AP Wiretap Story just got serious

Remember that the AP had it’s phone records grabbed without them being told, because the revealed a terror plot?

Well, fair enough you say – if they compromised an ongoing investigation they should be investigated for possible breaches of the law.

Well, here’s the thing: there was no compromise of an investigation. See, the AP was negotiating with the US government on releasing the story. AP was told that the  government  wanted to announce it’s success before AP published the story – a story they’d already been sitting on for days because of the security concerns.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to believe that the AP’s release of the story on Monday threatened national security. In fact, the news organization was explicitly told at that point that it did not. Foiling the ability of the administration to chest-thump is not the same as endangering national security.

Or to put in bluntly: the Obama administration ins harassing journalists for getting in the way of their PR.

When you put this against the various accusations that the Benghazi cover-up was due to the embarrassment it might have caused for the Obama administration (hard to claim a foreign policy success in Libya when your embassy has just been attacked – as opposed to a protest turning violent because of some you-tube video), and the IRS scandal, a very clear picture begins to emerge of a president who has used the levers of power to entrench that power.

Recall with Benghazi, the Hillary Clinton told the families they’d “get the guy” who did it, and promptly arrested Mr Nakoula for his youTube video. That was the guy they said they’d “get” even though he had nothing to do with it. But he was a good scapegoat - easily caught and slaughtered. Seems the guys who actually did the deed aren’t even close to being apprehended (nor is the administration looking keen to get on with that job in spite of it’s promises). Note the PR is taken care of (we “got the guy”) while the security isn’t a priority.

And of course, with the IRS scandal, the Administration called for the head of the IRS. But it turns out, he was leaving anyway. Again, it’s the PR.

Oh, and if you’re not convinced just how bad the IRS issue is, watch this.

Let me bring one more thread in here: this tweet….

TWEET OF THE DAY: “These scandals are so bad that for the first time Obama wants to talk about the economy.”

The joke here is that Obama has created a really bad economy. It’s not recovering. But he was re-elected. Why is that?

It’s not because he had a bang-up second term agenda. In fact, he had no agenda at all until very late in the campaign.

No, he won because he convinced enough of America that Romney was some sort of out-of-touch billionaire who was only out for the rich. That was how he won - smearing his opponent instead of writing policy. In other words, more PR.

And instead of highlighting that, instead of raising alarm bells over how 4 Americans died with assistance within reach, instead of demanding an end to the disasters of Obama’s economic policy, the US media lapped it up and glossed over Benghazi and the economy.

Well congratulations guys, you sucked up to the machine. Now it’s your job to kill it before it kills you.

If you’ve lost Piers Morgan…

Video

Watch the video – Piers Morgan is pretty much eating his (very recent) words re: the possibly of an american government being tyrannical. It was only weeks ago that he was scoffing at the idea in relation to the 2nd amendment.

Props to the man for recognizing he was wrong though!

One thing is sure though, Obama has a very serious political problem right now.

Obama’s attitude comes home to roost

From Politico (via Instapundt)

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.”

When the going got tough for Bush, he stayed loyal to his people and they tended to stay loyal to him.

Obama on the other hand, has always pursued the strategy of throwing “under the bus” anyone who became a political problem. During the first campaign it was his pastor. Today the head of the IRS resigned, while Obama declared that he knew nothing about any of this stuff.

A couple of years ago I read Born Again, Charles Colson’s autobiography. I’d recommend it to any political nut, as it gives a real insight into what a decaying presidency looks like. (Though I strongly suspect that the book paints a slightly less than honest view of Colson’s own actions of the time.)

Time will tell if today’s actions will bring relief to the Administration. I can already see some media reports written by people who clearly are relieved they have an excuse to declare this one “over”. But the ground has certainly shifted, and it will be interesting to see how things develop with at least some of the media now casting a long-overdue critical eye over the administration.

Children as social suicide

I noticed this article the other day, and while it’s from Israel, it does speak volumes about the prevailing attitudes in the west.

In most places in Israel, having children is essentially the law: Observant Israelis feel obliged to observe the mitzvah pru urvu—be fruitful and multiply—from Genesis 1:28. And secular Israelis seem to adhere to the Zionist idea of having kids as part of the demographic war. In Tel Aviv, on the other hand, the issue is more complicated. There are two opposing attitudes when it comes to kids: one anti and one very much pro.

And it’s just my luck that most of my friends belong to the anti-baby side. So for me, in Tel Aviv’s hipster society, having a baby has been basically social suicide.

