China publicly congratulated “bright idealistic” NSA leaker Edward Snowden for exposing “the bleakest moment yet in the history of the Internet,” and said in the Xinhua editorial that he’s welcome in People’s Republic.

China doesn’t mention that it holds 69 bloggers behind bars, according to the latest Reporters Without Borders statistics.

“The case indicates that through outsourcing and contracting, Big Brother is breaching the fundamental rights of citizens by getting unfettered access to their most personal communications,” says Xinhua.

“As the case unfolds, there are many things to worry about. How do we make sense of the fact that the market and the state colluded in the abuse of private information via what represents the backbone of many modern day infrastructures? How do we rationalize the character of Snowden and his fellow whistleblowers? How do we understand the one-sided cyber attack accusations the U.S. has poured upon China in the past few months? To what degree have foreign users of these Internet services fallen victim to this project?”

The official government mouthpiece called the case “a rare chance to reexamine the integrity of American politicians and the management of American-dominant Internet companies, and it appears that while many of these individuals verbally attack other nations and people in the name of freedom and democracy, they ignore America’s worsening internal situation.”

“We can see, therefore, that when American politicians and businessmen make accusatory remarks, their eyes are firmly fixed on foreign countries and they turn a blind eye to their own misdeeds. This clearly calls into question the integrity of these rich, powerful and influential figures and gives the definite impression that the U.S. bases its own legitimacy not on good domestic governance but on stigmatizing foreign practices.”

Xinhua compared Snowden to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning — adding these men “can be categorized as the ‘bright feathers’ of our time, to borrow some words from the popular American movie The Shawshank Redemption.”

The editorial notably claims that Snowden, who checked out of his Hong Kong hotel a week ago, is still in Hong Kong.

“While human rights activists from developing countries (defined by Western apparatus for sure) are often blessed with a choice of hiding places, we are now seeing the dilemma of Western dissidents. For this reason China, despite the fact that it does not have a good reputation as far as Internet governance is concerned, should move boldly and grant Snowden asylum,” the piece continues.

“To further understand the likes of Snowden, let us end with a narrative by the character Red from the Shawshank Redemption as he rationalizes the escape of his friend Andy: ‘Some birds are not meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice.’”

By now, we’re all familiar with the habit among environmental extremists and activist groups to engage in hyperbole and spread utter disinformation.  Less familiar, but equally destructive, is their tactic of filing frivolous lawsuits and administrative complaints to advance their agenda through vexatious litigation.  Not only does excessive environmental litigation waste even more resources of already-congested courts and regulatory commissions, it also advances their destructive strategy of slowing commerce and disrupting private markets.

We’re currently witnessing a perfect example in the domestic timber industry, where the extremist groups ForestEthics and Greenpeace recently filed a frivolous complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that a forest certification program, Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), engages “unfair and deceptive acts and practices.”

By way of background, SFI is the preferred program in the domestic certification market, utilized by family farmers and small and large businesses.   In contrast, the favored program of ForestEthics and Greenpeace, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), is international in scope.   Among other flaws, FSC demands that domestic landowners meet stringent standards to obtain certification, whereas foresters in Indonesia, China and Russia are held to much lower benchmarks.  In fact, FSC doesn’t even attempt to deny that.   As a consequence, resulting government regulations and environmental activist pressures in favor of FSC and at the expense of SFI reduce commerce in domestic timber markets, and increase the amount of wood harvested in environmentally-unfriendly nations for use in domestic projects.

In the present case, the ForestEthics and Greenpeace complaint does not withstand even cursory scrutiny.  Experts on land management, tree farmers, academics and silviculturists, who all know a lot more about forestry than the litigious activists, vouch for SFI’s contributions to sustainable forestry.

Any remaining question as to the merit of the instant ForestEthics and Greenpeace FTC complaint can be answered by looking to Greenpeace’s recent actions in Canada.

Late last year, Greenpeace inaccurately accused Resolute Forest Products of building logging roads in banned areas.  Greenpeace claimed it possessed photo and video evidence of these actions, and pulled out of the widely-heralded Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, where businesses had already bent over backwards to address environmental concerns.  Fortunately, in an all-too-rare response, Resolute actually fought back against the accusations.  Ultimately, Greenpeace was forced into an even rarer response:  an apology and admission that it used “inaccurate maps” as the basis for its attacks.  Undeterred, Greenpeace stubbornly still opposes both Resolute and the Boreal Agreement.

What this demonstrates is that environmental groups are rarely interested in facts or science, but rather extremist partisan agendas and disregard of any concept of restraint in pursuing them.

Returning to the complaint against SFI here in the U.S., the activist parties obviously give little thought to the economic and environmental consequences to the domestic timber industry of making the FSC certification program a monopoly by blackballing SFI for landowners across the country.

ForestEthics filed a previous FTC complaint against SFI in 2009, but the Commission dismissed it.  Now they’re attempting to go back to that well.

Taken together, activist organizations like Greenpeace and ForestEthics have demonstrated a consistent habit of distorting the truth in shameless pursuit of their extremist agenda.  The American public should keep that in mind, and the FTC should take the same approach this time around and dismiss this complaint as nothing more than an attempt to make the FTC part of a the complaining parties’ destructive and deceptive smear campaign.

Republicans who favor passing the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill ought to answer a simple question: If this bill is so good and necessary for Republicans, why are Democrats salivating to see it passed?

Sen. Lindsey Graham won’t answer that question. Instead, he’ll blame last year’s narrow presidential defeat on the GOP’s alleged “demographic death spiral.”

According to Sen. Graham, “If we don’t pass immigration reform, if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016. We’re in a demographic death spiral as a party and the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic community in my view is pass comprehensive immigration reform. If you don’t do that, it really doesn’t matter who we run in my view.”

It matters a great deal who Republicans run in 2016. The facts are that the Obama campaign targeted and brought out its voters to a granular level not seen before in politics. He bought enough votes, he kept the cheating just viable enough in swing states by blocking voter ID laws, and he scared enough voters, and he retained his world historic candidacy just enough to beat a Republican whose record and rhetoric were far less than inspiring and whose organization never matched Obama’s. Obama had the “Cave,” which worked, while Romney had ORCA, which failed. A better, more inspiring candidate with a clear message, with a better and smarter, more aggressive ground game can win. Republicans should get behind a real leader in 2016, not yet another moderate who seems to be embarrassed to be a Republican. At one time, Sen. Marco Rubio appeared to be just such a leader. That seems a long time ago now.

Graham and Rubio could do their country, their party and themselves very well by insisting that security comes before legalization. But they’re choosing not to do that. Why?

The Supreme Court has just granted certiorari in Mt. Holly, NJ v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens, so it will hear arguments on the case in the fall.  This is the case I previously wrote about that involves the questionable  “disparate impact” legal theory that has gotten Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (and Obama Labor Secretary nominee) Thomas Perez into so much trouble.  The Court granted review despite a brief from the Solicitor General telling the Supremes that they should not take the case.  No doubt, civil rights groups will now do everything they can (perhaps with the help of the administration) to convince the town of Mt. Holly to dismiss its case before their pet legal theory gets tossed out by the Supreme Court.

So, logically speaking, we must legalize 11 million who broke the law…?

[Chuck Schumer aide Leon] Fresco and [Rubio aide Enrique] Gonzalez helped to unlock the deal with labor and the Chamber of Commerce. The two biggest sticking points were wages for foreign workers (the unions wanted them to be higher) and the objections of the Building and Construction Trades union, which argues that plenty of Americans are looking for this kind of work.

Rubio sided with the Chamber against the construction workers. ‘There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,’ a Rubio aide told me. ‘There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.’ In the end, the wage issue was settled to the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s satisfaction, and the Building and Construction Trades union won a cap on the number of visas for foreign construction workers.

