NSA Reforms Threatened by ‘Business-as-Usual Brigade’, Ron Wyden Warns

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Photo Credit: Win McNamee/GettyThe Democratic senator leading congressional efforts to rein in the National Security Agency warned on Wednesday that senior intelligence and administration officials will attempt to block any meaningful change while publicly speaking the language of reform.

Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, told a conference on the NSA and privacy at the Cato Institute in Washington that the reform campaign was at a pivotal moment, with the Senate and the House of Representatives to examine new surveillance legislation over the next few weeks.

But, Wyden said, the American public should not be fooled by what he called the “business-as-usual brigade” – made up of intelligence officials, their supporters in Congress, thinktanks and the media.

They will “try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting”, Wyden said. “Their endgame is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin deep.”

The Oregon senator is a part of a bipartisan Senate group who unveiled the first comprehensive surveillance reform bill two weeks ago. It would end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records, first revealed by the Guardian in June, change the secret court that oversees the agency’s foreign intelligence programs and close the loophole that allows analysts to review Americans’ communications without a warrant.

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James Woods: ‘I Don’t Expect to Work Again’ in Hollywood

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe actor has been critical of Democrats and the president and presumes his political opinions will cost him jobs.

After repeatedly criticizing President Barack Obama, actor James Woods suggested in a tweet late Tuesday that his politics may cost him work in Hollywood.

Woods has been critical of Obama before but in the past few days seems particularly incensed at the president’s handling of the partial government shutdown. He tweeted, for example: “This President is a true abomination. To have barricaded the WW2 vets, but allow illegal aliens privilege…” The tweet linked to a USA Today article.

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Recent College Grad Claims Obamacare Has ‘Raped My Future’

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Photo Credit: NObamaNoMasA university graduate, 26 year old Ashley Dionne, posted an open letter on the Facebook page of conservative radio host, Dennis Praeger detailing the negative effects Obamacare has had on her life. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2009 and went back to school to obtain a second degree but has not been able to get a job that offers more than 32 hours a week. Obamacare takes her monthly health costs from $75.00 to $319.00 with a $6,000.00 deductible. She feels her future has been “raped” and she qualifies as the very same “working poor” this law was supposed to help.

Whenever proponents of Obamacare are told of these anecdotal stories outlining the harm that the Affordable Care Act has inflicted on people, they respond with either a denial of it being true, that it only applies to a “small” percentage of people or that the “sacrifice” is worth it to supply health care to those who did not previously have it…

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Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) Confronts Obama About Failure to Support House Funding Bill

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Photo Credit: IntangibleArtsDel. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) had what some colleagues called “a heated exchange” and what she described as “a conversation” with President Obama during a White House meeting Wednesday afternoon regarding the District’s budget constraints as a result of the partial government shutdown.

Norton attended the meeting in the White House East Room with nearly 200 House Democrats and was one of a handful given the opportunity to ask the president a question. When she was called upon, Norton pressed Obama to support a House-passed bill that would permit the District to use its locally raised tax funds to maintain operations until Dec. 15.

Democrats, including Obama, have held fast in opposition to such piecemeal funding bills, saying Republicans must come to a deal to fund the entire government, not just favored segments.

Making her point, Norton spoke over the president and refused to yield the microphone, according to a lawmaker who attended the event. The lawmaker described Norton as “strident,” “self-absorbed” and “parochial” in her exchange with Obama.

But Obama held firm to his belief that Republicans should work to reopen the entire federal government and not pass stand-alone spending measures, said the lawmaker, who asked not to be identified in o

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Obama: ‘I’m Not Budging’

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller President Barack Obama tried Tuesday to sway the public’s jaundiced view of the budget crisis with a mishmash of economic threats, campaign-style attacks on Republicans, repeated offers of budget talks and numerous promises to reject any compromise.

“I’m not budging when it comes to the full faith and credit of the United States…I think people understand that,” Obama told reporters in the White House’s press office.

The threat came shortly after he suggested he’d be willing to accept a budget deal that would require the GOP to abandon its Obamacare reforms in exchange for subsequent chats with him about ways to improve the effectiveness of his health-sector takeover.

During the hour-long press conference and speaking in a low, calm voice, Obama slammed the GOP as deadbeats and extremists, as kidnappers, as unserious and insincere. He portrayed them as opposed to health care and as threatening to drop a “nuclear bomb” on the nation’s economy, while repeatedly also praising himself as willing to compromise and negotiate.

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‘Gestapo Tactics’ Meet Seniors at Yellowstone

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By Fox News

A Massachusetts woman says she and fellow tour-group members were locked under armed guard inside a Yellowstone National Park hotel during a visit to the park at the start of the government slimdown.

Pat Vaillancourt told the Newburyport News newspaper the incident unfolded Oct. 1 when they were already inside the park and a ranger would not let them off the tour bus to photograph roaming bison.

The group — roughly 40 senior citizens from around the world — was allowed to return to the Old Faithful Inn to spend a second night at the hotel, but some with limited English skills thought they were under arrest, she said.


