‘LOTS OF UNCERTAINTY’ – Hill Leaders Wary of Obama’s Course on NSA

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Congressional leaders on Sunday said a key part of President Obama’s effort to overhaul U.S. surveillance will not work while another said the president didn’t go far enough to protect Americans’ privacy.

The leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees pushed back against the president’s assertion that the government should cede control of how Americans’ phone records are stored.

Obama, under pressure to calm the controversy over government spying, said Friday he wants bulk phone data stored outside the government to reduce the risk that the records will be abused.

However, Obama did not say who should have control of Americans’ data and instead has directed the attorney general and director of national intelligence to find a solution within 60 days.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that decision had intensified a sense of uncertainty about the country’s ability to root out terrorist threats.

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Does the Buck Ever Stop with Hillary Clinton?

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Photo Credit: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

Photo Credit: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

Mainstream pundits have many excuses for Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi, Libya, performance. The most common being trotted out was that Benghazi was below her radar screen, and she can’t be expected to know everything going on in her shop. Let’s count the ways this is unconvincing, if not downright wrong.

First, of course, every politician (ahem, a Northeastern governor) is held responsible for what goes on by underlings. The head of an organization must be held accountable for the people she hires. And, yes, leaders need to take ownership of the “culture” around them.

The Clinton culture is simple: Deny, insulate, deny. This is how Hillary and Bill Clinton have kept scandal from enveloping them again and again. (The Rose law firm documents were in a closet?!) They have loyalists, Cheryl Miller is among the closest, who clear up messes, as she apparently was seeking to do when she cautioned State Department personnel against talking to members of Congress. Clinton can keep trotting out the excuse that every scandal is someone else’s doing, but at some point the lady who knows so little about what is going on around her ceases to be seen as a competent leader.

Journalists who’ve never worked in a big company, served in the military or held an executive post may not have a good grasp on how information gets to the person at the top. It begins with the person at the top and/or her chief of staff setting up procedures and understandings about what is urgent, what gets elevated and what should never be a surprise for the boss. If this doesn’t exist, it is because the boss wants plausible deniability (that Clinton culture again) or because the boss is so caught up in minutiae and/or is out of the office so much (Clinton, to a tee) that the organization is chaotic and slow to react.

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Iran ‘2 to 3 Weeks’ from Nuclear Bomb (+audio)

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

If Iran breaks its deal with the West tomorrow, the country would be only two to three weeks away from producing enough highly enriched uranium to assemble a nuclear weapon, according to Olli Heinonen, former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Heinonen directed the safeguards division of the United Nations body charged with enforcing the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

He was asked Sunday on Aaron Klein’s WABC Radio show about the timeframe in response to statements from Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, who boasted last week that Tehran can nix its deal with the West and resume enriching uranium to 20-percent levels within one day if it so desires.

Heinonen responded that if Iran wanted it would currently take the country “two, three weeks to have enough uranium hexafluoride high-enriched for one single weapon.”

He told Klein: “If [Iran] in reality [abrogates the deal] tomorrow, they still have quite a substantial stock of uranium hexafluoride, which is enriched to 20 percent. … And then technically, when Iran has committed to this month to certain parts of the processes in such a way these tandem cascades are not anymore connected with each other, you can indeed put them back in one day’s time.

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How to Survive the Coming Dollar Cyber-Economic Attack

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The new book Game Plan: How to Protect Yourself from the Coming Cyber-Economic Attack by Kevin Freeman is a stunning collection of factual research which lays out how a systematic international plan to bring down the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Freeman warns today’s international effort to “crash the dollar” has reached critical mass: “Stage 3.”

I have been writing about the increasing threat of economic and cyber war in my books and quoting Mr. Freeman for several years now. (For example, in The Inflation Deception p. 28-29) I wrote:

A Financial Pearl Harbor

According to Defense Department consultant Kevin D. Freeman, America in September 2008 suffered a financial “Pearl Harbor,” an internationally-launched coordinated computer raid designed to drain overnight trillions of dollars from our most important financial institutions. The resulting panic gulled Federal lawmakers into approving vast emergency bailout funds for banks, brokers and key corporations.

This remarkably-timed attack and resulting economic confusion persuaded voters to renew the liberal Democratic control of Congress and to elect a fresh and unknown-and-untested anti-capitalist radical community organizer as president.

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Chris Christie: ‘I Don’t Know’ When Scandal Ends

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was warmly received at a private event in Florida Sunday on his first major political outing since a traffic scandal hit his administration, attendees told POLITICO — but he said he didn’t know when the so-called “Bridgegate” controversy would end.

The Republican and prospective 2016 presidential candidate faced only one question about the scandal — and when it might subside — during the private event, said host and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone.

“He said, ‘I don’t know,’” Langone said. “‘But as far as I’m concerned, I did what I can do, with great apologies and embarrassment.”

“I did the one thing I had to do,” Christie said, according to Langone. “I fired them. What else can I do?”

The governor ousted one aide earlier this month and distanced himself from another after documents surfaced showing his aides and allies were involved in orchestrating a September traffic mess near the George Washington Bridge that is at the heart of the controversy. The governor has denied any direct involvement in the fiasco, blaming wayward aides. He also apologized publicly and vowed to cooperate with “appropriate” investigations, as well as do an internal review.

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Obama vs. Obama

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Consider “income inequality.” As far as this can be said to actually exist, it’s a function of certain sectors of the financial industry reaping massive windfalls over the past few years while the rest of the country has stagnated under the burden of the recession.

So who is responsible for this state of affairs? Consider the trillion and a half dollars handed over to the banks and other financial institutions shortly after Obama took office. This money was supposed to be extended as credit to businesses — including small businesses — in a bid to supercharge the economy according to the old Keynesian formula.

Instead it went directly into the markets, where it triggered the growth of the current market bubble, generating plenty in the way of paper profits, bonuses, and so forth along the way.

Also consider the $65 billion a month handed to the banks in the form of “quantitative easing.” This was supposedly the brainstorm of Ben Bernanke. But Bernanke is nobody’s idea of an independent agent. Any notion that he was acting outside of a framework created by Obama is ludicrous. This money did more of the same — slipping essentially unearned income into already well-upholstered pockets, and all at the bidding of none other than Barack Obama.

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Critics Ballistic Over Christian Film’s Oscar Nod (+video)

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Photo Credit: ebbandflowphotography

Photo Credit: ebbandflowphotography

Like David versus Goliath, an upstart Christian film has shocked the world by winning an unlikely victory in the form of an Academy Award nomination.

Only this time, the crowds aren’t cheering for David.

Instead, mainstream-media Oscar watchers across the nation have blasted the Academy for choosing the hymn-like testament to God’s presence over hits by pop artists like Jay-Z and Taylor Swift.

“I can’t figure any of this s— out,” an unnamed competitor told the Hollywood Reporter, or THR, after learning his or her song was beaten out by “Alone Yet Not Alone,” the title song from the faith-themed movie of the same name.

“It is difficult to understand why ‘Alone Yet Not Alone’ snagged an Oscar nomination over more acclaimed and high-profile competitors,” THR remarked, claiming multiple people whose songs were snubbed by Academy’s music branch wonder how “a song that has been heard by virtually no one outside the branch from a film that hardly anyone has seen” secured an Oscar nomination.

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MIT Analysis: Obama Called for War Based on Bogus Intel

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

A just-published report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirms earlier reports by WND that the Syrian government could not have launched the sarin poison-gas-laden rocket last Aug. 21 into a Syrian suburb of Damascus that killed hundreds of civilians, many of whom were children.

At the same time, the report disputes continued U.S. insistence that the Syrian government was at fault, a position that almost prompted the United States to launch military attacks on Syrian chemical depots.

The chemical attack, in which some estimates of deaths from the attack approached 1,800 people, occurred in the Ghouta area then under Syrian opposition control in the midst of the Syrian civil war.

The report concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered the sarin was too short to have been fired from Syrian government locations, even though the Obama administration, based on what it says was technical intelligence, said – and still insists – the gas attack was from the government forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The report said a large canister to hold the chemicals was placed on top of the rocket, limiting the capability of the rocket.

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HOPE AND CHANGE: Obama Employs Usual Zig-Zag Strategy to Exert More Control Over Americans, Uses Racial Politics to Justify Marijuana Legalization

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

President Barack Obama says he backs limited marijuana legalization because it could help reduce the number of African American and Hispanic men who are jailed for drug offenses.

“African American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties,” Obama told the New Yorker’s top editor during a series of interviews published on Friday.

The legalization efforts in Washington state and Colorado should be accepted and measured, Obama said.

“It’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished,” he said.

In 2012 state ballots, Colorado and Washington voters made marijuana consumption legal.

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Obama on Pot: ‘I Don’t Think It Is More Dangerous Than Alcohol’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t think marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”

“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol,” the president said an interview with “The New Yorker” magazine.

Smoking marijuana is “not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy,” Obama said.

Obama’s administration has given states permission to experiment with marijuana regulation, and laws recently passed in Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana recently went into effect. The president said it was important for the legalization of marijuana to go forward in those states to avoid a situation in which only a few are punished while a large portion of people have broken the law at one time or another.

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