Where Are My Keys?

Isn't it interesting..

That the same guy who tells us that a few players don't speak for an entire group, then tells us a few players speak for a whole group?

To be fair, the two positions were offered a whole 3 minutes apart, so there was clearly time for him to evolve his position.

Why have any advisors or meetings??

The President has shown a pattern of not knowing anything about his Administration, until it hits the news:

Preferring to look ignorant rather than irresponsible, President Obama said last week that he only recently learned of scandals at the Department of Veteran Affairs through news reports. He spoke of the problems at the department as if they had blindsided him, despite the fact that as a candidate in 2008 he railed against the “the broken bureaucracy of the V.A.” and decried outrageous delays in treatment for veterans.

He didn’t need news reports to inform him of the depth of the department’s flaws; he could have reviewed his own campaign speeches. His long familiarity with the department’s problems gave his press conference last week an air of adding insult to injury. Somehow he was at once aware of the department’s deplorable condition and unaware of it.

Obama doesn’t mind appearing as the hapless spectator on the sidelines of his government if that saves him from the charge of dereliction of duty about a known problem. Yet the plight of veterans at the hands of indifferent bureaucrats clearly lost its urgency for him once the 2008 campaign ended and only now resumes urgency for him as an annoying political problem.

He said last week that he won’t “tolerate” mistreatment of veterans but he managed to tolerate it easily enough since he gave those speeches over five years ago. His aides claim he is “madder than hell” about the scandal, but at last week’s press conference he implied that his anger was provisional. He is still not sure if the “allegations” of mistreatment are true and needs to wait for more investigations in order to determine whether or not “accountability” is required.

Learning about problems in his own government through random news reports has become one of Obama’s common refrains. Last year he said that he learned of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups through glancing at the newspaper and he made a similar claim about his knowledge of various Justice Department scandals. Historians, looking for a simple snapshot of his administration’s fecklessness, can cite the frequency of Obama’s admission.

Obama also learns of non-events through news reports, as evident in his administration’s reliance upon fragments of reporting from the foreign press to claim that the Benghazi terrorist attack was a demonstration over an Internet video that turned violent. Former Obama administration spokesman Tommy Vietor commented to Fox News, “What I’ve seen is, in a number of outlets, reporters talked to people on the scene that night… who said they were there because they were upset about this video.” Vietor suggested that “guys quoted in newspapers saying that’s why they were there” was the reason for the bogus storyline.

All of this contributes to a picture of an administration that is hopelessly superficial, dishonest, and incompetent. It also exposes Obama’s ideology as false: the federal government is clearly too big to know and too dysfunctional to control if he can only keep up to date on its failures through news accounts.

Remember when Howard Dean was almost the Democrat candidate for President?

Yet, the Left will dismiss Dean, but continue to hold up Cliven Bundy (and his comments) as reflective of the Republican Party.  Will Harry Reid call on Democrats to condemn Howard Dean?

Today it was Howard Dean (filmed a week ago, but seen on YouTube today). He was addressing a Democratic crowd in Colorado, and went off on a tirade against Republicans. Yes, he really did say that Republicans aren’t American. And that they should stay away from the United States, and go to Russia where they belong.

 

Springtime in the Rockies..

Coors Field around 8 am today:

Coors Field around 345 pm today:

It's not just moving the goalposts..

It's changing the rules, the playing field, and the ball:

The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.

The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said.

An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.

“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,” said Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau.

With the new questions, “it is likely that the Census Bureau will decide that there is a break in series for the health insurance estimates,” says another agency document describing the changes. This “break in trend” will complicate efforts to trace the impact of the Affordable Care Act, it said.

This could never happen with Obamacare..

When faced with a backlog, the VA destroyed Veterans medical records:

“We just didn’t have the resources to conduct all of those exams. Basically we would get about 3,000 requests a month for [medical] exams, but in a 30-day period we only had the resources to do about 800. That rolls over to the next month and creates a backlog,” Mitchell said. ”It’s a numbers thing. The waiting list counts against the hospitals efficiency. The longer the veteran waits for an exam that counts against the hospital as far as productivity is concerned.”

By 2008, some patients were “waiting six to nine months for an exam” and VA “didn’t know how to address the issue,” Mitchell said.

