Where Are My Keys?

Eugene Robinson(!) recognizes what Obama has done..

And yet many Lefties still think it is no big deal.

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” should rule out secretly obtaining two months’ worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what the Justice Department did.

...

In both instances, prosecutors were trying to build criminal cases under the 1917 Espionage Act against federal employees suspected of leaking classified information. Before President Obama took office, the Espionage Act had been used to prosecute leakers a grand total of three times, including the 1971 case of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Obama’s Justice Department has used the act six times. And counting.

Robinson (to his credit) even acknowledges that Eviiiiil George Bush did nothing even remotely close to this, even though he would have had plenty of opportunities:

If this had been the view of prior administrations, surely Bob Woodward would be a lifer in some federal prison. The cell next door might be occupied by my Post colleague Dana Priest, who disclosed the CIA’s network of secret prisons. Or by the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who revealed the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.

A federal “shield” law protecting reportersfrom having to divulge their sources means nothing if it includes an exception for cases involving national security, as Obama favors. The president needs to understand that behavior commonly known as “whistleblowing” and “journalism” must not be construed as espionage.

I'm sure Robinson will cool down, and eventually get back on the Obama Administration bandwagon, but it is encouraging to see that some on the Left can see overreach from their own side from time to time.

If you are a reporter today covering this Administration, is it safe to assume you are being watched?

First it was AP, now we learn it is Fox.  Any reason to believe CBS' Sharyl Attkisson (the reporter who keeps banging on the Benghazi story) isn't under surveillance?  Also good to know Google turned over private emails to the Feds.

I find comfort in seeing reporters that might otherwise have ideological differences with Fox, realizing what a disgrace this is:

“Rosen was not charged with any crime, but it is unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets,” declared New Yorker reporter and CNN contributor Ryan Lizza.

Nice Administration you run there, Mr. Obama.

Incredible..

I'm sure the Left and the MSM would stand for this if this was a Republican Administration.

 

Clearly Pfeiffer likes the word "irrelevant":

 

Bob Schieffer seems to have reached his tipping point:

 

Althouse has a great observation on the White House not sharing the basic information of "Where was Obama?":

In talking about Benghazi, the interviewer, Chris Wallace, is trying to extract a specific fact about the events, a fact that has not yet come out and that Pfeiffer might know. Pfeiffer blows out a tirade of truly irrelevant verbiage to distract us from the question asked, including the notion that the fact isn't important. Who cares where the physical body of Obama was as long as he was "in touch"?  Well, some people would like to know, so tell us the fact and let us decide what use to make of it. To withhold the fact — on the ground that, in your opinion, we don't need it — is to make us think it would be damaging. We're likely to think Obama went golfing or something like that. Otherwise, why not just cough up the irrelevant fact? It must be relevant, we think, at least for political purposes, or Pfeiffer wouldn't strain so hard to suppress it. (He does claim at one point that he doesn't remember where Obama was.)

It's not bad enough the IRS targeted Tea Party groups..

Turns out they also shared confidential information with ProPublica:

In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six [2] of those [3] public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

On Friday, Lois Lerner, the head of the division on tax-exempt organizations, apologized [4] to Tea Party and other conservative groups because the IRS’ Cincinnati office had unfairly targeted them. Tea Party groups had complained [5] in early 2012 that they were being sent overly intrusive questionnaires in response to their applications.

That scrutiny appears to have gone beyond Tea Party groups to applicants saying they wanted to educate the public to “make America a better place to live” or that criticized how the country was being run, according[6] to a draft audit cited by many outlets. The full audit, by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, will reportedly be released this week. (ProPublica was not contacted by the inspector general’s office.)  

Before the 2012 election, ProPublica devoted months to showing how[7] dozens of social-welfare nonprofits had misled the IRS about their political activity on their applications and tax returns. Social-welfare nonprofits are allowed to spend money to influence elections, as long as their primary purpose is improving social welfare. Unlike super PACs and regular political action committees, they do not have to identify their donors.

You know how it takes forever to get something you have requested from the Government?  Not in this case:

Just 13 days after ProPublica sent in its request, the IRS responded with the documents on 31 social welfare groups.

They sure wanted to get that information out in a hurry, didn't they?

This is what happens when the Press doesn't do its job, and the Executive Branch is allowed to do whatever it wants.

