GOP Congressmen Seek Details on How Beyonce Toured Cuba Despite Travel Ban

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Two Republican members of Congress have asked the U.S. Treasury Department for information on what type of license American pop star Beyonce and rapper husband Jay Z obtained for a high-profile trip to Cuba to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

Beyonce and Jay Z celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary this week in Havana, where big crowds greeted them as they strolled hand in hand through the Cuban capital.

They ate at some of the city’s best restaurants, danced to Cuban music, walked through historic Old Havana and posed for pictures with admiring Cubans, who recognized them despite the past half-century of ideological conflict that separates the United States and Cuba.

In a letter dated on Friday, U.S. Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, asked Adam Szubin, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, for “information regarding the type of license that Beyonce and Jay-Z received, for what purpose, and who approved such travel.”

Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart represent districts in south Florida where there is a high Cuban-American population.

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The Internet is a Surveillance State

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I’m going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels — and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

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Feds: Pro-life Christians are the Focus of Evil in the Modern World (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

In this troubling interview with the excecutive director of Life Legal Defense Foundation, attorney Dana Cody describes the hostile efforts of the FBI against pro-life Christians in the United States.

She suggests that the feds view “pro-life Christians [as] the focus of evil in the modern world.”

Ms. Cody talks about cases involving federal interrogations of pro-lifers that originated solely from Internet activities, reflecting that such activists were being tracked by the FBI online.

She said that the interrogations are increasingly becoming “like the SS showing up at your door.” She advises that anytime the feds approach you, you must “videotape, videotape, videotape.”

Ms. Cody believes that the feds are “going after people that are exposing them.”

She concludes that this federal law enforcement action is “threatening the very structure of the nation and people need to wake up.”

Here’s the interview:

MSNBC Host: 'All Your Kids Belong To Us' (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

On March 23, my colleague Mark Finkelstein noted how MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry considers the unborn child a “thing” which takes a “lot of money” to “turn into a human,” costing thousands of dollars to care for each year of his/her life. Now it appears that Harris-Perry thinks that, after they’re born, children fundamentally belong to the state.

Narrating a new MSNBC “Lean Forward” spot, the Tulane professor laments that we in America “haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children.” “[W]e have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities,” Harris-Perry argued.

“Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the households, then we start making better investments.” By “investments,” of course, Harris-Perry means things like spending “as much in public education as we should have.”

Watch video here:

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Satirist Evan Sayet: Media Corruption will Prompt Public Backlash

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

In the final part of his interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas, political commentator and satirist Evan Sayet said the tea party is part of a larger movement that is developing in response to media corruption and political maneuvering.

“I do think that it’s going to be more than talk, you know?” Sayet said. “What do you do when you seek redress via, let’s say, the media, and the media is corrupt? What do you do when you seek redress through the courts, and the courts have activists who don’t care about the law and the Constitution? What do you do when you seek redress through the electoral process, but all of the seats are gerrymandered? What do you do? … There is going to be a progression of actions, I think. We saw that start with the tea party.”

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Politically Correct AP Strikes Again!

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Photo Credit: WND

For the second time in just days, Associated Press has redefined a word for its reporters that adopts a politically correct position, this time pleasing Muslim activists with a decision to ban the use of “Islamist” as a synonym for “fighters” and/or “militants.”

Politico’s Dylan Byers noted the change by AP was made “after much prodding from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.”

“CAIR had complained late last year that the AP’s old definition of ‘Islamist’ – ‘a supporter of government in accord with the laws of Islam [and] who views the Quran as a political model’ – had become a pejorative shorthand for extremist Muslims,” Byers wrote.

The [AP] stylebook’s entry for Islamist now reads …. ‘An advocate or supporter of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam. Do not use as a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals, who may or may not be Islamists.”

The move followed by just days the AP’s decision that it would redefine the American lexicon to discontinue references to “illegal immigrants.” That move widely drew guffaws, with “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno joking that it was being replaced with “undocumented Democrat.”

