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But during a visit Friday to a Republican stronghold, the governor went out of his way to put some distance between himself and the Democratic president.
Before taking questions from the public, Christie spoke about the problems in Washington and “a president who can’t figure out how to lead.”
Read more from this story HERE.
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The dispute is raging over a settlement the DOJ with the University of Montana that inserts new language into requirements for the proper investigation and prosecution of sexual-assault allegations on campus.
The new DOJ standard says that “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” is sexual harassment, which critics already have argued could include unwanted flirting or date invitations and some content of classroom curricula.
And the new policy demands immediate discipline for those accused of offending – hearkening to “Alice in Wonderland,” where the standard was sentence first, verdict later.
McCain, the ranking member of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote to the DOJ expressing his concern that the civil rights division under Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez “has circumvented the regular rulemaking process and congressional authority by redefining long-standing legal precedent,” according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.
The relationship provides a rare window into the U.S. law enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks, the transparency group newly thrust back into international prominence with its assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Thordarson’s double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI’s work against organized crime and computer hacking — or, more darkly, the bureau’s Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights groups.
“It’s a sign that the FBI views WikiLeaks as a suspected criminal organization rather than a news organization,” says Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “WikiLeaks was something new, so I think the FBI had to make a choice at some point as to how to evaluate it: Is this The New York Times, or is this something else? And they clearly decided it was something else.”
The FBI declined comment. Read more from this story HERE.
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By Kim Zetter. The National Security Agency collected bulk data on the email traffic of Americans under the Obama administration, according to new documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The program involved email metadata — the “enveloped” information for email that reveals the sender address and recipient as well as IP addresses — as well as web sites visited until 2011 when it ended, according to the Guardian.
The collection, which did not include the content of email, was actually part of a decade-long surveillance program launched under the Bush administration in 2001 called Stellar Wind that was initially conducted without oversight from a court. The program was first exposed in 2004 by a former Justice Department attorney who leaked the information to the New York Times.
The collection involved “communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States,” according to an NSA inspector general’s report the newspaper obtained.
The NSA subsequently was granted authority to “analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States.” The NSA didn’t just focus on targeted individuals, but also studied the data of people who communicated with people who communicated with targets. Read more from this story HERE.
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By David Kravets. Today’s revelations that the National Security Agency collected bulk data on the email traffic of millions of Americans provides startling evidence for the first time to support a whistleblower’s longstanding claims that AT&T was forwarding global internet traffic to the government from secret rooms inside its offices.
The collection program, which lasted from 2001 to 2011, involved email metadata — the “enveloped” information for email that reveals the sender’s address and recipient, as well as IP addresses and websites visited, the Guardian newspaper reported today.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, revealed in 2006 that his job duties included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to a secret room in AT&T’s San Francisco office. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabins were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, he said.
The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, Klein said.
That’s how the data was being vacuumed to the government, Klein said today.
Read more from this story HERE.
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As Republican lawmakers urge Obama to get tough with Russia as it denies extradition requests, Obama said he has not directly spoken with Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping. He flashed some annoyance as he declared he has not called either leader because “I shouldn’t have to.”
He noted that the U.S. does “a whole lot of business” with both countries, and said he doesn’t want to be in a position where he’s “wheeling and dealing and trading” just to “get a guy extradited.”
The president suggested this should have been a routine bit of business for either leader, so he decided not to get personally involved. Read more from this story HERE.
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Tensions flare with Ecuador, Hong Kong over Snowden
Tensions flared Thursday between the Obama administration and countries that appear to be helping NSA leaker Edward Snowden, with the State Department pointedly warning a defiant Ecuador there will be “grave consequences” if the foreign government grants Snowden asylum.
State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell also ripped Hong Kong officials for trying to claim a day earlier that a misspelled middle name on Snowden’s paperwork contributed to him being allowed to catch a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow over the weekend.
“They knew he was a wanted fugitive, and they intentionally let him go,” Ventrell said, calling their excuse frivolous. “They’ve tried to sort of say, oops, he just left. And we’re saying, no, that this was an intentional decision.”
