Tag Archives: mother

Did the White House Create a Bunch of Fake Lois Lerner Emails?

by DesireeCheesman Posted on June 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Howard Kurtz thinks Jon Stewart is going too damn easy on our current president:

When it comes to Obama, the humor is gentle. I do recall Stewart pummeling the president over the botched ObamaCare rollout. But on the IRS scandal this week, he mocked the tax agency for almost criminal stupidity in losing all those emails—but never questioned whether the Obama administration is engaged in a coverup.

Yes, Kurtz actually wrote that. He thinks Jon Stewart should have entertained the possibility that someone in the White House invented a time machine and wrote a bunch of emails in 2011 asking the IT department at the IRS to fix Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive. Maybe it was the same time machine that inserted Obama’s birth record in the Honolulu Advertiser in 1961. Or, perhaps, Mission Impossible-like, a crack team of forgers ginned up a bunch of fake emails that just looked like they were from 2011.

Look, I’m not saying that’s what’s happened. I’m just asking the question. It’s what any responsible journalist would do.

This article is from: 

Did the White House Create a Bunch of Fake Lois Lerner Emails?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did the White House Create a Bunch of Fake Lois Lerner Emails?

Friday Cat Blogging – 27 June 2014

by Oliver9602 Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

Here is Domino peeking out from under one of Marian’s sweatshirts. I guess cats just like caves. It’s not like it’s been chilly around here these days.

And now, I’m off to the dentist to see if we can finally install a crown. The first two didn’t fit properly, so we’re hoping third time’s the charm. It will be nice to be able to chew on both sides of my mouth again.

View this article:  

Friday Cat Blogging – 27 June 2014

Posted in Crown, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 27 June 2014

President Obama Has Finally Learned the Limits of American Military Power

by AlysaKincaid Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’ve been meaning to make note of something about Iraq for a while, and a story today in the LA Times provides the perfect hook:

A group of U.S. diplomats arrived in Libya three years ago to a memorable reception: a throng of cheering men and women who pressed in on the startled group “just to touch us and thank us,” recalled Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security advisor….But in three years Libya has turned into the kind of place U.S. officials most fear: a lawless land that attracts terrorists, pumps out illegal arms and drugs and destabilizes its neighbors.

….Now, as Obama considers a limited military intervention in Iraq, the Libya experience is seen by many as a cautionary tale of the unintended damage big powers can inflict when they aim for a limited involvement in an unpredictable conflict….Though they succeeded in their military effort, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies fell short in the broader goal of putting Libya on a path toward democracy and stability. Exhausted after a decade of war and mindful of the failures in Iraq, U.S. officials didn’t want to embark on another nation-building effort in an oil-rich country that seemed to pose no threat to Western security.

But by limiting efforts to help the new Libyan government gain control over the country, critics say, the U.S. and its allies have inadvertently helped turn Libya into a higher security threat than it was before the military intervention.

The view of the critics in this piece is pretty predictable: no matter what happens in the world, their answer is “more.” And whenever military intervention fails, it’s always because we didn’t do enough.

But I don’t think Obama believes this anymore. He mounted a surge in Afghanistan, and it’s pretty plain that it’s accomplished very little in the way of prompting reconciliation with the Taliban or setting the stage for genuine peace. Even lasting stability seems unlikely at this point. That experience made him reluctant to intervene in Libya, but he eventually got talked into it and within a couple of years that turned to shit too. Next up was Syria, and this time his reluctance was much more acute. There would be some minor steps to arm the anti-Assad rebels, but that was it. There was a brief moment when he considered upping our involvement over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, but then he backed off via the expedient of asking for congressional approval. Congress, as Obama probably suspected from the start, was unwilling to do more than whine. When it came time to actually voting for the kind of action they kept demanding, they refused.

By now, I suspect that Obama’s reluctance to support military intervention overseas is bone deep. The saber rattlers and jingoists will never change, but he never really cared about them. More recently, though, I think he’s had the same epiphany that JFK had at one time: the mainstream national security establishment—in the Pentagon, in Congress, in the CIA, and in the think tanks—simply can’t be trusted. Their words are more measured, but in the end they aren’t much different from the perma-hawks. They always want more, and deep in their hearts the only thing they really respect is military force. In the end, they’ll always push for it, and they’ll always insist that this time it will work.

But I don’t think Obama believes that anymore, and I think he’s far more willing to stand up to establishment pressure these days. This is why I’m not too worried about the 300 advisors he’s sent to Iraq. A few years ago, this might very well have been the start of a Vietnam-like slippery slope into a serious recommitment of forces. Today, I doubt it. Obama will provide some limited support, but he simply won’t be badgered into doing more. Deep in his heart, he now understands that Iraq’s problem is fundamentally political. Until there’s some chance of forging a genuine political consensus, American troops just can’t accomplish much.

