All Your Private Data Are Belong To Obama

When it comes to spying, eavesdropping on its citizens as well as the complete invasion of American privacy, the first thing that comes to mind is the Patriot ACT and Dubya. And with good reason: because while the rest of the world may "hate us for our freedoms", they certainly love us for the fact that the NSA usually can autocomplete sentences before they are written in any electronic medium (recall: NSA Whistleblower Speaks Live: "The Government Is Lying To You"). However, as it turns out that the first thing that should be coming to mind is none other than the current administration and Barack Obama. Here are the facts: as the ACLU reveals using documents released by the Justice Department following months of litigation, "federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability." How "increasingly"? Look at the chart below and decide.

From the ACLU: Between 20909 and 2011 "the number of people whose telephones were the subject of pen register and trap and trace surveillance more than tripled. In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade."
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
This is how Uncle Sam spies on you:

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn't entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).

Read more: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-28/all-your-private-data-belong-obama

Meaningless Words in Politics

As we enter the fall political season, we will hear a great deal of rhetoric from both major political parties and their many candidates for office. It’s important for us to remember, however, that words can be made meaningless by misuse or overuse. And when we as citizens allow politicians to obscure the truth by distorting words, we diminish ourselves and our nation.
For example, we’ve all heard politicians use the words “democracy” and “freedom” countless times. They are used interchangeably in modern political discourse, yet their true meanings are very different. They have become what George Orwell termed “meaningless words.” Words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice,” Orwell explained, have been abused for so long that their original meanings have been eviscerated. In Orwell’s view, such words were “often used in a consciously dishonest way.”
Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As just one example, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word “democracy” as a synonym for freedom. Thus we are conditioned to believe that democracy is always and everywhere benevolent.
The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with freedom. While our Constitution certainly features certain democratic mechanisms, it also features inherently undemocratic mechanisms like the First Amendment and the Electoral College. American is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Yet we’ve been bombarded with the meaningless word “democracy” for so long that few Americans understand the difference.

Read more: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2012/08/27/meaningless-words-in-politics/

New Contract Earns Chicago Schools 2nd Credit Downgrade – In One Quarter

Sound financial management clearly wasn’t a concern to any party involved in the recent contract negotiations in Chicago Public Schools.
They were warned that new labor expenses might result in a credit downgrade for the financially-strapped school district, and they chose to ignore it.
Now it has comes to pass. The credit rating agency Moody’s has downgraded the school district for the second time in one quarter.
Moody’s wrote:
“The negative outlook reflects the school district's budgeted depletion of reserves to fund ongoing operations in fiscal 2013; the moderate additional unbudgeted salary costs of labor contract negotiations, which have not yet been ratified by CTU; an estimated $1 billion budget deficit for fiscal 2014; and the sizable increase in pension contributions following a three-year relief period. Significant budget adjustments will be necessary, but the demonstrated power of collective bargaining suggests that future budget controls may be difficult for the district to implement.”
Chalk one up for the Chicago Teachers Union. It’s insistence on pressing for higher wages at a time when the district could not afford it has pushed CPS even closer to financial collapse. And Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn’t deserve a pass. He didn’t have the guts to stand up to the union, and now schoolchildren and taxpayers will pay.
The downgrade will, of course, make it more expensive for the school district to borrow money, complicating an already messy financial situation.

Read more: http://townhall.com/columnists/kyleolson/2012/09/29/new_contract_earns_chicago_schools_2nd_credit_downgrade__in_one_quarter

Obama's Abandoned Power Plants

If voters knew how America's economy would look after two terms of President Barack Obama's administration, Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.
In the 2008 campaign, President Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that the “notion of no coal...is an illusion.” He noted that he favors a cap-and-trade system “[s]o if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
While Obama did not get to implement cap-and-trade, he found other ways to shut down coal burning power plants.
In the name of a rigidly anti-prosperity ideology, Obama's administration, through the Environmental Protection Agency, is continuing its war on jobs and reliable sources of energy. And like most onerous regulations, the true costs are not immediately visible.
As announced by Lisa Jackson, the chief EPA Administrator, three new regulations for air emission standards have been announced, which will cost American consumers more than $13 billion per year. Also, according to estimates by the Senate Republican Policy Committee, other rules dealing with coal ash and air could cost an additional $90 billion annually.
Obama's claim to have an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy is a ruse. Instead, his administration seems determined to extend our economic recession, while government bureaucrats find creative ways to make energy more expensive.
More than 2,000 employees of the coal industry were laid off this year, and that industry expects 10,000 more layoffs in direct and related jobs. In addition, as reported by Human Events, leaked documents from the Obama administration estimates that one rule on water quality requirements will be responsible for an additional 7,000 fired workers.

