Soldier Told Not to Read Levin, Limbaugh or Hannity in Uniform

Thought crime always comes disguised as tolerance.

Ron Crews, executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty said stories like this are becoming commonplace in the military post-repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

“These stories are the ones that have not been told – about some of the more subtle ramifications of the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy,” he said.

One service member received a severe reprimand for expressing his faith’s religious position about homosexuality in a personal religious blog.

A chaplain was relieved of his command over a military chapel because he could not allow same-sex weddings to take place in the chapel.

And a chaplain who asked senior military officers whether religious liberty would be protected in the wake of the repeal of the law against open homosexual behavior in the military was told to “get in line” or resign.

Crews said they are sharing these stories to let other service members know there is a place to get help. He said Chaplain Alliance publishes a religious liberty palm card – explaining constitutionally protected liberties to service members.

“If you believe your religious liberties have been violated, here’s what you can do,” he said. “We will see that you get the help that you need.”

" ...to do battle with those reactionary punks."

Roger Simon in Israel tells how Matt Drudge is the indispensable man. 

Forget Travels with My Aunt or Travels with Charley. I travel with Matt.

By reading Drudge any time I want (virtually) I can stay almost as tuned in as I am in New York or L.A. — and without the absurd NYTimes filter placed on the International Herald Tribune.

And it is clear from afar that Matt Drudge is the most important person in America today. He is the key man holding our society up. I know some sing the praises of their talk radio and/or print pundit favorite, but I’ve got news for you — get out of the country for a few days and Drudge leaves them in the dust.

He is the man holding things together, the bastion against the absolute Orwellian madness that is the Obama administration. You know Drudge will be there with the latest on the IRS, Benghazi, the Associated Press, James Rosen, and now the downloads of all our personal data (are we faintly surprised?) by the most proto-fascistic group of so-called progressives ever assembled.

The man has a way with words.

Hashtag Fun: #NSACalledToTellMe

Via IMAO

#NSACalledToTellMe the 60,000-mile warranty on the car was expiring. To avoid a drone strike, time to extend it.

#NSACalledToTellMe What Happens in Vegas, stays in our Utah data center.

#NSACalledToTellMe I shouldn’t worry cause they’re only targeting terrorists. Oh, and the milk in my fridge is past it’s sell-by date.

#NSACalledToTellMe that I left my garage door open this morning but not to worry, they’ll close it when they leave.

#NSACalledToTellMe they want to survey how my wiretapping experience went. Customer service is important to them.

#NSACalledToTellMe Hey I just met you. And this is crazy. But I listen to all your phone calls. So call anyone, maybe.

#NSACalledToTellMe Every breath you take Every move you make Every bond you break Every step you take I’ll be watching you…

#NSACalledToTellMe my phone bill is due: I told them: you pay it… you’re on it more than I am…

Hitler uses the Obama excuse: "I don't blame people for being outraged. I'm outraged too. I learned about this holocaust from the news reports, just like the rest of you."

One of the comments by C Stanley on the Althouse blog made this darkly humorous comment in the headline.  Remember, there are no written orders from Hitler ordering the extermination of the Jews.   Perhaps his supporters just assumed that's what he wanted done and went ahead on their own, like the IRS underlings in Cincinnati.   Could it be that Hitler has been wrongly accused all this time?   That he would have put a stop to it if he had only known? 

 

Yeah, it all makes sense now.  If only Hitler Obama had known. 

UPDATE:  Thanks to Kate at  Small Dead Animals.  And from the comments:

Quick, someone make a Downfall parody video, "Hitler finds out about the Holocaust"...

Ann Althouse on Obama

 

I watched the video at the link 3 times because I was fascinated by the hesitations and the facial expressions. I can't tell when/whether he's lying, but I can tell when he's pleased with himself.

 

 

Ann Althouse is a woman. Her comment about watching an Obama video clip is a woman’s reaction. She’s looking of visual cues, for facial tells, for hesitancy in speaking. She probably does that when she’s talking with her husband or her female friends, because that’s what women do. And people who can speak with apparent sincerity, no matter if they are speaking the biggest bullshit, and do it with a straight face, convince her.

Men, on the other hand, listen to the words. They listen for inconsistencies, for untruths, for self-congratulation, for straw men arguments and, as Obama does again in this speech, blaming Bush.

That’s disappointing in a law professor, but then she did vote for Obama.

Brokeback Summit

Ghost of Columbia- Part II: Legendary Columbia Professor Never Heard of Obama

From The Blaze by Wayne Allyn Root.

My life has crossed paths with President Obama on multiple occasions. According to Obama, we were Columbia University classmates, both Pre Law and Political Science majors in the Class of ’83. I also ran against Obama in 2008 on the Libertarian Party Presidential ticket. What are the odds?

But something about “the Obama at Columbia story” has always bothered me. Earlier in the week right here at The Blaze I wrote about having just returned from New York, where I attended my 30th Columbia University reunion. I celebrated with my esteemed classmates. Everyone except Barack Obama. As usual- he wasn’t there. Not a trace. Not a video greeting. Not a letter. I could not find any classmates who knew him.

I called Obama “the Ghost of Columbia University.” I pointed out (as I’ve said in the media for many years now) that Obama may have been registered at Columbia, may have graduated from Columbia, but he was rarely (if ever) seen for the two years in-between. It’s a strange, mysterious and frightening story.

Is he the real-life “Manchurian Candidate?” What explains Obama having just enough skeletal proof that he was there (one photo, one roommate, one professor, one friend)…but never seen in a class, never on anyone’s radar screen, almost invisible. A total 2-year blackout. It’s like a story straight out of a novel about the CIA or KGB. He graduated Columbia, but it’s almost as if he never went there.

To make matters more mysterious, Obama’s college records are sealed. He’s had plenty of opportunities to authorize the release, to clear the air. He has never chosen to do so. But why? What has he got to hide? Funny enough Obama has never had a problem ripping open the sealed records of his political opponents. Every step of his career Obama has beaten his opponents by having sealed documents just happen to be publicly exposed by anonymous sources. But not Obama. His records are always unavailable (and never leaked). Obama always seems to have powerful forces on his side.

Did he attend Columbia as a foreign student? That was the educated guess I made in my appearance on “Hannity” on Fox News a year ago. The only photo of Obama from his Columbia days was in his off-campus apartment with a roommate described by USA Today as a Pakistani national, pot smoker, and cocaine abuser. If you’re a foreign student, you live in housing off-campus with other foreign students.