I'm sure things will be different when the IRS has a significant hand in your private health information.

You know what happens when you try to throw someone under the bus?

If they shouldn't be getting thrown under the bus because they were following your orders, they'll probably speak up.  On Friday, Jay Carney and the Administration basically said the 12 edits to the talking points were done at the hands of the CIA.  Forget for a second that the reporters (and those paying attention) say this as complete nonsense.  What happens next shouldn't be a surprise to anyone-seems there additional whistleblowers ready to come forward.  Wanna bet some (if not all) are CIA?

Why isn't there an "After Action" report from Benghazi?

When you do something every time there is a fatality, and then you don't do one, it makes reasonable people ask why:

The military has conducted hundreds of assessments for battles throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. At the platoon level, an “After Action” critique is required whenever there are American fatalities. But at the highest level, there has been no military After Action assessment about Benghazi.

The fight at the U.S. consulate waxed and waned for ten hours. Yet during that time, the Marine Force Recon unit on Sigonella Air Base, 500 miles away, was never deployed and not one F-16 or F-18 was dispatched. Granted, Force Recon and fighter aircraft weren’t on alert and did not appear on the Pentagon’s official list of “hostage rescue forces.” But they were one phone call away, and no general asked for them. Ten hours provided adequate time for a range of ad hoc responses. Commanders are expected to adapt in battle.

Pentagon spokesman George Little said, “We have repeatedly stated that . . . our forces were unable to reach it in time to intervene to stop the attacks.” That is true only if the Pentagon is incapable of improvising. If you see people in a burning house, you do your best to help immediately; you don’t wait for the fire department to respond in a normal manner. If called upon, the Marines on Sigonella would have gathered whoever was on hand and piled into one of a dozen military planes parked at the base. The Benghazi airport 90 minutes away was secure; CIA operatives were standing on the runway, because they had improvised by hiring a plane and flying in from the embassy in Tripoli, 400 miles away. A fighter jet could have refueled at that airport, with the CIA providing cover. Instead, the military ordered four Special Operations soldiers at the Tripoli embassy not to fly to Benghazi and join the CIA team. 

The military did nothing, except send a drone to watch the action. Defense Secretary Panetta later offered the excuse, “You can’t willy-nilly send F-16s there and blow the hell out of place. . . . You have to have good intelligence.” As a civilian, Mr. Panetta probably didn’t know that 99 percent of air sorties over Afghanistan never drop a single bomb. General Dempsey, however, knew it was standard procedure to roar menacingly over the heads of mobs, while not “blowing the hell out of them.” A show of air power does have a deterrent effect and is routinely employed.

...

The integrity of the Pentagon is not in question. The purpose of an After Action is to perform better the next time. Is the public seriously to believe that in ten hours Dempsey and the $600 billion dollar Defense Department could not dispatch one ad hoc rescue team, as our embassy in Tripoli did, or order one fighter jet to scramble?

Have our military’s best and brightest lost the capacity to improvise? Clearly, that merits an assessment. Will General Dempsey ask for a review of his own procedures? Do as I say, or as I do? The chairman of the joint chiefs is the only general who can answer that.

Cronies all around him..

Remember how Barack Obama was going to usher in a new era of Government?  How he was going to keep the "special interests" away from DC?  Once again, we are reminded his promises come with an expiration date:

President Obama announced Thursday that Penny Pritzker, an ex-national finance chair for the Obama campaign, will lead the Commerce Department. If confirmed, she will be the richest cabinet secretary in U.S. history. The president already skipped over her for the nod once.

The New York Times said of Pritzker in 2008, "Ms. Pritzker's family is renowned for finding ways to avoid paying taxes on its wealth. The Pritzkers were pioneers in using tax loopholes to shelter their holdings from the internal revenue service, and many of their dealings have never been made public."

Pritzker's trusts were set up by her grandfather, and she has not received a dime from them, said Tommy Vietor, former White House National Security spokesman.

"What we need in a Commerce Secretary is somebody who can create jobs," said Vietor. "Those are the qualifications we should focus on, not something her grandfather did when she was a little girl."

On Wednesday, the president named another campaign bundler, Tom Wheeler to head up the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler spent two decades as a lobbyist representing the two industry groups that represented every single cable company, and every single cellphone provider.

