John Kerry On Special Forces Raids: Terrorists ‘Can Run But They Can’t Hide’ (+video)

Photo Credit: GettyU.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday that a pair of U.S. military raids against militants in North Africa sends the message that terrorists “can run but they can’t hide.”

In raids in Somalia and in Libya’s capital, U.S. special forces on Saturday struck against Islamic extremists who have carried out terrorist attacks in East Africa. They captured a Libyan al Qaeda leader allegedly involved in the bombings of U.S. embassies 15 years ago.

After a fierce firefight, a U.S. Navy SEAL team in Somalia aborted a mission to capture a terrorist suspect linked to last month’s Nairobi shopping mall attack.

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Welcome to the Era of Unlimited Government!

Photo Credit: Reason.comTelling coincidence that the latest scandalous revelation about the National Security Agency (NSA) is hitting the front pages just as the enrollment period specified by the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare) is getting started.

Each of these things underscores different but related aspects of the virtually unlimited state that has ruined the peaceful slumber of libertarian-minded Americans for decades. Whether we’re talking about surveilling citizens without any sort of serious legal oversight or forcing them to participate in economic activity in the name of health care über alles, the answer always seems to favor the growth and power of the state to control more and more aspects of our lives. Is it any wonder that a record-high percentage of Americans think the federal government is too powerful?

In an explosive story, The New York Times detailed the ways in which the NSA, which was originally supposed to spy on communications among foreign agents and provide intelligence on threats posed by noncitizen actors and governments, is increasingly focused on domestic activities. Since 2010, according to an NSA memo obtained by the Times, “The agency was authorized [by officials in the Obama administration] to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier.”

Through a process known as “contact chaining,” the NSA is able to suck up all sorts of email addresses, phone numbers, social-media-network information, and more without regard to the physical location or citizenship of each data point. The agency, reports the Times, then “enriches” that metadata “with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information,” and more. The result, as George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr puts it, is “the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

The only restriction on the practice appears to be that the NSA must make a claim that their data-gathering serves a foreign-policy justification. Which is never a problem for the agency since, as a spokesperson told the Times, “All of NSA’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose.” While it’s clear that the contact chaining results in vast webs of information that rope in Americans completely uninvolved in terrorism, the NSA refuses to divulge any relevant numbers or incidents.

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Analysis: IT Experts Question Architecture of Obamacare Website

Photo Credit: Reuters/Joe SkipperDays after the launch of the federal government’s Obamacare website, millions of Americans looking for information on new health insurance plans were still locked out of the system even though its designers scrambled to add capacity.

Government officials blame the persistent glitches on an overwhelming crush of users – 8.6 million unique visitors by Friday – trying to visit the HealthCare.gov website this week.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw development of the site, declined to make any of its IT experts available for interviews. CGI Group Inc, the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov, is “declining to comment at this time,” said spokeswoman Linda Odorisio.

Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems.

For instance, when a user tries to create an account on HealthCare.gov, which serves insurance exchanges in 36 states, it prompts the computer to load an unusually large amount of files and software, overwhelming the browser, experts said.

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Maher Mocks WWII Vets Visiting Closed Memorial: ‘Nobody Said They Were the Brightest Generation’ (+video)

Photo Credit: APLiberal comedian Bill Maher ridiculed the group of World War II veterans for visiting the barricaded World War II memorial, telling his audience that the Greatest Generation wasn’t the “brightest generation.”

“The other that was apparently so important for the Republicans to keep open was the World War II Memorial in Washington. That was closed, so a bunch of the World War II vets knocked down the barriers and stormed it,” Maher said on his Friday HBO “Real Time” program, making a sardonic face at the audience.

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Failed Navy SEALs Raid on Somali Target Could Bolster Al Shabab (+video)

Photo Credit: Mohamed Sheikh Nor/APA commando unit from the US Navy’s Seal Team Six launched an amphibious raid on a Somali town, but failed to confirm a capture or kill of their Al Shabab target, suspected to be linked to Nairobi’s Westgate mall terror attack.

The operation could have opposite its intended result of discouraging further attacks. Analysts warn that even earlier successful targeted strikes against Al Shabab, a Somalia-based Islamist militant group, failed to curb the group’s capacity to carry out international terror attacks, and that failed missions could in fact bolster its support and recruitment.

The predawn raid Saturday came unstuck when the US troops were faced with heavier-than-expected return fire, and pulled out to avoid civilian casualties, two security sources said. No Americans were injured.

Although the target was not named and officially described only as “high-value,” US officials suggested the raid was “prompted by Westgate”.

Saturday’s mission took place in Baraawe, an Al Shabab stronghold 110 miles south of Mogadishu, where US Special Forces carried out a daytime raid in 2009 to kill Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, wanted in connection with earlier terrorist strikes in East Africa.

