Friday, June 7, 2013

Barker's Newsbites: Friday, June 7, 2013


My wife is a drunk...

(*SIGH*)

Picked up a bottle of Bailey's two weeks ago so we'd have it in the house in case the drunk'n Irish relatives wanted it in their morning coffee when they stayed with us... I can't imagine we drank more than six or eight drams between that Saturday night and Sunday morning... and today I go to pour a dram in my afternoon coffee and...

(*DRUM ROLL*)

That's all there was left! One friggin' measure! My wife is a friggin' drunk...!!!

5 comments:

William R. Barker said...

* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html?_r=0

Within hours of the disclosure...

* MADE - ONCE AGAIN - FIRST BY THE FOREIGN PRESS... THE UK PRESS IN THIS CASE...

...that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counter-terrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.

* AND YET YOU DON'T CALL FOR HIS RESIGNATION.

* BTW... THE TIMES RE-EDITED THEIR OWN EDITORIAL - POST-PUBLICATION - ADDING "ON THIS ISSUE" TO "THE ADMINISTRATION HAS NOW LOST ALL CREDIBILITY."

* SEE: http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/06/ny-times-changes-scathing-editorial-165650.html#.UbHi3_g6iAk.twitter

Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.

* AND YET... HE'S YOUR GUY, NYT!

* TO BE CONTINUED...

William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the FBI and the NSA used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

* ACTUALLY... THAT LAST PART ISN'T CERTAIN!

Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by which the NSA. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions about whether the NSA separated foreign communications from domestic ones.

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where. This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

* NOTICE, FOLKS... THESE SCUMBAGS CAN'T BRING THEMSELVES TO SAY "VIOLATES AMERICANS CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS."

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.

* NOTE: THE TIMES ISN'T CALLING UPON FEINSTEIN TO BE REPLACED AS CHAIR OF THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE.

Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used...

(*HEADACHE*)

* TO BE CONTINUED...

William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

* YEAH? SHOW US THE EVIDENCE!

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

(*GUFFAW*)

* THIS ADMINISTRATION IS CORRUPT, VENAL, INCOMPETENT, AND CARES NOT ONE BIT ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION; INDEED, THIS ADMINISTRATION IS OPENLY HOSTILE IN MANY RESPECTS TO THE CONSTITUTION. (WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU SUPPOSE "FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE" MEANT, FOLKS...?!)

That’s no longer good enough.

* IT WAS NEVER GOOD ENOUGH!

Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian.

* WHY NOT...??? I AM!

But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

* OBAMA IS A PHONY PIECE OF SHIT!

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

* A "PROBLEM," HUH...??? (AND WYDEN AND UDALL ARE SUPPOSEDLY THE GUYS LOOKING OUT FOR "WE THE PEOPLE!")

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the NSA overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

* YA THINK...?!?!

“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement.

* HE'S "TROUBLED."

(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)

“While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

* AND YET IT WAS DONE - DONE UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.

William R. Barker said...

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/admiral-mullen-named-to-sprints-board/?smid=tw-dealbook&seid=auto

Sprint announced Friday that Adm. Mike Mullen would join the company’s board after its proposed $20.1 billion sale to SoftBank of Japan closes.

(*SMIRK*)

Admiral Mullen, 66, who had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 2007 to September 2011, would serve as an independent director as well as the company’s security director. (He is also on the board of General Motors.) His appointment would satisfy one of the concessions that the companies agreed to to win government approval for the merger.

* "...ONE OF THE CONCESSIONS THAT THE COMPANIES AGREED TO TO WIN GOVERNMENT APPROVAL...???" WOW... JUST... WOW...

Some Congressional leaders have expressed concerned about SoftBank’s ties to Chinese telecommunications equipment makers.

* RIGHT... IN... FRONT... OF... OUR... FACES...!!!

* FOLKS... WE'RE THE LOSERS OF A WAR FEW UNDERSTAND WE'VE FOUGHT!

* FOLKS... THIS IS NO DOUBT PART OF MULLEN'S REWARD FOR HIS PART IN THE (THE CONTINUING) BENGHAZI COVER-UP. AGAIN... NOTHING IS BEING "HIDDEN." THEY'RE BRAZENLY GOING ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS!

William R. Barker said...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/justice-department-electronic-frontier-foundation-fisa-court-opinion

Government lawyers are trying to keep buried a classified court finding that a domestic spying program went too far.

In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications, the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

* ONE... MORE... TIME:

"...the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying."

As news reports emerge about the massive phone records and internet surveillance programs — each of which began during the Bush administration and were carried out under congressional oversight and FISA court review — critics on the left and right have accused the government of going too far in sweeping up data, including information related to Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing. There's no telling if the 86-page FISA court opinion EFF seeks is directly related to either of these two programs, but EFF's pursuit of this document shows just how difficult it is — perhaps impossible — for the public to pry from the government information about domestic surveillance gone wrong.

* IN ENGLISH: CORN - THE AUTHOR OF THIS PIECE - IS A COMMITTED LEFTIST. HIS ARTICLE - THIS ARTICLE - WAS PUBLISHED IN THE PAGES OF MOTHER JONES. YEP. THE PATRIOT ACT CAME INTO BEING UNDER BUSH. HOWEVER... (*DRUM ROLL*)... THIS "GOING TOO FAR" CORN WRITES OF IN THE PAGES OF MOTHER JONES... (*ANOTHER DRUM ROLL*)... THAT'S ALL OBAMA... OBAMA AND HOLDER... OBAMA AND BIG SIS... OBAMA AND THE DEMS - WHO YOU MAY RECALL HAD A MONOPOLY ON FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POWER FOR TWO ENTIRE YEARS!

* IN ENGLISH: OBAMA AND THE DEMS ARE FAR, FAR WORSE THAN BUSH AND THE RINOs EVER WERE.