"This guy was a lobbyist a decade ago," said Vietor.

President Obama signed an executive order the day he stepped into office putting tough new anti-lobbying rules into place.

"The president took this important step, and you get kind of one day of stories about how this was sort of a good idea and a good move," said Vietor. "Then if you do anything where you mention lobbyist afterward, he's getting dinged for it."

Shame on Us for asking him to keep to his word.

Appoints a person that uses the same tax strategies as Mitt Romney got blasted for; and a guy who acted on the behalf of every major player in the cable and cell phone world will now be in charge if the FCC.

What could go wrong?

You know what is a good measure of how things are going in your Country?

I'd probably start with how many of your households are on food stamps.  Stands to reason, doesn't it?  If you have a lot of folks on food stamps, things probably aren't going very well.  So how many in the good old US of A are being fed by the White House these days?

More than 23,000,000 households you say?  And that's a record, you say?  And it increased by almost 900,000 since the same year?

Nice economy, Mr. Obama.

Remember how Candidate Obama preached about caring for our Veterans?

It's almost like he used them as props to help get elected, and now doesn't need them anymore:

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are getting frustrated about President Obama’s apparent lack of urgency in speeding up the claims process for veterans waiting nearly a year on average to get processed by the VA.

Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) today sent Obama a letter asking the president to take “direct action and involvement” in ending the backlog in which more than 600,000 veterans are stuck.

Sixty-five other senators joined on to the plea for the president to get things moving.

Some vets have been forced to wait more than 1,000 days. More than half of the total backlog consists of Vietnam and Gulf War veterans.

Over Obama’s first term, the Department of Veterans Affairs budget increased 40 percent but the number of claims pending for more than a year jumped by more than 2,000 percent.

“As a reminder, during this same time period, Congress has given VA everything it has asked for in terms of more funding and more employees; however, this has not eliminated the backlog of claims,” the senators wrote. “Solving this problem is critical for veterans of all generations. We need direct and public involvement from you to establish a clear plan to end the backlog once and for all.”

“This country must be grateful for the safe homecoming of every single man and woman who has served in harm’s way. Our joy at their return must be reflected in our commitment to helping all who have served.”

Toomey said the VA’s two regional offices in his home state are mired in more than 23,000 unprocessed claims.

While the average wait time for first-time disability claims currently ranges between 316 and 327 days, veterans in certain parts of the country are waiting even longer – 681 days in Reno, 642 in New York, 625 in Pittsburgh, 619 in Los Angeles, 612 in Indianapolis, 586 in Houston, and 510 in Philadelphia, the senators noted.

I can't think of anything that has garned this kind of bipartisan support over the last five years. 

Yet the President does nothing.

I take that back.  He did have time to comment on an NBA player coming out of the closet yesterday.

Hating America, while accepting its charity..

Nice to see Older Bomber happy to let his wife work 80-hour weeks, while he say back and took welfare benefits, and plotted for death and destruction:

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home.

In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.

We also learn that he was on several watch lists, yet was allowed to travel to Russia, and wasn't a suspect when the bombings first occurred.  We also now know that Russia had contacted the US"multiple times" to discuss Older Bomber.

Russian authorities alerted the US government not once but ``multiple’’ times over their concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- including a second time nearly a year after he was first interviewed by FBI agents in Boston -- raising new questions about whether the FBI should have focused more attention on the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, according to US senators briefed on the probe Tuesday.

The FBI has previously said it interviewed Tsarnaev in early 2011 after it was initially contacted by the Russians. After that review, the FBI has said, it determined he did not pose a threat.

In a closed briefing on Tuesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee learned that Russia alerted the United States about Tsarnaev in ``multiple contacts’’ -- including ``at least once since October 2011,’’ said Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina, speaking with reporters afterward.

Senators said the briefing also revealed failures among federal agencies to share vital information about Tsarnaev, indicating, they said, that the US government still has not established a strong system to ``connect the dots’’ about would-be terrorists residing in America more than a decade after 9/11.

Nice to learn that more than a decade after, and billions of dollars spent, we still don't have the ability to "connect the dots".

Good thing the Country is focused on gay marriage and if Republicans want to take away women's access to birth control.

Is it okay to talk about entitlement reform now?