It Can Happen Here – Tea Party Nation

It Can Happen Here – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

“How the Jews Defeated Hitler” is the title of a new book by Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg PhD, subtitled “Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism.”  The title is counter-intuitive because, as is well known, the Nazis murdered six million Jews in Europe during the course of a deliberate genocide that has since become known as the Holocaust.

The author is a professor of political science and is chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the book is more than just a history of that horrific period of history. It is not that long ago. I was a child at the time so, within the living memory of the survivors, their children and grandchildren, as well as others like myself around the world, it is living history.

The value of the book is the way it explains how many of the Jews of Europe, particularly those herded into ghettos, failed to grasp what was happening. “It was initially difficult for most Jews to believe that the Germans actually intended to kill them all.”

Another major factor was that the Nazis ensured that they were disarmed and unable to defend themselves, as were others who opposed the regime.

Where resistance fighters emerged, Ginsburg notes that “Germany relied, especially in Western Europe, on the help of local police forces to deal with partisans, and, especially in France and Holland, whose local police were quite helpful.” In occupied France, “The French police helpfully compiled a card index of all the Jews of Paris by name, street, occupation, and nationality.”

Therein lies the fears and concerns of Americans as they slowly come to realize that their government not only knows where they live, but a great deal of information about them courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, right on down to their local law enforcement authorities.

If or when Obamacare is fully implemented, anonymous bureaucrats will be able to “target” selected Americans who are seeking medical care for death simply by denying it. No need to set up concentration camps to kill them en mass. Just as the little girl who needed a lung transplant that was initially denied by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, individuals identified as “patriots” or other enemies of the state could simply be allowed to die.

So, yes, it can happen here.

The focus of the present day animus against Jews in general—extremely active throughout the Middle East and a major trend in Europe—is the nation of Israel. Zionism, the political movement that supports Israel, is a handy substitute for anti-Semitism.

Dr. Ginsberg, however, notes that “In actuality, Israel’s founding was very much the result of the West’s postwar unwillingness to accept Jewish refugees. Governments that felt that even one Jewish refugee was one too many had to find someplace to resettle several hundred thousand Jews.” The State of Israel, like the mythical phoenix, literally rose from the ashes of Europe’s murdered Jews.

“To the Americans and eventually even to the British, the State of Israel seemed the least undesirable alternative. Within two decades of Israel’s creation (in 1948) though, the reasons for its existence were forgotten or had become irrelevant, and new configurations of political forces gave rise to a renewed European anti-Semitic discourse taking the form of anti-Zionism…The European Left loudly proclaims its anti-Zionism by denouncing Israel as a racist and apartheid state and calling for boycotts of Israeli products, citizens, and ideas.” The United Nations is a hotbed of anti-Semitism.

During World War II, however, Jews played leading roles in the partisan efforts to disrupt German aggression, often held leadership positions in the allied military forces and served within them, were active throughout the FDR New Deal administrations, supported the U.S. bond drives to finance the war, and were instrumental in breaking the codes of the Nazis and Empire of Japan. Jews were also the core of physicists and engineers who developed the atomic bombs that speeded the end of the war in the Pacific.

The same authoritarian and leftist forces, whether it is the rise of Islamic ambitions to conquer the world or the efforts of the Left to impose a one-world government via the United Nations or just to undermine the former power and position of the United States as a defender of freedom, are at work today.

You need not be a Jew to fear the growing centralization of power in the federal government.

If you are a gun-owner, you know that the Obama administration and some in Congress seek to amend and erode the Second Amendment in an effort to take your arms away from you; a common goal of fascism.

If you are a member of the Tea Party or a patriot movement, you now know that the Internal Revenue Service sought to deny applications for tax-exempt status needed for fund-raising.

If you fear that your Fourth Amendment right to privacy is being eroded then you know that the Constitution is under attack.

If you are concerned about government by executive order, then yes, it can happen here.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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Super-Dooper Snoopers – Tea Party Nation

Super-Dooper Snoopers – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

While in the U.S. Army in the early 60s, I worked in the G-2 (intelligence) office of my battalion. I was surely no James Bond, but I did need a security clearance and quickly was granted one to be around documents marked “secret.” There are now thousands waiting for their security clearances and 4.8 million who already have one!

When Edward Snowden, an analyst for a national security contractor, decided to tell the world that the National Security Agency was actually gathering meta-data about all of our communications (and the rest of the world’s), I was among those who were not surprised. Whole books had been written about this practice before and since 9/11. James Bamford had published “The Puzzle Palace” about the NSA way back in 1983!

The Justice Department has charged Snowden with conveying classified information to an unauthorized party, disclosing communications intelligence information, and theft of government property. The charges, each of which carries a potential 10-year prison term, were filed in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Well, at least that beats a firing squad.

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media thinks a lot of notable news media personalities have been duped. “Those who claimed NSA traitor Edward Snowden was a patriot or hero have egg all over their faces, as the former NSA contract worker has fled from China to Russia…” I am inclined to agree.