That would also explain how he transferred to Columbia. Transferring into an Ivy League school is all but impossible. I did a little digging and found out only 3 transfer students in all of America were accepted into Columbia in the past academic year. Three students out of 315 million Americans. Yet those who knew Obama at Occidental called him a pot smoker and partier who rarely attended class. You’re telling me that a poor student, with that record, at an average college, was accepted for transfer into prestigious Columbia University? Only if he was an exotic Indonesian foreign student transferring into a college that desperately wanted to claim an ethnically and globally diverse student body.

Still that might explain how Obama got into Columbia. But where was he for those two years? My gut instincts say something is wrong with “the Obama at Columbia story.” Very wrong. Rancid.

But until now, I was the only one publicly voicing my suspicions. That just changed in a big way. Meet Professor Henry Graff, perhaps the most legendary and honored professor ever at Columbia University. He was THE American History and Diplomatic History professor at Columbia for 46 years. And he is more emphatic than yours truly that there are no Obama footprints at Columbia.

I was put on Professor Graff’s trail by another Columbia classmate, skeptical about Obama’s story. He told me that Professor Graff had been the speaker for the Class of ’53 last weekend at Columbia. My friend was watching Graff answer questions from the crowd when he was asked about Obama at Columbia. Graff said, “I have my doubts he ever went here.”

I did some digging and located Graff’s home phone number. I called him yesterday. Now retired, he was delighted to hear from me. He agreed to go on the record about Obama. Unlike Obama, Professor Graff clearly remembered me. He was thrilled to hear from his former student. I was in several of Graff’s classes and he remembered me like it was yesterday. He sounded great- like he hasn’t lost any of his trademark sharpness in 30 years since we last met.

I was honored to learn that this legendary historian has been following my political career for many years. But he had no such cheery things to say about the President. Graff said, “I taught at Columbia for 46 years. I taught every significant American politician that ever studied at Columbia. I know them all. I’m proud of them all. Between American History and Diplomatic History, one way or another, they all had to come through my classes. Not Obama. I never had a student with that name in any of my classes. I never met him, never saw him, never heard of him.”

Even more importantly, Professor Graff knew the other history and political science professors. “None of the other Columbia professors knew him either” said Graff.

Graff concluded our interview by saying, “I’m very upset by the whole story. I am angry when I hear Obama called ‘the first President of the United States from Columbia University.’ I don’t consider him a Columbia student. I have no idea what he did on the Columbia campus. No one knows him.”

There is something wrong with Obama’s story- I know that. Many of my classmates at last weekend’s 30th reunion knew that. Now the most beloved Professor ever at Columbia joins us in publicly questioning the story. Obama is either the ghost of Columbia, or the perfect Manchurian candidate. But something smells rotten at Columbia.

This is Part II.  Part I is found here.  A brief excerpt:

One of the speakers at the 30th reunion should have reminisced about “my days with the future President.” But no one did. You’d think Obama might have sent a video to tell us all how much he enjoyed his time at Columbia. You’d think he’d have sent at least a letter to be read aloud from one of his former college buddies. Right? But he didn’t. Because Obama has no former college buddies. No one that ever met Obama, let alone befriended him, was in attendence at our 30th class reunion.

Now you might argue this is all strange, but it’s possible. After all Columbia says he graduated. And I take my college’s word for it. Would one of the world’s greatest Ivy League institutions participate in a coverup, thereby risking their billion dollar reputation? And there is one single article written for the Columbia newspaper with Obama’s name on it. A single photo also exists of Obama in his Manhattan apartment with the man he claims was his college roommate- a Pakistani foreign student. And one single radical leftist Columbia professor who hates Israel also claims he remembers Obama.

You would think that Barack Obama received the invitation to the reunion and there would have been some response, along the lines of "he's too busy." He is, after all, part of the class of 1983.

Is this like the birth certificate story?  Let's unseal the transcript, what can it hurt?

How Putin removed wedding ring while watching the ballet and emerged with his wife to announce their divorce on live TV

Putin, 60, and 55-year-old wife announce that their 29-year marriage is over
President and wife Lyudmila reveal split in interview after night at the ballet

The other woman.

 

Why is Washington, D.C., a boomtown when the rest of the country has economic despair? Why are housing prices going up in D.C. when everywhere else in the world they’ve had a horrible five years?

Looks like someone to keep an eye on.

Ask Midland University’s Ben Sasse if he’s going to run for Nebraska’s open Senate seat next year, and he’s quick to insist that he hasn’t committed to anything. But within hours of Representative Jeff Fortenberry’s May 29 announcement that he would not be pursuing the seat, Sasse had a video up on Facebook announcing he was going to embark on a 45-day listening tour across the state​—​“from Benkelman to Beatrice”​—​with his wife and three young children in tow before making a decision....

Being president of the college in his hometown agrees with Sasse, but his résumé suggests no shortage of ambition. He studied at Harvard, Oxford, and St. John’s, then earned a Ph.D. from Yale. His dissertation won the Theron Rockwell Field and the George Washington Egleston Prizes. The dissertation is a treasure trove of forgotten history relating to the populist backlash surrounding the Supreme Court’s school prayer decisions in the 1960s. More broadly, it’s a sophisticated and brilliant dissection of how a lot of the standard liberal narratives about American political realignment in the last 50 years are woefully incomplete at best and self-serving fictions to attack religious conservatives at worst. Given his academic background, it’s not surprising that Sasse has taught history and politics at Yale and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. ...

When Sasse was appointed president of Midland three years ago, he was just 37 years old​—​making him one of the youngest college presidents in the country. At the time, Midland was in dire straits and contemplating bankruptcy. Sasse turned out to be a prodigious crisis manager. In the last three years, Midland’s enrollment has gone from 590 students to 1,100. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that in the process of turning Midland around, Sasse reinvented the higher education wheel. Oddly enough, his vision for reforming higher ed grew out of his experience trying to fix America’s dysfunctional health care system.

“The only sector that even compares with higher ed for being broken is health care. Think about how similar they are. They’re both dominated by third-party payment, and that third party is mostly public funders that don’t know how to hold anybody accountable for outcomes. The institutions exist primarily for the good of their own workers, not their own customers​—​students or patients. Quality is hard to measure, but to the degree you can measure, you have to measure things that are team outcomes, not solo, virtuoso outcomes,” he says.