Vaillancourt told the newspaper the two-and-a-half hour ride leaving Yellowstone wasn’t much better because tour members couldn’t make a scheduled comfort stop at a dude ranch because the owner was told he would have his license revoked for accommodating the group.

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By John Macone – Newburyport Daily News

Pat Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard….

“We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Vaillancourt, who grew up in Lawrence. “It was like they brought out the armed forces. Nobody was saying, ‘we’re sorry,’ it was all like — ” as she clenched her fist and banged it against her forearm….

[After park rangers prevented the group from stopping to take pictures of bison], the seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door…

The bus trip made headlines in [the town of] Livingston [near the park entrance], where the local newspaper Livingston Enterprise interviewed the tour guide, Gordon Hodgson, who accused the park service of “Gestapo tactics.” He added, “The national parks belong to the people…This isn’t right…”

“My father took a lot of crap from the Japanese,” [as a prisoner of war Vaillancourt] recalled, her eyes welling with tears. “Every day they made him bow to the Japanese flag. But he stood up to them. “He always said to stand up for what you believe in, and don’t let them push you around,” she said, adding she was sad to see “fear, guns and control” turned on citizens in her own country.

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Boehner Dismisses Obama’s Call for Republicans ‘Unconditional Surrender’

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Photo Credit: Fox News ScreenshotHouse Speaker John Boehner dismissed President Obama’s position on the fiscal crisis as “not sustainable” Tuesday, only hours after Obama held a non-press conference to say he was willing to compromise but not negotiate.

“What the president said today was, if there’s unconditional surrender by Republicans, he’ll sit down and talk with us. That’s not the way our government works,” Boehner said.

The speaker said he wants conversations about spending cuts to start “now,” not “next week” or “next month.”

It’s unclear how Republicans will navigate Obama’s stance going forward, with the country in week two of the partial government shutdown. Their demand is that they get some concessions — like spending cuts — in exchange for passing a spending bill and raising the debt ceiling.

Boehner’s appeal on Tuesday was for Democrats to simply come to the negotiating table.

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Titanic Obamacare Hits Iceberg of Reality

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Photo Credit: A Train/flickrThe first reviews are in, and so, far, Obamacare is a lot like “new” Coke. Few product roll-outs in history have had more problems.

Even some of its strongest supporters are the most scathing critics of the way Obamcare has been introduced to the public.

When President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius compared the Obamacare website problems to a glitch in an Apple product roll-out, Washington Post columnist Ezra Kelin responded, “But the Obama administration doesn’t have a basically working product that would be improved by a software update. They have a website that almost nobody has been able to successfully use.

“If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for (Apple CEO) Tim Cook’s head.”

Klein’s column was titled “Obamacare’s website is really bad.”

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Obama to Nominate Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve Chairman

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Photo Credit: AP/Eugene HoshikoPresident Obama will announce Janet Yellen as his nominee to replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve system on Wednesday afternoon, White House officials said Tuesday evening.

The 67-year old Yellen, the current vice chairman of the Fed, would become the first female leader of the central bank.

Yellen has been viewed as the favorite for the job since former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration in September.

Previously, Summers’ candidacy had drawn an unusual amount of attention to the nomination process, which usually is a relatively muted affair. He was forced to exit when a number of Democratic senators, including members of the Senate Banking Committee that approves Fed nominations, announced that they would not support him.

Yellen is expected to face a much easier path to confirmation. A number of Democrats took the unusual step of endorsing her for the post as an alternative to Summers when he was rumored to be Obama’s preferred pick.

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Why America Wants Drones That Can Kill Without Humans

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Photo Credit: defenseone.comScientists, engineers and policymakers are all figuring out ways drones can be used better and more smartly, more precise and less damaging to civilians, with longer range and better staying power. One method under development is by increasing autonomy on the drone itself.

Eventually, drones may have the technical ability to make even lethal decisions autonomously: to respond to a programmed set of inputs, select a target and fire their weapons without a human reviewing or checking the result. Yet the idea of the U.S. military deploying a lethal autonomous robot, or LAR, is sparking controversy. Though autonomy might address some of the current downsides of how drones are used, they introduce new downsides policymakers are only just learning to grapple with.

The basic conceit behind a LAR is that it can outperform and outthink a human operator. “If a drone’s system is sophisticated enough, it could be less emotional, more selective and able to provide force in a way that achieves a tactical objective with the least harm,” said Purdue University Professor Samuel Liles. “A lethal autonomous robot can aim better, target better, select better, and in general be a better asset with the linked ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] packages it can run.”

Though the pace for drone strikes has slowed down — only 21 have struck Pakistan in 2013, versus 122 in 2010 according to the New America Foundation — unmanned vehicles remain a staple of the American counterinsurgency toolkit. But drones have built-in vulnerabilities that military planners still have not yet grappled with. Last year, for example, an aerospace engineer told the House Homeland Security Committee that with some inexpensive equipment he could hack into a drone and hijack it to perform some rogue purpose.

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