Bloggers, Surveillance and Obama’s Orwellian State

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Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla – Getty Images
Advancements in technology have fueled this White House’s obsession with controlling the message.

Jay Carney is free. But not loose – at least so far. After resigning as the press secretary for President Obama on June 20, Carney gave insight into the Obama administration’s handling of classified documents, and responded to criticism that this administration has been the most Orwellian in recent history.

“I know — because I covered them — that this was said of Clinton and Bush, and it will probably be said of the next White House,” said Carney in a recent New York Times Magazine interview. “I think a little perspective is useful…It is a serious, serious matter to leak classified information. Some of the debate around this kind of forgets how serious that is.”

But, it could also be the changing nature of the relationship between the media and the White House. At a recent event at the New America Foundation, journalists and historians challenged Carney, arguing that this White House has been more secret than previous occupants.

“Increasingly, the Obama White House has become so brittle, and so controlling of the message, that people are afraid to respond to me,” said Kimberly Dozier, a former Associated Press reporter. She was one of the journalists whose phone records were obtained by the Department of Justice last spring during its investigation into a leak of classified information about a failed Al-Qaeda plot. The scope of that investigation, some critics said, was unprecedented overreach.

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School: We Have a Right to Ban God

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Photo Credit: Fox News A California school district says it will not apologize to a teenager who defied its orders and mentioned God in his graduation speech.

Attorneys representing the Brawley Union High School District have written a 10-page letter defending the school’s right not only to censor graduation speeches, but also to ban any speech that references God or Jesus.

“It is well established in the Ninth Circuit and California that a public school salutatorian has no constitutional right to lead a prayer or include sectarian or proselytizing content in his/her graduation speech,” reads a letter from the San Diego law firm of Atkinson, Andelson, Loya, Ruud and Romo.

Last month, 18-year-old Brooks Hamby made national headlines when he committed an act of civil disobedience by thanking Jesus in his salutatorian address. School administrators had redacted references to Jesus and the Christian faith in three previous versions of Hamby’s speech.

One administrator went so far as to redact every religious reference with a black marker – as if it were some sort of top-secret government document.

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Judge Says ABORTION Makes Incest Okay, And Incest Is Fine Because It’s Like Homosexuality

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Photo Credit: YouTube A judge in Australia’s most populous state has compared incest and pedophilia to homosexuality because homosexuality, now broadly accepted, used to be illegal and widely considered unnatural as recently as a few decades ago.

The judge, Garry Neilson, also opined that legalized abortion makes the taboo against incest unnecessary because the “only reason” incest remains a crime is to lower the risk of genetic defects in children born from incest, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

“But even that falls away to an extent [because] there is such ease of contraception and readily access to abortion,” the judge pontificated.

“A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available,’ not having [a] sexual partner,” he also said.

Neilson made the bizarro statements guaranteed to offend virtually everyone while he was presiding over a criminal case back in April.

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How Liberalism Became an Intolerant Dogma

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Jonathan ErnstAt the risk of sounding like Paul Krugman — who returns to a handful of cherished topics over and over again in his New York Times column — I want to revisit one of my hobby horses, which I most recently raised in my discussion of Hobby Lobby.

My own cherished topic is this: Liberalism’s decline from a political philosophy of pluralism into a rigidly intolerant dogma.

The decline is especially pronounced on a range of issues wrapped up with religion and sex. For a time, electoral self-interest kept these intolerant tendencies in check, since the strongly liberal position on social issues was clearly a minority view. But the cultural shift during the Obama years that has led a majority of Americans to support gay marriage seems to have opened the floodgates to an ugly triumphalism on the left.

The result is a dogmatic form of liberalism that threatens to poison American civic life for the foreseeable future. Conservative Reihan Salam describes it, only somewhat hyperbolically, as a form of “weaponized secularism.”

The rise of dogmatic liberalism is the American left-wing expression of the broader trend that Mark Lilla identified in a recent blockbuster essay for The New Republic. The reigning dogma of our time, according to Lilla, is libertarianism — by which he means far more than the anti-tax, anti-regulation ideology that Americans identify with the post-Reagan Republican Party, and that the rest of the world calls “neoliberalism.”

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Obama Struggles To Stay Awake During One-On-One Chat With Student Whose Parents Lost Their Jobs

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Imagine you’re Kinsey Button, a college junior. You’ve been granted a meeting with the President after writing to him and expressing your family’s troubles after your parents lost their jobs.

And then – the President’s eyes gets heavy, and his head starts nodding. Right then and there, in front of photographers, and while you’re mid-sentence, he’s falling asleep.

What do you say?

