Snowden Says ‘Many Other’ Spy Programs Remain Secret, For Now

/5 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: US News Exiled whistle-blower Edward Snowden told the European Parliament in testimony published Friday there are many more surprises in the classified cache of documents he downloaded and distributed last year.

But, Snowden said, he will allow the journalists with whom he’s shared the material to decide what to report.

“There are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens’ rights, but I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders,” he said.

The documents that have already been reported on reveal massive efforts by the National Security Agency and its British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, to scoop up electronic data.

“I don’t want to outpace the efforts of journalists, here, but I can confirm that all documents reported thus far are authentic and unmodified, meaning the alleged operations against Belgacom, SWIFT, the EU as an institution, the United Nations, UNICEF, and others based on documents I provided have actually occurred,” he said. “I expect similar operations will be revealed in the future that affect many more ordinary citizens.”

Read more this story HERE.

Kerry Urges US Envoys to Make Climate Change a Priority

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AFP Photo/Alberto PizzoliUS Secretary of State John Kerry has called on American ambassadors around the world to make the fight against climate change a top priority ahead of new UN talks next year.

In his first department-wide policy guidance statement since taking office a year ago, he told his 70,000 staff: “The environment has been one of the central causes of my life.”

“Protecting our environment and meeting the challenge of global climate change is a critical mission for me as our country’s top diplomat,” Kerry said in the letter issued on Friday to all 275 US embassies and across the State Department.

“It’s also a critical mission for all of you: our brave men and women on the frontlines of direct diplomacy,” he added in the document seen by AFP.

He urged all “chiefs of mission to make climate change a priority for all relevant personnel and to promote concerted action at posts and in host countries to address this problem.”

Read more this story HERE.

President’s Brother George Asked Dinesh D’Souza, Not Obama, for $1,000

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/flickrBestselling author, academic, and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza joined Breitbart News Saturday’s live broadcast from CPAC on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 and explained the difference between him and President Obama is, “I am a third world guy who has embraced America, and, as I see it, he is an American-born guy who has adopted a third world ideology.”

D’Souza shared his thoughts with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon and Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow. Marlow asked what D’Souza thought about Obama’s new My Brother’s Keeper initiative. The filmmaker had a story to tell that shed light on just how the President treated his real brother, George Obama. D’Souza recounted that he had interviewed George for his movie 2016: Obama’s America, which he shot in Kenya prior to the 2012 presidential election.

Right before the 2012 election was to occur, D’Souza received a phone call from Kenya. “I get a call, and I look at my phone, and it is from Kenya. Like, who’s calling me in Kenya? It’s George!” George explained to D’Souza that he had fathered an illegitimate child, who was a year and a half old, and asked if he could please have $1,000 for some emergency treatment that his child needed:

He’s like, “Dinesh, can you help me?”

I said, “How am I going to get you money?”

“Oh, it’s easy,” he said. “Western Union.”

I say, “Well, isn’t there someone else you can call?”

Read more this story HERE.

DHS Tells American Border Guards to Run Away from Illegal Immigrants Hurling Rocks at Them, Fleeing in Vehicles

/13 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller Top administration officials have directed 21,000 border patrol officers to retreat whenever illegal immigrants throw rocks at them, and to avoid getting in front of foreign drug-smugglers’ vehicles as they head north with their drug cargoes.

“Agents shall not discharge firearms in response to thrown or hurled projectiles… agents should obtain a tactical advantage in these situations, such as seeking cover or distancing themselves,” said the instructions, issued Mar. 7, under the signature of Michael Fisher, chief of U.S. Border Patrol.

Agents were also directed to keep their weapons holstered when drug smugglers drive by.

Agents can’t use guns against “a moving vehicle merely fleeing from agents,” say the instructions.

The new instructions do allow agents to use guns to defend themselves from vehicles that drive at them. “Agents shall not discharge their firearms at a moving vehicle unless the agent has a reasonable belief that… deadly force is being used against an agent,” the new instructions say.

Read more this story HERE.

Watchdog Says Schultz Misrepresented its Reporting, Facts about Keystone XL Letter

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APMSNBC’s Ed Schultz featured a Nebraska Watchdog.org story on his “Ed Show” on Friday about the Keystone XL oil pipeline but Schultz’s words didn’t match the reporting the group has done on the issue this week, the group said Saturday.

During the opening to his show, Schultz put on screen Wathdog’s May 2013 story about the $27.4 million lobbyists spent in Nebraska in 2011-2012. That figure includes $700,000 spent by TransCanada lobbying for the pipeline it wants to build across America. He then cut to former Sen. Abbie Cornett, a Republican, saying there was heavy lobbying on both sides, Watchdog reports.

Read more this story HERE.

IRS: 89K Fewer Audits in 2013 Because of ‘Sequestration and Furloughs’

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APBy Terence P. Jeffrey.

Because of “sequestration and furloughs” the number of individuals audited by the Internal Revenue Service fell by 80,000 in fiscal 2013 and the number of businesses audited fell by 9,000, according to the IRS’s Budget in Brief released this week.

“As a result of the impacts of sequestration and furloughs, the IRS delivered key enforcement programs below 2012 levels,” said the budget document. “Total individual audits fell 5 percent from 1.48 million to 1.40 million, while audits of high income individuals declined from 179,000 to 172,000. Business return audits dropped 13 percent from 70,000 to 61,000”

Because of the decline, says the IRS, the federal government pulled in only $9.83 billion in revenue from audits in fiscal 2013, the lowest in ten years.

However, the IRS’s overall revenue from enforcement actions increased by $3.1 billion, climbing from $50.2 billion in fiscal 2012 to $53.3 billion in fiscal 2013.

Read more this story HERE.

____________________________________________________________________________

The IRS’s behavior taxes credulity

By George F. Will.