VA Greater Los Angeles Radiology department chief Dr. Suzie El-Saden initiated an “ongoing discussion in the department” to cancel exam requests and destroy veterans’ medical files so that no record of the exam requests would exist, thus reducing the backlog, Mitchell said.

Audio from a November 2008 meeting obtained by TheDC depicts VA Greater Los Angeles officials plotting to cancel backlogged exam requests.

It'll be different with Obamacare.  We'll always have plenty of doctors, no backlogs, and it will be super easy to get in to see your doctor. So nothing to worry about.  Absolutely okay to have the Government in charge of your health.

Dude.

 

The Bad Guys are getting better and better..

Newset Malware is a tough bitch:

The software, dubbed Careto, is a sophisticated suite of tools for compromising computers and collecting a wealth of information from them. Whoever is behind the malware sends out "spear phishing" e-mails, with addresses designed to be mistaken for the Web sites of mainstream newspapers, such as The Washington Post or the Guardian. If the user clicks on a link, it takes her to a Web site that scans her system for vulnerabilities and attempts to infect it. There are multiple versions of the malicious software designed to attack Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions, and Kapersky believes there may be versions that attack iOS and Android.

Once Careto has compromised a system, it begins collecting sensitive information from it. The software can "intercept network traffic, keystrokes, Skype conversations, analyse WiFi traffic, PGP keys, fetch all information from Nokia devices, screen captures and monitor all file operations."

It can also capture any encryption keys found on the machine, which can help launch attacks against other machines. The software has a plug-in architecture, allowing the attacker to dynamically load new software to perform tasks such as monitoring keystrokes or capturing the victim's email.

So who's behind the malware? It's likely that only national intelligence agencies have the resources to build software of this complexity and sophistication. Fragments of Spanish embedded in the software's files suggest that the culprit is a native Spanish speaker. But it's not clear which Spanish-speaking nation would build such a sophisticated intelligence operation. And the researchers note that the fragments of Spanish may be a "false flag" operation: The software's authors may have deliberately inserted Spanish slang into the software's source code to divert attention from the real authors.

Regardless, the emergence of the malware underscores that software-based espionage is an important new source of power. Last year, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency has a large "Tailored Access Operations" department dedicated to building offensive hacking capabilities. If the NSA didn't build Careto, it's a safe bet that they have something like it. And intelligence agencies in China, Russia and other great powers are likely working on software like it too.

No more secrets.

I don't think he understands what the word "mandate" means..

Another day, another delay (and law ignored):

The Obama administration announced Monday it would give medium-sized employers an extra year, until 2016, before they must offer health insurance to their full-time workers.

Firms with at least 100 employees will have to start offering this coverage in 2015.

By offering an unexpected grace period to businesses with between 50 and 99 employees, administration officials are hoping to defuse another potential controversy involving the 2010 health-care law, which has become central to Republicans’ campaign to make political gains in this year’s midterm election.

Even the nation’s largest employers got a significant concession: They can avoid a fine by offering coverage to 70 percent of their full-time employees in 2015 and 95 percent starting in 2016. Under an earlier proposal, employers with at least 50 employees would have been required to offer insurance, beginning 2015, to 95 percent of those who work 30 hours or more a week, along with their dependents.

The regulation finalized by the Treasury Department involves one of the biggest issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act: how the law’s employer mandate plays out in practice. The mandate has enormous ramifications for how businesses classify their employees and how much these men and women work.

Initially, these requirements — which affect firms employing 72 percent of all Americans — were supposed to take effect this year, at the same time that most individuals faced a new obligation to obtain health insurance or risk a tax penalty. Last July, the administration announced it would delay the regulation for a year after many employers and some unions complained about the law’s reporting requirements and classification system for workers.

A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the proposal on the condition of anonymity because the rule was not yet public, said the Treasury Department decided to allow medium-sized businesses more flexibility because they “need a little more time to adjust to providing coverage.”

Businesses that fail to offer coverage face a fine of up to $2,000 for each employee that is not covered, though workers are not required to sign up for the benefits.

Laws are for the little people.

When will someone on the Hill have the guts to challenge this fraud in the White House?

No need for citizens to own guns, right?

Here's what happened in the foreign Country of Iowa: