that Rice delivered the talking points that had been altered by the administration to distort the facts in order to mitigate any damage to Obama's reelection efforts.
In December, Rice withdrew her name from consideration for secretary of state because "the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly." Yes, because there was no way she was going to be confirmed after mouthing lies to the American people about the cause of the attacks on our embassy in Libya that resulted in the murder of four Americans.!
In a piece for The Washington Post explaining her decision to withdraw, Rice did anything but acknowledge her wrongdoing. She said, "I have never sought in any way, shape or form to mislead the American people. ... Even before I was nominated for any new position, a steady drip of manufactured charges painted a wholly false picture of me."
Well, if she didn't seek to mislead the American people, then someone higher than her in the administration sought to and did mislead her and used her to deceive the people by repeating a steady barrage of manufactured lies to paint a wholly false picture of what precipitated the terrorist attack on our embassy.
We knew then and we know even more certainly now that this was a premeditated terrorist attack and not a spontaneous occurrence spurred by angst over an obscure anti-Muslim video. We know that the administration knew that, as well, and deliberately said otherwise at least in part to protect Obama's narrative that he had al-Qaida and radical Islamists on the ropes prior to the November election.
If Rice wasn't lying, she owed it to the American people to help determine who put her in the position of unwittingly defrauding the public about a matter of vital importance.
But Obama, Rice and the rest of the administration have just thumbed their noses at Congress and the American people and arrogantly refused to explain themselves.
Now Obama is rewarding Rice for her fierce loyalty with an appointment to a position arguably as influential as secretary of state and one for which she will not need to be confirmed. He is also counting on her continued deference in placing his personal interests above the nation's.
With Obama's brazen appointment of Rice to this position, he is saying either that Rice didn't lie (in which case someone else in the administration did, including possibly himself), or that she did lie and he is perfectly fine with it, maybe even grateful for it. Obama might as well say to us, "I don't really care what you think about our bogus story concerning the video. It got us through the election. I won."
If Obama insists on stubbornly clinging to the story that Rice did not know she was broadcasting falsehoods, then he should tell us who did know. But he's Obama. That's not going to happen.
Equally troubling is Obama's selection of Samantha Power to replace Rice. In announcing Power's appointment, Obama praised her as "a relentless advocate for American interests and values." But is she?
In 2003, Power called for a "historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, permitted by the United States." In a piece in The New Republic, she advocated a "doctrine of the mea culpa," which essentially involves the United States owning up to its alleged past foreign policy abuses to put itself in a better light to the world.
Is this not exactly the attitude Obama has expressed in his ongoing apology tour at home and abroad, always anxious to throw this nation under the bus and distance himself from its pre-Obama history? Those who have pooh-poohed this accurate characterization of Obama's blame-America-first approach should take note that Obama has now boldly reaffirmed this very worldview with his appointment of Power.
The Power appointment also further validates Obama's critics who have accused him of being a poor friend of our ally Israel. Space limitations don't permit elaboration here, but Paul Mirengoff at the Powerline blog has described Power as "virulently anti-Israel" and "Israel hating," and supports his assertion in these two posts: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/06/soft-power-finds-a-perfect-home.php and http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/06/samantha-power-hater-of-israel.php.
Obama's two appointments show that even as he is under heavy criticism for a smorgasbord of scandals, he is utterly undaunted. He "won" the election, and he is going to impose his agenda for transformational change no matter what and militantly ignore all efforts to make him accountable.
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4)Whistleblower’s NSA warning: ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’
By ShaunWaterman
The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens.
William Binney, an award-winning mathematician and noted NSA whistleblower, says the collection dates back to when the super-secret agency began domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I believe they’ve been collecting data about all domestic calls since October 2001,” said Mr. Binney, who worked at NSA for more than 30 years. “That’s more than a billion calls a day.”
He called his figures “back of the envelope” estimates, adding that they include emails as well as telephone calls.
Mr. Binney, who left the agency in October 2001, said the data were collected under a highly classified NSA program code-named “Stellar Wind,” which was part of the warrantless domestic wiretapping effort — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — launched on orders from President George W. Bush.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was revealed by The New York Times in 2005, but officials said it only monitored calls between Americans and suspected terrorists abroad. The Bush administration said it based the program’s legal authority on the president’s powers as commander-in-chief.
