Raw Power--Obama administration spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen: Report

Yahoo-Knox
The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

In a chilling move sure to rile defenders of civil liberties, an FBI agent also accused Rosen of breaking anti-espionage law with behavior that—as described in the agent's own affidavit—falls well inside the bounds of traditional news reporting. (Disclosure: This reporter counts Rosen among his friends.)

UPDATE: Fox News responds with a blistering statement that asserts Rosen was "simply doing his job" in his role as "a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”
The revelations surfaced with President Barack Obama’s administration already under fire for seizing two months of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press. Obama last week said he makes “no apologies” for investigations into national security-related leaks. The AP's CEO, Gray Pruitt, said Sunday that the seizure was "unconstitutional."
The Obama administration has prosecuted twice as many leakers as all previous administrations combined.

“The president is a strong defender of the First Amendment and a firm believer in the need for the press to be unfettered in its ability to conduct investigative reporting and facilitate a free flow of information,” White House press secretary Jay Carney insisted last week. “He also, of course, recognizes the need for the Justice Department to investigate alleged criminal activity without undue influence.”

The details of the government's strategy against Rosen sound like something out of a spy novel.

Investigators looking into disclosures of sensitive information about North Korea got Rosen’s telephone records and a warrant for his personal emails but also used his State Department security badge to track his movements in and out of that building, the Post reported, citing court documents.
The case began when Rosen reported on June 11, 2009, that U.S. intelligence believed North Korea might respond to tighter United Nations sanctions with new nuclear tests. Rosen reported that the information came from CIA sources inside the hermetic Stalinist state.
Read More

I am James Rosen

DAILYCALLER  Jim Treacher

So are you. So is anybody who displeases this administration.

Alex Pappas reports:
Before the Justice Department was secretly obtaining phone records of Associated Press reporters, the Obama administration was investigating a Fox News journalist.
The Washington Post reported Sunday evening that the federal authorities went to great lengths to investigate how James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, was able to report on classified intelligence on North Korea in 2009.
According to the Post, the Justice Department went further in investigating Rosen than they did with AP reporters. They obtained his security badge access records at the State Department, looked at records of his calls with a specific State Department adviser and even went through his personal e-mails.

For doing his job. As a reporter, you’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to take what the Obama administration gives you, say please and thank you, and pass it along verbatim.
And not just him:

Not just one! Three Fox News staffers in DoJ sites reports @megynkelly #fb
— johnny dollar (@johnnydollar01) May 20, 2013

How many more? Where does it end?
Do you think you’re safe, just because you’re on “Obama’s side”? Just ask the Associated Press about that one. Obama doesn’t have a side. Obama is out for Obama. And if you cross him, his cronies will go after you.
This is an outrage. And you’d think so too, if they did it to you.

Read More

White House Chief of Staff KNEW of IRS Report before its release

CNN
New details emerged of what the White House knew about the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups, with spokesman Jay Carney disclosing Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was among the top officials made aware of the matter late last month.

In a new timeline provided by Carney to reporters on Monday, General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler learned on April 24 of a pending Treasury inspector general's report on how IRS staff used criteria targeting conservative groups in assessing eligibility for tax-exempt status.

According to Carney, Ruemmler told McDonough as well as other Treasury officials about the pending report. It was the first time the White House acknowledged that McDonough was aware of the report before it became public in early May.

In addition, Carney made clear that the information Ruemmler received on April 24 included details of improper acts by IRS officials.

At the same time, Carney emphasized that the information was preliminary and could have changed before the inspector general released his final report on May 14.

Carney insisted no one -- including Ruemmler and McDonough -- told President Barack Obama!! anything about the inspector general's pending report before media reports about it began appearing on May 10.

"We knew the subject of the investigation and we knew the nature of some of the potential findings, but we did not have a copy of the draft report," Carney said. "We did not know the details, the scope, or the motivation surrounding the misconduct and we did not know who was responsible. Most importantly, the report was not final and still very much subject to change."

However, the new information on Monday continued a perception of a White House on the defensive over the issue, one of at least three controversies dogging Obama as his second term reaches the four-month mark.

Read More Click slide show 

Common Core Ed or Hardcore Progressivism Education--Nowhere Else to Go

AmericanThinker-Kane
The intended consequences of the education reform movement have finally shaken out due to the debate over Common Core.  We're left with nationalized standards via either the Common Core or hardcore progressivism.

We get two "choices" in leadership: the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) crowd, headed by Obama/Duncan/Rhee/Gates/RINOs or the Dewey-driven traditionally progressive public schools crowd headed by Bill Ayers and Diane Ravitch, education professor at New York University.