Whether the immigration bill ought to pass or not should not hinge on Mr. Gonzalez’s opinion of American workers. It should hinge on whether it helps bolster or diminish the rule of law in the country, and it should hinge on whether it is the right thing to do for Americans citizens and legal immigrants.

A Rubio spokesman, Alex Conant, emailed NRO to clarify his colleague’s statement.

We strongly objected to the magazine including that background quote in the piece because it’s not what Sen. Rubio believes or has ever argued. In truth, Sen. Rubio has always said the reason we need a robust temporary worker program is to create legal avenues for US businesses to meet labor needs when not enough Americans apply for jobs. This is a persistent issue in many industries, like agriculture, and has been a draw for illegal immigration in the past. The legislation that Sen. Rubio agreed to sponsor creates a robust temporary worker program to meet our economic needs while protecting American workers and wages.

Sen. Rubio believes that American workers can compete against anyone in the world.

It was a background quote given to Politico by name from inside the effort to pass one of the most consequential bills of the past century or so. If it truly does not reflect Sen. Rubio’s thinking, perhaps Mr. Gonzalez should be allowed the opportunity to compete in the job market with those non-stellar American workers out there.

The G8 summit kicks off today in Northern Ireland, UK. As the summit begins, the hosts have a headache by the name of Edward Snowden. Snowden, the NSA leaker, has leaked again — this time detailing the means and methods by which the British spied on G20 summit leaders at a 2009 meeting. The UK’s far-left Guardian is once again the leaker’s choice conduit for relaying the leak.

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

That the hosts spied on personnel from the other countries involved in the discussions is not, or should not be, news to anyone who knows the first thing about international relations. Nations spy on nations, friend and foe alike. Always have, always will. But the Guardian, thanks to Snowden, goes the extra mile and details the means and methods by which the British spied. They have dropped the story with exquisite timing to embarrass the British ahead of the current summit.

Specifically, Snowden leaks that the British were keen to obtain information on the Turkish and Russian delegations at the 2009 summit. Neither of these countries have the best human rights records on the planet; Turkey has been battling its own citizens lately over Erdogan’s authoritarian, Islamist rule. Putin is former KGB and under his watch a few dissidents have met bizarre and untimely deaths. This latest leak hurts the West, of which Snowden is stridently critical, while never touching on any of the tactics or methods used by any of the West’s adversaries. Snowden once again launched his leak attack from Hong Kong, which is territory belonging to the Communist Chinese regime. Snowden has yet to leak anything critical of his new hosts.

Here’s one of those local stories which should have gotten national attention:

Blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, speaking out for the first time since The Post reported the school was giving him the boot, said pressure from Beijing had school officials planning his departure almost as soon as he arrived.

“As early as last August and September, the Chinese Communists had already begun to apply great, unrelenting pressure on New York University,” Chen said in a statement yesterday.

“So much so that after we had been in the United States just three to four months, NYU was already starting to discuss our departure with us.”

According to the report, NYU is trying to get help opening another campus — in Shanghai. And University president John Sexton never once met with Chen.

I don’t recall hearing of any New York or national politicians taking up Chen’s case, either. Isn’t that what we used to do for dissidents of oppressive regimes?

In November of 2012, CNET reported that the government would be able to read through your e-mails without a warrant.  Admittedly, I blogged about it.  However, the story turned out to be false. As Kashmir Hill at Forbes reported on November 20, 2012, “The version of the bill that Declan McCullagh [of CNET] excerpts in his report appears to be one of many that have been drafted and passed around, but is not a version that would be considered seriously at a hearing to review the bill next week.’Senator Leahy does not support broad carve outs for warrantless searches of email content,’ says a Senate Judiciary aide. ‘He remains committed to upholding privacy laws and updating the outdated Electronic Privacy Communications Act.”

In all, the story was debunked.  Granted, the NSA was tracking the internet and phone activity of Americans, but it was authorized by a secret warrant issued by the FISA court.  A court that rarely, if ever, turns down a request for covert surveillance. Now, CNET is back. And they’ve dropped another whopper on June 15 claiming that the NSA was listening to Americans’ phone conversations without warrants.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

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.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Well, that’s exactly not true. Buzzfeed reported on June 15 that Congressman Nadler basically retracted the claim of warrantless phone surveillance.

Update Rep. Nadler in a statement to BuzzFeed says: “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.”

Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades was skeptical from the beginning.

Why in the world are we treating Nadler’s hearsay from Unnamed Official as if it is true?

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 16, 2013

The headline for every damn story on the CNET/Nadler claim should come with a giant question mark at the end.

— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) June 16, 2013

As a result, CNET’s Declan McCullagh, who reported on this development and the Sen. Leahy story, issued this update.

Updated 6/16 at 11:15 a.m. PT The original headline when the story was published on Saturday was “NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants,” which was changed to “NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls,” to better match the story. The first paragraph was changed to add attribution to Rep. Nadler. Also added was an additional statement that the congressman’s aide sent this morning, an excerpt from a Washington Post story on NSA phone call content surveillance that appeared Saturday, and remarks that Rep. Rogers made on CNN this morning.]

Yet, the Nadler claim is still in the lead paragraph.

Oh, really, Mr. President? Not even a little bit?

After a week of NSA defenders saying there must be a “tradeoff” between privacy rights and surveillance, the president, through his Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, says that he doesn’t feel he has violated the privacy rights of Americans at all.

Reuters:

The administration has said the top-secret collection of massive amounts of “metadata” from phone calls – raw information that does not identify individual telephone subscribers, was legal and authorized by Congress in the interests of thwarting militant attacks. It has said the agencies did not monitor calls.

Asked whether Obama feels he has violated the privacy of Americans, McDonough said, “He does not.”

While he defended the surveillance, McDonough said “the existence of these programs obviously have unnerved many people.” He said Obama “welcomes a public debate on this question because he does say and he will say in the days ahead that we have to find the right balance, and we will not keep ourselves on a perpetual war footing.”

Revelations of the NSA’s broad monitoring of phone and Internet data has drawn criticism that the Obama administration has extended, or even expanded, the security apparatus the George W. Bush administration built after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“We owe it to the American people to have a fulsome debate in the open about the extent of these programs,” Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat a long-time critic of the surveillance programs, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Describing the surveillance overseen by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Udall said, “I just don’t think this is an American approach to a world in which we have great threats. My number one goal is to protect the American people, but we can do it in a way that also respects our civil liberties.”

McDonough said Congress authorized the programs as a way to thwart plots against Americans and that lawmakers should stay up to date on how they are run. The administration has said the program collected only “metadata” – raw information that does not identify individual telephone subscribers and did not monitor calls.

“The president is not saying ‘trust me.’ The president is saying I want every member of Congress, on whose authority we are running this program, to understand it, to be briefed about it, and to be comfortable with it,” he said.

It should be noted that McDonough said nothing about the internet surveillance program PRISM that did far more than gather “metadata.”

By their very nature, these surveillance programs violate our privacy. We did not give our permission for government to access this data — whether they can access content or not. And regardless of assurances that safeguards are in place that prevent snooping, the awesome potential of this technology to make a hash of our constitutional rights is easily seen. The very existence of these programs is a threat to constitutional liberty, and it is troubling that the president apparently doesn’t understand that.

We are past the point of taking anyone’s word for it. If the programs have to be so secret that no one can confirm our constitutional rights aren’t being violated, then they should be scrapped. Most of us are willing to allow government some leeway in collecting data — but not at the expense of privacy or our rights.

The Hill gives us 6 floor amendments to the immigration reform bill that bear watching over the next few weeks.

Some of them — including a border security amendment by Senator Cornyn and another by Senator Rand Paul — will probably determine whether the bill passes the Senate. Another amendment offered by Senator Patrick Leahy that would allow partners of same sex couples living overseas to apply for a green card the same way that heterosexual married couples do, would mean that Senator Marco Rubio would probably withdraw his support of the bill if the amendment is passed.

