RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/

One of the great questions about the 2012 campaign has been “Where was the tea party?” They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the question is: “Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to raise money.”

The economist Stan Veuger, on the American Enterprise Institute‘s blog, takes the question a step further.

The Democrats had been badly shaken by the Republican comeback of 2010. They feared a repeat in 2012 that would lose them the White House.

Might targeting the tea-party groups—diverting them, keeping them from forming and operating—seem a shrewd campaign strategy in the years between 2010 and 2012? Sure. Underhanded and illegal, but potentially effective.

Veuger writes: “It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered—and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been demobilized by the IRS.”

The research paper Veurger and his colleagues have put out notes that, in Veuger’s words, “the Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise.”

More: “The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5-8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”

Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012 victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication. The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped.

Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did. Which is why our editor, James Taranto, calls him “President Asterisk.”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ OBAMAWAR 2: THE SEQUEL To invade Libya, Obama lied and told the American people that the residents of Benghazi were about to suffer a massacre that would stain “the conscience of the world.” No such massacre had taken place or was ever going to take place. The only innocent people who wound up massacred […]

The late Billy Carter, Jimmy’s smarter brother said in 1978 :

“The only thing I can say is there is a hell of a lot more Arabians than there is Jews.”

Well yes he was right….and he could have added that the “Arabians’ control the world’s energy supply, a fact that influenced the Middle East policies of all State Departments and Administrations since the advent of Israel.

Well now it appears that energy independence- and I don’t mean the chimerical notions of wind and solar power- is in the offing. Will it make a difference in international policies with respect to Israel?

In a sad word…..No!!

In Europe the thinking, the media, the academies are being subverted by Islam and in our own nation, ostensibly Israel’s best ally, the President has stacked his deck with- Susan Rice, Chuck Hagel, Samantha Power, and the eternally obtuse John Kerry- who babble on about solutions to the Middle East “conflict” that are inimical to Israel’s survival. And, no amount of energy independence will alter their bias.

Only an electoral sweeping out of this administration will help, unless Hillary Clinton becomes President, and then things will be even worse.

Incidentally Billy Carter also argued that the “Jewish media [tore] up the Arab countries full-time,” and defended Libya against charges of state-sponsored terrorism by saying that a “heap of governments support terrorists and [Libya] at least admitted it.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3827/the_great_renewables_scam_unravels

Energy insiders have long known that the notion of ‘renewable energy’ is a romantic proposition – and an economic bust. But it is amazing what the lure of guaranteed ‘few strings attached’ government subsidies can achieve. Even the Big Oil companies bought into the renewables revolution, albeit mostly for PR reasons. Like Shell, however, many quickly abandoned their fledgling renewable arms. Post-2008, they knew, the subsidy regimes could not last. Neither was the public buying into the new PR message.

Now it was just a question of time before Europe’s world leading pioneers of solar and wind power, Germany and the UK, decided they had had enough of the self-inflicted economic pain. And all the signs are – as Germany’s solar sector just went belly up and the UK is made aware of how much every wind job actually costs – that the slow implosion of the renewables revolution is under way.

The plain fact is that installing solar panels, especially in the northern hemisphere, makes about as much economic sense as Iran heading up a UN Human Rights Commission (which it has done by the way). Equally, the viability of windfarms has always been the renewables industry’s worst kept secret.

And yet, aided by aggressive and heavily-funded green lobbies, leftist social engineers, appalling journalism, naive politicians and unscrupulous opportunistic renewable energy entrepreneurs, wind turbines and the photovoltaic industry quickly became established facts on the ground, giving the appearance of economic ‘viability’. Why else would government back them using our cash?

I have written before about ‘Hamish’ who is convinced that his wind turbine investment offers him some ‘free’ energy – ‘free’ so long as you overlook the double-whammy of ‘front end’ feed-in tariffs and other green levies and the ‘back end’ high energy bill tariffs passed on by the power companies to others now forced to buy Hamish’s electricity at above market prices.

And that’s before you consider Hamish’s maintenance costs, his need for hydrocarbon back-up, intermittent and unreliable generation, and the fact that the power company cannot store his product which may never be used.

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/north-korea-holds-un-press-conference-check-your-sanity-at-the-door/ For the first time since 2010, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sin Son Ho, held a press conference [1]Friday at the UN — thus establishing that once every three years is far too often. Sin held forth for about 50 minutes, most of which he spent reading a prepared statement denouncing the […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/06/barack_bamboozles_berlin.html Barack Obama showed up again in Berlin. Sadly, 194,000 of the fawning devotees that cheered him like a rock star in 2008 chose to skip the 2013 encore. Nonetheless, directly out of the Brandenburg gate, the president commenced with injecting race and gender into the conversationwhen he said “Angela and I don’t exactly look […]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-are-the-nsa&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20130621

A metadata expert reveals the sobering implications of personal data collection by governments and companies

Earlier this month, former NSA employee Edward Snowden revealed the agency is collecting data on millions on Americans, from phone call durations to Facebook posts, all through a program codenamed PRISM. The resulting media backlash has revived the debates about internet privacy and government surveillance techniques, but questions remain: how is the National Security Agency taking in the data, and how much of a threat to our civil liberties does such data-collection efforts pose?