Telling the truth

“The greatness of America is the greatness of the American people,” he continues, “not the greatness of centralized bureaucracies in Washington, D.C. Why is Washington, D.C., a boomtown when the rest of the country has economic despair? Why are housing prices going up in D.C. when everywhere else in the world they’ve had a horrible five years? The federal government ain’t feeling the pain. They just keep on growing.”

3rd victim dead in Santa Monica College shooting

Another victim of "gun free zones."

A woman injured during a shooting rampage that ended at Santa Monica College on Friday afternoon has died, officials from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center said.

Two other people have been confirmed dead inside a home that was set on fire in Santa Monica, law enforcement sources said.

Authorities said a gunman allegedly set the home on fire, opened fire on several cars and appeared to try to carjack two vehicles. One of the attempted carjackings occurred near the campus library and college police station.

Although, to be fair, it started off-campus.

Progressives, Democrats must stand with New York Times against Obama on NSA phone records collection

Every progressive with even a shred of moral consistency should side with the New York Times against the White House.

Of course they should, but they won't.  Hell, even the NY Times won't side with itself in a few days.

Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans

By Michael Isikoff, National Investigative Correspondent for NBC News takes the government line.

"Nothing to see here folks, move along."

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

You're going to see a lot of that "mistakenly" in reporting along with the overused word "unexpectedly."

Limbaugh: 'We are in the midst of a coup'...

From Rush Limbaugh on Friday June7th. [Hi there Mr. NSA guy]

He [Herbert Meyer] said whether you believe it or not, there is not one document linking Adolf Hitler to the holocaust. Adolf Hitler never put it on paper what he intended to do. There is no smoking gun. And yet what happened? We know that the Nazis engaged in the Holocaust. Herb Meyer's point was that the people Hitler hired didn't have to be told. They didn't have to be given instructions. All they had to do was listen to what Hitler was saying. All they had to do was listen to what his objectives were. And he said the same thing's happening here with this administration. He went to great pains to say: I'm not calling this administration a bunch of Nazis. I'm just using this as an illustration. I know people will get my point if I use something this notorious, the Nazi regime.

It's a point that I've made here about the IRS. They say, "Well, you can't link it in to Obama." You don't need to link Obama to it. He hired these people. Lois Lerner and everybody at the IRS who's doing this is doing everything they can to please Obama. There's not gonna be a smoking gun, but you don't need a smoking gun to know where this administration's doing what it's doing.

Obama puts people in positions that mirror him. Eric Holder, you name it, they're doing Obama's bidding. Everybody. Susan Rice and Samantha Power, they are Obama, and there's a context for what's happening. Herbert Meyer, if I may quote him again, asserted that essentially what's taking place in the United States right now is a coup, not a violent coup, and not a million artistic coup, but nevertheless a takeover of a government, and it's being done by the Obama administration.

He referred to it as a coup. I don't know if he used the word "peaceful," but clearly there's a coup d'etat going. You know it and I know it. This is what animates us. This is why the Tea Party exists. This country was founded on certain concepts, principles, beliefs -- and they're under assault. Chief among them under assault is the right to privacy, and that's what all this is about. So in the midst of this coup d'etat... I happen to like that formulation.

In seeking ways to persuade, for example, the low-information voters of what's going on, this happens. These are the people continuing to prop Obama up with high approval numbers. The Limbaugh Theorem. How do we reach 'em? How do we tell them? How do we explain what's going on when they have, perhaps, almost an idolatrous relationship with the president? Well, maybe you tell 'em there's a coup going on.

There are people attempting to take over this country and to make it something that it wasn't founded as; turn it into something that it wasn't intended to be. That is happening. You know it and I know it. It's peaceful, nonviolent. The military isn't involved. But nevertheless it's a coup. So in the context of that and the realization that's happening, in the midst of learning that the National Security Agency is literally "Hoovering," vacuuming every telephone record they can, what do we hear?

"Nothing to see here, Rush. Calm down! Slow down, Rush. This is nothing to get concerned about. There's nothing illegal here. The Fourth Amendment's not being violated or breached. This is nothing whatsoever to get concerned about." How can I...? (sigh) I don't know how people can look at this in context and say that. The people doing this are what make it a big deal. Their motives and their intentions and their clear assault on the whole notion of privacy make it interesting.

I'm sorry for the long detour there, but in the midst of being told that I need to be more levelheaded -- and not just me, but all of us who are a little bit concerned here about this Verizon story. We are all being told, "Back off, back off. Nothing to see here. We're not really, really concerned." It was in the midst of that that I heard about Prism. That was a Washington Post story that posted on their website around five or six o'clock yesterday afternoon.

The basic tenet of this story is that somebody in the intelligence community -- NSA, somewhere -- is so concerned over what he's seeing take place that he went to the Washington Post and took with him a little PowerPoint slide presentation and gave it to the Post and their reporters, and they wrote a story up and put it on their website. The story is that practically every major tech group and company in this country is participating with the government in allowing the government access to their servers.

E-mails, texts, phone calls, photographs. Virtually any communication that's taking place via the Apple servers, the Microsoft servers, the Google servers, the NSA is able to look at in real time. This is the story now. The guy that went to the Washington Post said, "It was so scary. They can watch us as we type." The Washington Post published some of the PowerPoint slides. I'm reading this after being told that the Verizon thing is no big deal. "It's nothing to get concerned about.

"Nothing to see here. Don't get too worried about that. Don't go off half cocked!" Here comes the Prism story, and then shortly after the Prism story hits, all of these tech firms start denying it. Apple says, "I never heard of Prism. We don't know what this is about. We never let anybody have access to our servers without a warrant, without a court order. We never!" Google said the same thing. Microsoft said the same thing. Facebook said the same thing.

They're all out there denying it. So I thought, "Did the Washington Post get set up?" I'm asking myself, "Did they get set up by somebody walking in and telling them something that wasn't true?" But then I saw that Prism reported someplace else by this Glenn Greenwald guy at the UK Guardian. So there were two sources for the Prism story, but the tech firms involved continue to deny it. "Nope, it's not happening." Now we've got audio sound bites.

These guys from the tech firms like Greenwald and some of these others, are blaming Bush for all of this, still. Today! Still today, all of this is the fault of Bush. Bush is the guy that got this ball rolling. So there must be something to it if the left is circling the wagons around Obama and trying to make all of us think that all of this is the fault of George W. Bush. I just gotta tell you something, folks. Richard Nixon never even dreamed of this kind of stuff, and yet most people in this country think that Nixon did 10 times as bad as what's happening now.

The fact is, Nixon never dreamed of this.

Whatever he wanted to cook up, he never even came up with this. So there is clearly -- somewhere, somehow, in some form or another -- a coup taking place, and there is an assault on privacy, and there are assaults on people because of their politics and their ideology. It is taking place; it's undeniable. Yet many of the people we would hope would be pushing back against this and doing their best to join us and warning everybody say, "Nothing to see here! Don't get all crazy about this. We must be level headed."

Plays soundbite of Maxine Waters:

WATERS: Well, you know, I don't know, and I think some people are missing something here. The president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That's going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it's never been done before.

I have a sister who was a teen ager in Holland before and during World War 2. She is terrified of Obama because what is going on in the US reminds her so much of what was going on in Europe leading up to that war. Until recently I dismissed her fears as those of an elderly person living too much in the past. No more. Now I'm taking her fears seriously.

Who do we trust? Who do we fear most?

Some things just depend on the situation. When I go shooting at a range or hunting in the field I have no fear of the guns in the hands of the people around me. If I were to meet a masked man with a gun on a street, I would be very worried. That’s one of the reasons the law says that violent criminals can’t legally carry guns even after they get out of jail.  They have demonstrated that they are not to be trusted with deadly weapons.

Which brings me to the telephone and Internet surveillance the Obama administration has been conducting. I want the government to protect the people of this country from attack. And let’s not kid ourselves about the source of the threat: it’s the violent followers of Islam.

To that end, I trusted George Bush when he asked for the passage of the Patriot Act because I knew that he was an honorable man. Heck, I trusted Bill Clinton with some things; just not women or money because I knew his history with both. Hell, you could even trust Richard Nixon because he was a patriot.  And you could even trust him around the IRS because the IRS in Nixon’s time refused to obey orders to go after his enemies.

But I don’t trust Obama with the powers of the surveillance state because he is a liar who has shown no consideration for the Constitution and the limits on the power of the government.  In fact he has openly stated that he believes the Constitution is fundamentally flawed.  In addition, the series of rapid-fire scandals that have surfaced after the election have demonstrated that he has subverted the executive branch agencies.  From the IRS to the FBI, the CIA, the EPA and the HHS and are no longer to be trusted to obey the Constitutional limits that safeguard our freedoms.  Even the Supreme Court has shown itself to bow to the pressure of Obama and his allies in the press.  We don't trust a government that has, like a violent criminal, demonstrated that the law is no impediment to the advancement of the Obama agenda.  

 

At this point it's a shame, but we may have to choose who we are more fearful of, the Jihadi or the US government. 

From American Digest:

Lawyer speak "€œNobody is listening to your calls"€. Correct! It is a building full of Cray computers listening to your calls, looking for key words and phrases and faithfully reporting to whomever programmed it.

I don't even care if anyone is reading or listening in. I know how it works, they have a system that flags specific words and phrases to be examined, then if it looks problematic, the entire call/email/whatever is analyzed. 99.99999% of the stuff goes through without even being noticed, and the stuff that is almost none of it gets to an analyst, I get it.

The problem is that they're doing it to begin with, and that problem is insanely increased by an executive branch which has so completely and repeatedly demonstrated they are willing to use their power to punish political enemies for no other reason than disagreeing with them.

I mean, its one thing to have government scanning emails for phrases like "kill the president," its another to have them looking for "small government" and "overtaxed."

 

Long-Run Silence

Mark Steyn on the homosexuality of Lord Keynes, his racism and the press who has the vapors when it's mentioned. 

The other day, Niall Ferguson, a celebrity historian at Harvard, was at an "investors' conference," the kind of speaking gig he plays a lot of: You get a ton of money to go see a small number of extremely rich people and tell them something provocative — but not too provocative. So, at this conference of money guys in Carlsbad, somebody brings up the best-known quote from the most influential economist of our age — John Maynard Keynes's line that "in the long run we are all dead" — and Ferguson responds to the effect that, well, Keynes was a childless homosexual, so he would say that, wouldn't he? It's not an original thought: In fact, the only reason I didn't include it in the passage on Keynes in my book was that I felt it had been done a bazillion times before. But it evidently was so shocking to the California crowd, many of whom undoubtedly have friends who are gay hedge-funders or are thinking of becoming one, that everybody had the vapors about it, and poor old Ferguson found himself instantly transformed from one of Time's "100 most influential people in the world" into the Todd Akin of Harvard. "This takes gay-bashing to new heights," shrieked Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor, who really needs to get out of the house more.

In the long run, Keynes is dead. So Obama was unable to place a Sandra Fluke/Jason Collins supportive phone call to him. But "the Queen of King's," as he was known at Cambridge, would have been amused by his newfound status as America's most bashed gay. In 1917, in Washington for Anglo-American debt talks, Keynes wrote home to his lover Duncan Grant about what a ghastly place it was: "The only really sympathetic and original thing in America is the niggers, who are charming."

If I understand the Gay Enforcers' position correctly, Keynes's homosexuality is no reflection on his economic theories, but Ferguson's homophobia most certainly is a reflection on his economic theories, which can now be safely dismissed by all respectable persons. Recognizing the threat to his highly lucrative brand, Professor Ferguson immediately issued an "unqualified apology." He is married to one of the bravest women on the planet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has stood firm for a decade against loons who want to kill her as they did her friend Theo van Gogh. Up against a bunch of hysterical ninnies threatening only his speaking fees, Ferguson caved.

Read the whole thing.

‘A Conspiracy So Immense’ — Was FDR Aide Harry Hopkins a Soviet Agent?

Yes, yes he was.

The evidence pointing toward Harry Hopkins’s complicity in a plot of subversive Soviet influence within the FDR White House is more extensive than this one incident, but this incident by itself is shocking enough to deserve front-page headlines.

The FBI had gotten clear proof that the Soviet Union was using diplomatic cover to insert Comintern agents into the United States, and that these agents were, in turn, funding and directing espionage aimed at our top-secret Manhattan Project. And when J. Edgar Hoover told the president’s most trusted aide about this investigation, in a letter that emphasized the confidential nature of the information, Harry Hopkins tells the Soviet embassy about it?

HOLY! FREAKING! CRAP!

Read the whole thing.

An IRS Political Timeline

Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal provides a revealing look at the Genesis of the attack on conservative organizations.  Once you connect the dots, the evidence is irrefutable.  This was an Obama operation from the beginning. You won't find any memos or written orders, but then you won't find any specific orders from Hitler ordering the extermination of the Jews either.  But somehow it was done.

Perhaps the only useful part of the inspector general's audit of the IRS was its timeline. We know that it was August 2010 when the IRS issued its first "Be On the Lookout" list, flagging applications containing key conservative words and issues. The criteria would expand in the months to come.

What else was happening in the summer and fall of 2010? The Obama administration and its allies continue to suggest the IRS was working in some political vacuum. What they'd rather everyone forget is that the IRS's first BOLO list coincided with their own attack against "shadowy" or "front" conservative groups that they claimed were rigging the electoral system.

Below is a more relevant timeline, a political one, which seeks to remind readers of the context in which the IRS targeting happened.

Aug. 9, 2010: In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names a group he is obsessed with—Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers)—and warns about conservative groups. Taking up a cry that had until then largely been confined to left-wing media and activists, he says: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Aug. 11: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends out a fundraising email warning about "Karl Rove-inspired shadow groups."

Aug. 21: Mr. Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of "attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don't know who's behind these ads and we don't know who's paying for them. . . . You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."

Week of Aug. 23: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled "Covert Operations," in which she accuses them of funding "political front groups." The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created "slippery organizations with generic-sounding names" that have "made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington."

Aug. 27: White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does "not pay corporate income tax." The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. The report has never been released.

This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status.

Sept. 2: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warns on its website that the Kochs have "funneled their money into right-wing shadow groups."

Sept. 16: Mr. Obama, in Connecticut, repeats that a "foreign-controlled entity" might be funding "millions of dollars of attack ads." Four days later, in Philadelphia, he again says the problem is that "nobody knows" who is behind conservative groups.

Sept. 21: Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article "Obama, Dems Try to Make Shadowy Conservative Groups a Problem for Conservatives," writes that a "senior administration official" had "urged a small gathering of reporters to start writing on what he deemed 'the most insidious power grab that we have seen in a very long time.' "

Sept. 22: In New York City, Mr. Obama warns that conservative groups "pose as non-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups," even though they are "guided by seasoned Republican political operatives" who might be funded by a "foreign-controlled corporation."

Sept. 26: On ABC's "This Week," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declares outright that the "benign-sounding Americans for Prosperity, the American Crossroads Fund" are "front groups for foreign-controlled companies."

Sept. 28: The president, in Wisconsin, again warns about conservative organizations "posing as nonprofit groups." Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, writes to the IRS demanding it investigate nonprofits. The letter names conservative organizations.

On Oct. 14, Mr. Obama calls these groups "a problem for democracy." On Oct. 22, he slams those who "hide behind these front groups." On Oct. 25, he upgrades them to a "threat to our democracy." On Oct. 26, he decries groups engaged in "unsupervised spending."

These were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were repeated by the White House and echoed by its allies in campaign events, emails, social media and TV ads. The president of the United States spent months warning the country that "shadowy," conservative "front" groups—"posing" as tax-exempt entities and illegally controlled by "foreign" players—were engaged in "unsupervised" spending that posed a "threat" to democracy. Yet we are to believe that a few rogue IRS employees just happened during that time to begin systematically targeting conservative groups? A mere coincidence that among the things the IRS demanded of these groups were "copies of any contracts with and training materials provided by Americans for Prosperity"?

This newspaper reported Thursday that Cincinnati IRS employees are now telling investigators that they took their orders from Washington. For anyone with a memory of 2010 politics, that was obvious from the start.

Note the repeated references to foreign money.  Of course when the Obama campaign in 2008 disabled the verification on credit card contributions, lots of money was donated by people using names like Osama bin Laden as well as Donald Duck.  There is a very strong suspicion that Obama got a lot of his money from foreign sources in the Middle East who liked his anti-Israel stance.

Bolivian villagers bury suspected killer alive

When the judicial system is discredited, justice will be done somehow.

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Villagers in Bolivia's southern highlands buried a man alive in the grave of the woman he is suspected of having raped and murdered, an official said Thursday.

Police had identified 17-year-old Santos Ramos as the possible culprit in the attack on 35-year-old Leandra Arias Janco Sunday in a Quechua community near the municipality of Colquechaca, said Jose Luis Barrios, the chief prosecutor in Potosi province where the community is located.

Enraged, more than 200 community members seized Ramos and buried him alive alongside his alleged victim Wednesday night, according to Barrios. He said residents on Thursday blocked the road to the community, preventing police and prosecutors from reaching it.

A local reporter for an indigenous radio station, who would only speak on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, told The AP that Ramos was tied up at the woman's funeral. Mourners threw him into the open grave, placed the woman's coffin in it and filled the grave with earth.

Colquechaca is a town of 5,000 inhabitants located 207 miles (333 kilometers) southeast of Bolivia's capital, La Paz.

Also in Potosi, residents of the Quechua indigenous community of Tres Cruces on Wednesday stoned to death a suspected thief and burned his accomplice alive, Barrios said. The official said the two had earlier robbed a car and killed its driver.

Obama's Internet Spying

NYC mayoral candidates get rise out of Weiner

Now that Anthony Weiner is finally back in campaign mode, the question is how he’ll respond to his opponents bringing up his minor indiscretions from a few years back. Will he go hard? Or fall back limp?

He uses the "how dare you" defense.

Looks like Clapper lied to Congress

LYING TO CONGRESS? Clapper denied NSA surveillance before Senate panel.

56% Of Carmakers Who Asked For Government 'Green' Loans Are Dead

 

 

 

Of the 18 existing or would-be carmakers we identified as having applied for loans under the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program, 10 have since faded into bankruptcy or ceased operations.

Campus bans guns, tells people to nod at attackers

In lieu of guns, people who find themselves in dangerous situations at or near the University of Arkansas should defend themselves by glancing and nodding, said a university safety expert.