But there are two interesting amendments that will show just how serious Democrats are about immigration reform:

Rubio has offered an amendment that would require immigrants with provisional legal status, who are 16 or older to read, write and speak English. This would require that immigrants speak English before they’d be eligible to apply for a green card rather than taking the English proficiency test right before gaining citizenship.

Some Republicans argued that the Gang of Eight bill was offering undocumented immigrants amnesty because it wasn’t hard enough to start the pathway to citizenship. Rubio’s amendment bumps up the English-language requirement by a few years in the process.

[...]

Earlier this week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) warned the Gang of Eight that if his four amendments to the immigration reform bill weren’t included that he wouldn’t support final passage. He said he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t take “stiffing lightly.”

Hatch was one of three Republicans who voted for the bill in committee, but he said his support for final passage was contingent on further changes being made to the legislation.

“As I told my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, my support in committee did not guarantee my support for the bill on the floor unless further changes were made to make this bill better,” Hatch said.

His amendments would ensure people on the pathway to citizenship aren’t granted federal welfare benefits, including ObamaCare, for at least five years after gaining citizenship. He also wants to strengthen language in the bill that calls for immigrants to pay back taxes.

The back taxes issue may yet be a deal killer as there have been several GOP senators who have indicated that some means to collect the back taxes of people who have lived here illegally must be found in order to guarantee their support of the final package. And while the House will be dealing with its own immigration bills, the idea that newly legalized immigrants can access Obamacare and other welfare benefits is not going over well on that side of the Hill.

These amendments represent potential booby traps that one side or the other will use in the political maneuvering to come. Democrats won’t want to budge on border security while the Leahy amendment would, if passed, probably sink the entire package.

The Democrats are going to have to give on border security and resist the temptation to pander to the gay community by passing Leahy’s amemdment. Otherwise, it is probable that the entire bill won’t even get 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and die an ignoble death.

Approval for the Keystone Pipeline has been languishing in the administration because the president doesn’t want to offend the greens, but also doesn’t want to abandon the 10,000 jobs or so that experts believe will be created if it is eventually built.

So, typical Obama, he continues to vote “present” and delay making a decision. There is little doubt that the greens will scream bloody murder if the pipeline is approved — as Al Gore made perfectly clear in an interview with the Guardian newspaper:

Al Gore has called on Barack Obama to veto the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, describing it as “an atrocity”.

The former vice-president said in an interview on Friday that he hoped Obama would follow the example of British Columbia, which last week rejected a similar pipeline project, and shut down the Keystone XL.

“I certainly hope that he will veto that now that the Canadians have publicly concluded that it is not safe to take a pipeline across British Columbia to ports on the Pacific,” he told the Guardian. “I really can’t imagine that our country would say: ‘Oh well. Take it right over parts of the Ogallala aquifer’, our largest and most important source of ground water in the US. It’s really a losing proposition.”

Campaigners have cast Keystone XL as the most important decision of Obama’ presidency. The State Department, which has say over the project because it crosses the US-Canadian border, is to announce its decision later this year.

But Gore said an even larger environmental decision loomed for Obama next month. The White House has indicated Obama could offer a long-awaited climate plan, the first concrete proposals since his inauguration in January when the president suggested it was a religious and patriotic duty to deal with the challenge.

“This whole project [Keystone XL] is an atrocity but it is even more important for him to regulate carbon dioxide emissions,” Gore said. He urged Obama to use his powers as president to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power plants – the biggest since source of global warming pollution.

Why use the word “atrocity” to describe a project that no one can make a good argument against based on anything rational? The greens oppose the pipeline because it means more energy at cheaper prices. This is exactly the opposite of what they are agitating for. They want less energy that’s more expensive. They will tell us that it is for our own good, that paying more for energy while reducing the amount of fossil fuels that are available will save the earth. What they won’t say is that it will also severely damage industrialized civilization and the philosophy that drives it; capitalism.

The Keystone Pipeline is an atrocity because it reinforces the notion that capitalism is successful. In a similar vein, the regulation of carbon — especially on power plants that are currently in operation — will destroy the coal industry as we know it, perhaps double consumer electric bills, and severely limit the operations of many factories in many industries.

The result will be lost jobs, a shrinking economy, and a stifling of entrepreneurial energy. No doubt, this will be a boon to those who view capitalism as an atrocity — as Gore and his climate change warriors believe.

This would probably be a bigger story if not for the NSA revelations still reverberating across America. FBI Director Robert Mueller disclosed in Congressional testimony this past week that the FBI knew of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the Russians asked the Bureau to look into his potential ties to terrorism.

Politico:

Deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to the attention of the FBI on at least two occasions prior to a Russian government warning in March 2011 that said he appeared to be radicalizing, FBI Director Robert Mueller said in Congressional testimony this week.

The earlier references have led some lawmakers to question whether the FBI acted too quickly in closing an assessment of Tsarnaev’s potential ties to terrorism done in response to the Russian request.

In a little-noticed exchange before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, Mueller acknowledged that the Russian alert was not the first time the elder Tsarnaev brother crossed the FBI’s radar.

“His name had come up in two other cases,” Mueller said in response to questions from Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). “Those two other cases, the individuals had their cases closed. So, he was one or two person [sic] away.”

When King asked Mueller if it was reasonable to say that the Russian letter “refocused” the FBI on Tsarnaev, Mueller replied, “Absolutely.”

Mueller did not elaborate on the nature of the prior investigations where Tsarnaev’s name had arisen. However, an FBI official told POLITICO they were not related to terrorism. The official, who asked not to be named, also said the agent who conducted an “assessment” of Tsarnaev in response to the Russian warning in 2011 found the previous references and was aware of them.

Former House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.) said he believes the prior mentions of Tsarnaev in FBI files should have resulted in greater scrutiny of the Russian-born U.S. resident who allegedly went on to carry out the April 15, 2013 bombing that killed three and an ensuing crime spree that left a police officer dead.

Tamerlan was eventually killed in a shootout with police a few miles away from the bombing scene. His brother, Dzhokhar, survived the shootout. He has been charged with the bombings and is in a federal prison hospital near Boston.

“What are the chances of the Russians reporting on someone who’s pretty obscure and the FBI checks him out and finds out his name has come up twice before?” asked Peter King. “Wouldn’t it have warranted keeping the investigation open longer or at least going to the Boston police and warning them?”

Why didn’t we hear about this earlier? Here we are, nearly two months after the bombing, and Mueller casually lets it drop that they had Tamerlan Tsarnaev on their radar even before the Russians asked the agency to look into any connections to terrorism.

There are many reasons the FBI would have had an interest in Tsarnaev beyond terrorism. The feds may have been investigating whether he lied on his asylum application. If Tsarnaev’s mother can be believed, the FBI was using Tamerlan as an informant. But the fact that he had been under investigation by the FBI previously makes Rep. King’s questions very relevant: why close the investigation?

There is little doubt that the FBI should have been keeping better track of Tsarnaev. At the very least, they should have informed Boston police of the Russian inquiry. But whether anyone could have done anything to stop the bombing will probably remain an unknown.

I guess all the defenders of the NSA PRISM and phone-record surveillance programs will now try to tell us that this latest revelation, that the NSA listens in on our phone calls and monitors emails, text messages, and IM chats — all without a warrant — is the price we pay for preventing terrorist attacks.

Not only don’t they need a warrant, says the DoJ, but low-level analysts can make the decision to listen to our phone calls for any reason they want.

CNET:

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

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week 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.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”

There are serious “constitutional problems” with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. “It epitomizes the problem of secret laws.”

The NSA yesterday declined to comment to CNET. A representative said Nadler was not immediately available. (This is unrelated to last week’s disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)

The NSA has between 500,000 and one million numbers on their target list — perhaps more. All electronic communications belonging to these people are recorded.

This isn’t “monitoring.” This isn’t “scanning.” This is eavesdropping — exactly what President Obama denied when he said “nobody is listening to your phone calls.” Oh, yes they are, Barry, and lying about it is about the most egregious breaking of trust with the American people that has occurred in your administration.

