op ed review 6/9
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Big Brother Barack is watching you: The National Security Agency has obtained
direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet
giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA
access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows
officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails,
file transfers and live chats, the document says.
In fact, the NSA can now secretly access real-time data
provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating
agencies to internet service providers.
“PRISM, the latest surveillance program leaked to the press,
makes the collection of metadata from the three major phone companies seem
quaintly old-fashioned. Its Big Brother implications are stunning from the
standpoints of both technology and audacity.”
And phone surveillance: The Obama administration is secretly
carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting
millions of business communications records daily. Verizon is ordered to turn over “on an
ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs…..
The Obama administration is expected to open a criminal
investigation to find out who revealed the secret surveillance of Americans'
telephone and email traffic.
And the Justice Department filed a court motion to keep
secret a court opinion that determined that the government had engaged in
unconstitutional spying. (Even some on the Left are appalled)
President Obama defended the surveillance as a just a “modest
encroachment” on privacy of Americans.
Obama in 2005:
"If someone wants to know why their own government has decided to
go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document....
This is just plain wrong."
Obama in 2008:
“[Bush] acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our
security... The first thing I will do, when I am president, is... review every
executive order issued by George Bush to determine which of those have
undermined civil liberties, which are unconstitutional, and I will reverse them
with a stroke of a pen."
A Washington IRS attorney named Carter Hull closely oversaw
the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups and suggested questions that IRS
employees could ask of conservative and Tea Party groups applying for
tax-exempt nonprofit status.
The controversy over IRS targeting of conservative groups
took a new turn this weekend when right-leaning websites drew a connection
between the agency´s former head and his wife´s employment at a liberal group.
A Texas
high school silenced its Valedictorian’s microphone during his speech when he
diverted from his pre-approved remarks and instead spoke about the
Constitution.
“Mainstream Media Fail to Break Even One of Four Obama
Scandals”
Almost a year-and-a-half out from the 2014 midterm
elections, when 35 seats — 21 now held by Democrats and 14 by Republicans —
will be up for grabs, a GOP road map for picking up the six seats needed to
retake control of the Senate is taking shape.
“Rubio 'Trying to Get Out of the Gang of Eight'”
“Koch Confirms
Interest in Buying Newspapers”
Most of Planned Parenthood´s 750 health and abortion clinics
around the nation will be covered under Obamacare, imposing a new demand on
insurers who want to participate in Obamacare
health care exchanges.
If you’re a ten-year-old girl, the Obama Administration
thinks you’re old enough to discuss anal sex, mutual masturbation, birth
control, and “emergency contraceptives” that can cause early abortions. A
Department of Health and Human Services website, GirlsHealth.gov, offers all
this information to girls from the ages of 10 to 16 in its “Body” tab.
Sarah Palin showed she never forgets her roots, saying she
was honored to address high school graduates in Republic, Washington, the town that
helped her father 49 years ago when his station wagon broke down on his way to
Alaska. She movingly spoke about her father who grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho.
Former Miss America runs for Congress from Illinois as a Republican.
American Petroleum Institute Director of Regulatory and
Scientific Affairs Howard Feldman warned that new ozone regulations currently
under review by the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection
Agency could put “nearly the entire country” out of business
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
Dr. Keith Ablow
I believe that the Obama administration is conducting
psychological warfare on conservative Americans. Not only that but it is also
waging this war on all Americans who previously viewed themselves, their
country, their Constitution and their overwhelming belief in God as a force for
good in the world. The psychological warfare began with an apology tour in
which President Obama publicly “confessed,” presuming to speak for all of us,
for the shortcomings of America
and our supposed contributions to tyranny and all manner of evils around the
world. This confession planted in the American mind the notion that our
values and beliefs might not be in line with freedom and truth.
The president, with the help of his administration, is
attempting to conduct psychological warfare on Americans who value autonomy and
free will. It was reinforced by the first lady stating during the 2008
presidential campaign that she had never felt pride in our country. These
statements were seemingly shrugged off by Americans who, collectively, seemed
to be telling themselves that they were hearing discontent channeled from
disenfranchised groups in our nation who, nonetheless, loved the country—and
all of us, too.