To find out, Scientific American spoke with metadata expert Mark Herschberg, CTO at Madison Logic and instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Herschberg has worked with the programs used to gather big data and was able to elucidate how our internet data has become an important—if not invasive—commodity.

An edited transcript of the interview follows.

What kind of software can be used to collect big data?

It can be collected a number of different ways. It sounds like the NSA is going into the servers of Facebook and others and accessing their log files through some kind of “backdoor.” In that case, you can write pretty simple programs that can copy those files and transfer them to local servers. You could also get this data by installing spying software on an individual’s computer. The third option is actually listening through the pipe, the digital version of wiretapping.

When an individual downloads something or visits a webpage, all the data go through the Internet service provider. By effectively wiretapping their line, you can see every single byte they’re sending back and forth.

Why would the NSA want access to things like Facebook posts?

What you can get are signals. For example, if you look at teens committing suicide, they often spend a lot of time thinking about it and planning. There are signs that professionals have been trained to look for, such as saying goodbye to people before they take their own life.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351748/rewriting-fisa-history-andrew-c-mccarthy

Representative Sensenbrenner does not appear to have read the law he “wrote.”

Confronted with a few embarrassing assertions in his autobiography, pro-basketball legend Charles Barkley famously protested, “I was misquoted.” Apparently, Representative James Sensenbrenner knows the feeling. The Wisconsin Republican claims to have written the PATRIOT Act. Like the Round Mound of Rebound, though, he seems less than familiar with his handiwork.

Congressman Sensenbrenner purports to be stunned by revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has, for years, collected records of phone usage by untold millions of Americans. This was done under the PATRIOT Act’s business-records provision, passed and later reauthorized while Sensenbrenner chaired the House Judiciary Committee. He is thus closely identified with the law and incensed over its use to amass this “metadata” trove. Or is it that he is mortified over publicity about the trove and the ensuing ire it has provoked in some Republican and tea-party precincts?
In such a spot of bother, most politicians would be content to gripe that their legislation is being used in a way they never contemplated. Not Sensenbrenner. He insists that the law is being violated. The PATRIOT Act’s plain terms, he maintains, do not permit the ongoing data collection, period. He therefore accuses both the Justice Department (which began the program under Bush and has expanded it under Obama) and the judges of the FISA Court (the special tribunal created by Congress in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) of running roughshod over the strict, clear limitations he says he wrote into the law.

So is Sensenbrenner encouraging you to verify this by reading the law for yourself? Nope. His highly exaggerated claim of PATRIOT Act authorship is a transparent attempt to become the showstopper authority on what the act says. Just take his word for it — no need to check his version against the text.

In truth, the controversial PATRIOT Act had many authors, drawn from both parties, both political branches of government, and both chambers of Congress. Sensenbrenner conceded as much in a recent op-ed he penned for the U.K.’s Guardian — correctly crediting the Bush Justice Department with primary authorship, but noting that many lawmakers got involved in the drafting process, especially during the frenetic aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities.

As I’ve recounted elsewhere in refuting Sensenbrenner’s claims, lawmakers also got a good deal of drafting advice from outside the government. That was especially true in 2005–06, when, largely due to Sensenbrenner’s insistence at the time of PATRIOT’s original passage, several significant provisions were scheduled to sunset. As public debate over the question of reauthorizing PATRIOT heated up, the American Bar Association sponsored exchanges between former government lawyers on the national-security Right, including moi, and our progressive and libertarian counterparts. (See, e.g., this debate between Ohio State law professor Peter Swire and me over the business-records provision — eventually published in a 2005 ABA compendium called Patriot Debates: Experts Debate the USA PATRIOT Act.) I was also involved in a bipartisan working group of former government officials who helped lawmakers work through PATRIOT issues. After months of debate, our group (which eventually included future Obama-administration attorney general Eric Holder, as well as several other Clinton- and Bush-administration veterans) came to a consensus about the need to reauthorize several PATRIOT provisions — very much including the business-records statute.

By recounting this kitchen glutted with chefs, I do not mean to suggest that Sensenbrenner was a tangential figure. The Justice Department was the lead executive agency pushing the bill, and he chaired the committee responsible for Justice Department oversight. Plainly, his support was pivotal — and he is no wallflower. Nevertheless, he now says he not only helped push the measure through but actually wrote it. “I authored the Patriot Act,” he proclaimed in the Guardian. With even less restraint, he repeated the claim Monday night when interviewed on Hannity, my friend Sean Hannity’s prime-time Fox News television program, popular among conservatives.