It is a fact of life in this year of our Lord 2013 that information about you is so available that there are few if any of your purchases and preferences that are not known to every company with whom you do business. Your local supermarket knows the brand of cereal or shampoo you prefer. This is called “open source” information and it is not only gathered, but sold to anyone who wants it.

The information you voluntarily or unwittingly give to those with whom you do business as well as the information may post daily on your Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In accounts is all accessible and accessed.

The NSA has long had powers to scoop up scads of information about communications by, to, and from Americans. Its roots go back to the earliest days of the Cold War. Until recently revelations, we thought that the information we provide to the Internal Revenue Service was closely guarded and never to be used for political purposes, but in the Age of Obama, that illusion has been shattered.

In a recent Business Week article, Ashlee Vance reported “Less recognized is that, in this era of open-source software, the NSA gets direct access to the inventions of thousands of the smartest computer science minds on the planet for free.”

“It started,” said Vance,”with the founding of Google in 1998. The search engine giant needed to collect and analyze so much data that it couldn’t afford to buy systems from big-name tech companies. Instead, Google created its own open-source software program that ran across hundreds of thousands of computers. Yahoo!, Facebook, and Twitter have been even more aggressive about open-sourcing their underlying infrastructure.”

NSA and, indeed, the President, could have put a lot of the consternation to rest by coming out early and explaining what it does and the limitations under which it works. While it is most certainly a very secretive agency, there is much that is common knowledge about its mission.

In the post 9/11 era with a massive Homeland Security Agency charged with keeping us safe, it is a good, if not essential, idea to have a public discussion about the role of the Fourth Amendment protection of our privacy. Even though the Founders had no idea of modern communications they still believed that our privacy must be respected. Meanwhile, we live in a world of enormous electronic connectivity that is subject to surveillance.

Moreover, there are those who believe all the surveillance we are learning about is just the tip of the iceberg. There is widespread speculation that the Department of Homeland Security, in conjunction with the Department of Justice and other agencies has been working on a massive consolidation of power in the White House, preparing for the deliberate collapse of the U.S. dollar, and the chaos that would follow.

On June 19, the president of the Associated Press, Gary Pruitt, spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. saying that the DOJ seizure of journalist’s phone records has had “a chilling effect” on newsgathering, not just for the AP but other newsgathering organizations. He described the collection of records affecting more than a hundred journalists was an “overbroad and sloppy fishing expedition” that failed to follow procedures on notification. If the intent was to impact legitimate news gathering, it was successful.

We still trust that law enforcement must secure a warrant to tap our phones, but the information about with whom we speak is routinely gathered, as it must, by telephone companies. It can be a useful tool to determine patterns, especially if they are between Americans and foreigners with bad intentions.

Inherent in all this data-gathering is the potential for its misuse—and worse—but that is true of much of what government does. The need for congressional oversight was never more paramount, but it comes at a time when the Congress is held in low esteem and sharply divided.

The greater present concern must be that we have a White House engaged in a plan to render the Constitution useless with a manufactured crisis to deliberately impose an authoritarian control over all of us.

We now living in an Orwellian era of super-dooper snoopers

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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Wind Power Lunacy – Tea Party Nation

Wind Power Lunacy – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

Can you love nature when it is covered with wind turbines? Or solar panels?

Putting aside the scientific, engineering, and economic idiocy behind the use of wind turbines and solar panels to generate less than three percent of the electricity used nationwide—or that, if the wind is not blowing and the sun not shining, electrical energy must be supplied by back-up traditional coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants.

My personal objection to wind power is the sheer ugliness of these devices. The notion of covering hillsides and plains with them is an offence to the land—to the nature Greens profess to love—and to the many thousands of birds they slaughter every year.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect that the only reason we have any wind energy, i.e. windmills and solar panels, anywhere in the U.S. is a combination of the huge propaganda power of the Greens, bribery, the stupidity and chicanery of politicians, and the gullibility of people who actually believe that wind—which does not blow all the time—is a rational source of power generation.

Suffice to say, the wind power industry would not exist without state government mandates for its use, federal tax credits, and the deafening silence of environmentalists who want to save every species on Earth with the exception of the wind turbine’s slaughter of a million of eagles, hawks, geese, bats, and other flying creatures every year.

The cliché is that great minds think alike and recently there have been a spate of editorials and commentaries, all coincidently written by colleagues of mine. One of them is Dr. Jay Lehr, the science director of The Heartland Institute, for which I am a policy advisor along with others with far more impressive credentials than my own as a longtime science and business writer. On June 17, The Wall Street Journal published Dr. Lehr’s commentary, “The Rationale for Wind Power Won’t Fly.”

“After decades of federal subsidies—almost $24 billion according to a recent estimate by former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm—nowhere in the United States, or anywhere else, has an array of wind turbines replaced a single conventional power plant.” Dr. Lehr inferentially raises the question of why any nation would spend that kind of money without receiving sufficient and equivalent electrical power. It is a very good question.

As Dr. Lehr noted, “It’s known to everybody in the industry that a wind turbine will generate electricity 30% of the time—but it’s impossible to predict when that time will be.” There are about 24,000 of these hideous machines according to the American Wind Energy Association and, given their lobbying, that number could double in the next decade. They will still not produce sufficient electricity—let alone predictable and constant electricity—for a small city.