…

For months before I got pregnant, my friends tried to convince me that having a baby would be a horrible mistake. They emailed me links to academic studies and research showing that children don’t, in fact, make you happy. They told me that wishing to reproduce is narcissistic. I couldn’t always argue with their logic, and in hindsight I must admit that they were right in predicting that once I had a baby, I’d be having more conversations about the different shades and textures of poo than political debates or semiotic analysis of films.

But their ignorance turned into outright denial when I actually did get knocked up. From week to week my belly grew, but my friends around the Friday café table didn’t seem to notice—or, maybe, they didn’t want to notice. At one point I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to blatantly point to my baby bump. The first reaction was a series of blank looks. Then: “What? You got a new shirt?”

***

A few months after my boyfriend and I became parents, we found out we weren’t invited to an afternoon barbecue at a friend’s house. I tried to remember if one of us said anything to annoy him, or if a notorious ex might be on the guest list, thwarting our invitation. After some unsuccessful speculation, I decided to confront my friend, who simply said that he was sorry, but the other guests didn’t want babies at their party. I assumed even baby-haters know that a sleeping infant in a baby-carrier wouldn’t be much of an imposition, but maybe they were afraid I’d be so rude as to breastfeed while people are eating—a vulgar and thoughtless act that might propel someone to lose his spareribs.

As it turns out, my mistake was trying to rationalize the host’s answer, which led to me naively telling him he could have still invited us and told us not to bring the baby. To that he didn’t have an answer; he just mumbled something about not wanting to insult us. That’s when it sank in: It’s not the baby they imagined would cramp the party’s style; it was us. We simply weren’t considered cool anymore. The fear that we would open our mouths to report that a certain someone rolled over for the first time was so great that we had to be kept off the premises altogether.

Children are not optional for a functioning society. Repeat: not optional.

Yet, we’re seeing an increasing trend towards not only seeing them as optional, but undesirable. Partly that’s driven by the misguided idea that more people is “bad for the planet” and the idea that we’re “overpopulated” (even though birth rates are quickly falling below sustainable rates in many countries). 

But there’s also an increasing tread towards people who should be parents simply not wanting to make the sacrifice that children bring. That’s a double loss, because we lose the next generation, and we lose touch with a vital part of life in this generation too – fostering what can only be called selfishness instead.

It’s Official – Obama is in serious trouble now

Wow, what a difference a few days make. 

Obama is now embroiled in three scandals:

1. Benghazi – covered here previously, and thanks to extensive WH cover-ups  a scandal that still has a lot of legs. 
2. It’s just been discovered that the IRS was deliberately targeting conservative/Tea Party groups for heavy auditing, demanding all sorts of information – and then (and this bit is not quite in the MSM yet) leaking it to the press
3. The grabbing of AP’s phone records. This one has even made the news here. And it’s  the one that has turned the above from “this gives the Republicans something to complain about” into “Obama is in trouble”.

And Obama really is in trouble, big trouble.

Let’s start with the Benghazi attack and the issue of what the White House knew and when. This scandal has bubbled below the surface for the past few months, but the embarrassing shift more than a week after the attack from the fiction that the attack started as a demonstration over a YouTube video to a belated acknowledgment that it had been a planned terrorist attack — and that there had been no demonstration at all — had not been forgotten on Capitol Hill.

Three State Department career employees finally came forward to tell Congress last week that no one had even suggested to the State Department that a demonstration had taken place. Gregory Hicks, who was the deputy chief of mission in Libya, told the House Oversight panel that he personally briefed Hillary Clinton during the attack, and that no demonstration had taken place, and that the supposedly catalytic YouTube film about Mohammed was a “non-factor” on the ground. Hicks also said that his “jaw dropped” when he heard Susan Rice tell five different Sunday talk shows that the attack started with a spontaneous demonstration at the consulate, directly contradicting what Libya’s president was telling U.S. news outlets at the same time.

It’s a big problem when you go around telling people you’ll “get the guys who did this” and you then go out and “get” some guy who had nothing to do with it.

And this was the least of the scandals that erupted over the last week. The IRS scandal was entirely new, and at first blush bad enough to drive the Benghazi story out of the headlines. Lois Lerner admitted that her IRS unit overseeing tax-exempt groups had expressly targeted groups with words like “Tea Party,” “Patriot,” and “9/12″ in their names for extra scrutiny. Lerner claimed that this took place only last year among “low-level workers” in the Cincinnati office that handles those applications. Over the weekend, though, it became clear that Lerner left a lot of other information out.