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North Korea to Progressives: Join Us in War Against U.S.

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Photo Credit: conservativefiringline

If you’re a progressive, North Korea wants you.

According to a post at the North Korean News Service, the United States is the “common enemy” of all the world’s progressives, including, apparently, those in the United States. And the regime wants them to join Kim Jung Un in his effort against the United States.

“The Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army in a statement called upon the progressive people across the world to actively join the army and people of the DPRK in defending independence and justice, not blindly following the U.S. high-handed and arbitrary practices,” the statement says.

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Democrats Recruiting Trojan Horse Candidates for 2014

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee

Democratic Party officials believe that Kevin Strouse is exactly the kind of candidate who can help them retake the House next year. He’s a smart, young former Army Ranger — good qualities for any aspiring politician. But what party leaders really like is that Strouse doesn’t have particularly strong views on the country’s hottest issues.

Immigration? Tax policy? “Certainly I have a lot of research to do,” Strouse acknowledged in an interview Thursday as he announced his candidacy in a suburban Philadelphia House district.

Strouse’s candidacy reflects an emerging Democratic strategy for taking back the House from Republicans after the tea party takeover of 2010.

The best way to defeat the conservative, ideologically driven GOP, Democrats say, is to field non-ideological “problem solvers” who can profit from the fed-up-with-partisanship mood of some suburban areas. These districts will offer some of the few competitive House campaigns in the country.

“You pick your strategic high ground and force them to fight on it,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has begun a particularly early effort at traveling the country and working the phones to lure Strouse and others like him into races.

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South Korea Has Already Won

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Photo Credit: valeuf

On March 30, three days after North Korea severed a military hotline with the South and announced that South Korean President Park Geun-hye “will meet a miserable ruin,” the country declared a state of war. “The time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle,” an official statement said.

Meanwhile, many of South Korea’s youth were worried about something else. A 25-year-old pop star named Seo In-guk had appeared on a popular reality TV show the night before and, in a misstep that quickly dominated online conversations, had washed his strawberries incorrectly. Ilbe, a conservative Web forum — a place you might expect to find a nationalist screed — was preoccupied with a month-old debate on regional differences in how to eat sweet and sour pork.

Pop stars, bourgeois lifestyle commentary and funny videos often seem to interest young South Koreans more than Pyongyang’s latest provocation. North Korea may be trying to intimidate its neighbor, particularly on economic and cultural fronts that increasingly matter, South Korea has already won the fight.

Of course, young people are discussing the risk of a second Korean war. But, even if this week’s chest-thumping has them a bit jittery, they typically mock Kim Jong Un and dismiss his war declaration as hot air. It’s a distraction from more pressing matters — not a particularly high bar for a youth culture obsessed with the latest Korean pop girl group or Samsung gadget.

“Netizens and ordinary citizens alike are fairly fatigued with the recent stream of threats,” James Pearson, the Seoul-based editor of KoreaBang, a blog that covers Korean social media trends, told me. “People just laugh.”

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Massive Corporate Money to be Dumped in 2014 Races

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Photo Credit: AP

Operating with few rules and limited oversight, outside groups spent a record $1 billion to influence last year’s election.

Politicians of all persuasions griped about the meddling. But few are working to change laws that ushered in an unprecedented flood of money made possible by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that erased years of campaign finance law.

Instead, political leaders and donors from both parties are preparing for the flow of outside money to intensify. New groups have formed and others are shaping plans to come back bigger and smarter ahead of the 2014 congressional elections and the 2016 presidential race.

What laws do remain could become even looser as the Supreme Court considers another high-profile decision.

“The unregulated system that we seem to be headed in will make Watergate look like a bad soap opera,” said Robert Zimmerman, a member of the Democratic National Committee’s national finance team who helped raise as much as $500,000 for President Barack Obama’s re-election effort.

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