President Obama, Vice President Biden, and former President Bill Clinton have all agreed to appear in the closing days of the Massachusetts Senate race on behalf of Rep. Ed Markey, the Democratic candidate.

The Democrat’s most potent political artillery are coming for a reason; an expected easy victory by Markey is not materializing as polls consistently show the Republican candidate, former Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez within a few percentage points of the Democrat.

Markey may be outspending Gomez, but he is not out-hustling him. The Republican has showed up at an astonishing 50 events in the 45 days since April 30.

But Gomez still faces a daunting task; how to overcome the massive registration advantage for Democrats in the state, while raising enough money for a final big push next weekend in advance of the June 25 special election:

The Hill:

Nearly every poll of the race, including two released this week, give Markey just a single-digit lead over Gomez, stoking those fears with hard data.

Tufts University Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Berry said Gomez needs, ultimately, to get independents excited for his bid, because neither candidate has really ignited any passion in their supporters.

“The emphasis in the Gomez campaign has been on character, because the issues favor Democrats,” he said. “Gomez needs to create some excitement about his personal story among independents here.”

Gomez spokesman Will Ritter said the campaign plans to do just that, launching a series of town halls throughout the state to meet voters over the next week.

He said that if the campaign can get out their message, they’re confident they can take the seat.

“We need to be able to make our case for Gabriel Gomez to independent voters in Massachusetts. Ed Markey has decided that he is going to tailor his message to scare independents and excite the far Left,” Ritter said.

“We’re going to have to combat that by portraying Gomez as an outsider, Navy SEAL businessman, going up against an insider, hyper-partisan guy who couldn’t possibly change Washington.”

As Massachusetts GOP strategist Ryan Williams, a former Mitt Romney campaign staffer, explained, the outsider message is one that works in Massachusetts.

“It’s the message that the Republican gubernatorial candidates used over the years. We’ve had people who ran as outsiders versus the insider machine on Beacon Hill. To highlight the contrast between his record as a Navy SEAL and a businessman, and Markey being a career politician, is the right strategy,” he said.

But spreading that message may come down to funding, something Gomez has struggled to obtain throughout his campaign.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee appears to have funneled money to the state GOP to back a sizeable buy for Gomez earlier in the campaign, but thus far only one outside spending group — a mysterious group that bills itself as moderate and was registered with the FEC earlier this month — has gone on air for Gomez.

Republicans are still hopeful they’ll see an influx of outside help, but concede any groups would have to buy this weekend or early next week to make a difference.

But Markey has his own problems:

A Gomez victory would not be unprecedented.

In 2010, Brown was a little known state senator who won a special election race for the long-held Democratic senate seat of Sen. Ted Kennedy.

An averaging of polls by the website RealClearPolitics has Markey leading by 9 percentage points.

Democratic strategist Ben Tulchin argues Markey leads in almost every poll, including one by 11 points, and the poll in which Gomez trails by just 1 percentage point was done by a Republican-leaning firm.

Still, he recognizes the challenges, including the likelihood of a low voter turnout in a special election, particularly this time when people are otherwise occupied in the summer.

“When you have a lower turnout special, Democrats lose their edge quite a bit,” said Tulchin, founder of San Francisco-based Tulchin Research. “And while Massachusetts might be considered a heavily Democratic state, it has a lot of older, white, blue-color workers. It’s never as easy as it looks.”

I don’t exactly know why but it seems there is less interest in Gomez’s candidacy than in Scott Brown’s run. While it’s true neither one could win a Republican primary in most other states, Gomez is one of the most impressive GOP candidates to come out of Massachusetts in a while. It could be that the big outside money is not coming his way because he is given a very small chance of success. It certainly isn’t because he is a lackluster candidate.

The Brown special election was held in the dead of winter with a Democratic candidate who managed to annoy just about everyone in the state. This one will be held during the summer with a state Democratic icon running. While turnout will be unpredictable, Markey is no Martha Coakley and barring a major gaffe, or a last minute surge of cash for Gomez, he should win the special election by a fairly comfortable margin.

Detroit’s state-appointed municipal manager Kevyn Orr has declared the city to be in default on $2.5 billion in debts and is asking creditors and bond holders to take about 10 cents on the dollar in order to avoid bankruptcy.

It may be a futile effort. Orr will also ask unions to take a cut in their pensions — something the unions have already said is not negotiable. If Orr can’t swing the pension cut, he will have little choice but to declare bankruptcy.

AP:

A team led by a state-appointed emergency manager said Friday that Detroit is defaulting on about $2.5 billion in unsecured debt and is asking creditors to take about 10 cents on the dollar of what the city owes them.

Kevyn Orr spent two hours with about 180 bond insurers, pension trustees, union representatives and other creditors in a move to avoid what bankruptcy experts have said would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Underfunded pension claims likely would get less than the 10 cents on the dollar.

An assessment of the plan’s progress will come in the next 30 days or so.

Orr also announced that Detroit stopped paying on its unsecured debt Friday to “conserve cash” for police, fire and other services in the city of 700,000 people. The debt not being paid includes $39 million owed to a certificate of participation.

“We will not pay that today,” Orr told reporters after the meeting with creditors at a hotel at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus.

His team said the proposal is the one shot to permanently fix fiscal problems that have made the city insolvent.

Orr said everyone involved needs to come to grips with Detroit’s dire financial situation that has been worsened by years of procrastination and denial.

“If people are sincere and look at this data, you would think a rational person will step back and say, `This is not normal … but what choice do we have?’” Orr said.

The city’s budget deficit could top $380 million by July 1. Orr believes long-term debt tops $17 billion.

As Detroit Free Press business writer Nathan Bomey points out, defaulting on the debt and negotiating in good faith with creditors is a prerequisite to declaring bankruptcy:

Orr warned that the city’s bondholders and creditors won’t fare well in bankruptcy court, so they should agree to concessions now.

“It doesn’t get better with time, OK?” he told the Free Press editorial board after the meeting. “It actually gets worse. So the sooner you come in, the better treatment you might get.”

Still, early indications suggest the city’s unions will seek to block Orr’s attempt to reduce pensions, which could lead him to catapult the city into bankruptcy court in a bid to secure the legal authority to slash payments.

Pension holders are already agitating for their unions to fight Orr’s proposal.

Shelby Township resident Andy Oddo, 77, who retired in 1986 after a 32-year career as a Detroit employee, said he isn’t ready to accept cuts to his pension of about $800 per month.

“I’m just looking at my own problem here, just trying to hang on,” Oddo said. “I just want to hopefully have enough for me to pay my bills.”

Orr’s decision to target cuts to retiree pensions signaled to legal experts that he is preparing for a legal battle that will almost certainly unfold as part of the Chapter 9 bankruptcy process.

Some experts say they believe a bankruptcy reorganization would take years, while others say it could just take months if Orr can line up enough support ahead of time.

“Simply because it goes into Chapter 9 doesn’t mean it has to be chaos,” University of Michigan bankruptcy expert John Pottow said.

One of the reasons that legal experts believe a Chapter 9 filing is inevitable is that Orr is aiming for significant cuts to pensions, which can’t happen outside bankruptcy unless the unions agree.

Orr said he’s ready to “pull the trigger if we have to,” but he would prefer to reach agreements outside bankruptcy.

Ken Schneider, a bankruptcy attorney and principal shareholder of Detroit-based Schneider Miller, said it’s not politically palatable for union leaders to agree to major concessions without being able to say “the court forced it onto me.”

For Detroit, it was more than the exorbitant public union pensions and health benefits that laid them low. It was extraordinary mismanagement by city officials, as well as the flight of auto manufacturers that sealed their fate. There was much procrastination in Detroit too. As recently as February of this year, Mayor Bing was predicting that the efforts he was making to cut the budget and pay the bills would improve the situation.

