IRS’ Lois Lerner Gave Confidential Tea Party Tax Info to FEC, Violating Law

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Photo Credit: AP The Internal Revenue Service shared highly confidential tax information of several Tea Party groups in the IRS scandal with the Federal Election Commission, a clear violation of federal law, according to newly obtained emails.

The public watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets Thursday that it was former scandal boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project.

The emails obtained by Judicial Watch show that the IRS, which was considering the tax status of the groups, gave the FEC the tax returns of the groups, including income, expenditures and staff pay. The emails also revealed the exact working of the prying political questions the IRS wanted the groups to reveal, such as their goals and the requests for brochures and ads.

The information, sent via email, to the FEC came in response to the organization’s questions about whether the IRS had granted tax-exempt status to the Tea Party groups. It is unclear how the information the IRS sent was going to help the FEC, since the IRS hadn’t determined the tax status of the groups yet.

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G.O.P. Filibuster of 2 Obama Picks Sets Up Fight

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/APSenate Republicans on Thursday thwarted the confirmation of two of President Obama’s nominees, one to a powerful appeals court and another to a home-lending oversight post, setting up a confrontation with Democrats that could escalate into a larger fight over limiting the filibuster and restrict how far the minority party can go to block a president’s agenda.

In a series of swift back-to-back votes, Republicans first blocked the nomination of Representative Melvin Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, to become the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a rare affront to a sitting member of Congress who has an extensive record of public service.

Next Republicans, who have accused the president of trying to tip the court’s ideological balance in Democrats’ favor, quickly dispensed with the nomination of Patricia Ann Millett to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A former government lawyer whose husband serves in the military, she has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations. The White House chose her as a test of how far Republicans would go to derail a qualified nominee.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a longtime member of the Senate and a fierce protector of its arcane institutions, said he believed the rejection of the two nominees was grounds to re-examine the filibuster rules, which some senior Senate Democrats have advocated.

“I think it’s time for some common sense on confirmations,” said Mr. Biden, who was in the Capitol to swear in Cory Booker, a Democrat, as New Jersey’s newest senator. He called the loss a “gigantic disappointment.”

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Watchdogs: Government Paid Millions in Medicare to Deceased, Illegal Immigrants

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Photo Credit: APThe federal government has paid tens of millions of dollars in Medicare benefits to dead people and illegal immigrants, according to a pair of reports from federal watchdogs released on Thursday.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services paid out $23 million to beneficiaries after their deaths in 2011, according to one report from HHS’ inspector general.

Another report tallied more than $28 million in payments from 2009 to 2011 to individuals who were in the country illegally.

In all, CMS paid Medicare benefits to 4,139 illegal immigrants and 17,403 deceased people, according to the two reports.

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Book Details Obama Aides’ Talks About Replacing Biden on 2012 Ticket

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Photo Credit: Martin H. SimonPresident Obama’s top aides secretly considered replacing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the 2012 ticket, undertaking extensive focus-group sessions and polling in late 2011 when Mr. Obama’s re-election outlook appeared uncertain.

The aides concluded that despite Mrs. Clinton’s popularity, the move would not offer a significant enough political boost to Mr. Obama to justify such a radical move, according to a newly published account of the 2012 race.

The idea of replacing Mr. Biden with Mrs. Clinton had long been rumored, but the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in their new book, “Double Down,” provide a detailed description of the effort inside the senior circle of Obama advisers. It was pushed by the chief of staff at the time, William M. Daley, despite the close personal rapport Mr. Daley had developed with Mr. Biden, a fellow Irish Catholic and veteran of Washington politics.

“When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds,” the authors write in their sequel to “Game Change,” which chronicled the 2008 campaign. “Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming — and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret.”

In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Daley acknowledged that he had wanted to research what the move would have meant for Mr. Obama, whose popularity, in the fall of 2011, was at its lowest in his presidency to date. He called it simply “due diligence.”

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Obama’s Military Coup Purges 197 Officers In Five Years

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Photo Credit: APDefense: What the president calls “my military” is being cleansed of any officer suspected of disloyalty to or disagreement with the administration on matters of policy or force structure, leaving the compliant and fearful.

We recognize President Obama is the commander-in-chief and that throughout history presidents from Lincoln to Truman have seen fit to remove military commanders they view as inadequate or insubordinate. Turnover in the military ranks is normal, and in these times of sequestration and budget cuts the numbers are expected to tick up as force levels shrink and missions change.

Yet what has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture. We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham. He was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.

Rear Adm. Chuck Gaouette, commander of the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group, was relieved in October 2012 for disobeying orders when he sent his group on Sept. 11 to “assist and provide intelligence for” military forces ordered into action by Gen. Ham.

Other removals include the sacking of two nuclear commanders in a single week — Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, head of the 20th Air Force, responsible for the three wings that maintain control of the 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Vice Adm. Tim Giardina, the No. 2 officer at U.S. Strategic Command.

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Newt Gingrich: Sebelius Worse Liar Than Nixon

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreNewt Gingrich accused embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Wednesday of being a worse liar than disgraced former President Richard Nixon.