Neither wind nor solar power will provide sufficient electrical energy. This begs the question why they even exist.

The short answer is that wind and solar have been sold to the public (which pays more for the electricity they produce) as not producing “greenhouse gas emissions” that are blamed for a global warming which is not happening, but the main gas, carbon dioxide, is vital to all life on Earth, being the “food” for all plant life, much of which we consume as crops such as wheat, corn, and rice. As a demonstration of the idiocy and hypocrisy of environmentalists, huge quantities of corn are, by government mandate, converted to ethanol—moonshine—that must be added to gasoline.

Another colleague, Rich Kozlovich, has a commentary in circulation that asks why the “Precautionary Principle” that is beloved by the Greens is not applied to wind turbines. Rich quoted another colleague of mine, CFACT’s Paul Driessen, “The Precautionary Principle insists that no new technology should be permitted until it can be shown that it will pose no threat to human health or the environment.” If fully applied, humanity would be denied another medication, chemical, or technological innovation.

“The hard reality is that the green movement does not care about facts, wildlife or humans,” says Kozlovich, “and logical consistency is totally alien to them…Green elites ‘know’ what is best for all of humanity,”

I doubt he will get the plaudits and recognition he deserves, but Dr. John Droz, Jr., a physicist, has devoted his knowledge to providing the best collection of scientific date available regarding the futility and stupidity of wind power. Dr. Droz has a website where you can learn the FACTS about wind power or you can Google his name to find his many excellent articles on the subject.

I have cited some of those facts, as has Dr. Lehr, Paul Driessen, and Rich Kozlovich, but it does not take an advanced degree in physics or any other science to grasp why constructing thousands of wind turbines to produce a miniscule amount of electricity has been one of the most idiotic enterprises to emerge from the vast global warming/climate change hoax.

Instead, we live in a nation whose president insists that climate change is the greatest threat to mankind and who is devoting the powers of government to shut down coal-fired plants, deter exploration and extraction of energy reserves on lands owned by the federal government, delaying the construction of a new pipeline, and the construction of new nuclear facilities. One of his suggestions for power generation is algae, pond scum.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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Obama’s Enormous Climate Lies – Tea Party Nation

Obama’s Enormous Climate Lies – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

Putting aside Obama’s intention to further reduce our nuclear arsenal as articulated in his June 19 speech in Berlin, he has solidified his position as the World’s Greatest Liar with his statements about climate change, aka global warming, which he called “the global threat of our time.”

Let us stipulate that the global threat of our time is the rise of Islamic fanaticism in its pursuit of a worldwide caliphate. It threatens some six billion of the world’s population that represent other faiths. It is on the rise throughout the Middle East and into northern Africa’s Maghreb. It has cells in South America and it threatens the lives of millions of Americans if the jihadists acquire nuclear arms.

Regarding the President’s call for nuclear disarmament, veteran journalist Bill Gertz observed that “The president is using a new term to support his earlier disarmament call back in 2009 in Prague, and it’s called ‘peace with justice’ which has a very Marxist-Leninist ring to it. All the rhetoric of the communist groups around refer to peace with justice, (and) now the president has employed it for the first time.”

Obama continues to conjure up global warming despite overwhelming evidence that it does not exist. Dubbed “climategate”, revelations in 2009 made clear that a small group within the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were deliberately falsifying their climate models.

There is nothing that humans can or should do regarding the Earth’s climate. It is a force that is so vast and powerful that calls for renewable energy, energy conservation, and a “carbon tax” on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are utterly false, a danger to human life, a threat to global economic development, and the work of scoundrels and charlatans.

At present, there has been no warming for almost seventeen years. The Earth is in a natural cooling cycle as the result of another natural cycle, the reduction of the Sun’s radiation that warms the Earth.

“For the grim alternative affects all nations,” said Obama. “More severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise.”

The President is lying!

In his 2008 speech in Chicago’s Grant Park following his election, Obama said, “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America”

The change has been, not just the election of the first black American as president, but the first president to consistently lie to Americans. The change he has wrought in his first term and is seeking to bring about in his second includes the largest seizure and nationalization of the American health system in our history and a “stimulus” that wasted billions of dollars that accomplished nothing to reduce unemployment and avoid economic stagnation.

Obama’s promise of change has reduced America’s standing in the world as the protector of peace and his decisions have helped advance the spread of the Islamic jihad.

It has produced a war on coal, the energy resource that, prior to his taking office, provided fifty percent of all the electricity Americans use every day. It has reduced access to oil and natural gas on federal lands. Obama will pursue more action in the name of climate change in the form of more regulation of power plants, new subsidies for so-called clean energy, and other big, futile, farcical, and costly government programs

Obama’s administration has given us scandals from “Fast and Furious” to the failure to come to the aid of our ambassador to Libya in Benghazi; the revelation that the IRS engaged in a deliberate program against Tea Party, patriot groups, and even Jewish organizations. It has reduced and degraded the U.S. military with programs to permit homosexuals to serve and women to be in combat units. An outbreak of sexual assaults—26,000 and most men-on-men—in the military has resulted.

