Welcome to Mother Russia

I was incensed by this. I could feel my blood pressure rise as I watched what happened to this man at a school board meeting in Maryland.

What has happened to our country?

The Most Transparent White House in History

From the Washington Examiner:

President Obama and his successors in the Oval Office are not obligated to make public the names of individuals visiting the White House, according to a decision of the federal Circuit Court for the District of Columbia made public Friday. 

The case was brought by Judicial Watch, the government watchdog nonprofit that has been fighting a long legal battle seeking to force release of the White House visitor logs as public records under theFreedom of Information Act. 

But in a decision that is drawing intense criticism from across the ideological spectrum, the circuit court said the president has a "constitutional perogative" not to tell the American people who he or his staff meets with in the White House.

So much for it being the People's House, especially since Obama's "sequester" has closed the White House to the public.

The 1st Amendment Don't Live in Missouri

Outrageous.

Occupy thugs foul things up for weeks in cities across the nation and nothing happens. But two guys try to protest on an overpass in Missouri and it's the freaking end of the world.

What have we come to?

This is What Perjury Looks Like

The director of the NSA lied to Congress on March 12. This is what perjury looks like.

I wonder how long before he's thrown in prison in light of recent developments such as the leak of PRISM.

You Hide Things If You Know You're Doing Something Wrong

Told Ya

I hate to say it, but I called it two years ago. My mistrust in Google was well placed. I just never suspected that there were so many other companies involved in providing data to the government.

Simply put - the government that spies on its own people - people who have not committed or are even suspected of having committed - a crime is unacceptable. That government is not to be trusted in anything.

They're Spying on Us ALL

From the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. 

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley. 

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

Wow. And all Nixon did was authorize the break-in of a hotel room.

Ask yourself: "does this sound like a government that is using its power responsibly?"

They Really Are Watching and Listening

From the Guardian:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largesttelecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. 

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. 

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. 

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. 

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

Remember, back during the Bush administration when our friends on the left breathlessly accused the president of wanting to wiretap and listen to every call in the United States?  Yeah. Well now something like that is actually happening.

Ask yourself: "does this sound like a government that is using its power responsibly?"

Wait... Wasn't Nixon Impeached For Something Like This?

This is going to get really ugly really quickly.

IRS officials in Washington were involved in targeting of conservative groups

From the Washington Post:

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed... 

“For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote. 

Moreover, details of the IRS’s efforts to target conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012, far earlier than has been disclosed, according to Republican congressional aides briefed by the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration ­(TIGTA) on the details of their reviews.

Ask yourself: "does this sound like a government that is using its power responsibly?"

Department of Justice Spies on the Press

From AP News:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. 

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls. 

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

Ask yourself: "does this sound like a government that is using its power responsibly?"