The Truth Or The Fight

“This is happening a lot (it’s not just this lady).  I don’t know… wouldn’t someone who does this to a dead veterans family deserve a very slow medieval style death. I’d have no problem helping out. I got pliers. I wouldn’t hesitate a bit & I’m one of the most peaceful people you’d every meet.”

-Fred Face 7/31/10

Cindy Lohman holds a photo of her late son, Ryan, on the grounds of Monocacy National Battlefield in Frederick, Maryland, on July 9, 2010. Photographer: Bill Cramer/Bloomberg Markets via Bloomberg

By David Evans

The package arrived at Cindy Lohman’s home in Great Mills, Maryland, just two weeks after she learned that her son, Ryan, a 24-year-old Army sergeant, had been killed by a bomb in Afghanistan. It was a thick, 9-inch-by- 12-inch envelope fromPrudential Financial Inc., which handles life insurance for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Inside was a letter from Prudential about Ryan’s $400,000 policy. And there was something else, which looked like a checkbook. The letter told Lohman that the full amount of her payout would be placed in a convenient interest-bearing account, allowing her time to decide how to use the benefit.

“You can hold the money in the account for safekeeping for as long as you like,” the letter said. In tiny print, in a disclaimer that Lohman says she didn’t notice, Prudential disclosed that what it called its Alliance Account was not guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September issue.

Lohman, 52, left the money untouched for six months after her son’s August 2008 death.

“It’s like you’re paying me off because my child was killed,” she says. “It was a consolation prize that I didn’t want.”

As time went on, she says, she tried to use one of the “checks” to buy a bed, and the salesman rejected it. That happened again this year, she says, when she went to a Target store to purchase a camera on Armed Forces Day, May 15.

‘I’m Shocked’

Lohman, a public health nurse who helps special-needs children, says she had always believed that her son’s life insurance funds were in a bank insured by the FDIC. That money — like $28 billion in 1 million death-benefit accounts managed by insurers — wasn’t actually sitting in a bank.

It was being held in Prudential’s general corporate account, earning investment income for the insurer. Prudential paid survivors like Lohman 1 percent interest in 2008 on their Alliance Accounts, while it earned a 4.8 percent return on its corporate funds, according to regulatory filings.

“I’m shocked,” says Lohman, breaking into tears as she learns how the Alliance Account works. “It’s a betrayal. It saddens me as an American that a company would stoop so low as to make a profit on the death of a soldier. Is there anything lower than that?”

Millions of bereaved Americans have unwittingly been placed in the same position by their insurance companies. The practice of issuing what they call “checkbooks” to survivors, instead of paying them lump sums, extends well beyond the military.

Touching Americans

In the past decade, these so-called retained-asset accounts have become standard operating procedure in an industry that touches virtually every American: There are more than 300 million active life insurance policies in the U.S., and the industry holds $4.6 trillion in assets, according to the American Council of Life Insurers.

Insurance companies tell survivors that their money is put in a secure account. NeitherPrudential nor MetLife Inc., the largest life insurer in the U.S., segregates death benefits into a separate fund.

Newark, New Jersey-based Prudential, the second-largest life insurer, holds payouts in its own general account, according to regulatory filings.

New York-based MetLife has told survivors in a standard letter: “To help you through what can be a very difficult, emotional and confusing time, we created a settlement option, the Total Control Account Money Market Option. It is guaranteed by MetLife.”

No FDIC Insurance

The company’s letter omits that the money is in MetLife’s corporate investment account, isn’t in a bank and has no FDIC insurance.

“All guarantees are subject to the financial strength and claims-paying ability of MetLife,” it says.

Both MetLife, which handles insurance for nonmilitary federal employees, and Prudential paid 0.5 percent interest in July to survivors of government workers and soldiers. That’s less than half of the rate available at some banks with accounts insured by the FDIC up to $250,000.

Bank of New York Mellon Corp. handles the paperwork and monthly statements for customers with MetLife “checking accounts.” The insurance company, not the bank, most recently reported holding about $10 billion in death benefits, in 2008.

The “checkbook” system cheats the families of those who die, says Jeffrey Stempel, an insurance law professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who wrote ‘Stempel on Insurance Contracts’ (Aspen Publishers, 2009).

‘Bad Faith’

“It’s institutionalized bad faith,” he says. “In my view, this is a scheme to defraud by inducing the policyholder’s beneficiary to let the life insurance company retain assets they’re not entitled to. It’s turning death claims into a profit center.”

Prudential’s Alliance Account is helpful to families of soldiers, says company spokesman Bob DeFillippo.

“For some families, the account is the difference between earning interest on a large amount of money and letting it sit idle,” he says. Prudential follows the law, he says.

“We fully and regularly disclose the nature and terms of the account to account holders,” DeFillippo says. “We make it clear that the money can be withdrawn at any time by simply writing a draft.”

Metlife spokesman Joseph Madden says his company’s customers are very happy with the Total Control Account.

‘Overwhelmingly Positive’

“The feedback from TCA customers has been overwhelmingly positive,” he says. “The TCA affords beneficiaries security, peace of mind and time to make an informed decision — while earning interest in the interim.”

Madden says the company was paying some survivors 0.5 percent in July while some others got 1.5 percent or 3 percent, depending on the age and origin of insurance accounts. The accounts don’t violate any laws, Madden says, and are authorized by New York state insurance law.

Insurers are holding onto at least $28 billion owed to survivors, according to three firms that handle retained-asset accounts for about 130 life insurance companies. There are no public records showing how much companies are holding in these accounts.

The “checks” that Cindy Lohman wrote, the ones rejected by retailers, were actually drafts, or IOUs, issued by Prudential. Even though the “checks” had the name of JPMorgan Chase & Co.on them, Lohman’s funds weren’t in that bank; they were held by Prudential.

Federal Bank Law

Before a check could clear, Prudential would have to send money to JPMorgan, bank spokesman John Murray says.

Insurance companies — in addition to holding onto the money of survivors, paying them uncompetitive interest rates and giving them misleading guarantees — may be violating a federal bank law. A 1933 statute makes it a felony for any company to accept deposits without state or federal authorization.

That means only banks or credit unions can accept deposits, says Arthur Wilmarth, a professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington who has testified before Congress about banking regulations.

If a prosecutor pressed an insurance company, retained- asset accounts could be outlawed because insurers say they deposit money into these accounts and don’t have bank charters or banking regulation, Wilmarth says. MetLife also offers its own version of certificates of deposit.

“If it swims, quacks and flies like a duck, the court could decide that it is indeed a duck,” he says. “You then potentially could have a criminal violation.”

Potential Bank Run

This unregulated quasi-banking system operated by insurers has none of the protections of the actual banking system. Lawrence Baxter, a professor at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina, says the potential exists for a catastrophe.

If one insurer is unable to meet its obligations on retained-asset accounts, people could lose faith in other companies and demand immediate payment, triggering a panic, says Baxter, who has consulted with federal agencies on financial regulation.

The government established the FDIC in 1933 after frantic depositors tried to pull their money from banks. The federal government has no such program for death-benefit accounts.

“There’s more than $25 billion out there in these accounts,” Baxter says. “A run could be triggered immediately by one insurance company not being able to honor its payout. The whole point of creating the FDIC was to put an end to bank runs.”

No Federal Regulation

The sweeping financial regulatory legislation signed by President Barack Obama on July 21 doesn’t address retained-asset accounts. It creates a new federal insurance office, which won’t be a regulator. It will collect information, monitor the industry for systemic risk and consult with state insurance regulators.

An industry with $19.1 trillion in potential liabilities will remain unregulated by the federal government. In 2008, insurers approved claims totaling $60 billion in death benefits, according to the life insurance council.

The federal government doesn’t even regulate the life insurance it supplies, via MetLife, to its own employees in a program called Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance. As the VA does for soldiers, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management sends handbook to nonmilitary government workers — some 4 million active employees and retirees.

The handbook says their life insurance policies automatically pay out death benefits in the form of a “money- market-account checkbook.” The 217-page handbook omits that the money isn’t FDIC insured and will stay with MetLife until someone writes a “check.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-28/fallen-soldiers-families-denied-cash-payout-as-life-insurers-boost-profit.html

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By Maggie Bridgeman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The United States is currently the world biggest weapons supplier — holding 30 per cent of the market — but the Obama administration has begun modifying export control regulations in hopes of enlarging the U.S. market share, according to U.S. officials.

President Barack Obama already has taken the first steps by tucking new language into the Iran sanctions bill signed in early July. His aides are now compiling the “munitions list,” which regulates the sale of military items.

The administration’s stated reason for the changes is to simplify the sale of weapons to U.S. allies, but potential spinoffs include generating business for the U.S. defense industry, creating jobs and contributing to Obama’s drive to double U.S. exports by 2015.

Critics say the reforms are being rushed and warn that the expedited procedures could allow weapons technology to fall into the wrong hands.

India, which currently is seeking 126 fighter-jets worth over $10 billion, 10 large transport aircraft worth $6 billion, and other multi-billion dollar defense sales, could be among the possible beneficiaries. Allies seeking advanced U.S. weaponry and equipment, who now often buy elsewhere due to the cumbersome U.S. approval process, would draw immediate benefit from the reforms, U.S. officials said.

Obama first called for the reforms in August 2009, then referred to them in his Jan. 27 State of the Union address as an element toward doubling exports by 2015.

In the House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, (D-Calif.), is drafting a bill that parallels the president’s plan.

However, it isn’t clear that the Senate will go along, as it is still reviewing the president’s proposals.

“It is probably going to be some time yet before there is movement in the relevant committees on formal hearings or writing or legislation,” said Andy Fisher, spokesperson for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Obama’s plan, according to top officials, is to ask Congress to streamline the bureaucratic process for approving arms sales by setting up a single new agency to oversee one list of exportable weapons, “tiered” according to the sensitivity of the technology. Currently the State and Commerce Departments maintain separate lists, and the State Department list contains many restrictions.