But wait.  Didn't Mary Grabar of Accuracy in Media point out Bill Ayers' connection to Common Core?  How can Ayers be on team Obama but at the same time in the Ravitch camp?  In a statement of support for Ayers a couple days after the 2012 elections, Ravitch forgives the terrorist for his activities "in the 1960s" because he speaks truth to power in 2012 when writing an open letter calling on Obama to "rethink his policies."

What a tangled web.  The only feasible hypothesis is that the left plays both sides against the middle.  Unsuspecting or complicit conservatives get caught up in the quagmire -- and end up with no choices.

Diane Ravitch has contributed to the confusion on a grand scale.  Reading through her biography, you might think she exemplifies nonpartisanship, but take a closer look, and you see that her loyalty lands consistently on the side of progressivism.

Ravitch has come out against the CCSS, but she is a proponent of voluntary national standards.  Since the Obama administration claims that the CCSS are voluntary even though they are a big part of Race to the Top grants, why has Ravitch actively denounced them?  Is she against the standards or against the bribery?

And to make the water murkier, Ravitch was on board in creating curriculum mapping for teachers who needed to learn the CCSS.  She co-directed the nonprofit Common Core, which, according to IRS tax documents, started in 2008.  She remained on their board through September 2010.  This organization states on its website that it "is not affiliated with the Common Core State Standards," yet its members worked side-by-side with the architect of the CCSS, David Coleman.

In yet another head-spinning scenario, Ravitch publicly renounced Bill Gates's style of education reform a couple months after she ended her stint with Common Core, calling him out as a corporate reformer who's not interested in really helping the children (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation heavily subsidizes Common Core).  If she was a consultant on the mapping project, was she paid with funds from Gates?

If this kind of back-and-forth isn't enough to rattle your brain, just look at Ravitch's opinion of Bush's No Child Left Behind; first she's for it, then she's against it.  In 2005, she stated that it's "paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation."  Then, in 2010, around the same time she published a bestseller criticizing the corporate model of education reform, she said, "But I've looked at the evidence and I've concluded they [NCLB policies]'re wrong."

NCLB acted as a precursor to Race to the Top competitive grants, which tied Common Core to receiving funding.  

Thus, three years ago, governors and school boards were unilaterally adopting Common Core without legislative debate or feedback from the real stakeholders -- families with children in the system.  Guess the standards had to be adopted so we could know what was in them.

Several states have now begun the process of stopping the implementation of Common Core because people are waking up to the standards' limited capacity to deliver a better education. 

But even if states can opt out of Common Core, how will the schools in those states avoid aligning their course materials to reflect the standards when David Coleman, the president of College Board, has been rewriting the PSATs and the SATs to match the CCSS?--to match Common Core.

Read More

Schumer gives GOP ‘PASS’ to vote against Benefits for Immigrants

WExaminer-York
One of the defining features of the Senate Judiciary Committee meetings considering amendments to the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill is that the two Republican Gang members on the committee — Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake — have often sided with unanimous Democrats to vote down GOP amendments.
There have been reports that the bipartisan Gang has met before each session to consider which amendments are acceptable and which are not. The result of those meetings was dramatically in evidence Monday afternoon.
The committee was considering an amendment from Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, an opponent of the comprehensive immigration reform proposal, that would forbid newly-legalized immigrants from receiving Earned Income Tax Credit payments. Under Sessions’ amendment, those payments would be limited to citizens and legal permanent residents of the United States. Formerly-illegal immigrants in provisional status — known as RPI in the bill — would not be eligible for earned income payments.

“EITC is generally available to anyone that has a Social Security number,” Sessions told the committee.  “As these [registered provisional immigrants] are all established and get a Social Security number, they will qualify, it appears, under the law, for earned income tax credit. I’m not sure the sponsors understood that, because they’ve insisted that RPI aliens will not receive any federal benefits under the bill. But [the Gang bill] would grant such benefits to millions and be a substantial burden on our country’s finances…”

The situation was potentially embarrassing for Graham and Flake, who might not want to explain to their constituents that their bill gave federal benefits to newly-legalized immigrants. So it appears that the Gang had met and Democrats had given the two Republicans permission to support Sessions’ amendment.
As the clerk was calling the roll for votes (at about 3:05 in the video), Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, the de facto leader of the Gang, was heard turning to an aide and asking, “Do our 
 Republicans have a pass on this one, if they want? Yes.”