That turned out to be wishful thinking. As a sign of how far Detroit has fallen, the city was ranked 9th in 2000 in population. The most recent census shows the city ranked 18th — and falling. With nearly 12% unemployment and the city being unable to pay for police, firemen, or even street lighting, Detroit will continue to lose population as anyone with the means to leave is abandoning the city. Soon, only those too poor or too old to leave will be left.

Associated Press reports:

A Connecticut woman disfigured by a friend’s pet chimpanzee was denied permission Friday to sue the state for $150 million because at the time of the attack, the law allowed private ownership of the animals.

The plaintiff reportedly went over to the owner’s house to help get the chimpanzee back in the house, when the chimp “went berserk and ripped off [the victim’s] nose, lips, eyelids and hands before being shot to death by a police officer.”

This particular chimpanzee had a history of violent attacks, having bitten two other people in 1996 and 1998. Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, while arguing that the state should not be held liable, also admitted that a state biologist warned this animal was an “accident waiting to happen.” After this most recent attack, Connecticut banned private ownership of chimpanzees.

Obviously, any decent person finds this story tragic. The victim is now blind, has endured numerous operations, received a face transplant, currently lives in a nursing home, and will be receiving hand transplants.

On the other hand, is it fair to hold the state accountable for the pain and suffering experienced by the actions of private parties? The victim received a $4M settlement with the estate of the owner, who died in 2010. The courts obviously believe in personal accountability between private individuals.

However, higher courts have consistently found that government agencies aren’t accountable when their actions or inactions contribute to private tragedies. (See DeShaney v. Winnebago and Castle Rock v. Gonzales.)

This story serves as a reminder that the state doesn’t hold itself responsible for your safety. Tell people this story when they say you should give up your guns and just call the police.

When somebody sues the state, they’re suing us: Our taxes pay the settlement. This means that all of us are personally responsible for the actions of private individuals. That’s bad law.

Large settlements like this proposed $150M suit represent massive transfers of our wealth into attorneys’ pockets. In my book 400 Years of Gun Control, I chronicle the story of the tobacco settlement. What was sold to us as a “public safety” issue—remember all the gun control rhetoric? Sound familiar?—was really a scam to steal money from your pockets, whether you smoked or not. After the settlement, attorneys received billions in contingency fees, and curiously enough, attorney campaign contributions tripled in the next election cycle. Transfer of wealth; transfer of power.

Not exactly Movie of the Week stuff.

In this setting, it’s easy to see how the young Snowden was exposed to the notion of spycraft as a career, first with the Central Intelligence Agency and later as a systems analyst for two companies under contract to the NSA. But details of his early life — in the agency’s shadows and with both parents working for other branches of the federal government — only magnify the contradictions inherent in Snowden’s decision to become a leaker.

What, after all, did he think he was getting into when he signed up to work for the nation’s espionage agencies? And what specifically triggered a “crisis of conscience” — as described by a friend who knew him when he worked for the CIA — so profound that it convinced him to betray the secrets he was sworn to keep?

While the tedious “Traitor or Hero?” debate rages on, there will be all sorts of analysis done to figure out what sent the poor kid over the edge, especially from the “Hero” camp.

Many of the rest of us will simply keep wondering how a guy who grew up near the NSA but was shocked to find out what the NSA was up to when did contract work for them was bright enough to be doing the work in the first place.

Also, if there is a movie I think Chaz Bono should play Snowden.

Heh.

Palin argued that the U.S. should not intervene in any Middle East conflict as long as President Obama remains in office.

“Until we have a commander in chief who knows what he is doing….let Allah sort it out!” she told the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Thousands of words have been written in the last couple of days about The Idiot King’s Bubba-induced change of heart on Syria, most of them negative. The woman both sides love to hate (and always for inaccurate reasons) provided a pretty good summation of the mess in eighteen.

Love her or hate her, she’s not going anywhere kids.

I remember this story at the time because it struck me as particularly generous. It was reported in 2005 that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, one of the real good guys in sports and a legendary philanthropist, gave Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin his Super Bowl ring. Kraft was on a trip with other business executives to St. Petersburg when they were granted an audience with Putin.

The rest of the story is like something out of a tale that might have been told of Ivan the Terrible:

Kraft explained the incident happened while Sandy Weill and other business execs were in St. Petersburg. “I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ ” Kraft told the crowd at Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria.“I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

Kraft released a statement at the time, “President Putin, a great and knowledgable sports fan, was clearly taken with its uniqueness. I decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and [his] leadership.

Amazing. But the story doesn’t end there. Despite his statement, Kraft wanted the ring back and enlisted the aid of the Bush White House in retrieving it:

But Kraft really wanted the 4.94-carat bauble back, he said Thursday, admitting he’d gotten a call from the George W. Bush-run White House, saying, “‘It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.” (In fact the Soviet Union had collapsed 14 years earlier.)

But, Kraft said, “I really didn’t [want to]. I had an emotional tie to the ring, it has my name on it. I don’t want to see it on eBay. There was a pause on the other end of the line, and the voice repeated, ‘It would really be in the best interest if you meant to give the ring as a present.’ ” The ring is now reportedly kept in the Kremlin library.

One could apply a metaphor about Putin purloining elections to this story but it goes far beyond that. Doing business in Russia basically means doing business with Putin. Corruption is rampant and it is believed that Putin has become fabulously wealthy as a result of kickbacks from foreign businesses. The once penniless former KGB agent has become a billionaire by milking the system for everything he can get.

So it isn’t necessarily surprising that Putin would literally pocket a $25,000 ring. The surprise is that the US government didn’t stand up to him and demand the ring’s return. Such petty thievery should have been very publicly and explicitly rebuked by the Bush administration and the fact that it wasn’t says a lot about how our government deals with this new Czar of all the Russias.

Reading reports about the election in Iran, one would think that the Islamic version of John McCain or Mitt Romney was about to win the presidential election.

Not hardly.

The “moderate” or “reformist” candidate, Hassan Rohani, appears to be an outright winner in the presidential election and judging by the comments made by foreign policy experts, a new day is dawning between Iran and the West.

Reuters:

Though an establishment figure, Rohani is a former chief nuclear negotiator known for his conciliatory approach. He has pledged to promote a foreign policy of “constructive interaction with the world” and to enact a “civil rights charter” at home.

Rohani’s wide early margin revealed a broad reservoir of pro-reform sentiment with many voters, undaunted by restrictions on candidate choice and campaign rallies, seizing the chance to repudiate the dominant hardline elite over Iran’s economic woes, international isolation and crackdowns on social freedoms.

[...]

With some 27 million votes counted from the 50-million-strong electorate, Rohani had tallied 50.81 percent of all ballots cast, Iran’s interior minister said. That would be enough to avoid a second-round run-off on June 21.

Rohani’s nearest rival was conservative Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a long way behind with less than 16 percent. Other hardline candidates close to Khamenei, including current nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, scored even lower.

British former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who dealt with Rohani during nuclear negotiations between 2003 and 2005, called him a “very experienced diplomat and politician”.

“This is a remarkable and welcome result so far and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there will be no jiggery-pokery with the final result,” Straw told Reuters, alluding to accusations of widespread rigging in the 2009 election.

“What this huge vote of confidence in Doctor Rohani appears to show is a hunger by the Iranian people to break away from the arid and self-defeating approach of the past and for more constructive relations with the West,” he said.

“On a personal level I found him warm and engaging. He is a strong Iranian patriot and he was tough, but fair to deal with and always on top of his brief.”

Suzanne Maloney, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Iran “appears to be on the verge of shocking the world”.

“With Rohani leading the vote, the regime’s calculation now is whether a run-off campaign … is worth the risk. A second round would entail an additional week of the kind of exhilarated campaigning, replete with young Iranians dancing in the streets and an amplified chorus of demands for social and political reforms, and ultimately pose a greater risk to the system.”