“Our aim is to make the system more transparent, efficient, and effective,” said Ben Chang, a White House spokesman. “This means we are improving our ability to administer our controls, which improves our ability to enforce them, and equally important, improves the ability of companies to comply.”

Critics say decontrolling weapons systems could fuel regional arms races, allow technology to fall into the wrong hands and, because arms purchasers often want to set up their own industries, end up exporting jobs abroad.

“The concern that we have is that the net result of this process would be to open the floodgates for military sales to states that do not meet the standards established in years previous,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

“We’re No. 1 in weapons in the world, so I don’t understand what the problem is we need to fix,” said a Republican staffer for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the topic.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the most outspoken administration advocate for the new system, said it will “build high walls around a smaller yard” by narrowing in on the nation’s “crown jewels.”

However, critics point out that what those crown jewels are depends on decisions yet to be made.

“There’s nothing in their top tier currently,” the Senate GOP staffer said. “They can’t figure out what should be in their top tier.”

Senior officials have said possible “top tier” items include certain night vision technology and advanced stealth technology, which makes aircraft invisible to radar, infrared, and sonar.

The new system would allow older technology such as Lockheed Martin’s F-16 fighter to fall to a lower tier as newer, more advanced technology emerges. The staffer said that some versions of the plan currently circulating don’t include the F-16 in the top tier of the secured list.

The F-16 may no longer be top technology for the U.S., but as is the case with much of the aging technology that will be decontrolled, the Senate GOP staffer said, “It’s often a question of what China, a terrorist, or even a rogue state would do with these things.”

Members of the Obama administration say that changes will enhance national security.

“In fact, our system itself poses a potential national security risk based on the fact that its structure is overly complicated, contains too many redundancies, and tries to protect too much,” United States National Security Advisor General James Jones said in a speech introducing the plans.

The administration hopes that by streamlining the process, allies will be able to receive more weapons and technology faster, making their equipment more compatible with that of the United States, and making it easier to complete joint operations.

“It spells the difference between U.S. forces going it alone or having allies who are able to operate in the lethal battle space with U.S. military forces,” said former Bush administration arms regulator Amb. Lincoln Bloomfield Jr.

Rep. Donald Manzullo, R-Ill., represents a district with aerospace and other manufacturers, and said reform is needed for the survival of U.S. manufacturing.

“We can begin to manufacture our way out of this recession by reforming our export controls,” Manzullo said in a speech at the American Enterprises Institute, a conservative think tank.

Manzullo has worked for export control reform throughout his career and says that the job creation benefits make the initiative worthwhile, but he retains doubts about the current review.

“I have a problem with giving all that power to one agency,” Manzullo said.

Manzullo explained that having one agency to govern export controls could be dangerous if the wrong person were put in charge.

Similarly, Christopher Wall, former assistant secretary of commerce, said he supports reform but thought initially that the changes were being rushed. In recent weeks, he said, the administration appears to have a better understanding of the immensity of the task.

“Whether it has to do with the possible departure of Secretary Gates or the election timetable coming up, neither of these should drive the reform process,” Wall said.

The Senate GOP staffer said that if the United States decontrols as the number one seller in the market, then others with less scrupulous records will follow suit.

The Obama administration isn’t the first executive to see the benefits of export control reform; both former President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush undertook similar reviews, which according to Gregory Suchan, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, “crashed and burned essentially because of opposition from Congress.”

“Anybody who thinks that they can come to a conclusion as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing,” Suchan said, “such a judgment is premature”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/29/98337/obama-seeks-to-expand-arms-exports.html#ixzz0vBdBuYFW

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By JULIA ANGWIN

Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.

The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn.

The code knows that her favorite movies include “The Princess Bride,” “50 First Dates” and “10 Things I Hate About You.” It knows she enjoys the “Sex and the City” series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.

“Well, I like to think I have some mystery left to me, but apparently not!” Ms. Hayes-Beaty said when told what that snippet of code reveals about her. “The profile is eerily correct.”

Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).

“We can segment it all the way down to one person,” says Eric Porres, Lotame’s chief marketing officer.

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.

The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

• The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.

The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges.

“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”

The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer.

As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles.

But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.

The top venue for such technology, the Journal found, was IAC/InterActive Corp.’s Dictionary.com. A visit to the online dictionary site resulted in 234 files or programs being downloaded onto the Journal’s test computer, 223 of which were from companies that track Web users.

The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.

And the industry says the data are used harmlessly. David Moore, chairman of 24/7 RealMedia Inc., an ad network owned by WPP PLC, says tracking gives Internet users better advertising.

“When an ad is targeted properly, it ceases to be an ad, it becomes important information,” he says.

Tracking isn’t new. But the technology is growing so powerful and ubiquitous that even some of America’s biggest sites say they were unaware, until informed by the Journal, that they were installing intrusive files on visitors’ computers.

The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.’s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer’s age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.

Both Targus and Microsoft said they didn’t know how the file got onto MSN.com, and added that the tool didn’t contain “personally identifiable” information.

Tracking is done by tiny files and programs known as “cookies,” “Flash cookies” and “beacons.” They are placed on a computer when a user visits a website. U.S. courts have ruled that it is legal to deploy the simplest type, cookies, just as someone using a telephone might allow a friend to listen in on a conversation. Courts haven’t ruled on the more complex trackers.

The most intrusive monitoring comes from what are known in the business as “third party” tracking files. They work like this: The first time a site is visited, it installs a tracking file, which assigns the computer a unique ID number. Later, when the user visits another site affiliated with the same tracking company, it can take note of where that user was before, and where he is now. This way, over time the company can build a robust profile.

One such ecosystem is Yahoo Inc.’s ad network, which collects fees by placing targeted advertisements on websites. Yahoo’s network knows many things about recent high-school graduate Cate Reid. One is that she is a 13- to 18-year-old female interested in weight loss. Ms. Reid was able to determine this when a reporter showed her a little-known feature on Yahoo’s website, the Ad Interest Manager, that displays some of the information Yahoo had collected about her.

Yahoo’s take on Ms. Reid, who was 17 years old at the time, hit the mark: She was, in fact, worried that she may be 15 pounds too heavy for her 5-foot, 6-inch frame. She says she often does online research about weight loss.

“Every time I go on the Internet,” she says, she sees weight-loss ads. “I’m self-conscious about my weight,” says Ms. Reid, whose father asked that her hometown not be given. “I try not to think about it…. Then [the ads] make me start thinking about it.”

Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman says Yahoo doesn’t knowingly target weight-loss ads at people under 18, though it does target adults.

“It’s likely this user received an untargeted ad,” Ms. Allman says. It’s also possible Ms. Reid saw ads targeted at her by other tracking companies.

Information about people’s moment-to-moment thoughts and actions, as revealed by their online activity, can change hands quickly. Within seconds of visiting eBay.com or Expedia.com, information detailing a Web surfer’s activity there is likely to be auctioned on the data exchange run by BlueKai, the Seattle startup.

Each day, BlueKai sells 50 million pieces of information like this about specific individuals’ browsing habits, for as little as a tenth of a cent apiece. The auctions can happen instantly, as a website is visited.

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By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times

With Congress gridlocked on an immigration bill, the Obama administration is considering using a back door to stop deporting many illegal immigrants – what a draft government memo said could be “a non-legislative version of amnesty.”

The memo, addressed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration ServicesDirector Alejandro Mayorkas and written by four agency staffers, lists tools it says the administration has to “reduce the threat of removal” for many illegal immigrants who have run afoul of immigration authorities.

“In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of Notices to Appear,” the staffers wrote in the memo, which was obtained by Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican.

The memo suggests that in-depth discussions have occurred on how to keep many illegal immigrants in the country, which would be at least a temporary alternative to the proposals Democrats in Congress have made to legalize illegal immigrants.

Chris Bentley, a USCIS spokesman, said drafting the memo doesn’t mean the agency has embraced the policy and “nobody should mistake deliberation and exchange of ideas for final decisions.”

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“As a matter of good government, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will discuss just about every issue that comes within the purview of the immigration system,” he said in an e-mail statement. “We continue to maintain that comprehensive bipartisan legislation, coupled with smart, effective enforcement, is the only solution to our nation’s immigration challenges.”

He said the Homeland Security Department “will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”

The memo does talk about targeting specific groups of illegal immigrants.

Mr. Grassley said it confirms his fears that the administration is trying an end-run around Congress.

“This memo gives credence to our concerns that the administration will go to great lengths to circumvent Congress and unilaterally execute a backdoor amnesty plan,” Mr. Grassley said.

The memo acknowledges some of the tools could be costly and might even require asking Congress for more money.

At one point, the authors acknowledge that widespread use of “deferred action” – or using prosecutorial discretion not to deport someone – would be “a non-legislative version of ‘amnesty.’ ”

The authors noted several options for deferred action, including targeting it to students who would be covered by the DREAM Act, a bill that’s been introduced in Congress.

In testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 11, Mr. Mayorkas first said he was unaware of discussions to use these kinds of tools on a categorical basis, then later clarified that officials had talked about expanding the use of those powers.

“I don’t know of any plans. I think we have discussed, as we always do, the tools available to us and whether the deployment of any of those tools could achieve a more fair and efficient use or application of the immigration law,” he said.

He acknowledged, though, that he was not aware that those powers had ever been used before on a categorical basis.

Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who queried Mr. Mayorkas on the subject, warned him against pursuing that strategy.

“I think it would be a mistake for the administration to use administrative action, like deferred action on a categorical basis, to deal with a large number of people who are here without proper legal documents to regularize their status without Congress‘ participation. I will just say that to you for what it’s worth,” Mr. Cornyn, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary immigration, border security and citizenship subcommittee, told Mr. Mayorkas.

“The American public’s confidence in the federal government’s ability and commitment to enforce our immigration laws is at an all-time low,”Mr. Cornyn said in a statement. “This apparent step to circumventCongress – and avoid a transparent debate on how to fix our broken immigration system –  threatens to further erode public confidence in its government and makes it less likely we will ever reach consensus and pass credible border security and immigration reform.”

After reports earlier this year that the agency was working on these sorts of plans, Senate Republicans, led by Mr. Grassley, have sent letters to President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking for details.