What’s been said of confession — that it is good for one’s soul but bad for one’s reputation — can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence.

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior.

And from Obama’s. After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns.

Read more this story HERE.

Philadelphia Judge Issues Ruling That Could Give Anonymous Online Commenters Second Thoughts

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty ImagesA Philadelphia judge has ordered philly.com to reveal the name of an anonymous commenter, in a defamation suit brought by electricians’ union leader John Dougherty.

An attorney in the case says it could have a broad impact on incendiary online comments and those users, sometimes called “trolls,” who post them anonymously.

The anonymous defendant in the suit, disguised by the nonsense name “fbpdplt,” called Dougherty a name in the comments section of an article on the website, one of the properties in the media group that also owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.

The website is not a party to the suit but it received a subpoena, more than a year ago, for information on the commenter. Its attorney, Eli Segal, says, “the company went to Court to make sure that the defendant received notice and an opportunity to be heard.”

The commenter remained anonymous but was represented in court by Phil Blackman, who argued that identifying his client would violate his, or her, First Ammendment right to speak anonymously.

Read more this story HERE.

Obama’s Favorite Union Just Raised The White Flag Of Surrender…

/7 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Western Journalism When the UAW (United Automobile Workers) union failed miserably in Chattanooga and was not able to unionize the Volkswagen plant, even with a staked deck, it started a chain reaction; and the next domino has fallen. The news that the AFL-CIO has decided to keep its money and not even try to save three Southern Democrat Senators comes as no real shock.

The powerful union reviewed the polls and the political climate in North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and decided that backing the Democrats in these states would be throwing good money after bad. The decision left Democratic Senators Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, and Kay Hagan in North Carolina on their own, with little major union help as they try to hold on to their seats in a region that is increasingly hostile to Democrats (especially those who are backed by unions.)

Despite an AFL-CIO spokesman’s attempt to put the best face on the news, his words ring hollow. He said, “Those states are states where we have relatively low union density. I think you’ll see in other battleground Senate states like Michigan, Alaska, [and] Iowa a really vigorous union program.”

Read more this story HERE.

Rand Paul at CPAC: ‘What You Do on Your Cell Phone is None of their D_ _ _ _ed Business!’

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Getty Images By David Martosko.

A sustained noise that could best be called a hoot and holler greeted Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at the mention of his name, before he took the stage at Friday’s Conservative Political Action Conference and declared that cell phone records sought by government agencies were ‘none of their damned business!’

By the time he launched into his blue streak against the National Security Agency and quoted Pink Floyd to criticize President Barack Obama, the overflow crowd of thousands sounded like Beyonce concertgoers who had stumbled into the wrong ballroom.

The crowd simultaneously drank it in and shouted it out, making Paul the star of the Conservative Political Action Conference’s second day and giving him – by far – the event’s loudest applause.

‘If you have a cell phone, you are under surveillance’ from the federal government, Paul warned in his biggest moment. ‘I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damned business!’

One group of partisans shouted ‘President Paul! President Paul!’ as he spoke.

Read more this story HERE.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesRand Paul Is the King of CPAC

By Sarah Mimms.

A year after his 13-hour filibuster won the hearts of young conservatives just a week ahead of the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference, the fandom for Sen. Rand Paul here has only grown.

Paul gave a speech Friday before the first standing-room-only crowd at the conference so far, asking a cheering audience, “Will you, America’s next generation of liberty-lovers, will you stand and be heard?”

Following his typical style, Paul’s speech focused largely on personal freedom, the Fourth Amendment, and rights he alleged are being usurped by the Obama administration, while avoiding the tricky topic of foreign policy, where his libertarian views are not as widely accepted by conservatives here.

Paul’s biggest applause line of the afternoon—the biggest applause line at CPAC so far—came during his discussion of what he perceived as President Obama’s failures, particularly at the National Security Agency. “As our voices rise in protest, the NSA monitors your every phone call. if you have a cell phone, you are under surveillance. I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business,” he said to loud cheers.

Paul continued an assault on Obama’s record, getting laughs when he asked how history will remember the president, and later quoting Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters in asking whether former supporters of the president now believed they had “trade[d] your heroes for your ghosts? … Did they get you to exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

Read more this story HERE.

___________________________________________________________________________________

‘Reunited’ Tea Party activists mount battle against IRS at CPAC

By Barnini Chakraborty.

The IRS targeting scandal may have faded from the headlines of major newspapers, but Tea Party groups renewed their battle cry against the tax agency on Thursday as the Conservative Political Action Conference got underway.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, kicked off CPAC — the annual conservative pilgrimage just outside the nation’s capital — by telling a crowd of the GOP faithful, “We need to abolish the IRS.”

“By virtue of your being here today, tomorrow each and every one of you is going to be audited by the IRS,” he said.

Following his speech, a six-person panel discussion, titled “IRS Targeting Scandal: Protecting the Voice of the People,” served as a refresher course for the standing-room-only crowd packed into the Maryland meeting room.

The purpose, panelists told FoxNews.com, was to come together and share stories about what they say are abusive targeting practices of conservative groups at the hands of the tax-collecting agency.

Read more this story HERE.

Court Rules NSA Can’t Keep Metadata Longer Than 5 Years

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge denied a request Friday by the National Security Agency to keep Internet and phone metadata gathered through bulk surveillance programs longer than five years.

Judge Reggie Walton of the secret FISA Court that approves classified surveillance warrants said the government failed to make a compelling case for preserving the data beyond the current five-year maximum, especially in light of escalating privacy concerns sparked by programs leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Many of those program’s protocols were either misrepresented to the court, or not presented at all.

“The amended procedures would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government to aid in national security investigations,” Walton wrote in the order posted by Politico.

Read more this story HERE.