‘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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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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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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Top Hill Lawmakers Concerned About Olympic Security, Amid New Terror Threats and Attacks

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Top Capitol Hill lawmakers on Sunday expressed concerns about terror attacks at the upcoming Olympic games in Sochi, Russia, amid nearby terror attacks and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assurances that his country will “do whatever it takes” to protect athletes and visitors.

“The threats are real,” Texas GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told ABC’s “This Week.”

McCaul is among those who think an attack during the games next month will most likely occur outside of the Olympic city and that terrorists will go after “soft targets” such as roads and transportation systems.

McCaul, who is in Moscow this weekend, declined to directly answer the question of whether he would tell Americans they would be safe to travel to the games, saying only that he will “do everything I can” to make sure the games are safe for everybody, including the estimated 15,000 Americans who will attend.

His comments were preceded on the show by an interview with Putin, who said the job of the Olympic host is to provide security and “we will do whatever it takes.”

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Krauthammer: Obama’s NSA Speech ’90 Percent Smoke and Mirrors’

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Screen Shot 2014-01-18 at 11.22.23 PMConservative columnist Charles Krauthammer had a rare moment of praise for President Barack Obama’s speech on NSA surveillance — even if it was a bit backhanded. “It was 90 percent smoke and mirrors and very little substantive change, which is what we need,” he said Friday, calling it “a terrific speech.”

Krauthammer spoke to Fox News’ Bret Baier on Friday about the president’s speech on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, where he promised largely superficial changes to the contentious mass collection of Americans’ metadata. Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul said “it doesn’t sound to me like he’s really going to change,” while the American Civil Liberties Union said “the president should end — not mend — the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding American’s data.

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Zogby Report Card – Grade D+: Nation ‘Terribly Split’ Under Obama

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Pollster John Zogby reports in our White House report card that President Obama’s bid to rule by executive order shows that the nation is torn.

“A new congressional study details the laxity in security in Benghazi prior to the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. There was plenty of blame to go around…

Grade: D+

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NJ Mayor: Christie Withheld Sandy Funds as Political Payback

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

The mayor of Hoboken, N.J., is accusing Gov. Chris Christie’s administration of withholding Superstorm Sandy relief money from her city after she refused to approve a redevelopment project he favored.

Mayor Dawn Zimmer, appearing Saturday on MSNBC’s “Up With Steve Kornacki,” said Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and Richard Constable, Christie’s community affairs commissioner, delivered messages from the governor early last year to warn her that the relief money would be blocked if the project wasn’t approved.

Zimmer, a Democrat who has been supportive of Republican Christie, did not approve the project.

And when she requested $127 million in hurricane relief to help in Hoboken’s rebuilding efforts in the wake of Sandy, which left the city 80 percent under water in October 2012, the city got a mere $142,000 to cover a backup generator and $200,000 in recovery grants.

“The bottom line is, it’s not fair for the governor to hold Sandy funds hostage for the city of Hoboken because he wants me to give back to one private developer,” Zimmer said Saturday.

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