Read more: http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2012/09/28/obamas_abandoned_power_plants/page/full/

The New Fed

Nowhere is this more true than in government – which means we have to watch it closely. Unfortunately preconceived notions can make us impervious to events right in front of us and lead us to colossal misperceptions.
Take the Federal Reserve System. (All together now: Please!) Since the central bank controls the money supply, advocates of free markets and market-based money are understandably wary of its power to generate inflation. It’s inflated in the past and has the capacity to do so in the future. So attention naturally goes in that direction.
The problem is that while we’re watching for inflation, we might be missing the Fed’s real mischief elsewhere. In stage magic this is called misdirection.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a macroeconomist at San Jose State University and a Freeman contributor (not to mention an old friend), says that’s exactly what has been happening. While inflation hawks have been busy looking for any sign, or even any word, of monetary expansion, Hummel writes, “[Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke has so expanded the Fed’s discretionary actions beyond merely controlling the money stock that it has become a gigantic, financial central planner.”
In other words, “Bernanke’s targeted and sterilized bailouts have altered the fundamental nature of the Federal Reserve…. [T]he Fed that emerged from the [housing and financial] crisis is no longer the same as the Fed before the crisis…. Most economists appear not to appreciate fully how drastic the changes are that Bernanke has wrought.”

Read more: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/the-new-fed/

Matt Damon’s Anti-Fracking Movie Financed by Oil-Rich Arab Nation

A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.
The creators of Promised Land have gone to absurd lengths to vilify oil and gas companies, as Scribe’s Michael Sandoval noted Wednesday. Since recent events have demonstrated the relative environmental soundness of hydraulic fracturing – a technique for extracting oil and gas from shale formations – Promised Land’s script has been altered to make doom-saying environmentalists the tools of oil companies attempting to discredit legitimate “fracking” concerns.
While left-leaning Hollywood often targets supposed environmental evildoers, Promised Land was also produced “in association with” Image Media Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media, according to the preview’s list of credits. A spokesperson with DDA Public Relations, which runs PR for Participant Media, the company that developed the film fund backing Promised Land, confirmed that AD Media is a financier. The company is wholly owned by the government of the UAE.

Read more: http://blog.heritage.org/2012/09/28/matt-damons-anti-fracking-movie-financed-by-oil-rich-arab-nation/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The FHFA didn't evaluate decisions on 700,000 loans made by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, watchdog warns

The government agency created to prevent another home mortgage crisis instead handed oversight over to the very financial institutions it bailed out was suppose to keep watch on, a federal watchdog says.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, was created in 2008 to oversee home mortgages handled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after the government bailed out the two mortgage giants with $187.5 billion in taxpayer money.
But only three months after it was tasked with regulating the financial giants, FHFA largely washed its hands of oversight, failing to evaluate 700,000 loans over the last few years worth more than $130 billion, the agency's inspector general reported Thursday. And that leaves taxpayers at risk again, the watchdog warns.
""FHFA’s role as conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is critical to mitigating instability in the nation’s housing finance markets and ensuring that the enterprises operate safely and soundly," the inspector general concluded, adding that "strengthening control over the agency’s conservatorship approval process will ... protect taxpayers from having to provide further financial support."
FHFA, however, remains unapologetic and doesn't think it needs to make any changes. "We believe that the approach we are taking to govern conservatorship decision-making is effective, and this approach remains appropriate given the size, complexity, and length of the conservatorship," FHFA said in a letter responding to the inspector general.

Read more: http://www.washingtonguardian.com/defaulting-mortgage-oversight