Small groups gathering outside Rohani’s campaign headquarters in Tehran were politely asked to disperse by police, witnesses said, indicating authorities’ desire to see no repeat of the crowds that gathered after the 2009 vote, but also more restraint on the part of security forces. The pro-Rohani groups moved on quietly, according to the witnesses.

Isn’t that nice? Police “politely”asked people to disperse. I suppose that’s an improvement from hitting them over the head with a truncheon.

At least Maloney has the wit to wonder if Khamenei is going to risk a run-off campaign, implying vote rigging. In this case, Rohani appears to have benefited from a total rejection of anyone associated with either Supreme Leader Khamenei or President Ahmadinejad. Such sentiment, if nearly universal, would be hard to hide even with massive cheating.

What would an Iranian “moderate” really look like? Let’s ask him. Does Rohani want to wipe Israel off the map? Will his “civil rights charter” include rights previously denied to women? To ethnic minorities in Iran? Does he condemn designating Jews as “dogs” or “pigs” or “apes?” Will he still put people in jail for dissenting from the government?

No Iranian reporter would dare ask any of those questions, nor would any western reporter for that matter. So despite the fact that Rohani would almost certainly not give many “moderate” responses to those questions, we’re going to be stuck with the mainstream press praising him as a “moderate” for the next 4 years.

President Obama’s remarks about what punishment should be meted out to service members who commit sexual assault crimes have landed him in hot water with a military judge.

At a press conference in early May, the president put on his outraged face and threatened to deal with sexual assault criminals by naming specific punishments:

“I expect consequences,” Obama said at a press conference in early May that came just as the Pentagon released a report detailing rising incidences of sexual assaults in 2012. “So I don’t just want more speeches or awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody’s engaging in this, they’ve got to be held accountable — prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.”

What sounded great on TV landed with a thud in a military court in Hawaii:

President Obama’s comments condemning military sexual assault and suggesting that those convicted be punished with, among other things, a dishonorable discharge may be backfiring on his efforts to root out the growing problem.

In pretrial hearings in two cases, a Navy judge in Hawaii ruled this week that Obama had exerted “unlawful command influence” as commander-in-chief in outlining the specific “consequences” he saw fit for members of the military convicted of sexual assault.

As a result of Navy Judge Cmdr. Marcus Fulton’s rulings, the defendants in United States v. Johnson and United States v. Fuentes can’t be punitively discharged, even if they’re convicted of sexual assault. Stars and Stripes first reported on the rulings.

[...]

Fulton wrote in his ruling that Obama’s comments raise “concern” because they “may indicate that a particular result is required of the military justice system.”

As soon as Obama made his off-the-cuff comment, military lawyers began to voice concern that his comments might be detrimental. “I thought of the unlawful command influence issue as soon as he spoke,” said James Mackler, a private attorney and Army reserve lawyer who was involved in sexual assault cases while on active duty.

“The principle behind it is a sound principle, which is that in the military there is a lot of pressure to follow the directives of your commanders, including the president,” he said. “It’s a legitimate problem.”

As a lawyer, Obama knows to be cautious in speaking about specific cases — as he has been for the past week in not speaking out on Edward Snowden — but may not be as familiar with the military justice system, Mackler said, where unlawful command influence creates problems, as it has in these cases and likely many more to come.

The president used the press conference to try and score political points with women’s groups who have been agitating for harsher treatment of sexual assault cases. The disposition of sexual assault cases is not at issue here. This is a question of knowledge and competence. In Obama’s eagerness to show women’s groups how tough he is going to be on military personnel convicted of sexual assault crimes, he stupidly handed defense lawyers a gift — and tied the hands of military judges.

Stars and Stripes lays out the consequences of Obama’s ignorance:

The judge’s pretrial ruling means that if either defendant is found guilty, whether by a jury or a military judge, they cannot receive a bad conduct discharge or a dishonorable discharge. Sailors found guilty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s Article 120, which covers several sexual crimes including assault and rape, generally receive punitive discharges.

“A member of the public would not hear the President’s statement to be a simple admonition to hold members accountable,” Fulton stated. “A member of the public would draw the connection between the ‘dishonorable discharge’ required by the President and a punitive discharge approved by the convening authority.

“The strain on the system created by asking a convening authority to disregard [Obama’s] statement in this environment would be too much to sustain public confidence.”

The ruling sets the stage for defense attorneys to use the same arguments in sexual assault cases throughout the military.

Those convicted of serious sexual assault charges will still go to prison. But being unable to dishonorably discharge the felons means it’s possible one could be convicted of sexual assault and still be eligible for veterans’ benefits.

A president more respectful of military traditions would not have made such a stupid gaffe.

It’s the weekend so let’s relax with the man who could do all sorts of magic without a teleprompter. The first one is in the video below. The rest can be found here. Have a great weekend everybody!

So they must be a good idea.

The International Monetary Fund urged the United States on Friday to repeal sweeping government spending cuts and recommended that the Federal Reserve continue a bond-buying program through at least the end of the year.

In its annual check of the health of the U.S. economy, the IMF forecast economic growth would be a sluggish 1.9 percent this year. The IMF estimates growth would be as much as 1.75 percentage points higher if not for a rush to cut the government’s budget deficit.

The IMF cut its outlook for economic growth in 2014 to 2.7 percent, below its 3 percent forecast published in April. The Fund said in April it still assumed the deep government spending cuts would be repealed, but it had now dropped that assumption.

Washington slashed the federal budget in March, adding to the drag on the economy created by tax increases enacted in January.

Blaming sequestration for the sluggishness of this muck-bound economy is like weighing 400 pounds and saying that it was the last Oreo you ate that did it to you.

From Business Insider.

People have started to realize that putting in four years and racking up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt only to find yourself out of a job (or working as a barista at Starbucks) is a raw deal.

Some entrepreneurs and academics have decided to do something about it. They’re looking to give quality education for free online, or job training in fields that actually pay enough to afford their tuition.

Several of the programs have over 90% of graduates working as software engineers, making an average salary of over $80,000 per year, for instance.

There’s a list of twelve of these companies, for those of you who just had kids graduate from high school and are having the higher education wallet panic right now.

As former resident of the Garden State, it doesn’t surprise me that New Jersey Democrats fumbled their own bill.  Right now, they’re crafting a gun control bill that is being championed as a model for the nation. The bill (S2723) would encode a firearm owner’s ID on their driver’s license, establish a system of instant background checks, and force gun owners to show that they’ve received the proper training.  There’s only one problem.  They didn’t have enough votes.

Dave Urbanski at the Blaze wrote on June 14 about the legislative kerfuffle.

The author of the bill, state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a Democrat, calls the legislation a “national model,” says NJ.com. And while it passed the state Senate, a political adversary of Sweeney’s stood in its way — Assemblyman Joseph Cryan (D-Union), who abstained from voting on the measure in the Assembly’s Law and Public Safety committee.

Cryan’s lack of support was critical, leaving the bill without enough votes to advance.

Apparently seeing the fallout ahead, the committee’s chairman — Charles Mainor (D-Hudson) — stopped the vote and called a recess, briefly conferring with abstainer Cryan. When the committee resumed, the intention was to move to another bill. But another member of the committee objected, saying rules prohibited stopping the vote.

Here’s the language from Assembly rules:

Cryan worried about the cost of the new law. He said, “I abstained based on cost concerns…I along with many other thousands of New Jerseyans have lost a motor vehicle office in our district. We had some real cost concerns about the bill.”  Then again, as Urbanski noted, Cryan and Sweeney are both vying for the chairmanship of the state Democratic Party. Thus, some political maneuvering may be at work here.  Cryan supported a bill that would limit magazine sizes from fifteen to ten rounds.  It passed the state Assembly, but Sweeney shelved it in the senate.

With Ed Snowden exposing the NSA’s surveillance programs, we shouldn’t be surprised that the agency gave members of Congress talking points to justify the spying of American citizens.  The talking points indicate that the programs aren’t secret, despite that fact that Americans were unaware that their phone records and internet activity were being monitored, collected, and analyzed.