From the comments:

1st: Nod
2nd: ask politely to stop
3rd: curl into fetal position
4th: pee yourself and try to throw up on them
5th: hope some person with a gun comes and saves your pathetic butt before they kill you.
6th: try to position yourself in such a manner so that your chalk outline will not be too embarrassing

New York Times quietly changes published editorial to make it less damning of Obama

They heard their master's voice.

The New York Times edited its damning editorial condemning the Obama administration for collecting phone call data from Americans to make it less stinging shortly after the editorial was published online Thursday afternoon.

The editorial originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act.

But hours later the stinging sentence had been modified to read the Obama “administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.”

DRUDGE on Internet spying

NSA, FBI secretly mining data from Internet firms...
'THEY QUITE LITERALLY CAN WATCH YOUR IDEAS AS YOU TYPE'...
MICROSOFTYAHOOGOOGLEYOUTUBEFACEBOOKSKYPEAPPLE...
Top-secret PRISM program...


<! MAIN HEADLINE>
THE INTERNET FROM HELL

Twitter comment

With all these Obama scandals piling up, I bet the next #SNL episode will have some hilarious Sarah Palin jokes.

Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers

Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ “business records” under the USA Patriot Act.

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

Boy, 9, Recovering After Being Shot In The Chest

Tykeece Hilliard, a third-grader at Fiske Elementary, recovers from a gunshot wound. (Family handout)

Updated 06/06/13 – 4:10 p.m.

CHICAGO (CBS) – A 9-year-old boy had stabilized in the hospital Thursday after being shot in the chest while riding in a car with his mother the night before.

It happened around 5:30 p.m. in the 6700 block of South Evans Avenue in the Park Manor neighborhood. Police sources said the boy’s mother was driving down the street with her boyfriend, a known gang member, when a passerby shot at them.

Sources say the boyfriend, who has been arrested 38 times, was sitting in the front seat of the car and was the intended target of a gang-related shooting.

Holder misses deadline to clear up testimony on reporter surveillance

Attorney General Eric Holder has missed the deadline set by Republicans to personally explain questionable testimony he gave on reporter surveillance, as lawmakers threaten to subpoena Holder if necessary.

A group of skinheads beat a French far-left activist to death in the heart of Paris' shopping district

Interior Minister Manuel Valls said a fight broke out Wednesday evening between two groups of young people in a pedestrian street just steps away from the famous Printemps department store. At one point, the 19-year-old leftist activist was beaten by several skinheads, according to Valls, a widely respected, center-leaning member of President Francois Hollande's Socialist government.

Matt Drudge was right

A rare admission from the Washington Post.

But, Drudge did — and does — have an impact. So, it’s worth going back 15 years this week to a speech Drudge gave at the National Press Club in which he outlined his vision of the future of journalism.

Turns out, Drudge was right about where journalism was heading.

From the comments

"All the news that's fit to print." . . . Really? So if the NYT doesn't print it, nobody really needs to know about it? What arrogance. And the rest of the MSM is just parrotting the NYT so there you have it. I prefer my news unfiltered and I will decide what is important and what isn't. It's called freedom.

As for Drudge pandering to the tinfoil hat group, anybody that believes that superpower organizations like our government and the Fed can operate in total secrecy and not become corrupt, deserves exactly what is coming.

The religious bigotry of the Virginian Pilot

The religious bigots at the Virginian Pilot have run editorials, news stories and carefully selected letters to the editors to smear E.W. Jackson, a Black minister who won the Republican nomination for Lieutenant governor of Virginia. Why so much hatred for a Black man? The answer is simple religious bigotry combined with the political bête noir of the Left: a Black conservative.

Black conservatives are vilified as a matter of course because they represent the runaway slave to the slave masters of the Democrat Party. In the 21st Century they don’t send the dogs out after them anymore; instead they strip them of their dignity and roast them over the slow fires of racial hatred as only people who control the mass media can.
 

But if that Black man is a preacher and adheres to Christianity, he becomes dangerous. Like Nat Turner, he has to be killed because there are a lot of Black Christians and if they begin to band together they become a threat to the ruling class.

So we have the editors of the Virginian Pilot trying to make sure that this revolt is put down with the maximum violence. E.W. Jackson’s crime? He believes that homosexuality is a sin. Why does he believe it? Because as a Christian his faith informs him that it is one of the sins that people commit.

The Virginian Pilot’s editors have surpassed Christianity long ago and now join with the Romans in crucifying anyone who adheres to that ancient faith. To them, 2000 years of Christianity was a huge error and all its adherents were bigots. The revelation they worship occurred during the last Gay Pride parade. They worship at the Church of What’s Happening Now. Global Warning is their faith and abortion is their sacrament. And people who disbelieve must be consigned to the flames.
 

"Quo vadis Domine"

DRUDGE on phone spying

Obama administration collecting phone records of millions daily...
Secret court order requires VERIZON to hand over ALL CALL DATA...
WH defends: Critical tool against 'terrorist threats'...
Specifically targeted Americans, not foreigners...
'Homeland Security': Laptops, phones can be searched based on hunches...
NSA SEES ALL: Phone Sex, Banks, Emails...
FBI WANTS BACK DOOR TO ALL SOFTWARE...
CIA: We'll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher...
'1984' Published 64 Years Ago Today...


<! MAIN HEADLINE>
WHAT BIG EARS YOU HAVE!

Mainstream Media Fail to Break Even One of Four Obama Scandals

The MSM has too much invested in Obama to do anything but shield him. Obama is their alter ego, he is the MSM in government.  They are Democrat operatives with bylines.

Well, if it is Thursday, there must be a new Obama scandal. But one thing is for damn sure, whatever that scandal is, you can bet the American mainstream media will be playing catch up and not carrying the glory of breaking a story about a major White House scandal.

Fact: Over the past few weeks, four major scandals have broken over the Obama administration, and it is a very sad (and frightening) truth that our pathetic, American, lapdog mainstream media is not responsible for breaking even a single one.

Verizon? Nope, not our guys. That was the Brits over at The Guardian.

IRS? Nope, not our guys. The IRS broke their own scandal with a planted question.

The Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press phone records? Nope, not our guys. Believe it or not, the Associated Press didn’t even break that story. Like the IRS, we only found out because the Justice Department outted itself in a letter notifying the AP of what it had done.