In one letter, the senators warned the president against making an end-run around congressional authority to write immigration rules, and asked for Mr. Obama to promise that he would not use the rules to grant mass pardons.

Rosemary Jenks, government relations manager for NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates for stricter immigration limits, said the memo is “an outrageous usurpation of congressional authority. It is unconstitutional, and a slap in the face to the American people.”

She said that the memo could explain why the push for an immigration bill has faltered in Congress.

“This makes sense of the fact that [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and Obama are sitting back calmly content with not moving immigration reform this year – because they know Obama is trying to take care of it for them, without Democrats having to be tied down to a vote before the election,” she said.

On the other side of the political spectrum, immigrant rights groups have demanded that Mr. Obama halt deportations until he secures a broad legalization bill from Congress – legislation that supporters call “comprehensive immigration reform” because it would tackle enforcement, some aspects of legal immigration and the status of illegal immigrants at the same time.

Two senators earlier this year wrote asking the administration to use its powers to stop deporting students who might be eligible for the DREAM Act, which would allow illegal immigrant college students brought to the U.S. at a young age to gain legal status. The legislation has not been passed by Congress.

Mr. Obama has rejected halting deportations, but his administration has been more careful about whom it pursues.

According to new figures from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the administration has stepped up its efforts to deport illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, but removal of “non-criminal” illegal immigrants has slowed so far in fiscal 2010.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/29/memo-outlines-backdoor-amnesty-plan-for-obama/

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by  Connie Hair

The latest version of the CLEAR Act is slated for a floor vote in the House this week as Democrats look for ways to use the Gulf oil spill as a means to pass elements of their unpopular energy agenda.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stripped out authorization for an independent investigation into the Gulf disaster.

The Natural Resources Committee unanimously passed the amendment in committee markup July 14 offered by Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that would establish a bipartisan, independent, National Commission on Outer Continental Shelf Oil Spill Prevention.

Unlike the commission set up by President Obama — packed only with environmental activists and no petroleum engineers — the commission unanimously approved by the Natural Resources committee would be comprised of technical experts to study the actual events leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Not a single member of the committee voiced opposition at the bill’s markup.  The Senate has also approved an independent commission.

“To investigate what went wrong and keep it from happening again, the commission must include members who have expertise in petroleum engineering.  The President’s Commission has none,” Cassidy, the amendment’s author, told HUMAN EVENTS after the announcement.  “It defies common sense that this amendment passed unanimously in committee, only to be deleted in the Speaker’s office.”

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), top Republican on the Natural Resources Committee said the Obama’s administration’s commission was set up to protect the President.

“By deleting the bipartisan, independent oil spill commission that’s received bipartisan support in both House and Senate committees, Democrats have shown they are more interested in protecting the President than getting independent answers to what caused this tragic Gulf spill.  Some of the biggest failures that contributed to the Gulf disaster are the direct responsibility of the federal government and by deleting this bipartisan, independent commission, Democrats ensure that only the President’s hand-picked commission will be digging into any failures of his own Interior Department appointees.  There is widespread agreement that no member of the President’s commission possesses technical expertise in oil drilling, and several are on the record in opposition to offshore drilling and support a moratorium that will cost thousands of jobs,” Hastings said.

The bill also sets up myriad regulations and new standards and laws for drilling that have nothing to do with offshore drilling.

“Even more outrageous is this bill’s attempt to use the oil spill tragedy as leverage to enact totally unrelated policies and increase federal spending on unrelated programs by billions of dollars. What does a solar panel in Nevada, a wind turbine in Montana, uranium for nuclear power, or a ban on fish farming have to do with the Gulf spill? Nothing — but the spill is a good excuse to try and pass otherwise stalled or unpopular new laws,” Hastings said.

Another member of the committee, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), pointed out the hand-picked Obama commission is just getting underway with no findings or recommendations made.

“This ‘fix it’ bill is being rammed through without an accurate and full understanding of what actually went wrong. The Presidential Commission is just barely beginning its work, no investigations are yet concluded, and the failed [blowout preventer] still on the ocean floor, yet we are voting on a bill without knowing what went wrong,” Fleming said.

“Furthermore, at a time when Washington should be focused on creating jobs, this bill will do just the opposite by hampering future energy development and stifling job creation along the Gulf Coast,” Fleming added.  “This knee-jerk legislation — coupled with the Administration’s damaging Moratorium on offshore drilling — will worsen, not help, the situation.”

Yet the House is poised to vote this week on the CLEAR Act, likely Friday.

“This bill has less to do with preventing another spill than it does preventing domestic energy production,” Cassidy said.

UPDATE: House Republicans released bullets on the CLEAR Act this morning breaking down some of the measures included in the bill, including:

-     Imposes job-killing changes and higher taxes for onshore natural gas and oil production. It fundamentally changes leasing onshore by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which affects not just leasing for natural gas and oil, but also for renewable energy including wind and solar. Forest Service and BLM leasing are shoved into the three new agencies that are replacing the former Minerals Management Service (MMS).

-     Creates over $30 billion in new mandatory spending for two programs that have nothing to do with the oil spill (the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Historic Preservation Fund). In the version of the bill headed to the House floor, Democrats added brand new language that expressly allows this $30 billion to be earmarked by the Appropriations Committee.

-     Raises taxes by over $22 billion in ten years – with the taxes eventually climbing to nearly $3 billion per year. This is a direct tax on natural gas and oil that will raise energy prices for American families and businesses, hurt domestic jobs, and increase our dependence on foreign oil. This tax only applies to U.S. oil and gas production on federal leases – giving an advantage to foreign oil and hurting American energy jobs.

-     Requires the federal takeover of state authority to permit in state waters, which reverses sixty years of precedent. The mismanagement, corruption and oversight failures of the federal government are being used as justification to expand federal control by seizing management from the states.

-     Allows 10% of all offshore revenues – an amount possibly as high as $500 million per year – to be spent on a new fund controlled by the Interior Secretary to issue ocean research grants (ORCA fund). There is no requirement that the fund is used for the Gulf region or anything related to oil spills or offshore drilling. These funds can be earmarked.

More at the link.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38284

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By Muriel Kane

From the point of view of civil libertarians, the Obama administration has been an exercise in frustration, with every hopeful sign followed by failures to live up to its own promises.

The ACLU has just issued a report (pdf), titled “Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration,” which focuses on this pattern of inconsistency.

“The administration has displayed a decidedly mixed record,” explains ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romaro, “resulting, on a range of issues, in the very real danger that the Obama administration will institutionalize some of the most troublesome policies of the previous administration — in essence, creating a troubling ‘new normal.’”

As summarized in a press release announcing the report, “President Obama has made great strides in some areas, such as his auspicious first steps to categorically prohibit torture, outlaw the CIA’s use of secret overseas detention sites and release the Bush administration’s torture memos, but he has failed to eliminate some of the worst policies put in place by President Bush, such as military commissions and indefinite detention. He has also expanded the Bush administration’s ‘targeted killing’ program.”

The report is divided into seven sections covering transparency, torture and accountability, detention, targeted killing, military commissions, speech and surveillance, and watch lists. The most striking areas of the report, however, are those which focus not on torture or secret prisons but on less-publicized recent actions by the Obama administration.

The transparency section, for example, emphasizes that the program of “targeted killing” of suspected terrorists has been “shrouded in secrecy,” and that despite a FOIA request by the ACLU, “the CIA has refused even to confirm or deny whether it has records about the program.”

It also points out that rather than living up to Obama’s promise as a candidate that he would make sure whistleblowers got protection, “the administration has been prosecuting them.”

“It has charged Bradley Manning,” the report notes, “a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, for allegedly leaking a video showing the killing of two Reuters news staff and several other civilians by U.S. helicopter gunships in Iraq. (Reuters had spent nearly three years trying to obtain the video through FOIA; now that the video is in the public domain, it is clear that there was no basis for withholding it.)”

“We urge the administration to recommit itself to the ideals that the President himself invoked in his first days in office,” the report urges. “Our democracy cannot survive if crucial public policy decisions are made behind closed doors, implemented in secret, and never subjected to meaningful public oversight and debate. It cannot survive if the public does not know what policies have been adopted in its name.”

Another striking revelation appears in the section on surveillance: “Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has invested border agents with the authority to engage in suspicionless searches of Americans’ laptops and cell phones at the border; Americans who return home from abroad may now find themselves confronted with a border agent who, rather than welcoming them home, insists on copying their electronic records — including emails, address books, photos, and videos — before allowing them to enter the country. (Through FOIA, the ACLU has learned that in the last 20 months alone, border agents have used this power thousands of times.)”

And the report blasts the use of watch lists of suspected terrorists as “a disaster that too often implicates the rights of innocent persons while allowing true threats to proceed unabated.”

“Rather than reform the watch lists the Obama administration has expanded their use and resisted the introduction of minimal due process safeguards to prevent abuse and protect civil liberties,” the report charges. “The result is an unconstitutional scheme under which an individual’s right to travel and, in some cases, a citizen’s ability to return to the United States, is under the complete control of entirely unaccountable bureaucrats relying on secret evidence and using secret standards.”

“There can be no doubt that the Obama administration inherited a legal and moral morass, and that in important respects it has endeavored to restore the nation’s historic commitment to the rule of law,” the report concludes. “But if the Obama administration does not effect a fundamental break with the Bush administration’s policies on detention, accountability, and other issues, but instead creates a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, then it will have ratified, rather than rejected, the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever.”

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0729/aclu-report-obama-core-liberties/

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“Here’s a couple of bozo’s for ya…”

-F.F.

• By Noah Shachtman

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

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msnbc.com

The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.

However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.

The information was posted by Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, on the Internet site Pirate Bay.

Bowes used code to scan the 500 million Facebook profiles for information not hidden by privacy settings. The resulting file, which allows people to perform searches of various different types, has been downloaded by several thousand people.

This means that if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy settings on Facebook, Bowes and those who have the file will still be able to access information that was public when it was compiled.

Bowes’ actions also mean people who had set their privacy settings so their names did not appear in Facebook’s search system can now be found if they were friends with anyone whose name was searchable.