Zack Carter of Huffington Post wrote on June 13 that:

The talking points originate from the Democratic side of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) serves as ranking member.

[...]

[D]ivided into two documents, one dedicated to a program that allows the U.S. government to collect the phone call records of all American citizens, including the telephone numbers involved and length of calls. The other document is dedicated a program that collects mass metadata on Internet activities, including email, that relate to matters the NSA deems a foreign threat to the United States.

Both documents assert that the programs are not secret. But the programs have alarmed Americans because most citizens were unaware of their existence prior to the recent articles, and the programs were authorised by a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose rulings are, in fact, secret.

The talking points regarding the Internet program read:

Section 702 is a vital legal tool that Congress reauthorized in December 2012, as part of the FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act, after extensive hearings and debate. Under Section 702, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) certifies foreign intelligence collection. There is no secret program involved — it is strictly authorized by a U.S. statute. The talking points for the phone records program read:

The news articles have been discussing what purports to be a classified, lawfully-authorized order that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) issued under an Act of Congress — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Under this Act, the FISA Court authorized a collection of business records. There is no secret program involved here — it is strictly authorized by a U.S. statute.

According to a staffer of Rep. Ruppersberger’s, “some of the articles that have been out there in the media have been confusing for members, so we put together this information to help them understand the programs.”  I haven’t made up my mind about Snowden being a traitor or a patriot, but one thing I’m not comfortable with is government perusing through my phone and internet activity.  What’s funny is that Barack Obama shared that opinion during the 2008 election.

Whatever gets you through the night.

He’s got jokes too:

Let’s say you’re a liberal. Your inclination is to ward against authoritarian government invading personal privacy.

He is obviously writing from 1940.

Most of the article is BUSH BAD! NIXON BAD! MCCARTHY BAD!

He then has to justify his bad journal entry rationalization with something other than “It’s cool because Obama is just so dreamy” so he comes up with some tripe about technology making governtment abuses of such things less likely now, an opinion he is sure to abandon the second a Republican is inaugurated president again.

As expected, many lefties are now realizing that they’ve been criticizing The Lightbringer for a week or two and need to cover their you-know-whats before they have to start calling themselves “RACIST!” Scher used a bunch of words simply to say, “It’s OK because he’s doing it.”

This kind of delusion is to be expected from anyone who still doesn’t understand that McCarthy was right.

They’re really low on sharp tools in the Soros shed.

Here’s the headlne:

GOP Civil War: Limbaugh Claims Jeb Bush Portrays Talk Radio As “Extremist Wackos”

As always, the diseased Soros monkeys are letting ignorance fuel a projection fantasy. They are completely unaware that there are only about seven people in the GOP not named Bush who care about Jeb. And, as they are members of a hive mind, they think any kind of disagreement means it’s time to break out the “OMG!”

The IRS abuse of hundreds of conservative groups has gripped the nation since it broke on May 10. President Obama declared that he was outraged by it, and fake-fired the acting IRS commissioner to show his rage. Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on May 15 “I can assure you and the American people that we will take a dispassionate view of this.”

He has evidently made good on the dispassionate part, if not the view. Because to date, there is no evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigations is even investigating the abuse. At all.

Testifying before Congress Thursday, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted under questioning that he knew nothing at all about the status of the investigation. He didn’t know who the lead investigator is. He didn’t know if anyone had been interviewed about it. He didn’t know anything, but he did assure Congress that it’s at least an active investigation.

But how active is it? Attorneys Jay Sekulow and Cleta Mitchell represent several of the victims. They tell the Daily Caller that the FBI has contacted none — zero — of their clients.

“We have not been contacted by any federal investigative agency and, to date, none of our clients have been contacted or interviewed by the FBI,” Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice told The Daily Caller on Thursday. The ACLJ has filed suit against the IRS on behalf of 25 conservative groups, with additional groups being added in the next couple weeks, according to a spokesman.

“I have been very surprised that I have not heard from anybody and frankly, none of my clients have. I talk to other tea party leaders on a regular basis,” said Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer largely credited with pushing the IRS abuses to the forefront.

Zero.

It’s obvious that the Obama administration isn’t interested, from the top down, in really investigating the abuse scandal.

That may be because they all already know the answer.

The FBI, which is tasked with the investigation, was itself involved in the flurry of government activity that came Catherine Engelbrecht’s way after she filed for tax-exempt status for True the Vote. The involvement of the IRS, FBI, OSHA and BATFE in harassing Engelbrecht and her family suggest that someone above all of those executive branch agencies had a hand in what those agencies were doing. Those agencies belong to different sections of the executive branch — IRS belongs to Treasury, FBI and BATFE belong to the Department of Justice, while OSHA belongs to the Department of Labor. No one cabinet officer atop any of the major departments could order any personnel in the other departments to launch investigations. If there was such an order, it had to come from the White House.

Republicans’ version of the National Defense Authorization Act passed today, but it faces little chance of getting past President Obama.

The bill authorizes a $552.1 billion topline for “base” national defense programs, which includes $7.7 billion in mandatory defense spending and $544.4 billion in discretionary spending.

The White House warned on Tuesday that it would veto the bill — for reasons other than just defense. “H.R. 1960 assumes adoption of the House Budget Resolution framework, which would hurt our economy and require draconian cuts to middle-class priorities,” the Office of Management and budget said in the veto threat. “These cuts could result in hundreds of thousands of low-income children losing access to Head Start programs, tens of thousands of children with disabilities losing Federal funding for their special education teachers and aides, thousands of Federal agents who can’t enforce drug laws, combat violent crime or apprehend fugitives, and thousands of scientists without medical grants, which would slow research that could lead to new treatments and cures for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, and hurt America’s economic competitiveness.”

The 315-108 vote was more bipartisan than the White House would have liked, though, with 18 Republicans and 90 Democrats voting against the appropriations bill.

“The Rules Committee provided for a robust debate of NDAA under an open process – making in order a total of 172 amendments, roughly divided between the parties. This action reflects our Majority’s commitment to enabling the House to work its will on behalf of the American people,” said Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

“In these times of fiscal restraint, we must continue to prioritize a strong national defense, and we must make the tough choices within our defense budget to make sure we are doing all that we can within our limited resources to secure this nation,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). “This bill meets that test.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), sponsor of the House bill, noted that “for the 52nd year in a row, the House has come together – Republicans and Democrats- to do our most important work; support the troops, and provide for our common defense.”

“This bill makes vital investments to repair our crumbling readiness, ensures our troops have the support and benefits they deserve and have earned, and institutes reforms designed to stamp out the incidents of sexual assault within the ranks. Every member can be proud of the work they have done here today,” he said.

McKeon also noted “the Senate Armed Services Committee also got their work done this week.”

The upper chamber finished its markup of the Senate version today. “This bipartisan bill provides for our nation’s defense and upholds our obligations to our men and women in uniform and their families,” Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said. “An important part of keeping faith with service members is addressing the plague of sexual assaults in our military, and the bill includes the strongest, most effective approach to combating sexual assault.”

Levin went to battle with other Dems this week over efforts to remove prosecution of sexual assault cases out of the chain of command. That language was eventually stripped from the bill as Levin won.

Glenn Greenwald is the Guardian journalist who broke the story of the NSA snooping. Greenwald came to prominence during the Bush years by denouncing that administration’s anti-terrorism policies. To his credit, Greenwald is one of the few on the left who has remained consistent and now criticizes Obama policies with almost as much zeal as he criticized Bush. Not to his credit, Greenwald developed a habit of using fake commenters to defend his written positions when others criticized him, and then denied that he engaged in any sockpuppetry. Greewald blamed the sockpuppetry on his boyfriend.