As leaks from an upcoming Inspector General report began on Saturday and rolled through today, a much different picture emerged. The enhanced scrutiny wasn’t applied only on the basis of word searches, but also to any groups critical of the way government was being run. The extra scrutiny didn’t start in June 2012, as Lerner claimed, but in March 2010 — before the midterms, when Tea Party groups campaigned in opposition to the ObamaCare bill that passed (coincidentally?) in that same month.

Using the tax department to persecute the president’s opponents is a massive no-no. 

As bad as that was, the IRS scandal wasn’t even the worst news for Obama. Just when he needed a sympathetic media to help downplay the politicization of the IRS and the rinsing of the Benghazi talking points (which Obama dismissed as “no there there” in a Monday press conference), the Associated Press announced that the Department of Justice had seized two months of phone records of as many as 100 of its reporters and three of its offices. The presumed trigger for this was a leak investigation into a May 2012 story about the CIA operation in Yemen that kept an airliner bomb plot from reaching fruition. Rather than alert the AP that it would subpoena the phone records, the DOJ seized them secretly, claiming that notifying the AP would “pose a substantial threat to the investigation” — even though the APcan’t bury the records of the phone companies involved, even if it were inclined to try.

Suddenly, conservative claims of active intimidation and pressure from the White House looked a lot less conspiratorial to the media. Erik Wemple at the Washington Post called the action “a dagger to the heart of AP‘s news-gathering activity.” What source will trust that their identity will remain anonymous if the government can seize the phone records without warning? TheACLU called it “an unacceptable abuse of power,” which is what conservative groups had called the IRS’s attack on them for most of the past three years.

An incredibly stupid thing to do. 

And these are just the ones making the news. 

Time will tell if the last few days have been a major turning point, or a pretty hefty bump in the road. I’m picking turning point for the public, but the media might just recover themselves in a month or two in time to attach the very notion that we impeach the guy.

Stupidity at a glance

Outside of all the other problems with this “heads we win” post from No Right Turn is the curious fact that… well, just read it for yourself. Emphasis mine.

Mighty River Power shares were listed on the stock exchange today, and immediately rose in value. At closing, they appear to have been worth $2.62 – 12 cents up on the government’s price.

The 2.5% will be happy with this – their wealth has increased by $82 million in an afternoon. But the rest of us shouldn’t be. That $82 million is $82 million we’ve been ripped off by. Its $82 million we won’t be able to spend on schools and hospitals because the government deliberately underpriced the shares it was selling to its donors and cronies.

meanwhile, I’m wondering just how many National MPs will be declaring MRP shares on their pecuniary interest declarations next year…

Posted by Idiot/Savant at 5/10/2013 05:12:00 PMLinks to this post

Labels: Corruption, Left, Privatisation

A conflict of interest

One of the core requirements on New Zealand public servants is political neutrality.

Need I say more? I don’t think I do.

(*as in “heads we win, tales you lose” – Idiot casually announced he’d be pursuing this morally bankrupt method of claiming the moral high ground post-sale earlier in the week.)

Benghazi Hearings

The proverbial just hit the fan in the US today.

Greg Hicks testified before congress that the Obama administration tried to get him to shut up about what happened the night that 4 Americans, including the ambassador, died.

This is bigger that Watergate. As the Republicans keep saying, no one died at Watergate.

There are a lot of questions about what actually happened, and why the Obama administration tried to blame a youtube video even after it was known that video had nothing to do with the attack. Even the response to the questions raises questions, since the Obama administration has denied access to almost all information even remotely connected to the attack.

This is serious stuff, and could easily lead to Obama being impeached. 

So naturally, the media are having a field day… covering it up.

Nope. We’ll have none of that. Instead, reporter Dilanian spews Obama talking points in the most blatantly partisan fashion imaginable:

Hicks and two other State Department witnesses shed little new light on the key questions at issue in the hearing: whether there was anything more the U.S. military could have done to thwart the attack and whether the Obama administration intentionally misled the American people when officials initially said the attacks stemmed from a protest.

An independent review board has concluded that neither charge is true, but the Republican-controlled House is pressing on with investigations, with particular interest in the role of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may run for president in 2016.

Wait, what? A highly praised individual questions the official line that this was a protest, and is suddenly the victim of blatant retaliation and is told not to talk to Congress — and none of this sheds any light on whether the Obama administration misled the public?