‘Scary privacy issue’
On his website, www.skullsecurity.org, Bowes said the results of his code were “spectacular,” giving him 171 million names of which were 100 million unique.

“As I thought more about it and talked to other people, I realized that this is a scary privacy issue. I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook,” he wrote.

“Facebook helpfully informs you that “[a]nyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings” — but that doesn’t help much anymore considering I already have them all (and you will too, when you download the torrent). Suckers!”

“Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details,” Bowes added. “If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops :)”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38463013/ns/technology_and_science-security/

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“Little smug fuck. Such a small little man he is…”

-F.F.

by Jason Ditz

Though one would have expected that the massive release of some 92,000 classified documents Sunday underscoring just how poorly the war is going would have changed some minds, the Obama Administration has gotten its way once again, with the House of Representatives approving the $59 billion emergency funding bill to keep the war going by a 308-114 vote. Some $33 billion of the bill was directly to pay for the Obama Administration’s December escalation of the Afghan War.

There was, at the very least, some vigorous debate in the House today, with Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D – OH) and Ron Paul (R – TX) at the center of the opposition to continuing the war. At the end of the day, however, all the new evidence about the disastrous war was ignored in favor of pumping tens of billions of dollars into the conflict.

The 308-114 vote was saw a majority from both parties supporting the war, with only 12 Republican and 102 Democrats opposing the conflict. A secondary vote calling for US troops to withdraw from Pakistan was voted down 38-372.

The House was forced into the direct vote last week after the Senate rejected a number of domestic spending amendments attached to the bill in a procedural effort by the House early in the month.

The Pentagon had been complaining about the delays in the funding and warned that it was running out of cash to continue the war. The “emergency” funds were intended to pay for the Obama Administration’s December escalation of the conflict.

The vote was a surprisingly major win for the Obama Administration, following evidence that a large number of Congressmen were already bristling at the expense of the war, and the dramatic release of the WikiLeaks War Logs just two days before the vote.

But pro-war Congressmen were quick to disregard the logs, insisting that the 92,000 documents detailing the war’s enormous shortcomings and massive civilian toll were “outdated” because they were from late 2009 and before. Though all of the evidence is that the situation has only worsened in the last seven months, it seems officials were able to shrug off the embarrassment with relatively little effort, and secure the funds to continue their ill-conceived conflict.

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/27/house-approves-more-afghan-war-funding/

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Lawyer Stewart Baker said the change would sometimes “mean giving a lot more information to the FBI.” (Courtesy Of The Department Of Homeland Security)

By Ellen Nakashima

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau’s authority. “It’ll be faster and easier to get the data,” said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. “And for some Internet providers, it’ll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL.”

Many Internet service providers have resisted the government’s demands to turn over electronic records, arguing that surveillance law as written does not allow them to do so, industry lawyers say. One senior administration government official, who would discuss the proposed change only on condition of anonymity, countered that “most” Internet or e-mail providers do turn over such data.

To critics, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. The proposal is “incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting,” said Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel.

The critics say its effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order. “You’re bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review,” said Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms.

Privacy concerns

The use of the national security letters to obtain personal data on Americans has prompted concern. The Justice Department issued 192,500 national security letters from 2003 to 2006, according to a 2008 inspector general report, which did not indicate how many were demands for Internet records. A 2007 IG report found numerous possible violations of FBI regulations, including the issuance of NSLs without having an approved investigation to justify the request. In two cases, the report found, agents used NSLs to request content information “not permitted by the [surveillance] statute.”

One issue with both the proposal and the current law is that the phrase “electronic communication transactional records” is not defined anywhere in statute. “Our biggest concern is that an expanded NSL power might be used to obtain Internet search queries and Web histories detailing every Web site visited and every file downloaded,” said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued AT&T for assisting the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

He said he does not object to the government obtaining access to electronic records, provided it has a judge’s approval.

Senior administration officials said the proposal was prompted by a desire to overcome concerns and resistance from Internet and other companies that the existing statute did not allow them to provide such data without a court-approved order. “The statute as written causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation,” Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said. “This clarification will not allow the government to obtain or collect new categories of information, but it seeks to clarify what Congress intended when the statute was amended in 1993.”

The administration has asked Congress to amend the statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, in the fiscal year that begins in October.

But the next clause specifies only four categories of basic subscriber data that the FBI may seek: name, address, length of service and toll billing records. There is no reference to electronic communication transactional records.

Same as phone records?

The officials said the transactional information at issue, which does not include Internet search queries, is the functional equivalent of telephone toll billing records, which the FBI can obtain without court authorization. Learning the e-mail addresses to which an Internet user sends messages, they said, is no different than obtaining a list of numbers called by a telephone user.

Obtaining such records with an NSL, as opposed to a court order, “allows us to intercede in plots earlier than we would if our hands were tied and we were unable to get this data in a way that was quick and efficient,” the senior administration official said.

But the value of such data is the reason a court should approve its disclosure, said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s much more sensitive than the other information, like name, address and telephone number, that the FBI gets with national security letters,” he said. “It shows associational information protected by the First Amendment and is much less public than things like where you live.”

A Nov. 5, 2008, opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose opinions are binding on the executive branch, made clear that the four categories of basic subscriber information the FBI may obtain with an NSL were “exhaustive.”

This opinion, said Sussmann, the former Clinton administration lawyer, caused many companies to reevaluate the scope of what could be provided in response to an NSL. “The OLC opinion removed the ambiguity,” he said. “Providers now are limited to the four corners of what the opinion says they can give out. Those who give more do so at their own risk.”

Marc Zwillinger, an attorney for Internet companies, said some providers are not giving the FBI more than the four categories specified. He added that with the rise of social networking, the government’s move could open a significant amount of Internet activity to government surveillance without judicial authorization. “A Facebook friend request — is that like a phone call or an e-mail? Is that something they would sweep in under an NSL? They certainly aren’t getting that now.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806141.html

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Dr. Paul highlights how many people thought this administration would shrink our foreign wars. Instead, drone attacks have doubled, civilian casualties are high, we sent $7.5 billion in “aid” to Pakistan with much of the money going to the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) who, it turns out, have been funding the Taliban. Dr. Paul states “we slip into wars” by slowly increasing the amount of our involvement…

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By John Tate

The so-called DISCLOSE Act currently under consideration in the Senate is an affront to personal liberties protected under the First and Ninth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. This knee-jerk reaction to Citizens United v. FEC constitutes a clear and present danger not only to the expressly stated freedom of speech listed in the First Amendment , but to the reasonable expectation of privacy and freedom of association American citizens have held throughout this country’s proud history.

Thousands of non-profits and corporations are facing costly and burdensome administrative regulations from this legislation. This bill would force organizations to adopt needless layers of bureaucracy in order to comply with new FEC filing requirements. That will exponentially increase the operating costs for groups that otherwise have low overhead. Additionally, the forced “disclosure” in the “stand by your ad” requirement would consume 15 seconds or more of a 30-second TV spot. This requirement would cut down an organization’s free speech—not to mention donors’ free speech—by only allowing a group to talk about an issue for less than half of the valuable airtime they are paying for. Short, 15-second ads might have to be eliminated altogether.

The ambiguous nature of this legislation’s language attempts to intimidate businesses and non-profits into not running any ads this November, for fear that they might somehow be violating federal election law by doing nothing more than talking about the issues. This bill blurs the distinction between express advocacy for a specific candidate and mere issue advocacy. Expressing support for an issue is not the same thing as expressly endorsing a candidate. This legislation does not make a distinction between the two, and, as a result, organizations running ads this November could face expensive lawsuits after the fact for allegedly violating some unwritten enforcement provision.

We call this legislation the Establishment Protection Act because that is exactly what it is intended to do. Politicians will do anything they can to avoid being held accountable to their constituents for their actions during the legislative season. Any organization that challenges the status quo will come under greater scrutiny than those that endorse the status quo—and that will make donors to such groups targets for harassment and intimidation. Donors will be less likely to give money to “controversial” issue advocates, resulting in a chilling of free speech. Fear and intimidation are simply incompatible with a free society and intolerable.

One of the main arguments made for this legislation during House debate was the claim that this bill would decrease the amount of money spent on elections. That is an outright falsehood. Nothing in this act would decrease the amount of money it costs to run for public office; rather, by restricting third-party fundraising and advertising it actually increases the amount a candidate would need to raise, thus again favoring incumbents who have a natural fundraising edge over challengers.

Senators Schumer, Feingold, and Leahy claim on their site: “When you buy toothpaste now, the money you spend can be used directly for television ads attacking people that you believe in without you even knowing.” The senators provide no evidence to back up these claims; it appears they are quite paranoid about Colgate and Crest having a political axe to grind against them.

In today’s society, where congressional representation affords us one representative for roughly every 700,000 people, the only way for “We the People” to have a voice is by banding together under the umbrella of issue-advocacy organizations. For many individuals in America, the only way to give voice to their views is through contributing to advocacy organizations. By stifling the free speech of these organizations, Congress is stifling the free speech of the individual.

What part of “Congress shall make no law… ” do they not get?

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1034

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By Ron Paul

I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States, and compromising our national security. Spending more and adding more programs and initiatives does not improve things for us; it makes them much much worse. This applies to more than just the military budget.

Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculation this is about 11,000 intelligence workers per al Qaeda member in Afghanistan. This also begs the question — if close to 1 million people are authorized to know top secrets, how closely guarded are these secrets?

They also found that since the September 11 attacks, some 17 million square feet of building space has been built or is being built to accommodate the 250 percent expansion of intelligence organizations. Intelligence work is now done by some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private contracting companies in about 10,000 locations in the United States.

The former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has asserted that US intelligence now has the authority to target American citizens for assassination without charge or trial. How many of these resources are being devoted to spying on American citizens for nefarious reasons at home rather than targeting foreign enemies abroad?

It has been pointed out how much information we had about the impending attacks on 9/11, but because of layers upon layers of bureaucratic inefficiencies, our intelligence community was unable to act meaningfully on that information. Obviously we needed drastic change. But it was pretty clear that we did not need more bureaucracy, more confusion, more expenditures and more government.