The charge — which the former House Speaker delivered in a biting tweet — came Wednesday morning as Sebelius delivered testimony on the disastrous rollout of the new Obamacare health insurance website before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

“Sebelius dishonesty in testimony this morning exceeds anything president Nixon was accused of. The Obama team can’t tell truth and survive,” Gingrich tweeted.

Sebelius’ testimony was her first appearance before Congress since the Oct. 1 debut of Healthcare.gov, the federal website that was set up to enable Americans to buy insurance.

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Obamacare On Trial: ‘You Deserve Better. I Apologize,’ Sebelius Says (+video)

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/APHealth and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized to the American people Wednesday for the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov – the web portal that is key to implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

“You deserve better. I apologize,” Secretary Sebelius said in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “I am accountable to you for fixing these problems, and I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”

But even as she insisted that the site’s problems are fixable, the optics could not have been worse: The site was down, yet again, due to technical difficulties (though not HHS’s fault). Uninsured Americans have until Dec. 15 to sign up for coverage that goes into effect Jan. 1, the date the mandate to carry insurance starts.

The administration has promised HealthCare.gov will be functioning smoothly by Nov. 30, a month away, but has said it will reveal preliminary numbers of enrollees sooner – by mid-November. Even now, Sebelius admitted, the feature of the site that transmits the data of enrollees to insurers is still not working.

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NSA Secretly Tapped Google, Yahoo Data Centers Worldwide, New Report Claims

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Photo Credit: Fox News Massive cloud networks from companies like Google and Yahoo cache and serve up much of the data on the Internet — and the NSA has secretly tapped into the unencrypted links behind those company’s enormous servers, according to a new report from the Washington Post.

By tapping into that link, the NSA can collect data at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, the Post reported — including not just foreign citizens and “metadata” but emails, videos and audio from American citizens.

Operation MUSCULAR, a joint program of the NSA and its British equivalent GCHQ, relies on an unnamed telecommunications provider outside of the U.S. to offer secret access to a cable or switch through with Google and Yahoo pass unencrypted traffic between their servers.

The massive servers run by the company are carefully guarded and strictly audited, the companies say; according to Google, buildings housing its servers are guarded around the clock by trained personnel, and secured with heat-sensitive cameras, biometric verification, and more.

Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw a drawing of the NSA’s hack revealed by Edward Snowden; the drawing includes a smiley face next to the point at which the agency apparently was able to tap into the world’s data.

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Obama Blames ‘Bad Apple Insurers’ for Canceled Insurance Plans

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Photo Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesPresident Obama tried a new tack Wednesday as he fought back against criticism of his Obamacare claims.

Fact-checkers and journalists have ruled that Obama wasn’t being truthful when he claimed that people who liked their insurance could keep it. Obama during a speech in Boston sought to cast the issue Wednesday as trying to weed out “bad apple insurers” who don’t provide enough coverage.

“One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured but also the under-insured,” Obama said. “And there are a number of Americans, fewer than 5 percent of Americans, who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.

“Remember, before the Affordable Care Act, these bad apple insurers had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received or used minor pre-existing conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy.”

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Facebook Tests Software to Track Your Cursor on Screen

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Photo Credit: Wall Street Journal Facebook Inc. is testing technology that would greatly expand the scope of data that it collects about its users, the head of the company’s analytics group said Tuesday.

The social network may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content, such as how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin said Tuesday during an interview.

Mr. Rudin said the captured information could be added to a data analytics warehouse that is available for use throughout the company for an endless range of purposes–from product development to more precise targeting of advertising.

Facebook collects two kinds of data, demographic and behavioral. The demographic data—such as where a user lives or went to school—documents a user’s life beyond the network. The behavioral data—such as one’s circle of Facebook friends, or “likes”—is captured in real time on the network itself. The ongoing tests would greatly expand the behavioral data that is collected, according to Mr. Rudin. The tests are ongoing and part of a broader technology testing program, but Facebook should know within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new data collection into the business, he said

New types of data Facebook may collect include “did your cursor hover over that ad … and was the newsfeed in a viewable area,” Mr. Rudin said. “It is a never-ending phase. I can’t promise that it will roll out. We probably will know in a couple of months,” said Mr. Rudin, a Silicon Valley veteran who arrived at Facebook in April 2012 from Zynga Inc., where he was vice president of analytics and platform technologies.

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Robert GalbraithFacebook smashes analyst targets but executive comments spook Street

By Alexei Oreskovic.

Facebook Inc posted strong growth in its mobile advertising business on Wednesday but rattled investors after saying that it did not plan to boost the frequency of ads shown to users.

Shares of the world’s No. 1 online social network soared as much as 15 percent in extended trading before suddenly falling to $47.40, down 3 percent from its $49.10 close. The stock settled at $49.16.

In July, Facebook said it was showing one ad per 20 stories in the newsfeed, but Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman told analysts Wednesday that the current ratio, although slightly higher than 5 percent, would not increase much more going forward.

Ebersman’s comments, combined with remarks suggesting that young teenage users in the U.S. were beginning to use Facebook less frequently, soured the mood abruptly on an afternoon when the company topped Wall Street’s targets with a whopping 60 percent increase in revenue, driven by its accelerating mobile business.

“There seems to be concern about the ad load not going up,” said BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield.

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