The dueling statements escalated the already-tense stand-off involving several countries now.
The Obama administration has warned that Hong Kong’s decision to let Snowden go could hurt U.S.-China relations. U.S. officials, to little avail, are still trying to convince the Russian government to expel Snowden to the United States — Snowden is believed to be hunkered down in the Moscow airport, but Russian officials claim he is not their problem. Read more from this story HERE.
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Obama administration reportedly allowed NSA to gather Americans’ Internet data until 2011
The Obama administration allowed the National Security Agency to gather Americans’ Internet information, including emails, until 2011 under a secret program launched by President George W. Bush, according to newly leaked documents.
The data collection was first reported by the Guardian newspaper. An official confirmed its existence to the Associated Press.
The NSA ended the program that collected email logs and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it did not do what was needed to stop terrorist attacks, according to the NSA’s director. Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command, said all data was purged at that time.
The Guardian Thursday released documents detailing the collection, although the program was also described earlier this month by The Washington Post.
The Guardian said that according to secret documents it had obtained, a federal judge sitting on the FISA court, a secret surveillance panel, would approve a collection order for Internet metadata every 90 days. Read more from this story HERE.
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“People should be treated equally,” Mr. Obama said Thursday at a news conference in Dakar, Senegal, on the first full day of his three-nation tour of the continent.
He said that although Africans have a variety of religions and customs and “we have to respect the diversity of views” of people who personally oppose gay rights, the laws of African nations must grant all people equal protection, regardless of sexual orientation.
“I want the African people just to hear what I believe … when it comes to how the state treats people, how the law treats people, I believe that everybody has to be treated equally,” Mr. Obama said.
That view was promptly rejected by Senegal’s President Macky Sall, who was sharing the stage with Mr. Obama. Read more from this story HERE.
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Nancy Pelosi: ‘Thank God’ for gay ‘marriage’ rulings
By Ben Johnson. Among those celebrating the two Supreme Court’s rulings handed down yesterday that favor the homosexual political agenda is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told Politico her first reaction was, “Thank God.”
Pelosi, who regularly identifies herself as a “devout” practicing Catholic, said the Deo gratias poured out of her heart the moment she heard that the High Court effectively overturned her home state’s Proposition 8 and invalidated a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) by a 5-4 margin in two cases.
“I was thinking when we were walking over here, ‘I’ll be devastated if it’s anything other than that’ for two reasons,” she said. “For what it means for the lives of people first and foremost, but secondly it’s clearly unconstitutional. I’m glad to hear that the court agrees.”
Another prominent figure who expressed gratitude that DOMA was repealed is the same president that turned the federal marriage bill into settled law for 17 years. President Bill Clinton, who signed DOMA without fanfare or a photo op in a late night ceremony in 1996, said, “By overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, the Court recognized that discrimination towards any group holds us all back in our efforts to form a more perfect union. ”
His wife, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, joined his statement. During her tenure as Secretary of State, Hilary put the promotion of homosexuality at the heart of U.S. foreign policy, a tactic continued by her successor, John Kerry. Read more from this story HERE.
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Three letters have been giving the payroll-services industry fits for several months now: ACA. That’s the semi-acronym for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, and it’s up to the payroll industry — which cuts checks to production workers and offers related financial services to TV and film studios — to help educate its clients on the rules before a good portion of the law kicks in Jan. 1.
“It’s a morass of regulations and requirements, and everyone’s trying to figure out what their exposure is,” says Eric Belcher, president and CEO of Cast & Crew Entertainment Services. Adds Mark Goldstein, CEO of Entertainment Partners, which has held 16 seminars to help studios understand ACA: “It’s going to be a very big deal.”
Determining the exact nature of the new laws has been difficult, given that many ACA terms have yet to be worked out. Hollywood productions, for instance, might find it irksome simply trying to categorize employees as full- or part-time, seasonal or variable, and it’s important that they get the classifications right lest they face hefty fines. “ACA is thousands of pages, and it wasn’t written with this industry in mind,” says Belcher.