In Berlin, the President said, “Our generation must move towards a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late, that is our job; that is our task.”

On June 25, he will announce new executive orders to implement “climate change” mandates in the face of congressional resistance. He says it will be “my vision for where I believe we need to go—a national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change, and lead global efforts to fight it.”

Carbon dioxide is not “pollution”; it is, along with oxygen, the other gas most vital to all life on Earth.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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A SUMMATION OF BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA

This is an opinion by Mychal Massie, which was found posted on his website, The Daily Rant.

 

According to his website bio Massie is a “syndicated op-ed columnist; and former

host of the top rated talk show on the Rightalk Radio Network – “Straight Talk with Mychal Massie;” he is a former self employed business owner of 30 plus years.”

 

A SUMMATION OF BARACK AND MICHELLE OBAMA

 

 

Mychal Massie is a respected writer and talk show host

in Los Angeles.

 

The other evening on my twitter, a person asked me why I didn’t like the Obama‘s? Specifically I was asked: “I have to ask, why do you hate the Obama’s? It seems personal, not policy related. You even dissed (disrespect) their Christmas family picture.”

 

 

The truth is I do not like the Obamas, what they represent, their ideology, and I certainly do

not like his policies and legislation. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for the Obamas. As I

responded to the person who asked me the aforementioned question, I don’t like them because they are committed to the fundamental change of my/our country into what can only be regarded as a Communist state.

 

I don’t hate them per definition, but I condemn them because they are the worst kind of racialists, they are elitist Leninists with contempt for traditional America . They display disrespect for the sanctity of the office he holds, and for those who are willing to admit same, Michelle Obama’s raw contempt for white America is transpicuous.

 

I don’t like them because they comport themselves as emperor and empress. I expect, no I demand respect, for the Office of President and a love of our country and her citizenry from the leader entrusted with the governance of same. President and Mrs. Reagan displayed an unparalleled love for the country and her people. The Reagan’s made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. His arrogance by appointing 32 leftist czars and constantly bypassing congress is impeachable. Eric Holder is probably the MOST incompetent and arrogant DOJ head to ever hold the job. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?

 

 

Presidents are politicians and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie, but even using that low standard, the Obama’s have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry, and they display an animus for civility.

 

I do not like them, because they both display bigotry overtly, as in the case of Harvard Professor Louis Gates, when he accused the Cambridge Police of acting stupidly, and her code speak pursuant to now being able to be proud of America. I view that statement and that mindset as an insult to those who died to provide a country where a Kenyan, his illegal alien relatives, and his alleged progeny, could come and not only live freely, but rise to the highest, most powerful, position in the world. Michelle Obama is free to hate and disparage whites because Americans of every description paid with their blood to ensure her right to do same.

 

I have a saying, that “the only reason a person hides things, is because they have something to hide.” No president in history has spent over a million dollars to keep his records and his past sealed.

 

And what the two of them have shared has been proved to be lies. He lied about when and how they met, he lied about his mother’s death and problems with insurance, Michelle lied to a crowd pursuant to nearly $500,000 bank stocks they inherited from his family. He has lied about his father’s military service, about the civil rights movement, ad nausea. He lied to the world about the Supreme Court in a State of the Union address. He berated and publicly insulted a sitting Congressman. He has surrounded himself

with the most rabidly, radical, socialist academicians today. He opposed rulings that protected women and children that even Planned Parenthood did not seek to support. He is openly hostile to business and aggressively hostile to Israel . His wife treats being the First Lady as her personal American Express Black Card (arguably the most prestigious credit card in the world). I condemn them because, as people are suffering, losing their homes, their jobs, their retirements, he and his family are arrogantly showing off their life of entitlement – as he goes about creating and fomenting class warfare.

 I don’t like them, and I neither apologize nor retreat from my public condemnation of them and of his policies. We should condemn them for the disrespect they show our people, for his willful and unconstitutional actions pursuant to obeying the Constitutional parameters he is bound by, and his willful disregard for Congressional authority.

 

Dislike for them has nothing to do with the color of their skin; it has everything to do with their behavior, attitudes, and policies. And I have open scorn for their constantly playing the race card.

 

I could go on, but let me conclude with this. I condemn in the strongest possible terms the media for refusing to investigate them, as they did President Bush and President Clinton, and for refusing to label them for what they truly are. There is no scenario known to man, whereby a white president and his wife could ignore laws, flaunt their position, and lord over the people, as these two are permitted out of fear for their color.

 As I wrote in a syndicated column titled, “Nero In The White House” – “Never in my life, inside or outside of politics, have I witnessed such dishonesty in a political leader. He is the most mendacious political figure I have ever witnessed. Even by the low standards of his presidential predecessors, his narcissistic, contumacious arrogance is unequalled. Using Obama as the bar, Nero would have to be elevated to sainthood… Many in America wanted to be proud when the first person of color was elected president, but instead, they have been witness to a congenital liar, a woman who has been ashamed of America her entire life, failed policies, intimidation, and a commonality hitherto not witnessed in political leaders. He and his wife view their life at our expense as an entitlement – while America ‘s people go homeless, hungry and unemployed.”