But, deep inside the American psyche, something more malignant
could have been planted—the seeds of self-hatred and self-doubt. And I no
longer believe that those seeds were planted unintentionally by people as smart
and capable as the president and first lady. Psychological warfare has been
described as a set of techniques aimed at influencing a target audience’s value
systems or beliefs and inducing confessions of wrongdoing or attitudes
favorable to the group proffering the techniques. The techniques are
often combined with black ops strategy, in which covert initiatives seek to
dispirit, disempower and confuse adversaries.
The psychological warfare has continued, I believe, with
other opportunities the president has had to make American’s question their
individual freedoms and autonomy. This has included misrepresenting
horrific crimes, such as the one which unfolded in Newtown, Connecticut,
as evidence of the need for gun control measures, when they clearly evidenced a
need for revamping our mental health care system. Gun rights are inextricably
entwined in the American psyche with freedom to defend oneself. Attacking
gun rights, I believe, is an element of the psychological warfare on the
American belief that force is justifiable when confronting evil.
My belief that psychological warfare is being deployed on
Americans by this American president and his administration has been solidified
as news has come out of the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS. This
black ops targeting doesn’t just have the effect of slowing the financial
momentum of these groups. It has the goal of dispiriting them and making them
feel helpless to achieve their goals……
Seen through the lens of psychological warfare, the failure
to defend our embassy in Benghazi
need not be understood simply as a screw-up. It could reflect an actual
strategy on the part of the administration to reinforce the notion that
homicidal violence born of hatred toward America is understandable—even
condonable—because we have generated it ourselves and are reaping the harvest
of ill will we have sown. In other words, we should take our punishment.
The president said as much when he blamed the murder of our
Ambassador to Libya
on a film that criticized Islam. This misstatement may disclose not just
incompetence and may not just be evidence of a cover-up, but may be evidence of
exactly what I am theorizing here: that the president, with the help of
his administration, is attempting to conduct psychological warfare on Americans
who value autonomy and free will and free markets and small government, by
convincing them that they are wrong-minded, prejudiced and pathological and
should deeply question their beliefs—including some ensconced in the
Constitution. The wiretapping of journalists would be, then, just another black
ops technique in an ongoing war against our freedoms.
There will be those that say that many American leaders have
sought to target groups hostile to their views. Some will point to President
Nixon or Senator McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover. And that debate can be had.
But I assert that this administration is engaged in a
coordinated attempt to dispirit, disarm and disenfranchise large portions of
the American population and to weaken our founding principles through what is
best understood as psychological warfare.
And with that statement in the public domain, let us, at
least, be aware and notice how many events unfold in-keeping with it, over the
next months and years. The enemy of psychological warfare is the knowledge of
what is really happening to us and remembering who we really are.
Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News
Medical A-Team.
Another good read: “Those
crazy American conspiracy theorists who live up in trees with guns and drink
their own pee don’t seem quite so crazy anymore……..totaling every scandal up –
IRS, AP phone records, Fox journalists being targeted, the Benghazi mess – this
has to be the most furtively authoritarian White House since Nixon’s. We don't
yet have a "smoking email" from Obama ordering all of this, but it
can’t be said often enough that there is a correlation between Obama’s
“progressive” domestic agenda and the misbehavior of the other agencies
governed by his administration – forcing people to buy healthcare even when
they can’t afford it, bailing out the banks, war in Libya and the use of drone
strikes to kill US citizens. This is exactly what the Tea Party was founded to
expose and oppose. All the laughter once directed at the “paranoid” Right now
rings hollow.
__________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Appearing on MSNBC, singer and former civil rights icon
Harry Belafonte told President Barack Obama how he should take control of the
political debate. His answer? Jail opponents.
Meet the journalism professor who says NRA members are
treasonous and should be executed.
New Jersey Doctor With Occupy Wall Street Ties Indicted on Explosives Related Charge
_________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Up to now the Obama Administration has faced three big
scandals—the IRS, the bugging of AP and Fox, and Benghazi. And now here is scandal Number 4:
For the last four years the Obama Administration has conducted a major
“outreach” program to Islamic groups in the United
States and in the Middle East.