Congress subsequently amended the law governing wiretapping by spy agencies — the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — to provide legislative authority for the program and require supervision by the special secret court the 1978 act established.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted online late Wednesday a copy of the “Top Secret” FISA court order directing telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over “metadata” about every call made or received by all of its customers in the United States. Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.
Mr. Binney noted the order’s serial number, which indicates it is the 80th issued by the FISA court so far this year. The court likely has approved similar orders for the other major U.S. telecom providers, he said, “and they have to be renewed every 90 days.”
The order excludes the actual content of communications, such as the sound of voices on the call or the text of an email.
“On its face, the order reprinted in the [Guardian] article does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls,” a senior U.S. government official said in an email.
Democrats and Republicans on the congressional intelligence committees defended the order Thursday, asserting that the wide-scale collection of such data had enabled authorities to disrupt at least one terrorist attack and noting that a warrant would still be required to access the actual content of calls.
But Stephen B. Wicker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University, said the practical distinction between the metadata of calls and their content is rapidly disappearing because of technological advances, such as GPS features in mobile phones.
“There is a blurring of the line between content and context,” said Mr. Wicker, whose research focuses on privacy issues in wireless information networks.
Using analytical software, the NSA could use mobile phones’ metadata over time to paint a picture of where their users went, who they talked to and what their habits were, Mr. Wicker said.
“The metadata available is now so fine-grained that it reveals where we’re going, what we’re doing, what our preferences and beliefs might be and who our friends are,” he said.
Federal law and rulings by federal courts have consistently held that metadata, including information about the location of mobile phones, is not covered by the warrant requirements of the U.S. Constitution.
“Unfortunately, technology and the opportunities it presents for surveillance have outpaced our understanding of the Fourth Amendment,” Mr. Wicker said, citing the constitutional ban on unlawful searches and seizures.
Mr. Binney said that, in any case, the NSA already is collecting the content of calls and emails, as well as metadata.
In 2003, according to sworn testimony by a former AT&T engineer, the NSA began building a special room at the company’s switching center in San Francisco and at other AT&T switching centers around the country. Equipment in the room enabled NSA to siphon off a copy of every byte of data running through AT&T’s fiber-optic cable network, according to privacy advocates.
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By Jonathan S. Tobin
Sometimes a great truth can be found even in a compendium of lies. That’s the upshot of the latest rant against Israel from a Palestinian leader. The leader in question is Jibril Rajoub, who currently serves as head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, though prior to assuming that post this senior official of the Fatah Party was an Arafat advisor and a terrorist who was imprisoned for throwing a hand grenade at an Israeli bus. Rather than concentrating on trying to get Palestinian kids to turn to sports as a preferable outlet to violence, Rajoub has been outspoken about his commitment to conflict with Israel recently and was quoted as having said that Palestinians suffered “three times as much” as Israelis as a result of the 1972 Munich massacre.
There is something egregious about a Palestinian Olympic official attempting to rationalize or even downplay the significance of an event in which terrorists under the command of Arafat and Fatah (albeit operating under the false flag of “Black September” which was merely a front for the PLO) murdered 11 Israeli athletes. But as wrong as Rajoub is about so much else, he’s right that the Palestinians have suffered more as a result of these events even if he doesn’t quite understand what the source of the suffering really was.
When he spoke of Palestinian suffering, Rajoub was referring to the Israeli efforts to kill all those involved in that bloody terror attack. But the real suffering was the ultimate impact on the Palestinian people of that crime and the thousands more like it committed in the name of Palestinian nationalism. By embracing terror, the Palestinians have doomed themselves to decades of war and hardship that might have been entirely avoided had they decided to devote themselves to reconciliation and coexistence. Rather than focus on the supposed misdeeds of the evil Israelis, as Rajoub would have his people and those that wish them well do, Palestinians would do well to finally realize that the ones who have been inflicting suffering on them are their own violent and corrupt leadership.