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‘Thousands of NSA Analysts Can Listen to Domestic Phone Calls,’ Read Emails, Texts, IMs – Tea Party Nation

‘Thousands of NSA Analysts Can Listen to Domestic Phone Calls,’ Read Emails, Texts, IMs – Tea Party Nation.

Posted by Seton Motley

Note: This first appeared in Red State.

UPDATES: Aplenty – from late last night – below.  Please, indulge us and read from top to bottom – for clarity’s sake.

—–

That’s some good news right there.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls….

Hold the phone.  (Get it?)  The NSA claims “it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.”  The Fourth Amendment begs to differ.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

How unreasonable are all of these probable-cause-and-warrant-free listening expeditions?

(T)he Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls….

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required….

More legal flights of fancy from Held-in-Bipartisan-Contempt-of-Congress-Once-and-Counting Attorney General Eric Holder.

Edward Snowden – the guy who first alerted us to this NSA-PRISM-NUCLEON mess – has had his veracity (and mental stability) challenged for claiming Little-Old-He could unilaterally “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to ev….”

Edward Snowden Is Completely Wrong

Not so wrong after all.

When some of us responded to all of this with alarm, we too were summarily dismissed.

‘Nobody is Listening to Your Telephone Calls,’ Obama Says

NSA Data Mining

The paranoid imagine that government eavesdroppers are listening in on their phone conversations and reading their intimate emails.

Someone is listening.  Thousands of someones (at least), in fact.  (And reading – please stay tuned.)  Not so paranoid after all.

(President Barack) Obama Calls Surveillance Programs Legal and Limited

“Legal” is highly dubious.  How about “limited?”

NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily

That’s a fairly expansive definition of “limited.”

By now, the following claim – now just nine days old – seems quaint and antiquated.  Not to mention fundamentally untrue.

President Insists Americans Not Target of Records Sweep

Again, we’re all James Rosens now.

What about our fantasies of the government reading our emails (and text messages, and instant m…?

(NSA phone call self-)authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too….

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, being able to listen to phone calls would mean the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications too without going before a court and seeking approval.

Again, we’re all James Rosens now.  And then some.

But wait – we were told it was just the email and Internet metadata – not the content.

Again, not so much.

We have throughout this nightmare awakening had Big Government proponents and officials aplenty – up to and repeatedly including the President – lying their faces off about what is actually happening with our phone calls, emails and all things Internet.

Preemptively listening to, peeking at and harvesting the data of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans is not a “national security” prerogative.  It is, however, a Big Brother imperative.

So when we have warned you about things like:

Forget the ‘Fairness’ Doctrine – Net Neutrality is the Future of Ce…

Obama Official-Network Neutrality Deviser Says First Amendment Does…

And the Left’s response is:

Right-Wing Delusion: Net Neutrality is Government Plot to Control I…

We can all be forgiven for being more than a little skeptical.  On Net Neutrality – and just about everything else.

—–

UPDATE #1: Obama Administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper late last night released a statement denying most or all of the above.  Which in part reads:

“The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress.”

This is the same James Clapper that in a March 12 Congressional hearing lied to Oregon Democrat Senator Ron … – denying that trillions of Verizon domestic phone call sweeps were occurring.

Fire James Clapper

The Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress about NSA surveillance. What else will he lie about?

Good question.  Is it possible (probable?) that Clapper is lying again here?  Indeed it is.

Which makes the following even more pathetic.

UPDATE #2: New York Democrat Congressman Jerry Nadler was a key original source for this eavesdropping story.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee….

In prostrating response to the statement from proven liar James Clapper – a member of the proven-lying Obama Administration – Congressman Nadler has retreated into being a good Democrat, but a troublingly bad representative of We the People and our Constitutio….

James Owens, a spokesman for Nadler, provided a statement on Sunday morning, a day after this (original) article was published, saying:

“I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.”

Owens said he couldn’t comment on what assurances from the Obama administration Nadler was referring to, and said Nadler was unavailable for an interview.

Congressman Nadler was thus also unavailable to explain why or how this latest Obama Administration assertion, after all of these lies, is any more believable.

And is Congressman Nadler addled?  Was the briefing he (and obviously, ostensibly other Members) attended merely a figment of his imagination?

Hard to think so.  Especially since he – and Snowdon – aren’t the only people to make similar Administration snooping claims:

Senate Intelligence committee chairperson Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) confirmed on Thursday, according to the report, that a court order is not necessary for the NSA to search its call data database that it collects under secret orders from major U.S. telecom firms….

(F)ormer FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente disclosed to CNN that under certain investigations relating to the protection of national security, his former employer could access call records and contents of those calls.

“All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not,” he claimed.

It is difficult under these circumstances – with all of these corroborating statements – to not think that what best represents the truth is what Congressman Nadler said first.

Given that the serially untruthful Obama Administration are the only ones denying it.