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Film Critics Hate 'America'

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Dinesh D’Souza shocked the movie world in 2012 with his anti-President Barack Obama documentary “2016,” which became the second highest-grossing documentary in U.S. movie history. On July 2, he unveiled his new documentary called “America: Imagine the World Without Her.” It has already grossed $5 million in its first week. One fictional competitor, the abortion-promoting comedy “Obvious Child,” barely grossed $2 million in its first month.

But there’s a more dramatic contrast. Film critics are supposed to judge art, but their liberal politics are smeared all over their reviews. Metacritic.com collects and analyzes movie reviews. “Obvious Child” drew a high Metacritic.com score of 75 (out of 100). For D’Souza’s “America,” it was a ridiculously low score of 14.

Then take the highest-grossing documentary in our history, Michael Moore’s 2004 hatchet job “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Editor and Publisher magazine reported nine of 10 newspaper movie critics recommended the film.

The Washington Post gushed over Moore’s prankumentary. “Its trajectory is guided with pinpoint accuracy,” wrote Desson Thomson, and it “obviously skews facts to its own advantage, but that’s what the game is all about. What counts is the emotional power of Moore’s persuasion.”

“Fahrenheit” was loaded with bizarre and unproven charges against former President George W. Bush, most offensively suggesting the Bush family and Osama bin Laden’s family were in cahoots over 9/11. Moore concluded the film with a conspiracy theory: “In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects.” All of that was just fine.

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Issa Accuses State Department of Dodging Benghazi Questions

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsTop Republican Rep. Darrell Issa Friday accused the State Department of trying to repeatedly dodge congressional efforts to look into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman sent a 37-page letter to the newly-created House Select Committee on Benghazi detailing attempts he claimed were made to sidestep providing documents and answering questions about the attack from September 2012 until May 2014.

Issa said the State Department promised to cooperate with Congress but failed to actually provide information requested and missed many deadlines.

He also claimed the State Department threatened to destroy “committee property necessary for internal organization of in camera documents” and called out “abusive State Department document redaction practices.”

According to the letter, the State Department in early 2013 refused to hand over documents to the committee and demanded that the documents be reviewed in private. Issa’s letter added State officials also started leaving some of the documents behind or forgot to bring them to meetings.

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Teachers Union Abruptly Breaks Rank On Common Core

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Photo Credit; YouTube In a major surprise, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the country’s second-largest teachers union, opened its biannual convention Friday by announcing a step back from its support for Common Core education standards.

The group, gathering in Los Angeles, announced that it will now provide monetary grants from its Innovation Fund for teachers who want to critique the standards or even write entirely new ones themselves.

The AFT’s executive council is also introducing a resolution, to be voted on at the convention, which would declare that the standards had noble intentions but have fallen short due to outside meddling and an inordinate focus on standardized tests.

The announcement came as part of a general opening address by AFT President Randi Weingarten.

“Some of you in this room think the standards should be jettisoned,” told thousands of assembled teachers. “Some of you, myself included, think they hold great promise, but they’ve been implemented terribly.”

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Democrat Congressman: Tax Drivers for Every Mile They Drive

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Photo Credit: CNSNews.com / Penny StarrWhile the House and the Senate this week issued measures intended to temporarily replenish the Highway Trust Fund before it runs out of money next month, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) ended the week by proposing to hike – then abolish – the federal fuel tax and replace it with a per-mile “fee.”

“The policy development that I’m most excited about and that will reinforce the right practices for the future: After we raise the gas tax, we should abolish it,” Blumenauer said on Friday at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “The time is right to replace the gas tax, because it’s no longer an accurate reflection of road use and benefit because of these wildly changing fuel consumption patterns, and replace it with a vehicle mile travel fee regardless of the choice of vehicle fuel.

“That technology is available,” said Blumenauer, whose home state of Oregon has already had pilot vehicle mile travel fee programs in place for a decade.

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Colorado Is Consuming Way More Pot Than Anyone Ever Believed

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Photo Credit: Time About 9% of Colorado’s population consumes marijuana, according to a market demand study conducted by the state department of revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division and the state’s Marijuana Policy Group. And those users, it’s estimated, will get through about 121.4 metric tons of pot every year.

According to the report, that consumption — calculated through survey results, demographic data and source data — is “31 percent higher than a recent department of revenue assessment, 89 percent higher than a study by the Colorado Futures Center, and 111 percent higher than an older study by the Colorado Center for Law and Policy.”

The state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division analyzed the market demand for the drug, which Colorado began selling for recreational use in January, in an effort to “effectively manage production within the regulated industry,” according to a press release.

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