Benghazi? Are you kidding. With a couple of rare exceptions (Jake Tapper, Sharyl Attkisson) the media has spent the last 8 months attacking those seeking the truth (Congress, Fox News) not seeking the truth. It was the GOP congress that demanded the email exchanges around the shaping of the talking points, not the media.

Left up to the media, we wouldn't know anything about Libya. All of the media's energy was collectively poured into ensuring the truth was never discovered.

And do you want to know what makes this realization especially pathetic? In three of the four scandals (the AP being the exception), had our media been less interested in protecting Power and more interested in holding Power accountable, these huge, career-making stories were right there for their taking.

...

Our media is not only biased, it is an utter and complete failure and embarrassment. And although there are plenty of remaining table scraps to make meals out of, the media is already losing interest in the IRS, Libya, and AP scandals, but for only one reason--they are absolutely terrified of where they might lead.

Atherton Revolts Over Cost Of Obama Visit, Targets Donors

A community on the Peninsula may take the unprecedented action of slapping a lien against two homeowners who hosted an April fundraiser for President Barack Obama that cost the town $8,000 in security and cleanup costs.

The Town of Atherton has been unable to recoup the money from the Democratic National Committee or Secret Service.

“If the town incurs a cost that rightly should belong to somebody else, we’re going to pursue that,” Atherton Town Manager George Rodericks told KPIX 5.

The town sent invoices to the White House, Democratic National Committee, the Secret Service and two people who own the homes where Mr. Obama raised more than $3 million for Democrats. So far, the town has not received a cent.

Caring about the destuction you leave in your wake is for the little people.

IRS claims it lost receipts for multi-million dollar meetings

Via Rush Limbaugh; he just said that the IRS does not have the receipts for part of the $50 million dollar sprees that it classified as meetings.

Who made the IRS toxic?

Steven Law who heads Crossroads GPS exposes the ultimate culprits. He compares the IRS scandal to what happened and why at Enron.

Any good CEO will tell you that ethical meltdowns like the IRS political-targeting scandal are rarely the work of a few rogue employees. Such messes are the result of a toxic culture that has been allowed to fester.

When I was chief of staff at the Labor Department, we investigated the ethical and financial disintegration of Enron in connection with the collapse of its pension funds in 2001. What we found was a small circle of certifiably bad actors who acted without regard for the law or for anyone else. Surrounding this inner circle was a culture that gave these employees tacit permission to run roughshod over others and break the law.

So who is responsible for IRS employees illegally and unethically targeting the Obama's - and Democrats' - opponents? It really isn't much of a puzzle.

At the very top the IRS got the green light to target Conservative groups from Barack Obama.

What the Enron scandal teaches is that such implicit permission can be communicated by a toxic culture fostered by the company's top brass.

Consider the tone that has been set by the person at the very top of the government the IRS serves. President Obama is the first president since Nixon to refer to political opponents as "enemies," in October 2010, apologizing only after a week of intense criticism. Around the same time, he assailed conservative advocacy groups as a "threat to democracy." As the nation's top law enforcer, Mr. Obama singled out groups such as Americans for Prosperity by name and suggested they What could be taking illegal foreign funds. That's toxic culture from the C-Suite.

What was Obama's evidence for this? Absolutely none. We suspect that when he disabled verification on credit card contributions in his first campaign, he may have gotten lots of foreign money. We'll never know. He may have simply been projecting.

Then there are hyper partisan Democrats like Dick Durbin calling for partisan harassment:

Next, at least 10 Democratic senators publicly pressured the IRS to do precisely what it is now being excoriated for: harassing center-right groups for conducting the same spirited advocacy that environmental groups and labor unions have done for years. I know something about this: A month before the 2010 election, Sen. Dick Durbin sent a letter urging the IRS to investigate the advocacy group I head, Crossroads GPS. Why us and not scores of liberal groups that do exactly what we do? Mr. Durbin claims he singled us out because we were raising so much money.

And let's not overlook Democrat Carl Levin:

Now that we see how ugly ideological profiling by the IRS looks, some of these senators are in full damage control. On May 23, Michigan Sen. Carl Levin dropped the bombshell that his subcommittee has been in constant contact with the overseers of the IRS political-targeting scandal since it started, and even discussed the applications of "certain" specific groups. Mr. Levin now says he had an "incomplete account" of what was going on under his subcommittee's nose. Does he mean he had no idea the IRS was targeting conservative groups? If senators and their staffs were leaning on the IRS to go after specific advocacy groups, then Congress is responsible for helping to feed this culture.

And then there's the National Treasury Employees Union, avowed enemy of the Tea party folks:

Finally, it's important to focus on the political stew that many IRS employees marinate in as members of the National Treasury Employees Union, which is headed by Colleen Kelley. Ms. Kelley has publicly vilified "extreme Tea Party elements," portraying their agenda as a threat to the IRS workers her union represents. In 2011, Ms. Kelley mobilized IRS employees to "lean on" members of Congress against tea-party-backed spending cuts, boasting that "anywhere there's an IRS service center, we have four to eight thousand" union members. When you have a union boss who demonizes private citizens and conscripts front-line IRS employees as boots-on-the-ground activists, you've got toxic culture from the ground up.

There has been a great deal of discussion about an increase in partisan rancor and much of the blame has been cast on the Internet. After all, you can go on-line and say just about anything, anonymously if you like. It is becoming evident that the hyper partisanship on the Internet is not the cause, but the result of an unprecedented level of Washington politicians creating a culture of lawlessness and take-no-prisoners partisanship. Team Obama and congressional Democrats are not content with holding offices that can be lost in the next election; they are working to destroy the opposition so that they don’t have to worry about the next election. That's creating a "culture of corruption" that the media for some reason will never attach to the Obama administration despite evidence to the contrary. There's a word for one-party rule and it's not Democracy .

Report: US hasn't seen expected 'Great Recovery'

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The expected U.S. "Great Recovery" hasn't materialized and the economy has fallen short of even normal growth, according to a forecast released Wednesday....

"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad," he wrote.

Yeah, well what do you expect.  This is the Age of Obama; the "one we have been waiting for."

Idiots. 

What do you expect when you elect an affirmative action President.

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir: ‘IRS’ Is the New ‘N****r’

The new Obama meme?  Can't say IRS?

The GOP is using the term “IRS” in place of the term “n****r,” MSNBC host Martin Bashir claimed on his Wednesday show.

“Republicans are using [the IRS scandal] as their latest weapon in the war against the black man in the White House,” he suggested. ”IRS” is the new “N****r.” Bashir gave a nod to the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, to whom he attributed the subtle strategy.

Liberal groups say they don’t see IRS targeting their tax applications

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

WASHINGTON — The storm over the Internal Revenue Service’s dealings with groups seeking tax-exempt status is now nearly a month old, and virtually no organizations perceived to be liberal or nonpartisan have come forward to say they were unfairly targeted since then.

Some have been rejected for special status, but groups both denied and given exemptions contacted by McClatchy said they thought the scrutiny they got was fair.

It's getting harder and harder to claim that there was no political motive.


The best defense the ObamaBots can come up with is that they are incompetent.

Sarah Murnaghan lung transplant case: Sebelius ordered to make exception on transplant

Just die, sorry about it says Sebelius, the one woman Death Panel. ObamaCare will decide that your life is not worth it.

The judge’s action may have taken some of the immediate heat off Sebelius and the Obama administration. Yet it opened up a host of other questions about organ donation policy and hot-button health care politics.

U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson wrote in a temporary restraining order that by refusing to set aside the existing rule for children, Sebelius had failed “to protect the very few children nationally who are subject to it.” He added that the evidence showed that the rule “discriminates against children and serves no purpose, is arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion.”

Bending the cost of medical care down: die without treatment.

Crowd stunned after valedictorian rips up speech, recites Lord’s prayer

Expect to see this denounced in the usual places.

A South Carolina valedictorian garnered wild applause after he ripped up his pre-approved speech and delivered the Lord’s prayer at his high school graduation on Saturday.

The act was apparently in protest of the Pickens County School District’s decision to no longer include prayer at graduation ceremonies, Christian News reported. Officials said the decision was made after the district was barraged with complaints by atheist groups.

But that didn’t stop Roy Costner IV of Liberty High School. He ripped up his graduation speech for all to see, before he started talking about his Christian upbringing, Christian News reported.

“Those that we look up to, they have helped carve and mold us into the young adults that we are today,” he said. “I’m so glad that both of my parents led me to the Lord at a young age.”

“And I think most of you will understand when I say…” he paused. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

The auditorium began to erupt with applause and cheers.

DRUDGE on Obama phone taps

Obama's NSA collecting phone records of millions daily...
Secret court order requires VERIZON to hand over 'telephony megadata'...
DHS: Laptops, phones can be searched based on hunches...
FBI 'WANTS BACK DOOR TO ALL SOFTWARE'...


<! MAIN HEADLINE>
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

Technological revolution - from PCs to tablets

Young people live in the “now.” One of the benefits of getting older is that we have an opportunity to remember the way it was a decade or five ago. So as I was sitting in church last week I noticed again how many people carried a tablet or iPad instead of a Bible. It’s not the first time I noticed that but I was reminded of it when I read the about tablet shipment on the First Trust Market Watch “Factoids” column for the week.

Tablet shipments are expected to outpace the entire PC market (portables and desktops combined) by 2015, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). IDC believes tablet shipments will exceed those of portable PCs in 2013. It sees shipments growing 58.7% (y-o-y) to 229.3 million units this year. The average selling price for a tablet is expected to decline 10.8% to $381 in 2013. The average price of a PC is expected to be $635. One change in the marketplace garnering attention is the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach at work. IDC reports that close to 25% of employees in organizations larger than 10 people claim to have purchased the primary PC they use for work. This phenomenon also extends to smartphones and tablets.

I’m sure that a few decades from now, when the teens of today are the elderly of tomorrow, they will remember the good old days of tablets as their data is projected directly to their eyeballs.

Those 157 meetings the IRS commissioner had in the White House

From Richochet: A Smoking Gun.

For some time now, we have been aware that Douglas Shulman, then the commissioner of this supposedly independent agency, met with Barack Obama in the White House no fewer than 157 times in the run-up to the 2012 elections. This, too, we are told, is insignificant. The implementation of Obamacare, a matter of profound concern to the President, deeply involved the IRS. The two men simply had to meet over and over and over again.

Yesterday, however, thanks to Investor's Business Daily, however, we learned something new. Those "Obamacare implementation meetings" were attended by Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. "I was in there with him," Cutter acknowledged. "There was nothing nefarious going on."

You can believe Ms. Cutter if you wish. But I am inclined to echo the IBD: the lady in question cannot have been "there to discuss the Easter Egg Roll."

Congressman Issa should call in Ms. Cutter and recall Mr. Shulman to testify under oath about these meetings. I, for one, would like to watch them squirm as they commit perjury.

The Sebelius Death Panel

Remember when Sarah Palin was ridiculed for talking of "death panels."

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is refusing to intervene in a case of a young girl who needs a lung transplant as doctors have only given her weeks to live.

 

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rebuffed an appeal from Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., on behalf of a girl who needs a lung transplant but can’t get one because of a federal regulation that prevents her from qualifying for a transplant.

Recall that Obama would have refused a pacemaker to an elederly woman, instead would have given her a pill for her pain.

LifeNews: One Woman Death Panel: Sebelius Won’t Allow Dying Girl to Have Transplant
Ricochet: Kathleen Sibelius - Death panel of One
Richt Wing News: Kathleen Sebelius Dooms 10 Year Old Girl To Death By Refusing To Waive Medical Regulation
The right scoop: Death Panels – Sarah Palin slams HHS Sebelius for not intervening in lung transplant for young girl
The mental recession: Obama’s First Death Panel? Sebelius Responds to Dying Girl ‘Someone Lives and Someone Dies’

Of course in 2009 Sebelius said that ‘Death Panels’ Talk Is “Horrific”

Obama’s top cabinet official in charge of health reform, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said this morning on ‘This Week’ that it’s “horrific" twisting of facts to say that “death panels” would be part of Obama’s proposed health care overhaul.

“I think it’s really horrific that some opponents of the health reform bill have used painful personal moments to scare people about what is in the bill,” Sebelius told guest host Jake Tapper on ABC’s “This Week.”

Sebelius criticized opponents of the Democrats' plans for health overhaul for using scare tactics to try to derail an overhaul saying, “Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

“If anything seniors should welcome the fact that doctors would have a payment provided to sit down with family members if they choose and have a discussion.”

But, Sebelius said these end-of-life provision would "probably be off the table" in final health care reform legislation.