Photo Credit: HowardLake
Photo Credit: AP
Claudia Mo Man-ching and Gary Fan Kwok-wai also sent a letter to President Obama, suggesting that prosecution of Snowden might put a “stain … on his political career.”
Man-ching said that extraditing Snowden would be complicated, and wrote in the letter that she and Kwok-wai believe Snowden has “done liberal democracy a service” by leaking the information alleging a vast domestic surveillance program by NSA that may be illegal.
Read more from this story HERE.
Barack Obama now holds a database “no one has ever seen before in life” that has “information about everything on every individual.”
The confirmation comes from U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., named “dishonorable mention” on an online list of most corrupt politicians…
In a video now getting attention once more, Waters said, “I think some people are missing something here. The president has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life.
“That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before,” she continued.
“And whoever runs for president on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place,” she said.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Fox News
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, seemed to rattle FBI Director Robert Mueller for not knowing the specifics surrounding the IRS probe.
“You’ve had a month now to investigate,” Jordan said. “This has been the biggest story in the country and you can’t even tell me who the lead investigator is. You can’t tell me the actions the inspector general took which are not typically how investigations are done. You can’t tell me if that’s appropriate or not. This is not speculation. This is what happened.”
Mueller repeatedly declined to answer Jordan’s questions, saying he couldn’t because the investigation was ongoing or that he’d have to get back to the lawmakers with answers.
When Jordan asked again,” Can you tell me who the lead investigator is?” Mueller responded, “Off the top of my head, no.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Irish Central
The 2012 presidential election was really not decided on a national level, it was always about who could take the edge in the deciding 9 swing/battleground states.
According to polls leading up to the election, the race was razor thin between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in many of those important states.
Hindsight is 20/20 and if the public knew in November 2012, what it knows today, would the election results have been different?
A characteristic lack of curiosity by the main stream media into any malfeasance by the Obama administration helped the President. This lack of curiosity helped quell outrage by the American public just prior to the election, as our Libyan Ambassador was killed. The cover story and the cover up by the administration to hide the magnitude of failure in foreign policy should have been a major campaign issue. But this news was suppressed with the aid and abetting of the major media.
Perhaps there is an easy answer when you see the inbreeding between the White House and influential members of the main stream media….The connections are astounding. Read the full story here in the Washington Post.
Suppose the latest scandal of IRS targeting of conservative organizations and individual donors had been exposed back in 2010-2011 and brought to a halt? As more gets revealed on this scandal it seems this was a deliberate attempt to suppress a major segment of opposition to the Obama campaign.
How much of a difference did it make in organizing voter turn out and support for the Romney campaign? Romney received 2-3 million votes less than McCain did in 2008. Perhaps if the TEA Party and other conservative groups weren’t being bullied by the federal government, they could have at least boosted voter turnout and matched voter numbers of 2008. See conservative vote was suppressed.
Many states prior to the 2012 elections had been trying to clean up their voter rolls as well as help stop vote fraud by requiring picture ID in order to vote. This was in response to widespread suspicion and reports of tainted elections due to vote fraud. But the Justice Department under Eric Holder, fought these safeguards tooth and nail and filed suit to delay any changes. Did not having strengthened voter ID laws and other safeguards have an effect on the election? Did precincts in heavily Democrat areas reporting 140% voter turnout help sway the outcome See Holder blocks Voter ID at every turn.
The recent revelation of how the NSA has collected and stored email and phone communications of millions of Americans is disturbing. Especially when coupled with the knowledge of how this administration has used the IRS and other government agencies to target political foes.
Would it be too much of a stretch to think the administration wouldn’t tap into this massive data base to help get itself elected?
From today’s World Net Daily: According to U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif , Barack Obama now holds a database “no one has ever seen before in life” that has “information about everything on every individual.” It’s a fact Obamas election team had use of massive amounts of data that gave them an edge in the election.
It’s disturbing to know Waters made her statement back in February of 2012 long before the election and long before we were aware of this administrations abuse of power.
Any of the above factors individually, could have helped tip the election in Obamas favor in just a few of the close battleground states. But if you add them all together, it makes it an unbeatable combination.
_____________________________________
Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.
Photo Credit: AP
Specifically, Snowden reportedly showed the newspaper “unverified documents” describing an extensive U.S. campaign to obtain information from computers in Hong Kong and mainland China.
“We hack network backbones, like huge Internet routers, basically, that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he told the newspaper.
Officials have confirmed that Snowden may have more secret material.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: YouTube
Greenwald told Business Insider that the likes of Time magazine’s Joe Klein and The New Yorker‘s Jeffrey Toobin, among others, have become NSA apologists for “principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic” reasons.
“I’m not surprised,” Greenwald said in an email to Business Insider. “I’ve been amazed and disappointed for a long time at how the most slavishly partisan media Democrats who pretended to care so much about these issues when doing so helped undermine George Bush are now the loudest apologists and cheerleaders for these very same policies.
“If they started a club called Liberal Pundits to Defend the National Security State, no auditorium in the country would be large enough to accommodate them.
“To call them principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic is to be overly generous.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Reuters
Edward Snowden dropped out of sight after checking out of a Hong Kong hotel on Monday. The South China Morning Post newspaper said it was able to locate and interview him on Wednesday. It provided brief excerpts from the interview on its website…
Asked about his choice of Hong Kong to leak the information, Snowden said, “People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality.”
The newspaper quoted him as saying that he had several opportunities to flee from Hong Kong, but that he “would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: WND
“The FBI and the Secret Service are showing up to request an interview to question specific Internet posts the veteran has placed on websites such as Facebook,” explained attorney John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute.
Whitehead said the agencies are looking for “anti-Obama views that can be interpreted to reflect psychological problems of sufficient seriousness to disqualify the veteran from ever owning a firearm.”
Whitehead told WND credible sources within the National Security Agency have told him the NSA is downloading 1 trillion communications on the Internet per month, including posts to various websites, emails, instant message communications and texting messages.
As WND reported last week, Whitehead and the Rutherford Institute in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Richmond, Va., are representing Marine veteran Brandon Raub, 27, who was arrested by FBI and Secret Service agents for comments he made on Facebook expressing dissatisfaction with the present direction of the U.S. government.
Read more from this story HERE.
When Americans expressed outrage last week over the seizure and surveillance of Verizon’s client data by the National Security Agency, President Obama responded: “In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.”
How many records did the NSA seize from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential mass data collections by the government from other communications and online companies. These are the “details,” and few Americans consider this approach “balanced,” though many rightly consider it Orwellian.
These activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific—”particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” And what is the government doing with these records? The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?
…Monitoring the records of as many as a billion phone calls, as some news reports have suggested, is no modest invasion of privacy. It is an extraordinary invasion of privacy. We fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked. Our lives are now so digitized that the government going from computer to computer or phone to phone is the modern equivalent of the same type of tyranny that our Founders rebelled against.
Read more from this story HERE.