 

Big Government is Stupid Government – Tea Party Nation

Big Government is Stupid Government – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

Nothing enhances a president’s reputation than to be seen in the company of other world leaders and Obama will have an abundance of photo-ops as he meets in Ireland with the G8 to address the many woes of the world. Too bad they think he is a dunce.

Given the unrelenting headlines about the Obama administration, it is worth worrying that Big Government is Stupid Government. It is inherently a danger to freedom. Just ask anyone who ever lived under communism.

While there are many fine people in government, those at the top of the current roster seem to be a collection of the most incompetent, inept, naïve, ignorant, and uninformed morons to have ever gathered around that big table where the cabinet meets. If, in fact, they really do get together except for the occasional photo-op.

The last Secretary State and President-in-Waiting, Hillary Clinton, flew a million miles in the job, but no one can point to anything she actually accomplished and she, apparently, had no idea what was going on at State. The present Secretary, John Kerry, is convinced that global warming is the greatest threat to, well, everything and is still trying to get the Palestinians to agree to peace terms with Israel; something they have refused to do since it opened doors for business in 1948.

Eric Holder, the Attorney General, cannot seem to remember anything. Usually you expect a lawyer to keep a few facts in mind such as the contents of the U.S. Constitution, but Holder is an exception or, like Obama, he read it and didn’t like it.

Other than Valerie Jarrett, only the White House reporters seem to know the names of his closest advisors. Tim Carney, the spokesman for Obama, has carved out a place in history as the biggest, lying weasel to ever hold that job. Oh how I miss the beautiful and intelligent Dana Parino, Bush43’s spokesperson. Happily I get to see her on “The Five”, a Fox News daily gab fest.

After Rahm Emanuel left the job as Obama’s chief of staff to become the Mayor of Chicago, the city has turned into a killing ground the equal of downtown Baghdad.

Obama is utterly devoted to Big Government and, thanks to Obamacare, the IRS is trying to hire the equivalent of an armed forces division to administer it. The popularity of Obamacare, plus the scandals, currently is plunging to depths that even the pollsters are beginning to measure in single digits. The President’s numbers are reaching new lows as well.

A notable aspect of Big Government is the increasing size of various pieces of legislation such as the so-called immigration reform and the Common Core education bills. Beginning life as No Child Left Behind under Bush43, this latter bill is not likely to be reauthorized. Any piece of legislation that exceeds a thousand or more pages in a one-size-fits-all is doomed to failure.

At this writing, the House is getting ready to vote for a trillion-dollar food stamp and farm bill about which few Americans are even aware. It’s a huge giveaway for a nation that is essentially broke. As Congress gets close to its summer break, all manner of comparable mischief will occur. Recall that Obamacare was passed on Christmas Eve 2009!

For the same reason, the ever-expanding surveillance of everyone’s electronic communications comes with the built-in limitation that the more signals intelligence it gathers, the less likely it will produce any results, except after the next attack. The NSA employs tens of thousands of analysts to deal with all the “signent” is acquires and, other than that which focuses on places like Yemen, the rest is not likely to yield much of value.

A government big enough to access every phone call and email from 310 million Americans is also failed to take serious action when the Russians
warned that two jihadists were living in Boston.

The other aspect of Big Government is the way the Obama administration has enlarged the numbers of Americans receiving food stamps, disability payments, and other “free” stuff that is not free, but dependent on those who still have a job. Social Security and Medicare are barely solvent and Medicaid is bankrupting the states that must contribute to it.

According to the American Enterprise Institute, “The number of federal employees has risen under President Obama. There were 2,790,000 federal workers in January 2009 when the president took office, and now there are 2,804,000 workers. The fact is that there is no month during President Obama’s term when the federal workforce was smaller than it was in the first month of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The president took over in January 2009. Every month after January 2009 has seen more federal workers than were employed in January 2009.

It would be wrong to suggest that federal workers are not productive, but the sheer size of this workforce suggests that Big Government takes a lot of people out of the private sector and provides them with employment that comes with a multitude of perks that adds to the federal debt for which everyone must be taxed.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have,” is attributed to Thomas Jefferson, as is “Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” This was true in the 1700s and is true today.

With considerable foresight, the Founders wanted a central government that was intended to remain limited in size, scope, and power. The Department of Homeland Security—the hasty reaction to 9/11—has metastasized into an Orwellian giant that should, at the earliest moment possible, be disassembled into its component parts.

The nation would no doubt benefit from putting an end to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the government mortgage companies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and comparable entities that are mostly the result of government’s vast expansion in the latter half of the last century and this new one.

Term limits is another idea worth considering. I sometimes think that the longer a Senator or Representative stays in Congress, the more senile, incompetent, and indifferent they become to the voters.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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Some more equal than others – Tea Party Nation

Some more equal than others – Tea Party Nation.

 Posted by Judson Phillips

One of the greatest lines from George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm was, “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

 

Animal Farm was an allegorical novel by George Orwell, where the animals rise up, depose the human owners of the farm and declare all to be equal.

 America is a nation that declares all to be equal.  Yet we are seeing with the Obama Regime, not all are equal.

 Who does the Obama Regime consider to be more equal than others and who does the Obama Regime consider to be enemies of the state?