Also not to his credit, Greenwald’s criticism of US anti-terror policy may not be coming from a civil libertarian perspective at all. It may result from a very very far left, Marxist, world view. Adam Levick has posted video clips of Greenwald addressing the International Socialist Organization’s annual conference in 2011. Greenwald speaks about the drone program that has been used to target and kill terrorists including American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki used the Internet to spread his Islamist doctrine, and among his acolytes was Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood mass killer in 2009. Speaking about Awlaki in 2011, Greenwald told the socialist gathering that Awlaki’s only crimes were “speak[ing] effectively to the Muslim world about violence that the U.S. commits [in Yemen] and the responsibility to stand up to that violence.”

The violence that the US commits in Yemen is aimed at taking out terrorists who target and kill US civilians and military personnel. The US violence, then, is aimed at defending people like Greenwald to go on criticizing his own country.

In another clip, Greenwald downplays the 9-11 terrorist attacks, in which Islamist terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, as “minimal in scope.” Radosh has posted both clips here.

Greenwald casts himself as a civil libertarian. No real civil libertarian, though, associates with admitted socialists and aligns himself with the talking points of Islamist radicals. His work with Snowden, who has fled to Hong Kong after leaking the NSA’s data-mining programs and may be working with the Chinese government, casts strong doubt on Snowden’s motivations.

The House Intelligence Committee held its eighth hearing on the Benghazi attacks — behind closed doors, naturally.

Deputy Director of the FBI Sean Joyce, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Matt Olsen, and other senior intelligence officials testified today on the status of the investigation to find and bring to justice those responsible for the attacks that killed four American citizens last September, according to the committee.

“The fact that nine months after the horrific attacks on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, there has still been no one brought to justice is frustrating and disheartening. The world is watching and terrorists are emboldened by our inability to bring those responsible to justice,” Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said.

“We must push forward even more aggressively to hold those responsible accountable and bring them to justice swiftly.”

Rogers made no reference to CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, though. House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) mused in May, after the White House release of more than 100 Benghazi talking points emails, that Morell would be meeting with Rogers’ committee.

Morell’s resignation was announced this week and he leaves the agency Aug. 9.

FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying in an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, was asked about the progress of the investigation by Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

“Is there a reason for — and can you explain to us — and this is a little longer than your usual answer, I’m sure — how it could be that we’ve got videos of them, we’ve got knowledge of who many of these people are — in some cases by name — and yet we haven’t found one of them in Libya or some other country? Isn’t that unusual to have such a cold record as far as we know today?” Issa asked.

“Yes, it is unusual to have such a cold record. As I articulated before, this is a unique situation. We’ve had embassy attacks before. We’ve had our colleagues in law enforcement and the government helping us,” Mueller responded. “There is no government to help us in Libya. We don’t have colleagues we can go to. And so, it is unique.”

“Nonetheless, we have video. We have something there that — to work with. And I can tell you that we have been working with it, and that quite obviously, individuals who may have participated, against whom we may have evidence, whether it be video or otherwise, we are pursuing,” the director added.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chariman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) has asked the State Department’s inspector general to elaborate on the “undue influence” found to have been exerted by higher-ups to interfere with investigations into department misconduct.

The final OIG report that Congress got lacked any references to the specific cases of criminal and other misconduct apparently detailed in an October 2012 OIG memorandum, Royce noted.

After the report was issued in February, Foreign Affairs Committee staff met with and asked OIG staff for specific examples of misconduct and senior-level interference. OIG staff refused to share examples with the committee, the chairman said.

“I am troubled by reports that senior State Department officials may have prevented the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) from investigating instances of administrative and criminal misconduct within the Department,” Royce wrote to Deputy Inspector General Harold Geisel. “I am likewise concerned that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) was reportedly aware of eight separate instances in which senior political appointees within the Department ‘influenced, manipulated, or simply called off’ these cases, yet it failed to disclose this information to Congress.”

Among the cases referenced in the October 2012 memorandum were allegations that a Department security official in Beirut was alleged to have sexually assaulted foreign nationals hired as embassy guards; members of the Secretary’s security detail allegedly “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries”; an “underground drug ring” may have supplied security contractors at Embassy Baghdad with drugs; and a U.S. Ambassador at a “sensitive diplomatic post” was “suspected of patronizing prostitutes in a public park.”

A Dec. 4 draft of that memo reportedly “watered down the language,” focusing more on the need for investigative independence, Royce noted.

“The final version of the report submitted to Congress in February 2013 was bereft of any reference to these specific cases,” the chairman wrote. On March 14, committee staffers received the briefing with scant details.

“While the Department and OIG deny any wrongdoing, the lack of detail appears to be inconsistent with the OIG’s mission to keep the Congress ‘fully and currently informed,’” Royce added.

“Therefore, I request the immediate production of both the October 23, 2012 memorandum and the draft Inspection report(s), as well as all documents and communications referring or relating to the February 2013 Inspection of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Office of Investigations and Counterintelligence, Divisions of Special Investigations, Divisions of Special Criminal Investigations, and Computer Investigations and Forensics (ISP-I-13-18). Additionally, we respectfully request a briefing from your Office at the earliest possible convenience to discuss your Office’s knowledge of this entire matter. Finally, please clarify in writing whether, and on what basis, OIG agreed to omit information from this final report pursuant to any State Department official’s request.”

Royce wants the information by June 27.

Here’s Senator Paul on the disturbing disparity in drug-related arrest rates between black and white Americans:

In the case of arrests, federal agencies have hamstrung local law enforcement agencies by requiring them to meet numerical arrest goals in order to secure funding. Morally, this is troubling. In practical terms, instead of local enforcement agencies spending their time investigating serious felony crimes, they concentrate on minority and depressed neighborhoods to increase their drug arrest statistics.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which reported on the arrest statistics, highlighted the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant Program. This federal program distributes millions of dollars a year to local law enforcement agencies. Arrest numbers are a performance measure used in doling out the money.

We are literally sending our money to Washington where an overgrown bureaucracy is encouraging racial profiling before the money is allowed to be sent back to us. We should keep more of our money and decision-making power closer to home — and put an end to practices that encourage discrimination.

A radical concept, returning to the states criminal jurisdiction never granted to the federal government by the Constitution.

Ten years ago, NSA leaker/dropout/fabulist/fillintheblanks Edward Snowden promised to take action against government surveillance.

“I can’t hope to change the way things are going by overtly complaining, writing letters, or blowing things up,” Snowden wrote in 2003 in response to a discussion about corporate greed on the Ars Technica online forum.

“That’s not the way a good person does things. I will, however, do what I can with the tools that are available to me.”

In 2003, Snowden would have been 19 years old. Not yet the security guard turned NSA spy we know today. Back then, he was an online commentator with a mission.

According to sources briefed on the matter, Snowden was employed by an unidentified classified agency in Washington from 2005 to mid-2006, by the CIA from 2006 to 2009, when he primarily worked overseas, and by Dell Inc from 2009 to 2013, when he worked in the United States and Japan as an NSA contractor.

He was also a prolific commentator on technology forum Ars Technica, posting approximately 750 messages using the screen name “The True HOOHA” from late 2001 to 2012.

Chances are, Snowden was using the Urban Dictionary’s second definition of his chosen nickname, which is off-color and comes with a language warning. It fits the sexy geek chic beast image he cultivated online.

Most of the postings were not political in nature: he dispensed advice about government careers, polygraphs and the 2008 stock market crash. He claimed to own the same gun as James Bond and posted glamour photos of himself. He jokingly compared the video console Xbox Live to NSA surveillance.

Obvious question: Given the fact that the surveillance state missed Nidal Hasan’s contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, missed the Tsarneavs, can’t seem to defend congressional offices from illegal aliens, and missed The True HOOHA’s one-man campaign to rip the surveillance state down, just how effective is the surveillance state?

I mean, if we’re going to have an expensive, intrusive surveillance state that shreds the Fourth Amendment, shouldn’t its surveillance at least accomplish something worthwhile?