It is even claimed by some leaders that the intelligence community has grown this way by design; that it is advantageous to have more than one set of eyes looking at the same information. With this logic, is there any number of intelligence employees at which we achieve diminishing returns? Can there ever be too many cooks in the kitchen, in their view?

Are there any problems at all that the government wouldn’t attempt to solve by throwing more money at them? Even now, the government is trying to solve our economic problems related to too much government spending and debt, with more government spending and debt.

The problem with our intelligence community before 9/11 was not an inability to collect information. Therefore, the post-September 11 build-up of the surveillance state does nothing to enhance safety. Instead what Americans have gotten in return for the billions of tax dollars spent on security is a surveillance state that reads our e-mails, wiretaps us without warrants, and strip searches grandmothers at airports. This is yet another instance in which Americans would be safer, richer and freer if our government would simply look to the Constitution and respect the boundaries it has set.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1032

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“Of course not.”

-F.F.

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

July 27, 2010

A U.S. audit has found that the Defense Department can’t properly account for how it spent about 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money earmarked for rebuilding the war-ravaged country.

The U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction report released Tuesday said there was shoddy record keeping and a lack of oversight of the $8.7 billion. The Pentagon cannot account at all for $2.6 billion spent between 2004 and 2007.

The money comes from the Development Fund for Iraq, set up in 2004 by the U.N. Security Council and made up of oil revenues, Iraqi assets frozen before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and surplus funds from the Saddam Hussein-era, oil-for-food program.

The audit highlights the continued problems over how the U.S. is handling Iraqi funds.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128793151#commentBlock

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By Stephen C. Webster

On its face, the DISCLOSE Act sounds like a good idea: by forcing big political advertisers to name the group behind their message, a greater level of transparency becomes possible. But dig a bit deeper into the particulars of the legislation and, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, red flags aplenty appear.

The Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act is a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which lifted restrictions on corporate funding of campaign advertising. In the wake of the court’s action, President Obama cautioned that it could herald “a potential corporate takeover of our elections” and urged Democrats to prepare new campaign finance legislation.

The ruling meant that corporations foreign and domestic would be allowed to run political television advertisements ahead of national and local elections without telling voters who was paying for them, Obama said. The purpose of the DISCLOSE Act is to require groups to declare who paid for political advertising, including the naming of donors who’ve given as little as $600, according to the ACLU.

“Demanding disclosure for such a small amount of money violates Americans’ right to privacy, and will have a chilling effect on free speech in our elections,” the rights group declared in a July 1 post. “Regulation like this can become a serious problem for supporters of controversial issues where anonymity is not just a matter of preference or convenience. The harassment and attacks on members of the civil rights movement show that anonymity can in fact be a matter personal safety.”

They add that the DISCLOSE Act contains exceptions for large, mainstream groups with more than 500,000 members, which would not have to provide some details when buying political advertising. The ACLU contends such exceptions pose a threat to smaller, more controversial groups, which may see their right to political speech run over by the disclosure requirements.

“The ACLU supports the disclosure of large contributions to candidates as long as it does not have a chilling effect on political participation, but the DISCLOSE Act would inflict unnecessary damage to free speech rights and does not include the proper safeguards to protect Americans’ privacy,” said ACLU legislative and policy attorney Michael Macleod-Ball, in a media advisory. “The bill would severely impact donor anonymity, especially those donors who give to smaller and more controversial organizations.”

Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the bill. Most in the GOP credit the Citizens United decision as a triumph of free speech and not, as the ACLU and other groups have said, an actual threat to the integrity of U.S. elections.

“You’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections would not be a partisan issue, but of course this is Washington in 2010,” Obama said on Monday, slamming Republican opposition and urging Senate Democrats to pass the bill.

“This shouldn’t be a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” the president argued in early May. “This is an issue that goes to whether or not we will have a government that works for ordinary Americans – a government of, by, and for the people.”

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0726/aclu-bill-aimed-toppling-citizens-united-decision-compromise-free-speech/

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These smart cards are the actual keys to the Internet. There are seven of them and they hold the power to restarting the world wide web “in the event of a catastrophic event.”

The basic idea is that in the event of an Internet catastrophe, the DNSSEC (domain name system security) could be damaged or compromised and we’d be left without a way to verify if a URL is pointing to the correct website. That’s when the holders of these smart cards would be called into action:

A minimum of five of the seven keyholders – one each from Britain, the U.S., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, and the Czech Republic – would have to converge at a U.S. base with their keys to restart the system and connect everything once again.

A minimum of five people is needed because each of the smart cards contains only a fraction of the recovery key necessary to set things right again. This means that no single person will hold all the power to resetting our little cyber world.

http://gizmodo.com/5597964/seven-people-have-been-entrusted-with-the-keys-to-the-internet

Related Article:

“Bath entrepreneur ‘holds the key’ to internet security”

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“This is where you live folks… scientific/eugenic dictatorship…”

-F.F.

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Chuck Baldwin

Among the limited duties of the US Government enumerated in the federal Constitution is Article. IV. Section. 4. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” However, for several decades now, the federal government in Washington, D.C., has shown great ambition and propensity to engage in activities to which it was never authorized, and to ignore those responsibilities with which it is specifically charged. The responsibility of the federal government to protect each State against invasion is a classic example of the latter.

Can anyone deny that the states on the US southern border (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) are being invaded by an ongoing onslaught of illegal aliens (many of whom are violent and dangerous criminals)? Somewhere between 12 and 30 million illegals now reside in the US. The entire country is feeling the effects of this invasion, but the Border States are literally under siege. And not only does the federal government do nothing to protect the states against this invasion, it actively wars against states such as Arizona when they attempt to protect themselves. Yes, I am saying it: the Washington, D.C., lawsuit against the State of Arizona’s immigration laws should be regarded as an act of war against the State of Arizona in particular, and against the states general in principle.

Please consider what Arizona and the other Border States are dealing with. According to published reports:

*In Los Angeles, 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide in the first half of 2004 (which totaled 1,200 to 1,500) targeted illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) were for illegal aliens.

*Some private reports state that 83% of warrants for murder in Phoenix and 86% of warrants for murder in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are for illegal aliens. These reports cannot be verified, of course, because the feds discourage law enforcement agencies from releasing such statistics.

*At any given time, up to 75% of those on the most wanted list in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Albuquerque are illegal aliens.

*23% of all inmates in LA County detention centers are “deportable.”

*LA police estimate that violent gangs, such as MS-13 and 18th Street Gang, are “overwhelmingly” composed of illegal aliens.

To read one very enlightening testimony given before Congress by an expert on illegal immigration containing some of the above information (and much more), go here:

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mac_donald04-13-05.htm

In addition, the Pew Hispanic Center (an organization friendly to all things Hispanic) reports that by 2007, “nearly one-quarter (24%) of all federal convictions” involve illegal aliens. And “among those sentenced for immigration offenses in 2007, 80% were Hispanic.” The PHC went on to report that illegal Hispanics “represented 29% of all federal offenders.”

See the report at:

http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=104

Remember, too, that illegal aliens murder (on average) 12 American citizens EVERY DAY in the United States. That means illegals murder more Americans EVERY YEAR than in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan COMBINED, TO DATE. Plus, illegal aliens who drive drunk kill an additional 13 Americans EVERY DAY.

See the following report:

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53103

At this point, I will not again chronicle the financial costs and job losses exacted upon the American taxpayers by these invading illegals, but I encourage you to read a previous column I wrote on this subject. See it here:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?p=1490

Plus, my web site contains an exhaustive page dealing with the problems and costs of the ongoing invasion by illegal aliens against this country. See it at:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?page_id=123

Add to the above the blatant rhetoric and public statements of activists within radical Hispanic revolutionary groups such as La Raza that incessantly call for the “reconquista” of the southwestern United States, and one can easily discern that the invasion by (mostly) Mexicans in the US is much more than “poor people trying to find a better life.” There is some of that going on, of course, but the invasion also includes violent criminal gang members, drug dealers, human traffickers, rogue government troops, and covert provocateurs who are attempting to destabilize US cities and states, promote crime and violence, disrupt honest elections, and even facilitate revolution against the American citizenry.

And what does the Barack Obama administration do? Instead of obeying the Constitution and helping to protect the State of Arizona (and the other Border States), it sues the State of Arizona for trying to protect itself. Again, by this action, has not Washington, D.C., declared war against the State of Arizona (and, by implication, the other 49 independent, sovereign states)?

Please understand: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in the Arizona legislature are not only defending their State, they are working to protect every State in the Union. Very obviously, the line is being drawn in the sand against a federal leviathan that increasingly shows blatant disregard for not only its own responsibilities and duties, but for the rights and freedoms of the individual sovereign states, and for the American citizenry as a whole.

And for those misguided Christians and pastors out there who are prone to defend and facilitate this invasion of illegal aliens in the name of Christian compassion, I would like to remind them of the words of our Lord, who said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” (John 10:1 KJV) Thus, our Savior plainly categorizes illegal aliens (or anyone who refuses to enter through a door–or across a border–honestly) as thieves and robbers. Unfortunately, many are also rapists, murderers, violent drug dealers, and slave merchants.

If Barack Obama had even a smidgen of honesty and integrity, instead of attacking the people of the State of Arizona for simply trying to defend themselves against a very real and dangerous foreign invasion, he would take seriously his responsibility to help protect them against this invasion, which Article IV. Section. 4. of the US Constitution clearly requires him to do.

*If you appreciate this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may now be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/?page_id=19

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By Sgt. Richard Sherba, 3rd ACR Public Affairs

Soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment are preparing to deploy to Iraq this summer. The months and days leading up to their impending deployment have been full of preparation and training for the upcoming mission. The regiment returned from its last deployment to Iraq in February 2009. Since then, the environment in Iraq has changed. To address those changes, the Brave Rifles recently teamed up with the Austin Police Department to train.