 For weeks now, stories have come out of Washington about how the Tea Party and other conservative groups have been targeted by the IRS and sometimes other agencies.

 When it comes to religions, the Obama Regime definitely believes that some religions are more equal than others.

 According to the Christian Post, the Coalition for Life of Iowa was asked as a part of the process to obtain non-profit status to have its board of directors sign a letter under penalty of perjury that the group would not protest outside Planned Parenthood.

 In a later letter, they were asked about the content of their prayers.

 This is not the only instance of Christian groups being targeted by the Obama Regime.  An Army briefing earlier this year listed Evangelical Christianity as a part of the threat from “religious extremism.”  Also listed in the same category was Al Qaeda.  The Catholic Church was also listed at a part of the threat of Religious Extremism.  One other example of a threat from religious extremism was something called, “Islamophobia.”

 On the other hand, Islam is treated as the religion that is more equal than others. 

 One of the myriad of Obama scandals has been the NSA surveillance scandal.  As Sarah Palin said Saturday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to the Majority” conference, “Our government spied on every single one of your phone calls but couldn’t find two pot-smoking deadbeat Bostonians with a hotline to terrorist central in Chechnya.”

 Why couldn’t they find these guys?

 Well, among other reasons, Mosques are off limits to FBI surveillance.

 According to Investors Business Daily, since October 2011, Mosques have been off limits.   One thing every Islamic Terrorist who has hit America since 9/11 has in common is involvement in a Mosque.  Tamerlin Tsarnaev had an outburst at his Mosque in Boston before he and his brother bombed the Boston Marathon.   The officials of the Mosque did not tell Federal authorities about Tsarnaev and since the FBI could not conduct surveillance at the Mosque, they remained clueless. 

 Nadal Hassan, the Army Major who committed mass murder at Fort Hood in 2009 openly espoused radical Islamic beliefs and even walked around with business cards that said he was “SOA” or a “Soldier of Allah.”

 The FBI, as the Blaze reported in 2012, did not investigate Hassan because of political correctness.   Even though FBI agents saw emails between Hassan and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, they were prevented from investigating him.

 While the Army would not investigate a man who had alarming connections to terrorists and who went on to commit mass murder, three years later, the Army is on the ball and is investigating a real threat to the Army.

 According to the Fox News, Army Master Sergeant Nathan Sommers, a soldier with twenty five years service has been given a reprimand (which will effectively end his career) for serving Chic-fil-A sandwiches at his promotion party, supporting the Defense of Marriage Act (which is the law of the land) and reading books by David Limbaugh and Mark Levine.

 Someone who is allied with our Islamic enemies and who eventually commits mass murder cannot be investigated but a patriotic American soldier must be punished.

Welcome to Obama’s America.  Here some truly are more equal than others.

 

Immigration “Reform” Bill the Worst Ever at the Worst Time Ever – Tea Party Nation

Immigration “Reform” Bill the Worst Ever at the Worst Time Ever – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

If you liked Obamacare, you will love the proposed immigration “reform” bill which is all about the politics of the Left with no regard to the welfare of U.S. citizens by birth and naturalized citizens. Its final length remains unknown, but it was more than 1,500 pages by late April. The Senate takes up the bill this week.

The fact that Congress is revisiting the immigration issue is testimony to the estimated eleven million aliens illegally here due to law enforcement failures and limitations, and the political implications of granting them and eventually their families what is essentially instant citizenship, though fretted with a variety of fines and other factors.

The immigration bill gives the finger to those waiting, often for years, to go through the naturalization process and to the millions of Americans in need of employment during the worst economic times since the Great Depression.

As Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote in the June 11 edition of The Wall Street Journal, “Mass joblessness is a shameful waste of human resources, a source of misery to millions, and now threatens to create an underclass of long-term unemployed whose skills are atrophying and whose hopes are vanishing.”

The “gang of eight” is composed of Senators of the far Left such as Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ), along with RINOs (Republicans in name only) such as John McCain (R-McCain) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Others include Marco Rubio (R-FL) who is either going to vote for it or against it depending on what day it is. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Michael Bennett (D-CO) complete the list.

You can ignore the promises of increased enforcement of laws to protect our southern border as these laws have been ignored for years. In January, a federal judge ruled that ten Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and officers had the right to challenge the so-called Morton Memo on prosecutorial discretion and the DREAM directive on deferred action that essentially ordered agents to violate federal laws for face adverse employment actions against them. The Memo prohibited ICE agents and officers from arresting or removing, i.e. deporting, any but the most violent criminal aliens; both initiatives of the Obama administration.

As NumbersUSA pointed out in May, the U.S. Senate’s S-744 bill “would give lifetime permits to 33 million more foreign citizens to complete with Americans for scare U.S. jobs” over the next decade when the 20 million Americans are currently seeking work. “That’s like putting the entire population of Canada in line for American jobs.”

The 33 million new work visas in the decade ahead would be almost as many as all immigrants who ever entered the U.S. in its history through to today.