Rajoub’s checkered career has included some time spent trying to cultivate the affection of Israeli and American Jewish left-wingers via the Geneva Initiative, of which he was one of the signers. But in the last year, he has been among the most outspoken Palestinians when it comes to attempts to demonize Israel. As the Times of Israel reports:
Rajoub, former director of the Preventive Security Force in the West Bank, told a conference in October 2012 that “Jews are Satans, and Zionists the sons of dogs.”
In an interview with the Lebanese TV channel al-Mayadeen on May 1, he said that, for Fatah, “resistance to Israel remains on our agenda.
“I mean resistance in all of its forms,” he elaborated. “At this stage, we believe that popular resistance — with all that it entails — is effective and costly to the other side [Israel],” Rajoub said in the hour-long interview, which was highlighted by the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch.
“If you ask me as a Palestinian,” he continued, “I say — our battle is with the Israeli occupation. Our main enemy, not [just] as Palestinians but as Arabs and Muslims, is Israel and the Israeli occupation.”
These sorts of statements are in keeping with the general tone of Palestinian politics in which vilification of Israel and support for conflict is always in fashion. But Rajoub’s reference to Munich is an opportunity to address just how badly those who act on such sentiments have damaged the Palestinians.
Violence against Jews and rejection of Israel has been the key element of Palestinian nationalism throughout its history. But imagine what the outcome would have been if instead of concentrating on trying to kill Jews, be they Olympic athletes or the children slaughtered by suicide bombers during the second intifada, Palestinians had focused their efforts on peaceful development, refugee resettlement or peaceful outreach. Untold suffering, death and destruction would have been avoided on both sides. And there’s little doubt the Palestinians would have achieved an independent state long ago.
Israelis have suffered from Arab terror such as the Munich massacre. But it is probably true that as awful as that pain has been, the Palestinians have been the much big losers in the exchange. It’s a pity that Rajoub can’t realize that. It’s even more of a pity that the people he supposedly represents haven’t come to the same conclusion and ousted their corrupt and violent Fatah and Hamas leaders in exchange for leaders who wish to end their suffering rather than prolong it in the name of an endless unwinnable war against Israel.
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6)UCLA Report: US 'Great Recovery' Isn't 'Even Normal Growth - It's Bad
The expected U.S. "Great Recovery" hasn't materialized and the economy has fallen short of even normal growth, according to a new forecast.
The second-quarter UCLA Anderson Forecast said the growth of real gross domestic product — meaning the inflation-adjusted value of goods and services produced — is too small to help the nation climb out of its slump.
The figure was 15.4 percent below a "normal" growth trend, forecast director Edward Leamer wrote.
"To get back to that 3 percent trend, we would need 4 percent growth for 15 years, or 5 percent growth for eight years, or 6 percent growth for five years, not the disappointing twos and threes we have been racking up recently," he said.
"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad," he wrote.
A real GDP growth rate of just 1.9 percent is expected for this year, only rising to 3 percent in 2015, according to the forecast.
The figures will get a boost from a recovering housing market, forecasters said, with housing starts jumping from the historic low of 550,000 in 2009 to 1.5 million by 2015.
Unemployment should fall to 6.9 percent next year and 6.6 percent by 2015, according to the forecast — partly due, however, to discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force.
Leamer said that while jobs are being created, "the tepid growth continues to obscure the nation's most fundamental problems: too much government spending funded with too much borrowing, too little national savings to cover late-in-life health care issues and too many workers lacking the skills to compete in the modern economy," according to a University of California, Los Angeles press statement.
In addition, the jobs being created may not provide workers with a secure future and the education system is failing to provide skills such as analytical thinking that will be crucial for future workers, he wrote.
"Regrettably we reward teachers if their students can regurgitate the information on standardized tests," Leamer wrote.
California, meanwhile, outperformed the nation in job growth during a 12-month period that ended in April. Only Utah's growth rate was greater, the forecast said.
The forecast for all of 2013 is for total state employment growth of 2.6 percent, slightly higher than predictions for national growth.
However, the state's current unemployment rate of 9 percent is still higher than the overall U.S. rate of 7.5 percent. UCLA forecasters predicted the state figure will drop to 8.8 percent by the end of the year and 7.7 percent by the end of 2014.
The state's technology sector was a big contributor to job increases, along with the construction industry, which benefited from rising demand for housing, the UCLA forecast said.
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