They did indeed want. In a somewhat unusual show of Republican unity, Graham and Flake joined other Republicans to vote for the Sessions amendment. It didn’t matter — Democrats have a 10-to-8 majority on the committee and voted unanimously against Sessions’ amendment, meaning it was killed by a 10-to-8 margin. But the moment provided a glimpse of the degree to which Graham and Flake are working with Schumer in maneuvering the Gang of Eight bill through the Judiciary Committee.

W.H.: ‘Entirely appropriate’ that senior staff didn’t tell Obama about IRS probe

WExaminer-Hughes
Senior White House officials knew for nearly a month that the Internal Revenue Service was under investigation for targeting conservative groups, but they decided not to tell President Obama about the incident, the White House said Monday.

The admission shows the White House knew about the IRS activities and investigation earlier than previously acknowledged.

Once White House officials were told of the probe, the president’s chief counsel, Kathy Ruemmler, determined the issue was not worthy of bringing to Obama’s attention until the final report of the investigation was complete, White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

The White House still insists Obama first learned from news reports that the IRS was targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

When asked if Obama was angry his top aides left him in the dark about potential political scandal, Carney said the president viewed such actions as “entirely appropriate.”
 “No one in this building intervened in an ongoing independent investigation or did anything that could be seen as intervening,” he said.

It was a brutal briefing for Obama’s top spokesman, who at one point said he was not even sure if he knew last week about senior staff being aware of the audit.

Carney refused to answer repeated questions about the Justice Department accessing security-badge data, phone records and the personal email account of

Fox News reporter James Rosen, part of the Obama administration’s attempt to identify the source of a government leak of information to the media. 

Obama is already under fire because his Justice Department had secretly monitored the phone lines of Associated Press journalists.
Read More

Video---Oklahoma Devastated by Second Round of Twisters

Newsok.com 
A monstrous tornado killed at least 51 people Monday as it roared through Moore and south Oklahoma City — leaving rescue workers frantically searching into the night for missing children at the devastated Plaza Towers Elementary School in the Moore School District. At least 20 children were included among those killed, and the death toll is expected to rise, the state medical examiner reported. More than 100 were injured. President Barack Obama issued a federal disaster declaration late Monday. The president's action makes federal funding available to affected individuals in Cleveland, Lincoln, McClain, Oklahoma and Pottawatomie counties.

 Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper Betsy Randolph described the devastation as “the worst thing I have ever seen.” “When I got to Moore, I saw a lot of walking wounded — people with blood all over. It was a matter of putting work gloves on and getting to work,” she said. “We hope that we don't have any more fatalities, but we know there are a lot more people trapped tonight.” Randolph urged people to stay away from the area. The number of fatalities already has surpassed the 44 killed in the horrific May 3, 1999, tornado that previously devastated the Moore-south Oklahoma City area.

 As night fell, relatives were crying out for their children at Plaza Towers, where they said more than 20 children were missing and feared dead. Emergency responders continued working late into the night in hopes of finding survivors. Plaza Towers was one of two Moore elementary schools ravaged by the massive tornado as it ground up neighborhoods, cars and everything else in its path. Briarwood Elementary School was the other elementary school slammed. The gymnasium at Moore's Highland East Junior High School also was struck, leaving football equipment strewn across the ground.

Chaos reigned at Briarwood shortly after the tornado hit as crying, mud-caked children could be seen streaming from the collapsed building. Frantic parents rushed toward the school, dodging downed power lines and scattered debris. What appeared to be the lifeless body of a child was pulled from the rubble of a home about four houses down from the school. The tornado — with wind speeds preliminarily estimated at up to 200 mph — ripped the roof off the school and collapsed school walls, leaving several children trapped in the debris. Emergency workers arrived quickly on the scene and began laboring to free the children. A witness said none of the Briarwood school children he saw appeared to have major injuries.

The smell of natural gas filled the air from broken gas lines. Emergency Medical Services Authority rushed ambulances to schools, several homes, businesses and intersections in response to reports of multiple injuries. Later Monday, Briarwood students were taken to a location at Vicki Drive and 156 Court, where officials sought to reunite them with parents. Southmoore High School used a bus and police squad cars to shuttle students from the school to a location where they could be reunited with their parents following the storm.
Read More

Best Link for Oklahoma Tornado Information

This is the best link for Oklahoma Tornado information. Videos, slideshows, many stories;

http://newsok.com/

Another body found in damaged home near SW 134 in Oklahoma City

News | Updated: 3 hr ago | 1

Another body was found by family members in a damaged home near SW 134 early Tuesday and the Oklahoma City police helicopter has been requested in Moore to provide light as rescuers continue to dig through the rubble, according to police radio traffic.
NEW: President Obama to speak Tuesday morning on Oklahoma disaster
NEW: Crews dig through night after deadly Oklahoma twister
Noon news conference planned for Tuesday in wake of Moore tornado
AP photographer describes destroyed Oklahoma school
Rescuers search into night for Moore schoolchildren
OHP: No Moore residents allowed back into neighborhoods overnight
Berry Tramel: 'The monster returns' How to help children cope
Chesapeake donates $1M to American Red Cross
Blue Door plans benefit shows Toby Keith reacts to devastation
Moore Tornado Lost and Found - connect with loved ones who live in Moore or might be missing

Photos: U.S. Marines raise Flag above Oklahoma Tornado Rubble

WExaminer-Spiering
Several photos of this flag, raised above the tornado wreckage in Moore, Oklahoma wreckage were shared on Twitter early this morning.

A symbol of the #Moore community’s resilience through tough times– the American flag back up at Plaza Towers,” reported FOX-25 Reporter Priscilla Luong.

 “An Oklahoma flag hangs above the rubble near Plaza Towers in #Moore. Through it all– the state is still standing,” Luong added.

See More

Washington Times: Fox News Scandal Goes ‘Much Deeper,’ W.H. Sitting on Something Obama Aides ‘Terrified’ About

 

THEBLAZE

Washington Times columnist Joseph Curl on Monday said the Obama administration’s developing scandal involving the monitoring of Fox News reporter James Rosen’s email accounts goes “much deeper.”

Citing a “CIA source,” Curl claimed via his official Twitter account that the Fox News scandal was the “4th Shoe” and the White House is sitting on “something” that has top White House aides “terrified.”

Joseph Curl @josephcurl

CIA source says Fox News scandal the "4th Shoe"; says it goes much deeper; says WH also sitting on "something" that has top aides terrified.

2:40 PM - 20 May 2013

 

TheBlaze will continue to monitor this story for additional details.

(H/T: Weasel Zippers)

Featured image via Fox News

VIDEO--Catherine Engelbrecht Discusses IRS,Govt Agency Targeting on Huckabee

YOUTUBE

Cell phone users ‘have No legitimate Expectation of Privacy’ – Judge

RT
A federal judge recently ruled that if someone has their cell phone turned on, their location data does not deserve protection under the Fourth Amendment, meaning law enforcement can track individuals without a search warrant.
New York magistrate judge Gary Brown decided in favor of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who were seeking his approval over a warrant on a doctor who they suspected was being paid for issuing thousands of prescriptions. The warrant would have compelled the physician’s phone company to provide real-time tracking data from his cell.
Brown, certainly to the delight of police, issued a 30-page brief outlining his opinion that, by carrying a cell phone, someone is essentially waiving their Fourth Amendment right to due process.

“Given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the prospective of a cellular telephone where that individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple expedient of powering it off,” Brown wrote. 

“As to control by the user, all of the known tracking technologies may be defeated by merely turning off the phone. Indeed – excluding apathy or inattention – the only reason that users leave cell phones turned on is so that the device can be located to receive calls. Conversely, individuals who do not want to be disturbed by unwanted telephone calls at a particular time or place simply turn their phones off, knowing that they cannot be located.” 

He goes on to suggest that because there are smartphone applications available that allow users to locate people in their area with similar interests, cell phone customers should not expect their inherent right to privacy to be observed.
“Given the notoriety surrounding the disclosure of geolocation data to retailers purveying soap powder and blue jeans to mall shoppers, the police searching for David Pogue’s iPhone and, most alarmingly, the creators and users of the Girls Around You app, cell phone users cannot realistically entertain the notion that such information would (or should) be withheld from federal law enforcement agents searching for a fugitive.”
Read More

Hugh Hewitt: House should expose Washington's growing Culture of Intimidation

WExaminer-HHewitt
Far better to have an imperfect tax code fairly applied than a perfect tax code unfairly applied.

It is far more important that the entire enforcement and regulatory philosophy of the executive branch be radically remade than any particular law be amended.

The proponents of tax reform are attempting to seize on the parade of horribles marching out of the Obama IRS to build momentum for their particular tax reform cause.
Nothing could be more calculated to destroy both the effort to reform all or part of the code and the pressing need to restore the integrity of the IRS than to merge the two very different controversies.