As for the work of that “independent” review board — convened by Hillary Clinton — Hicks was interviewed by that board, but never had a chance to read their conclusions before they were issued. Somehow, oddly enough, the board didn’t tell us everything we heard about today. And that board has faced criticism for not interviewing other key players — not that you would know that from reading today’s L.A. Times article.

Three paragraphs from the end of the piece, this tidbit is neatly buried: “Hicks said he was disgusted when he heard U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice say on television Sept. 16 that the attacks stemmed from a protest over an anti-Islamic video. There was no protest, Hicks said.” So that revelation is about as far from prominent as you can get.

What about the pressure on Hicks to keep his mouth shut? And the retaliation he suffered when he did not?

Yup, you guessed it. As remarkable as it ought to seem given that this story was written by an ostensibly professional journalist working for a large metropolitan newspaper, there is not a single, solitary word in the article about any of that.

It’s amazing that the US media has any credibility at this point. They are actively ignoring what is one of the biggest scandals in recent political history. The media is supposed to watch those in power, challenge them and hold them to account. 

But it seems that only applies to some administrations, not to others.

Time to move on – Green Party

Bob at Family First points out that the Green Party’s previous stance when faced with a petition falling short is to give up and move on.

He also posts a few stats comparing the referendums:

How many signatures were submitted? 324,216 v 391,355

How many were needed to force the referendum? 300,094 v 308,753

How many were found invalid after the thorough audit? 13% v 25%

To collect in two months: 18,027 v 16,500

Government funding: 0 v $91,000

That’s right – $91,000 of your money to get 100,000 irregular signatures 

Let’s face it, the CIR route was always a bad one for the Greens given their sneers at the last successful (and wildly popular) one. Submitting a petition with one hundred thousand (use Dr Evil accent for that one) false signatures sinks what was already a seriously leaky moral ship.

There’s some questions being raised that the duplicates and false signatures were planted there deliberately. Perhaps if they had relied on volunteers they might have had a few less. I have no  Either way, they only have themselves to blame for not checking more thoroughly  It’s not like they lacked funding or anything.

Update: Wow, Normal keeps it classy.

 

Because clearly there’s no difference putting a fake or duplicate signature on a petition and signing up for information on shares and then deciding that you’re not going to make the purchase (as I did).

One of these is fraud. The other is normal business. It appears we have a party leader who either doesn’t know the difference or think’s it’s good politics to pretend there isn’t.

Idiotic (Atheist) Comment of the Day

From Kiwiblog, on the thread that begain by talking about the HRC taking the Anglican Bishop to court for refusing an unchaste prospective priest’s application.

nasska (6,243) Says: 
May 6th, 2013 at 1:12 pm

Churches within NZ do enjoy independence & freedom from Government interference. Regrettably the rest of us do not enjoy freedom from religious meddling & lobbying.

The God afflicted have one vote each, exactly the same as the rest of us but this isn’t enough for them. Rather they seek extra influence through their organisations, then demand that the taxpayers subsidise the propaganda by granting them tax exemption.

“My God & Me & the Hell with Thee” sums it up.

Vote:  3  4

And then he followed it up with this:

nasska (6,243) Says: 
May 6th, 2013 at 1:34 pm

scrubone

Off the top of my head there are a few examples of religious organisations meddling in politics:

1) Bishop Tamaki & his lot

2) The Exclusive Bretheren in 2005

3) The Ratana Church

4) SPUC

5) The SPCS

If I have a vote I have a political influence…..you have the same vote plus an organisation piling on political pressure..

When I later pointed out that he was completely inconsistent with… well, democracy, religious freedom and all that stuff, he changed his mind and claimed it was all about tax exemptions.

One can only wonder how someone’s thinking can get so screwed up that you think religious people have some sort of “extra vote” or some such thing because there are groups lobbying who you agree with. 

Meanwhile, Family First have had a good whine about losing their tax exempt status. Given they were setup first and foremost to represent family issues in Parliament  I was surprised when they were given charitable status. So I’m not so worried about it being taken away – though the circumstances in which they have been do raise an eyebrow.

Quote of the Day – Obama Fail Edition

Jay Leno: President Obama held a press conference earlier today, and he said he still wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, but he doesn’t know how to do it. He should do what he always does: declare it a small business and tax it out of existence.It will be gone in a minute. 

Ouch.