“Third ACR leadership came and approached us, and asked if there was any way we could possibly assist, like we did back in ‘07, in helping prepare the Soldiers in a law enforcement manner for their next deployment,” said Lt. Steve Deaton of the Austin Police Department’s Special Operations unit.

“This is a unique opportunity for the squadron and the regiment, at large, to have the Austin Police let us come down to the academy and have them come to Fort Hood,” Maj. Thomas McNew, Tiger Squadron, 3rd ACR, said. “It helps us start down the road of partnering with police forces not unlike we will be doing in theatre with the Iraqis.”

McNew said the training is putting a different perspective on the 3rd ACR’s training of Soldiers, and is helping the regiment build a cadre of Soldiers that can go over to Iraq and train the Iraqi police. The two-week training was broken into two parts, the first week focusing on police fundamentals and the second week involving tactical training.

During the first week of training the APD was accompanied by a municipal judge and two attorneys from the Austin City Prosecutors’ Office. Some of the topics covered during the first week of training ranged from police ethics, crime scene investigation, case and courtroom preparation and collection of physical evidence.

During the second week the Soldiers received tactical training covering a broad range of topics including dynamic entry, firearms, vehicle assault, raid planning and improvised explosive device recognition. That week was also an opportunity for the regiment to learn more techniques on minimizing collateral damage during these dynamic operations.

“With the military mindset we’re about clearing each room and going on. The police mindset it’s more of a flowing through the entire structure and try and hit it as hard and as fast as you can,” Sgt. Scott Marvick, Tiger Squadron, said. “We’re learning some tactics that we have gone through before but we’re also getting a different side of it from the police department. We can learn things from them and take it back and integrate it into things we already know.”

Deaton, who supervises a SWAT team, bomb squad and an intelligence unit for APD, recently returned from Iraq.

“I had a unique perspective because I recently have gone to Iraq to evaluate law enforcement over there, and I was lucky enough to be able to volunteer and assist with the 3rd ACR training,” Deaton said. “We’re showing the Soldiers urban law enforcement so that they can go and train the Iraqi police. The Army obviously doesn’t need any instructions from us on how to shoot and engage in combat, because they are the best in the world at doing that. But having to go in with a softer approach and more of a law enforcement type of approach, now that is maybe something we can show them.”

Reflecting on the training, Deaton added, “The training has been symbiotic; we’ve (APD) probably learned more than what we’ve taught. To a man, all of these 3rd ACR Soldiers have been motivated, energetic and bright.”

http://www.forthoodsentinel.com/story.php?id=3327

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The administration “praised” New York Times reporters for their handling of leaked Afghan war material

BY ALEX PAREENE

The White House was very upset with WikiLeaks for its decision to publish thousands of pages of classified reports and documents describing our mission in Afghanistan. But according to Yahoo’s Michael Calderone, it was very pleased with how the New York Times dealt with its semi-exclusive access to the documents.

Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet took reporters Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt to the White House last week to brief the administration on what they planned on publishing. And they all got gold stars.

“I did in fact go the White House and lay out for them what we had,” Baquet said. “We did it to give them the opportunity to comment and react. They did. They also praised us for the way we handled it, for giving them a chance to discuss it, and for handling the information with care. And for being responsible.”

The Times redacted some information in the name of “national security” and protecting the safety of individual soldiers, but the White House doesn’t seem to have told the Times that publishing stories based on these documents would in any real way harm our troops.

So, uh … why was all of this information classified and top secret? If it’s old news, and it just confirms what “everyone” already knows, what was the rationale for keeping it classified and calling WikiLeaks all sorts of mean names for publishing it?

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/07/26/times_wikileaks_white_house_meeting

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David Brooks

When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.

During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.

In the second part of the period, Democrats were in control. They augmented the national security bureaucracy but spent the bulk of their energies expanding bureaucracies in domestic spheres.

First, they passed a health care law. This law created 183 new agencies, commissions, panels and other bodies, according to an analysis by Robert Moffit of the Heritage Foundation. These include things like the Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement Program, an Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and a Cures Acceleration Network Review Board.

The purpose of the new apparatus was simple: to give government experts the power to analyze and rationalize the nation’s health care system. A team of experts on the newly created Independent Medicare Advisory Council was ordered to review and streamline Medicare. A team of experts within the Office of Personnel Management was directed to help set standards for insurance companies in the health care exchanges. Teams of experts serving on comparative effectiveness boards were told to survey data and determine which medical treatments work best and most efficiently.

Democrats also passed a financial reform law. The law that originally created the Federal Reserve was a mere 31 pages. The Sarbanes-Oxley banking reform act, passed in 2002, was only 66 pages. But the 2010 financial reform law was 2,319 pages, an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus. As Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the financial reform law is seven times longer than the last five pieces of banking legislation combined.

The law calls upon government experts to make some heroic judgments. For example, it calls upon regulators to break up banks that might be about to pose a risk to the country’s economy. That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.

This progressive era amounts to a high-stakes test. If the country remains safe and the health care and financial reforms work, then we will have witnessed a life-altering event. We’ll have received powerful evidence that central regulations can successfully organize fast-moving information-age societies.

If the reforms fail, then the popular backlash will be ferocious. Large sectors of the population will feel as if they were subjected to a doomed experiment they did not consent to. They will feel as if their country has been hijacked by a self-serving professional class mostly interested in providing for themselves.

If that backlash gains strength, well, what’s the 21st-century version of the guillotine?

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.

http://www.bendbulletin.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20100725%2FNEWS0107%2F7250306%2F1032&nav_category

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By MARK MAZZETTI, JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and ANDREW W. LEHREN

A trove of military documents made public on Sunday by an organization called WikiLeaks reflects deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan’s military spy service has for years guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants.

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.

Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.

But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.

While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.

Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan’s militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with Al Qaeda is difficult.

The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan’s unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.

The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials, looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaeda havens. Administration officials also want to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan on their side to safeguard NATOsupplies flowing on routes that cross Pakistan to Afghanistan.

This month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in one of the frequent visits by American officials to Islamabad, announced $500 million in assistance and called the United States and Pakistan “partners joined in common cause.”

The reports suggest, however, that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game — appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.

Behind the scenes, both Bush and Obama administration officials as well as top American commanders have confronted top Pakistani military officers with accusations of ISI complicity in attacks in Afghanistan, and even presented top Pakistani officials with lists of ISI and military operatives believed to be working with militants.

Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that Pakistan had been an important ally in the battle against militant groups, and that Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officials had worked alongside the United States to capture or kill Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

Still, he said that the “status quo is not acceptable,” and that the havens for militants in Pakistan “pose an intolerable threat” that Pakistan must do more to address.

“The Pakistani government — and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services — must continue their strategic shift against violent extremist groups within their borders,” he said. American military support to Pakistan would continue, he said.

Several Congressional officials said that despite repeated requests over the years for information about Pakistani support for militant groups, they usually receive vague and inconclusive briefings from the Pentagon and C.I.A.

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By Dawn Kopecki and Catherine Dodge

July 20 (Bloomberg) — U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $23.7 trillion to bolster the economy and bail out financial companies, said Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The Treasury’s $700 billion bank-investment program represents a fraction of all federal support to resuscitate the U.S. financial system, including $6.8 trillion in aid offered by the Federal Reserve, Barofsky said in a report released today.

“TARP has evolved into a program of unprecedented scope, scale and complexity,” Barofsky said in testimony prepared for a hearing tomorrow before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said the U.S. has spent less than $2 trillion so far and that Barofsky’s estimates are flawed because they don’t take into account assets that back those programs or fees charged to recoup some costs shouldered by taxpayers.

“These estimates of potential exposures do not provide a useful framework for evaluating the potential cost of these programs,” Williams said. “This estimate includes programs at their hypothetical maximum size, and it was never likely that the programs would be maxed out at the same time.”

Barofsky’s estimates include $2.3 trillion in programs offered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., $7.4 trillion in TARP and other aid from the Treasury and $7.2 trillion in federal money for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, credit unions, Veterans Affairs and other federal programs.

Treasury’s Comment

Williams said the programs include escalating fee structures designed to make them “increasingly unattractive as financial markets normalize.” Dependence on these federal programs has begun to decline, as shown by $70 billion in TARP capital investments that has already been repaid, Williams said.

Barofsky offered criticism in a separate quarterly report of Treasury’s implementation of TARP, saying the department has “repeatedly failed to adopt recommendations” needed to provide transparency and fulfill the administration’s goal to implement TARP “with the highest degree of accountability.”

As a result, taxpayers don’t know how TARP recipients are using the money or the value of the investments, he said in the report.

‘Falling Short’

“This administration promised an ‘unprecedented level’ of accountability and oversight, but as this report reveals, they are falling far short of that promise,” Representative Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the oversight committee, said in a statement. “The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.”

The Treasury has spent $441 billion of TARP funds so far and has allocated $202.1 billion more for other spending, according to Barofsky. In the nine months since Congress authorized TARP, Treasury has created 12 programs involving funds that may reach almost $3 trillion, he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner should press banks for more information on how they use the more than $200 billion the government has pumped into U.S. financial institutions, Barofsky said in a separate report.

The inspector general surveyed 360 banks that have received TARP capital, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. The responses, which the inspector general said it didn’t verify independently, showed that 83 percent of banks used TARP money for lending, while 43 percent used funds to add to their capital cushion and 31 percent made new investments.

Barofsky said the TARP inspector general’s office has 35 ongoing criminal and civil investigations that include suspected accounting, securities and mortgage fraud; insider trading; and tax investigations related to the abuse of TARP programs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY0tX8UysIaM

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By Bob Unruh

One gun isn’t enough.

That was what Linda Smith (a pseudonym) was thinking after two thugs broke into herOklahoma apartment. One was holding a weapon (she initially thought it was a knife but it turned out to be a screwdriver) at her throat, and the other was pacing back and forth while holding her purse and demanding her money and valuables. She screamed, and was told if she screamed again, she’d be dead.

She was doing as police recommend in robberies – comply with a robber’s demands. But her Lady Smith & Wesson .38 special, which she carries by permit, was hidden in her purse – and the purse was being held by one of the attackers.

Then the situation, suddenly, got much, much worse: One of the robbers demanded that she take off her clothes.

“Come on, what are you waiting for,” he told her as he started to yank on her sweatpants, trying to take them off.

Smith pleaded for her safety and distracted the attackers by telling them she would get her money, which was “in my purse.”

The robbers inexplicably allowed her to drop to her knees and crawl across the floor to her purse, which the second attacker had dropped.

She reached inside, and the first shot was clear of the muzzle and into the torso of one of the attackers before she even pulled the weapon clear of the purse. Four more shots followed shortly and, in the end, one of the attackers was dead and the second was hospitalized facing a murder rap for having participated in a felony in which someone died.

Smith, in an exclusive interview with WND, explained she comes from a family that believes in self-reliance and courage.

“I choose to carry a concealed firearm, because even though I am immensely grateful for the protection from our police departments, I realize they’re not God, so they can’t be everywhere at once.

“Deadly situations can happen in the blink of an eye,” she said. “If you are not proactive … you are a vulnerable target.”

Smith, an Endowment member of the National Rifle Association, said she’s carried a gun for almost half a decade, but never dreamed she’d be in a situation where she’d have to use it to defend her life. But she’s glad the training she’s had over the years kicked in at a time when it saved her from injury, or possibly much worse.

“Ironically, I thought I was really prepared,” she told WND. “I remember that night and saw my life flash before my eyes. Darreon Carter, the man who was attempting to rape me, had me pinned down to my couch, with a knife at my throat. I knew I didn’t have access to my gun. I thought to myself, I really need to have a firearm for my home, and directly on my person.”

Rachel Parsons, an official for the NRA, said, while Smith’s case is among the more dramatic, there are similar scenarios that have been reported. But even more, there are many crimes that simply are not carried out because of the possibility that a “victim” is fully armed, she said.

“We see every day in newspapers across this country times when law-abiding people are able to protect themselves because they have concealed-carry permits,” she said.

“Numerous studies [show] having a concealed-carry permit, having a firearm and the ability to use one, has thwarted crime without the firearm ever having been fired,” she said.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

All the gun laws, regulations, rules, restrictions, plans and advisories in the world are not going to change the fact that criminals have guns, she pointed out.

“By definition, criminals break the law. All of these regulations do absolutely nothing [to stop] criminals,” she said.

Jason Willingham, a public-information officer with the Tulsa Police Department,told WND that officers encourage people to cooperate with robbers if they find themselves in the situation of losing a wallet or cash.

“However, if it’s a situation where a rape is going to take place, or a kidnapping, we definitely encourage people to fight,” he said. “You do not want to go willing. Scream. Make people wonder what’s going on.”

“Obviously, in this situation she did exactly … the right thing,” he said.

While the prosecutor had not yet made a formal decision regarding her case, Willingham told WND that Oklahoma not only has a “make my day” law allowing residents to use deadly force inside their homes, but also a “stand your ground” law allowing force to be used against an attack outside the home.

He said the surviving attacker probably will face a murder charge under a state law allowing that charge when a person embarks on a felony and someone dies.

He said the two perpetrators are “well-known” to the Tulsa police “for criminal activities.”

He said he had reviewed the 911 tapes made of Smith’s call to police after the shooting.

“It’s amazing. She’s calm and collected. You always wonder what would happen in such asituation,” he said.

According to records, the attack happened early on the morning of July 15, and one of the intruders, Darreon Carter, 18, died hours later in a hospital in Tulsa. The other, Daniel Holman, 23, was facing charges while still in critical condition.

Capt. Travis Yates of the Tulsa Police Department told the Tulsa newspaper it seemed to be an “opportunity crime.”

“Somebody saw a woman walking up to an apartment, and they decided to commit a crime, and here we are,” he said.

The attack developed only about 24 hours after another home invasion was reported in the area – and that one left a resident dead. Willingham, however, told WND it was unrelated to the Smith ordeal.

On the Tulsa World forum page, Smith came in for virtually unchallenged praise:

• “The scumbags got what they deserved and I hope it is a lesson for the rest of them out there.”
• “God bless this shooter.”
• “Pay attention to this one. This is what is going to have to start happening to let all these no good punks [know] that you won’t stand for it and are taking your freedom back. … You come to take whats [sic] mine ‘I will shoot you.’”
• “KEEP SHOOTING!!!”
• “Buy a gun. Learn how to use it. Kill intruders. Any questions?”
• “A perfect example of why we need the concealed carry! this is my kind of woman! fight crime! shoot back!”
• “Lock and load people, it’s a different world out there.”
• “I love the great equalizer.”
• “This story makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

Smith told WND she had come into her apartment after a late-night run for errands – she keeps unusual hours because of shift work at a hospital. She had one more item to fetch from outside but never got the chance because, within 20 seconds of her entering, the suspects followed.

She recalled with clarity the five shots, including those in which she picked out the attackers even though her boyfriend, black like the attackers, was struggling with them. He had been visiting and came in from the next room after the shots rang out.

He reported to Smith later that one of the attackers actually had a headlock on him when she fired, knocking the assailant off of him.

He had jumped into Smith’s defense as both attackers were beating Smith’s face and head, trying to knock her out to break her “death grip” on the weapon.

“We need to stand up and we don’t have to be victims,” Smith told WND. “We don’t have to passively stand by and allow criminals to overtake us.”

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=181341

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“2 Whores.”

-F.F.

James Delingpole

Last week’s meeting of 700+ scientists, policymakers, and concerned citizens in Chicago to discuss the science and economics of global warming at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change was a huge success as measured by the intent of its sponsors: to establish once and for all that the climate realist position is increasingly the accepted conclusion among thinking people in the three categories noted above. That position is this: manmade global warming is not a crisis.

Yes, all parties at the conference pretty much agreed that there was a good deal of warming in the 1980s and 1990s, and that the trend stopped and reversed in the current decade. Global temperatures have been falling in recent years, even though the weather stations and other data chosen to represent the official temperature records are in fact skewed to show higher and more-rising temperatures than are actually occurring.

The predictions of a steady, horrifying increase in temperatures have proven false, which should have been a great embarrassment to the climate alarmists who made the claims and set them as the basis for their extravagant power grabs such as emissions limits and cap and trade.

Yet the embarrassment has not been forthcoming from those proven to be wrong, because they are shameless.

One speaker at the conference, whom I was privileged to see, was James Delingpole, a non-scientist and a writer (a novelist, even!), who wowed the crowd with great common sense and a powerful insight into what’s really been behind the global warming scare all along. As Delingpole wrote in the Spectator after conference:

[T]he Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is not about science and never was. As Climategate proved (but as some of us suspected long before), AGW is the invention of a cabal of activists, all working towards more or less the same ecofascist agenda: Mother Gaia is suffering; it’s mostly our fault; the only way to atone for our sins is to destroy Western industrial civilisation and shackle ourselves with a form of One World government run by ‘experts’ and bureaucrats over whom we have no democratic control. It is a battle against a tyranny every bit as great as we faced in the second world war or the Cold War. All what’s different about this enemy is that instead of jackboots it wears long hair, a warm, caring smile and drives a VW Combi with an ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ sticker.

That’s something we climate realists have known all along and had been trying in vain to convince people of for some years: that global warming never was about saving the planet but always just a pretext for progressive elitists to take ever-greater control over your life and mine.

In fact, Delingpole notes, even if global warming were to occur, it would be a good thing. Warm periods have tended to coincide with human thriving, and cold periods are associated with war, famine, and economic stagnation. And the sad fact is that we are far more likely to be heading toward uncomfortable cold than comfortable warmth, Delingpole notes:

[W]hile there has been no global warming since 1998, the general view among those who really know is that we could now be entering a lengthy period — 20 or 30 years (most of the rest of your and my life buggered) — of global cooling.

All the auguries are there. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which works in roughly 30-year cycles, has now begun its cooling phase (such as we last had in the chilly years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s). We’re about to enter a La Niña phase in the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, which means at the very least we’re due for a winter every bit as harsh as the most recent one. Worse still, low sunspot activity suggests we might be entering a solar minimum period, such as the Maunder Minimum (1645 to 1715) when those ice fairs were held on the Thames, or the Dalton Minimum (1790 to 1830) which gave us both Napoleon’s frozen retreat from Moscow and the terrible ‘Year Without a Summer’ (1816). Periods of cooling such as this are much more greatly to be feared, of course, than periods of warming — which historically have coincided with abundance, relative peacefulness, economic growth and cultural flourishing.

Or, if you want to be really depressed, there’s always the possibility that we’re on the brink of another ice age. Warm ‘interglacial’ periods such as the one we’re in now last about 10,000 years. And we’re already past the 10,000th year.

And it isn’t hysterical alarmists saying this stuff. Climate realists don’t really do hysterical alarmism.

Delingpole is right: the attendees at the conference were remarkably good-natured and cheerful, and the discussion was strong on real science and economics and without any interesting infighting.

As was noted more than once at the conference, organizer James Taylor of The Heartland Institute invited countless well-known global warming alarmists to attend, and only two chose to do so. And none of the prominent ones deigned to step forward for a real discussion of the science and economic facts behind the matter.

That’s been the attitude of the alarmists from the start: to claim “the science is settled” and insist that we all pay no attention to the repulsively obese ex-vice president behind the curtain and move on to changing our lifestyles to suit their vile fancies regarding the limits that should be placed on the energy and other resource consumption of ordinary people—while alarmists such as Al Gore notoriously live in a manner King Midas would have been ashamed to contemplate.

The fact is, the big money—including the corporate money, despite hysterical claims to the contrary—is all on the alarmist side. Climate change realists are continually being pushed out of jobs and their scientific papers rejected simply because they dare to question the phony consensus of big-government elitists. As Delingpole notes:

It’s no wonder that the bit of my speech that got the biggest laugh was when I asked: ‘How many of you here are in the pay of Big Oil?’ No hands were raised. ‘And how many of you would like to be in the pay of Big Oil?’ Up shot 150 arms. ‘Guess we picked the wrong side of the debate to be on,’ I said, hardly needing to explain that companies like Shell and BP pump far, far more money into eco-nonsense like carbon trading and green posturing than they do into sceptical science.

That’s the problem with being an Evil Climate Change Denier. The tide is turning in our favour. History will vindicate us. But until then the only perks of the job are the joy of one another’s company and the smug satisfaction of knowing that one day we’ll be able to look at the wreckage of disasters like cap and trade, David Cameron’s wind farms and the IPCC’s junk science predictions and say: ‘I told you so.’

There is one thing and one thing only behind the global warming scare, and it is not science. It is greed for power. The truth is slowly coming out, however, and as Delingpole says, the alarmists will ultimately be pushed back.

In the meantime, however, we are in great danger of instituting a catastrophically enormous waste of money and human toil by enacting cap and trade and other such outrages. Being right would be meager solace under those circumstances.

http://stkarnick.com/culture/2010/05/27/climate-realism-not-to-be-denied-any-longer/

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by Scott Lazarowitz

“Politics or Principle” was the theme of Congressman Ron Paul’s farewell speech in 1984 and of his two presidential campaigns. Advocating the principle of Liberty is the theme of those in the libertarian school of thought, including the American Revolutionaries and Founders, who advocated individual freedom, private property rights, and freedom of association and voluntary contract. Throughout history, the State has been Liberty’s most egregious violator.

As sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer noted in his book, The State, there are two forms of sustenance: first, through one’s honest productive activity and voluntary exchange with others, or theeconomic means; and second, through theft and violence, the force and coercion of the State, or thepolitical means. For that is what politics is: the aggression of the State, which is why the State’s actions can never be principled.

The Founders’ Declaration of Independence is probably one of the most succinct documents declaring that the rights to life, liberty and property are inherent among all individuals. The Constitution, however, assigned to a federal government one monopolistic power after another, and gave to centralized bureaucrats in Washington the power of compulsion over their fellow Americans. Such a restrictive monopoly and that power of compulsion contradicted the very rights recognized by the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration declares the principles of Liberty, but the Constitution is the politics and power of the aggressive, parasitic State.

One thing I don’t understand is how the Tea Party movement, which supposedly supports limited government and moral values, nevertheless supports the U.S. government’s Leviathan bureaucratic military socialism, its foreign interventionism, and wars with indiscriminate murder of innocent human beings and destruction of whole societies abroad. Unfortunately, the Tea Party movement includes those military interventionist conservatives who partake in the mysticism of the State as a god, and cannot see that State interventionism into foreign lands is just as immoral as domestic State interventionism.

But any form of theft, trespass and murder, is immoral, period.

The Constitutionally mandated dependence of Americans on the socialist planning of centralized federal bureaucracy with a monopoly of territorial protection has turned the principle of self-defense into a parasitic political phenomenon. Such a monopoly has enabled politicians and bureaucrats to further a career in bureaucracy and power at the expense of Liberty, and has caused deterioration in quality of territorial protection.

But there is something about human nature that causes so many people to abandon principle when given a position of State power. The State is the only institution with the power to be above the Rule of Law. Agents of the State may commit theft and robbery through taxation, and may trespass and there is nothing any individual can do about it. It’s not what the Founding Fathers had in mind for America.

Two examples of how people who may have had potential in advancing Liberty and helping their fellow Americans through voluntary means, but instead have chosen the path of politics and the coercive apparatus of the State, are former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

During the earlier part of his pre-political career as a capital investment executive, Romney was extremely frugal with funds and careful not to take big risks “with other people’s money,” to such an extent that his firm Bain Capital hardly made any investments. He would seem to be the ideal candidate for many Americans, particularly conservatives, to help solve the nation’s financial crises. But not unlike most politicians, former business executives and otherwise, Romney seemed to change as shown by his decisions as governor of Massachusetts.

Perhaps Romney’s worst deed was RomneyCare, the health care bureaucracy and mandates he installed in his last year as governor. Given his expertise as an entrepreneur and capital investor, and his knowledge of how markets work, one would think that Romney would instinctively know that more government intrusions are the cause of our medical system’s dysfunction and not the cure.

Or perhaps he did know. Politicians oftentimes compromise principle for the sake of political strategy. At the time of his signing RomneyCare into law, mid-2006, it was widely speculated that then-U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton would be running for president in 2008, as well as Romney. Clinton’s own 1993 proposals for nationalized health care would be quite useful to compare to a Republican’s own proposals or policies.

For perhaps a better explanation of his record of government expansion and apparent attraction to the power of the State, it needs to be noted that Mitt Romney grew up in a very political family. His mother Lenore Romney had been a candidate for public office, and his father George Romney was a lobbyist in Washington for the aluminum industry and the automobile industry, and, as governor of Michigan for 8 years, George was credited (or blamed) for his instituting the state’s first state income tax, and greatly expanding state government. George Romney bitterly opposed Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination for president in 1964. Mitt Romney seemed to follow in his father’s footsteps in advocating more government interventions and intrusions, not fewer, into private economic affairs.

During his last 365 days as governor until January 2007, Romney spent over 200 of those days traveling outside of Massachusetts, “testing the waters” for a 2008 presidential bid. During that last year of Romney’s gubernatorial tenure, many of the duties of governor were taken up by Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, who was running her own failed campaign for governor. You would think that Romney would resign as governor to run his presidential campaign, but this is politics, after all. The political “public sector” inherently discourages its employees from maintaining a consistent job attendance.

And what does it say about someone such as Romney who spends $40 million of his own wealth on a presidential campaign, only to lose to the competition? It is doubtful that he or anyone would spend so much money to be hired as a CEO of even the most prestigious private firm. But that just shows the extent to which some people will go to achieve political power.

Sarah Palin is one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement, but her endorsements in 2010 have not all been for Tea Party conservatives. Palin, who supposedly advocates small, less intrusive government, low taxes and low government spending, and traditional moral values, endorsed for reelection Big Government Republican Senator John McCain, over his opponent, conservative J.D. Hayworth, probably more out of personal loyalty than of loyalty to those conservative principles. Granted, McCain gave Palin a huge advance in her career by choosing her as his 2008 presidential campaign running mate. But McCain is actually one of those inside-the-beltway politicians responsible for the very problems with the federal government that have been the stimulus for rebellion by Sarah Palin’s own Tea Party movement.

Palin also endorsed moderate Republican Terry Branstad over 2 conservatives for governor of Iowa. As conservative pundit Pat Buchanan observed,

The endorsement of Branstad suggests Palin, a politician of principle, has a pragmatic streak. She acts not only out of instinct but cold calculation. How else to explain the Branstad endorsement over a social conservative than a decision to befriend a future GOP governor in the first battleground state of 2012?

And Palin is somewhat similar to Mitt Romney, having grown up in a family with very close ties to the State apparatus.

Palin endorsed Texas Gov. Rick Perry for reelection over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and the actual Tea Party candidate, Debra Medina. Some Texas Tea Partiers were surprised, but understood that Medina was not well known. But given Sarah Palin’s anti-Establishment agenda in Alaska politics, one would think that Palin would not endorse a ten-year governor for reelection, and instead would choose a genuine private citizen and businesswoman such as Medina who was also challenging Establishment politicians. Medina’s single-digit polling numbers nevertheless rose following the Palin-Perry endorsement, but Medina’s candidacy was derailed by her interview with Glenn Beck. Some people believe that the interview was a set-up, and that Beck was in cahoots with Gov. Rick Perry.

And that brings me to the role of journalists, intellectuals and the news media who, as a group, developed – or devolved – from the principled tellers of truth and exposers of corruption, such as Tom Paine, Lysander Spooner, H.L. Mencken, Murray Rothbard and Daniel Ellsberg, to the current propagandists and stenographers for the State.

Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald has been doing a terrific job covering such a decadence of the journalism guild and their enthusiasm as State propagandists here, here, here, and especially here and here. And Judge Andrew Napolitano has excelled in his exposing of the State’s deceit and Orwellian newspeak on his FoxNews TV show Freedom Watch with the Judge, and his recent book, Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History.

Both Greenwald and Napolitano have discussed extensively the principles of civil liberties and due process, especially in the context of the Bush Administration’s War on Terrorism, and have thoroughly covered how the left and right propagandists disseminate their evangelism promoting the State and its extended powers.

And Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation is another principled and uncompromising modern day advocate of individual liberty, private property and civil rights.

The Bush Administration enacted policies based on political considerations that were favorable to expanding State power, rather than upholding the principles of Liberty and individual rights our American Founders strongly believed in, and the Obama Administration has been expanding such unconstitutional powers, all being cheered on by the left and right mouthpieces for the State. However, now that the Obama Administration is in charge, Sarah Palin and many other conservative Tea Partiers who have supported the Bush-initiated policies may eventually regret such support.

Unfortunately, the modern movement to restore Liberty by dismantling the Leviathan State has been maligned by not only those on both the left and the right whose parasitic livelihoods are dependent on that destructive State, but also by some libertarians, particularly those “regime libertarians,” some of whom work with the Cato Institute and write for Reason Magazine. Some organizations, while having done much to promote some aspects of Liberty, have tended to advance the libertarian philosophy more as a “lifestyle” issue rather than the moral principle of freedom from State intrusions. Too many people just seem to be attracted to the addictive power of the State, and tend to join in the popular witch hunts against those who advocate a society of actual independence under the Rule of Law. As Murray Rothbard noted,

We have seen clearly why the State needs the intellectuals; but why do the intellectuals need the State? Put simply, it is because intellectuals, whose services are often not very intensively desired by the mass of consumers, can find a more secure “market” for their abilities in the arms of the State. The State can provide them with a power, status, and wealth which they often cannot obtain in voluntary exchange.

In his 2006 Mises Institute article, Natural Elites, Intellectuals and the State, Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes that the “natural elites” of earlier times achieved status and success through their own natural abilities and talents, were characterized by wisdom, bravery and farsightedness, and acted as “judges and peacemakers” out of a genuine sense of duty to others, and often without financial compensation. But their status changed as democracies evolved:

The fortunes of the great families have dissipated through confiscatory taxes