Nothing would more quickly forfeit the crucial focus on the bullying culture of intimidation that has sprung up within the entire federal government than the attempt to use the people's outrage to tilt at the windmill of tax reform in 2013 and 2014.

There is a lot wrong with the tax code. The code won't be fixed in this Congress or even the next because President Obama and Harry Reid aren't interested in that. At best some key improvements might be made, such as repeal of the medical device tax, but the idea of a vast overhaul is a pipe dream and doomed to fail.

The House does have it within its power, however, to thoroughly investigate the culture of intimidation that has developed within federal agencies far and wide and which is most obviously and widely felt by the public with regard to the IRS.

That culture is not limited to the IRS. Recall the Obama appointee Al Armendariz, who led a region of the Environmental Protection Agency until a speech he gave surfaced in which he extolled the virtues of "crucifying" members of the regulated community.
That was a shocker, but it was also quickly consigned to the memory hole, an unfortunate appointee who had gone rogue. Turns out Armendariz wasn't an outlier. He was a model.

Now comes the IRS scandal hard on the heals of the Benghazi cover-up and side-by-side with the sweeping snooping by the Justice Department of the Associated Press, including the AP's phones within the precincts of the House of Representatives.

In the recent past is the 9-0 rebuke of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hosanna-Tabor case, and the court's smack down, again 9-0, of the EPA in the Sackett case.
Both were 2012 cases, and both concerned obvious abuses of federal power, which the Obama Justice Department took all the way to their embarrassing conclusions.

I-Hewitt- spend most days counseling various companies on how to deal with this or that part of the federal government, and increasingly it isn't about how to comply but how to persuade the distant but vast bureaucracy to even respond.
Read More

Was Chief Justice Roberts Blackmailed Into Supporting Obamacare? Maybe.

Mr Conservative-Bookworm
In 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote for the Supreme Court’s ruling that ObamaCare was a legal tax. Conservatives were beyond stunned. Roberts’ decision was a narrow, weaving, legal mess, unlike the clear, assured opinions he usually wrote. What the heck happened? Some people posited that he had brain damage from a fall he’d taken some years before. Others sourly said that he’d fallen prey to what’s called Greenhouse Syndrome – the Supreme Court justices’ desperate need to feel the love from The New York Times’ former Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse.

There were also some subterranean murmurings that the Obama administration was blackmailing Chief Justice Roberts. This was a bit far-fetched. We all knew that Obama habitually practiced a Chicago-approach to politics, one that saw him digging up secret dirt on his opponents, releasing it, and forcing them out of the election.

For example, when Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, his opponent was the popular Jack Ryan. As the campaign progressed badly for Obama, secret court filings from Ryan’s divorce “miraculously” appeared with unproven allegations from his former wife about his sexual practices. The scandal hit the fan, Ryan dropped out of the race, and Obama ran essentially unopposed against Ryan’s replacement, Alan Keyes.

But what in the world could Obama have on Chief Justice Roberts? The man is pure as driven snow, for goodness sakes. He has a lovely wife, two picture-perfect little blond children, and universal adulation from anyone who had ever associated with him, either personally or professionally.

But what in the world could Obama have on Chief Justice Roberts? The man is pure as driven snow, for goodness sakes. He has a lovely wife, two picture-perfect little blond children, and universal adulation from anyone who had ever associated with him, either personally or professionally.

The only information currently known about the adoption, says Baker, is that it was a private adoption, meaning that it was done without an agency. Instead, the birth parents and the adoptive parents arrange it on their own. Despite the vague reference to Latin America, given the children’s Nordic appearance, it’s entirely possible, Baker argues, that they came from Ireland
Read More

President Obama’s newest ALLY: John McCain

 SHAW- We must get John McCain out of DC as soon as possible.

Politico-MANU RAJU 

President Barack Obama has an important new ally as emboldened Republicans work to derail his agenda: John McCain.
The shift is striking: The 2008 rivals never got along throughout Obama’s first term in office. McCain has been Obama’s chief tormentor on issues ranging from the budget to Benghazi, tartly saying in late 2010 that the two men had “no relationship.”

Yet during one of Obama’s toughest times as president, there was McCain, sitting down last week with him in the Oval Office for a private strategy session. At the urging of new White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, who has sought better ties with Republicans, Obama has had more substantive discussions with McCain in the past five months than he did in his first four years in office, according to associates of both men. Suddenly, the two are working together on issues ranging from immigration to the deficit.

“I’m getting nervous,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), McCain’s closest friend in the Senate. “I told Denis McDonough, ‘I don’t know what you’ve done: You’ve hijacked him.’”
Read More