In fairness, who could have possibly guessed that a top-down solution from Washington and thousands of pages of regulations would cause problems for businesses with unorthodox work schedules, scads of part-time, contract, union and non-union employees from different fields, and the need for flexibility?
Read more from this story HERE.
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They will also likely have more researchers poring over such issues as whether childhood education programs against gun violence actually work; whether there actually is any relationship between violence in the media and in real life; and whether the safety plans that were drawn up by schools, colleges and communities in the wake of highly publicized mass shootings actually are effective.
Those and many other gun-related questions are the thrust of a new social science research agenda that the Obama administration hopes will keep the push for gun control alive for years to come.
The research agenda is intended to produce mammoth amounts of raw data on American gun owners, users and their circumstances, meaning that violence resulting from firearms use will be studied for “its causes, approaches to interventions that could prevent it, and strategies to minimize its health burden”…
The agenda, which aims to sidestep Second Amendment political and constitutional issues of gun ownership through its public health focus, was released earlier this month in a 124-page report titled, “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearms Related Violence.” It was sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) with financial support from private foundations.
Read more from this story HERE.
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“It all looks like doom, unavoidable doom,” Limbaugh lamented.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as the union between a man and woman to be unconstitutional.
But Limbaugh pointed out that was just one of a number of leftist initiatives moving ahead at full throttle.
“If amnesty happens,” he explained, “seven years from now this gonna be an entirely different country – politically, culturally, linguistically. It’d be different in six months if that happens. But that’s not isolated. Amnesty happens after Obamacare, and Obama’s efforts on climate change and so forth.”
“It looks like we’re headed to one-party rule!” he exclaimed.
Read more from this story HERE.
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The remark from Rush Limbaugh was in response to complaints from others lamenting the state of the country, telling him, “Boy, this Obama. He’s really, really making a mess of things.”
“Wait a minute,” Limbaugh responded. “Obama isn’t ‘making a mess’ of anything. Obama may be one of the most successful presidents that we’ve ever had.”
“He’s getting everything he wants,” Limbaugh continued. “He’s transforming this country in ways that no one ever thought possible. He is succeeding at every turn, and he has a scandal pop up at just the right time every moment some big transformation’s taking place so that we’re all distracted. Everything the guy wants is happening one way or the other, sooner than later, later than sooner. Whatever. Nobody’s stopping Obama. Nobody’s stopping the Democrats. They’re getting everything they want.
“They’re getting everything they want with the Republican Party going along with most of it! Now, if your definition of a successful president or a failure as a president is somebody who is making a mess of things? Yeah, then he’s a miserable failure. But from his standpoint, Obama’s objectives, his goals? I’ll bet you Obama, in private, can’t believe how easy this has been. I’ll bet you when he and [Attorney General Eric] Holder and Valerie Jarrett and rest of them get together, they laugh and talk about how easy this has been.”
Read more from this story HERE.
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Last week, U.S. officials celebrated what they regarded as a diplomatic breakthrough. They had persuaded the Taliban to open a political office in Doha, Qatar—and now America hopes it has the peace-negotiating partners the Obama administration covets as the U.S. plans its escape from Afghanistan. On Monday, the Taliban attacked the presidential compound in Kabul. The daylight gunbattle left at least eight Taliban and three guards dead.
The Afghan government—and the majority of Afghans—were not happy about the Doha news. The Taliban had immediately begun flying its flag and posting signs declaring the office as an outpost of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. President Karzai announced that he would not join peace negotiations with killers who had been so legitimized by the U.S., and he suspended talks with the U.S. about a long-term security arrangement.
The Taliban didn’t take long to prove his point. Or to expose Washington as a receding and tired presence in Afghanistan, desperate to leave.
But despair and confusion cannot bring enduring peace, or even an honorable exit. Now, with the U.S. endorsement of the Taliban office in Doha, the credibility and authority of the Afghan state has been undermined. The Doha debacle also represents the dismantling of an unwritten compact that Afghans thought they had with America: In return for Washington’s support for Afghanistan’s independence, sovereignty and constitutional order, the U.S. would enjoy all privileges of a strategic partnership in a dangerous part of the world, including cooperation on counterterrorism.
Read more from this story HERE.