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Nine Percent Have Considered Quitting Their U.S. Citizenship

Photo Credit: mrsdkrebsFew Americans have ever thought about giving up their U.S. citizenship, but nearly half think U.S. citizens should be able to be citizens of more than one country.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only nine percent (9%) of U.S. citizens have considered giving up their American citizenship. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Perhaps in part that’s because 93% consider it at least somewhat important to be a U.S. citizen, including 79% who think it is Very Important.

But 45% believe U.S. citizens also should be allowed to be citizens of other countries. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, while 19% are not sure.

However, in the context of immigration reform, 54% of likely U.S. voters said in March found that potential U.S. citizens should not be allowed to maintain dual citizenship.

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Campaign Contributions, Recess Appointments Slated for Supreme Court

Photo Credit: APThe Supreme Court is beginning a new term with topics that offer the court’s conservative majority the chance to move aggressively to undo limits on campaign contributions, rule on presidential recess appointments and allow for more government-sanctioned prayer.

Assuming the government shutdown doesn’t get in their way, the justices also will deal with a case that goes to the heart of the partisan impasse in Washington: whether and when the president may use recess appointments to fill key positions without Senate confirmation.

The court was unaffected for the first few days of the government shutdown and there was no expectation that arguments set for October would have to be rescheduled.

The new term that starts Monday may be short on the sort of high-profile battles over health care and gay marriage that marked the past two years. But several cases ask the court to overrule prior decisions — bold action in an institution that relies on the power of precedent.

“There are an unusual number of cases going right to hot-button cultural issues and aggressive briefing on the conservative side asking precedents to be overruled,” said Georgetown University law professor Pamela Harris, who served in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.

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Obamacare’s Implementation Threatens A Golden Age For The Healing Arts

Photo Credit: WikipediaMedical practice and healthcare policy are on a collision course. From an intellectual perspective, we are entering a golden age of the healing arts. The full promise of genomic medicine informing diagnosis and treatment beckons from just over the horizon. Younger physicians, just entering practice, have the ability to alleviate human suffering that no generation of doctors has ever previously known.

But not so fast.

The administration of health care policy, and ultimately dollars, are also undergoing a generational shift. But this shift is founded on some of the most irrational politics this country has ever seen. Future generations observing the political changes of the past five years will invariably say, “what were they thinking?”

The Affordable Care Act was not the product of any informed or learned group, it was a hastily contrived political farce that was literally cobbled together at the last possible minute. It was never intended to become law — except that it did. For the past 3 1/2 years literally “all the kings horses, and all of the kings men” have pushed and prodded to give it the appearance of workability. We are on the threshold of finding out if they were successful.

In medicine, we sometimes talk about the compression of morbidities, how the ravages of time and multiple maladies may overwhelm the patient at the end of life. That compression sequence also seems to describe afflictions of the Affordable Care Act as it careens towards implementation.

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Hidden Spending Measures Playing Chicken with Shutdown

Photo Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, APTemporary spending bills approved by the House of Representatives and the Senate include measures that would require the Obama administration to rescind strict new rules on the poultry industry.

Advocates for independent chicken farmers want lawmakers to drop the language, which had been sought by poultry processors and their trade groups. The rules give farmers more clout in their business dealings with the processors.

“It’s a totally outrageous for a handful of multinational corporations to waltz in while we are trying to keep the government open and insert these” provisions, said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, one of the groups siding with roughly 32,000 farmers who produce the broiler chickens that end up on supermarket shelves.

The most recent showdown between the two adversaries illustrates the way interest groups, large and small, are racing to shape whatever stopgap spending bill Congress passes to end the partial government shutdown that began Oct. 1.

Medical-device manufacturers, for instance, are lobbying aggressively to repeal a 2.3% excise tax imposed on their industry as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Some of the medical-device makers’ supporters on Capitol Hill want to insert the language in either a temporary spending bill restarting government operations or in another measure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has warned the government will run out of borrowed money Oct. 17, requiring action by Congress.

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Federal Government Closes AMBER Alert Website

Photo Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amber_Alert.jpgBy Christine Rousselle.

The government website for AMBER Alerts, a service dedicated to the safe recovery of missing children, has been closed during the shutdown. The name is a reference to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in 1996. Over 650 children have been safely recovered since the advent of the AMBER Alert system.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children:

AMBER Alerts are broadcast through radio, television, road signs and all available technology referred to as the AMBER Alert Secondary Distribution Program. These broadcasts let law enforcement use the eyes and ears of the public to help quickly locate an abducted child. The U.S. Department of Justice coordinates the AMBER Alert program on a national basis.

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