Patrick Poole has been investigating this project and in a comprehensive
article now presents the full scoop and scope of what’s been going on. His
article: “Blind to Terror: The U.S. Government’s Disastrous Muslim Outreach
Efforts”
_______________________________________________________________________
SECOND AMENDMENT
The House voted to stop the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) from entering into new contracts to buy millions of rounds of ammunition.
“To follow up on the recent story about a five-year-old boy
suspended for showing a cap gun to his friend on a school bus, Investor´s
Business Daily relates a charming collection of similar anecdotes regarding
such child abuse at U.S. re-education camps -- oops, I mean public schools.
Each tale involves a very young child receiving severe punishment for the
offense of imagining he had a gun…… in the current moral grammar of
progressivism, it is an offense against society to think about guns without
hating or fearing them.”
________________________________________________________________________
CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY
When it comes to scandals, the IRS targeting conservatives
seems to resonate with the public because no one likes the IRS.
A new postmortem on the November elections from the nation’s
leading voice for college Republicans offers a searing indictment of the GOP
“brand” and the major challenges the party faces in wooing young voters.. The
College Republican National Committee will make public a detailed report — the
result of extensive polling and focus groups — dissecting what went wrong for
Republicans with young voters in the 2012 elections and how the party can
improve its showing with that key demographic in the future. It’s not a pretty
picture.
“It is fitting that I should introduce the uninitiated
reader to a basic overview of the Gay Left and the simultaneous totalitarianism
and anomie that have shaped it since the famous Stonewall rebellion of 1969. In
light of the fluffy report issued this week by the College Republican National
Committee urging the right, in part, to abandon opposition to gay marriage, the
message I am about to deliver is triply urgent: don't fall for the con!”
?????? Gov. Chris Christie is cashing in donations from top
Democratic fundraisers and other traditionally liberal donors across the
country, even nabbing the support of a handful of rainmakers aligned with
President Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Star-Ledger review of state
and federal records shows. The checks are flying into the Republican governor’s
war chest from all sorts of unlikely places — the hedge fund run by liberal
billionaire George Soros, for example, and the politically progressive halls of
the University of California, Berkeley.
The nascent support from Democratic donors is an early sign of
_________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Herb Meyer: The
Smoking Gun in Plain Sight
David Bossie: As the
IRS scandal continues to take shape and the massive overreach of one of the
most powerful agencies in Big Government becomes even more apparent, it becomes
frightening to think this same agency will soon be heavily involved in your
personal healthcare situation.
Mark Alexander: The
'Gay Pride' Merit Badge: Gender Disorientation
Pathology and the Boy Scouts
“There are simply too many
surveys that show homosexuals and bisexuals as disproportionately
CSA victims to consider this a coincidence. The overlap between the
symptoms of CSA and behaviors that are very common in the
gay community should be causing some serious questions to be asked. Yet
"I was born this way" has now become dogma. The progressive
movement has made this into a cause -- and the facts do not much matter
anymore.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/i_was_born_this_way.html#ixzz2VjiZmUO3
____________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Here Are Some of the Questions the IRS Asked Conservative
Groups
Ten key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown
Greatest Limbaugh quotes:
Must see. When
freedom came ashore: Stunning shots of
Allied troops storming Omaha Beach in Normandy
by war photographer Robert Capa and how they were almost lost forever
Philadelphia
Orchestra members surprise airplane passengers with impromptu concert
___________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort
is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties,
or his possessions."
-James Madison
______________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: A new report
shows that the Obama administration has been collecting the telephone records
of millions of customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order. Here's the
sad part. It turns out that 90 percent of the phone calls Americans make are to
order a pizza……When I was growing up, we were afraid of Big Brother watching
us. Now with Obama, we actually HAVE a brother watching us……….The mystery is
over. After a month of waiting, it turns out that an 84-year-old woman in Florida has won the $590
million Powerball lottery. As for how much tax she’s going to have to pay, the
IRS said it’s too early to tell because they don’t know whether she’s a
Republican or Democrat………A new study says 20 percent of women in their 40s
would describe themselves as very happy. However, only 1 percent of women in
their 40s would describe themselves as a woman in her 40s.
posted by gary at
9:32 AM
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