The Center for Immigration Studies says that S-744 “assures the continuation of poverty for the American underclass for the foreseeable future, noting that in the first quarter of this year, the “broad unemployment rate for Americans without a high school degree has reached 30% and is close to 20% for citizens with only a high school education.”

“There are now 55.4 million working-age Americans who are not working.”

NumbersUSA provides another way of looking at S-744, pointing out that is that it is comparable to “re-creating ALL of the Top 20 cities in the United States, filling them entirely with foreign citizens and giving them lifetime work permits to compete with America’s struggling workers—and in just ten years’ time.”

The bill when it was released in April had approximately 1.14 waivers or exemptions per page. The 2,409 page Obamacare bill had 0.78 waivers and exemptions. S-744 is filled with 85 mentions of “unless”, 150 uses of “except”, 18 inclusions of “exempt”, 95 mentions of “waiver”, 47 offers of “discretion”, 47 uses of “notwithstanding” and 618 uses of “may” in its original 876-pages. As noted, the bill now has some 1,500 pages. These are the work of the countless lobbyists who have influenced the bill.

In addition, the immigration “reform” bill includes two “slush funds” amounting to $150,000,000 that may be supplemented with additional taxpayer dollars for years to come. These funds would go to “public or private, non-profit organizations such as La Raza, Casa de Maryland, and the American Immigration lawyers Association! These and other organizations are devoted to helping illegal immigrants apply for legal status.

It gets worse if that is possible. The bill not only provides amnesty for illegal immigrants, but does so as well for their employers. As the Center for Immigration Studies points out, “Illegal aliens will be rewarded for breaking laws for which American citizens are routinely punished” such as the use of fraudulent Social Security cards, while imposing a $1,000 penalty that “in many cases would be waived. Then they would be issued a new Social Security number without any past bad credit or arrest records.”

The so-called immigration reform bill is the worst bill at the worst time. It is an invitation to millions more to illegally enter the United States.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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Obamacare: The Real Agenda – Tea Party Nation

Obamacare: The Real Agenda – Tea Party Nation.

Barack Obama talked about Obamacare as soon as he got in office.  He and his administration begged, borrowed and stole votes to get it passed.  The Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase were only two of the creative names that came from the bribery that Obama used to try and steal votes to pass Obamacare.

 

When the nation was debating Obamacare, Obama promised that premiums would go down and Obamacare would save money.

 We are finding out almost every day that neither promise is true.  If Obamacare will not save us money in the cost of medicine and will create unaffordable premiums for Americans, why aren’t the Democrats rushing to repeal Obamacare?

 The Ohio Department of Insurance announced this past Thursday that the cost of health insurance in Ohio will rise 88% in 2014 because of Obamacare.

 The IRS itself, the agency charged with enforcing Obamacare’s individual mandate, in January issued regulations where they assume the lowest cost Obamacare policy will cost the average American family $20,000 a year.  According to government statistics the average American family makes a little over $63,000 a year.

 Health insurance will now eat 1/3 of the average family’s income.

 This only gets worse.  Because employers must pay for Obamacare for employees that work over 30 hours a week, many companies are shifting people down to 29 hours a week to avoid Obamacare.  Many other companies are simply going to temporary workers.

 Obamacare is a disaster for employment in a nation that is enduring the Great Obama Depression.

 So why don’t the Democrats want to repeal Obamacare?

 The answer is very simple.

 Obamacare was never the end goal. 

 Single Payer Healthcare has always been the goal.

 In 1948, Harry Truman was the first Democrat to propose Socialist Healthcare for America.  This has been one of the holy grails of the American left for decades.  Most Americans do not want single payer healthcare. 

 They don’t want it for good reason.  Before Obamacare, most Americans were happy with their health insurance plans.  In order for the left to impose socialist healthcare on America, they had to first destroy the health insurance industry.

 They are now doing that.

 Obamacare makes health insurance prohibitively expensive, requires insurers to cover many procedures at no cost and creates an incentive for people to simply pay a fine rather than have health insurance because it is cheaper.  And, as we sail through the Great Obama Depression, many Americans simply cannot afford health insurance. 

 Once Obamacare destroys the health insurance market and many people can only get part time jobs, the Democrats will offer the solution.  As the news is filled with stories of people who cannot get medical care or who are bankrupted because they could not afford health insurance and now have catastrophic medical bills, the Democrats will offer their solution.

 It will be Single Payer socialist healthcare.

 Their solution will offer to lift the burden on Americans that Obamacare is bankrupting Americans.  Their solution will change the rules on employers so that they do not have to cut so many employees down to part time employees.

 The only problem with their solution is that it has failed every place it has been tried.

 In the United Kingdom, people are pulling their own teeth and doing DIY (do it yourself) Dentistry because the National Health Service cannot provide enough dentists to meet demand.

 The UK’s National Health Service continues to see longer waits and in many cases will simply deny certain surgeries that are routine in America.  Waits of three months or longer to see specialists are not uncommon with socialist healthcare.

 In America, the free market creates efficiency and people get great medical care.  Under socialist single payer healthcare, people die waiting as healthcare is rationed. 

 This is the healthcare Obama and his team wants to impose on America.

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