Sensenbrenner’s authorship claim, implausible enough under the circumstances of the PATRIOT Act’s drafting, is even harder to fathom once his description of the business-records provision is compared with the law Congress actually passed. After agreeing that it was he who “wrote the PATRIOT Act,” Representative Sensenbrenner told Sean (at the 2:30 mark of the interview):

One of the most difficult things in getting the Patriot Act passed was the business-records section of the law, which is called “section 215.” And in order to get the act passed, it was limited. It was limited only to getting the business records of a foreigner, not an American, who was the target of an authorized terrorism investigation.

This is false, through and through.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351741/obamas-melting-wings-mark-steyn

Descending from the heavens for the G8 summit at beautiful Lough Erne this week, President Obama caused some amusement to his British hosts. The chancellor of the exchequer had been invited to give a presentation to the assembled heads of government on the matter of tax avoidance (one of the big items on the agenda, for those of you who think what the IRS could really use right now is even more enforcement powers). The president evidently enjoyed it. Thrice, he piped up to say how much he agreed with Jeffrey, eventually concluding the presentation with the words, “Thank you, Jeffrey.” Unfortunately, the chancellor of the exchequer is a bloke called George Osborne, not Jeffrey Osborne. President Obama subsequently apologized for confusing George with Jeffrey, who was a popular vocal artiste back in the Eighties when Obama was dating his composite girlfriend and making composite whoopee to the composite remix of Jeffrey Osborne’s 1982 smoocheroo, “On the Wings of Love.”
I suppose it might have been worse. When Angela Merkel proposed a toast to a strong West, he could have assumed that was the name of Kim and Kanye’s new baby. At any rate, President Obama’s mishap had faint echoes of a famous social faux pas during the Second World War. Irving Berlin, the celebrated composer of “White Christmas,” was invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street and was surprised to find that Churchill, instead of asking what’s that Bing Crosby really like, badgered him with complex moral and strategic questions and requests for estimates of U.S. war production. It turned out the prime minister had confused Irving Berlin with the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, then under secondment to the British embassy in Washington, and thought it was the latter he’d invited to Number Ten. In the Obama era, any confusion is the other way around. It would be a terrible thing for the president to invite the eminent rapper Jay-Z to lunch only to find himself stuck next to the turgid British philosopher Professor Sir Jay Zed. Although Obama’s confusion went largely unreported in America, the BBC’s enterprising Eddie Mair got Jeffrey Osborne on the line and inveigled him into singing George Osborne’s best-known words — “Tax cuts should be for life, not just Christmastime” — to Jeffrey’s best-known tune.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/06/21/telling-the-truth-about-ukraine%E2%80%99s-rising-anti-semitic-svoboda-party-an-eye-opening-experience-%E2%80%93-with-portents-for-ukraine%E2%80%99s-future/

SORRY, BUT WHY ARE THERE ANY JEWS IN THE UKRAINE?….RSK

On May 24, my commentary, “Svoboda Fuels Ukraine’s Growing Anti-Semitism,” was published in The Algemeiner, raising concerns about growing anti-Semitic political forces in Ukraine. In it I noted the overtly anti-Semitic, anti-Russian and anti-Polish rhetoric of Svoboda (“Freedom”) party. The rich history of Nazi-like symbolism and glorification of Ukrainian collaborators with the Third Reich did not stop the supposedly more responsible elements of Ukraine’s political opposition, the Batkivshchina (“Fatherland”) and UDAR parties from joining forces with Svoboda.

My article, which unbeknown to me, was translated and published in Russian, generated interesting comments both on The Algemeiner page and elsewhere. Some supported while others attacked me.

A supportive message, posted on The Algemeiner site from “Aleks,” included a piece of news: a Svoboda member of parliament, Mikhail Golovko, met in Germany with representatives of the (neo-Nazi) National Democratic Party (NDP) of Germany. In Germany, the NDP is shunned by other parties, has no seats in the Bundestag, and even has to hold their party conferences in a tent because conference halls will not rent to them. In Ukraine, by contrast, Svoboda’s political rise and entry into the parliament has been abetted by Opposition politicians and parties hailed by western governments as the standard-bearers of democratic values.

Another supportive letter was from Maria Zubareva, president of a group called All-Ukrainian Association “Journalists Solidarity.” She attributes the high level of anti-Semitic attacks in Ukraine to the virulent campaign that landed Svoboda with almost 10% of the votes at last year’s parliamentary election. Svoboda legitimized racial and national intolerance, which led to increasing violence on the ground, she argued and concluded, “Svoboda [is] a real threat to the Jewish community of Ukraine.”