Excerpt from – 

President Obama Has Finally Learned the Limits of American Military Power

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on President Obama Has Finally Learned the Limits of American Military Power

Digital Privacy Is Fundamentally Different From Physical Privacy

by FrankieReeder Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Tim Lee argues—or perhaps merely hopes—that yesterday’s decision protecting cell phones from warrantless searches might signal a turning point for the Supreme Court’s attitude toward digital information in general:

The government has typically pursued a simple legal strategy when faced with digital technologies. First, find a precedent that gave the government access to information in the physical world. Second, argue that the same principle should apply in the digital world, ignoring the fact that this will vastly expand the government’s snooping power while eroding Americans’ privacy.

….The government hoped the Supreme Court would take this same narrow, formalistic approach in this week’s cell phone privacy case. It wanted the justices to pretend that rifling through the vast quantity of personal information on a suspect’s cell phone is no different from inspecting other objects that happen to be in suspects’ pockets. But the Supreme Court didn’t buy it.

….The Supreme Court clearly recognizes that in the transition from information stored on paper to information stored in computer chips, differences of degree can become differences of kind. If the police get access to one letter or photograph you happen to have in your pocket, that might not be a great privacy invasion. If the police get access to every email you’ve received and every photograph you’ve taken in the last two years, that’s a huge invasion of privacy.

This is a problem that’s been getting more acute for years. The basic question is whether courts should recognize the fact that digital access to information removes practical barriers that are important for privacy. For example, the state of California keeps lots of records about me that are legally public: DMV records, property records, birth and marriage records, etc. In the past, practically speaking, the mere fact that they were physical records provided me with a degree of privacy. It took a lot of time and money to dig through them all, and this meant that neither the government nor a private citizen would do it except in rare and urgent cases.

In the digital world, that all changes. If a police officer has even a hint of curiosity about me, it takes only seconds to compile all this information and more. In a technical sense, they don’t have access to anything they didn’t before, but in a practical sense I’ve lost a vast amount of privacy.

In the past, the Supreme Court has rarely (never?) acknowledged this. In yesterday’s cell phone case, they not only acknowledged it, they acknowledged it unanimously. Is it possible that this means they’ll be applying a more skeptical view to similar cases in the future? Or even revisiting some of their past decisions in light of the continuing march of technology? We don’t know yet, but it’s certainly possible. Maybe the Supreme Court has finally entered the 21st century.

Original article: 

Digital Privacy Is Fundamentally Different From Physical Privacy

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Digital Privacy Is Fundamentally Different From Physical Privacy

Supreme Court: Aereo Looks Just Like Cable TV, So It Has to Follow the Same Laws as Cable TV

by JaniPerdriau Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

I’ve been reading the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Aereo case, and it’s kind of fascinating. As you may know, Aereo is a company that installs thousands of tiny antennnas in a warehouse and then lets users “rent” one of the antennas, as well as some storage space. Users connect to their antenna via the internet, and can either watch broadcast TV in real time or set up times for shows to be recorded.

Broadcast networks claim that Aereo is retransmitting their content to the public, which is a violation of copyright law. Aereo, naturally, disagrees. The court’s decision appears to hinge on a single key question: can Aereo be said to be an active infringer when it’s merely a passive conduit for users, who are the ones who choose what to watch and record?

The majority said yes, because Aereo is essentially just like a cable TV operator, and the Copyright Act of 1976 specifically says that cable TV operators are retransmitting content. Antonin Scalia, writing in dissent, calls this specious:

The Court’s reasoning fails on its own terms because there are material differences between the cable systems at issue in Teleprompter and other decisions on the one hand and Aereo on the other. The former (which were then known as community-antenna television systems) captured the full range of broadcast signals and forwarded them to all subscribers at all times, whereas Aereo transmits only specific programs selected by the user, at specific times selected by the user. The Court acknowledges this distinction but blithely concludes that it “does not make a critical difference.”

….Even if that were true, the Court fails to account for other salient differences between the two technologies….At the time of our Teleprompter decision, cable companies “performed the same functions as ‘broadcasters’ by deliberately selecting and importing distant signals, originating programs, and selling commercials,”, thus making them curators of content—more akin to video-on-demand services than copy shops. So far as the record reveals, Aereo does none of those things.

The key distinction here is that Aereo doesn’t actively “curate” its content or retransmit everything at all times. It just makes everything available and users then choose what to watch. “Some of those broadcasts are copyrighted; others are in the public domain. The key point is that subscribers call all the shots.”

I can’t say that I find this very persuasive. For one thing, cable operators don’t forward everything to all subscribers at all times. You have to turn on your cable box and then set your tuner to pick up a particular station. More substantively, I suppose it’s true that there are bits and pieces of broadcast television that are in the public domain, but come on. Virtually everything Aereo makes available is copyrighted material and they know it. Scalia says Aereo is a lot like a copy shop, which isn’t held liable for the occasional customer who infringes copyright because, in practice, most of their customers aren’t infringing. But if a shop ran a service where they copied entire books from their library, they’d be held liable—even if a few of their books were in the public domain and even if their users had to physically press a button to start up the copying process.

In any case, as near as I can tell this case is based almost entirely on extremely fine points like this. Is Aereo essentially the same as a cable TV operator, and thus something that Congress intended to regulate in the Copyright Act of 1976? Can Aereo be held liable for infringement even though it’s users who make the decisions about what to watch and what to record? Are Aereo’s transmissions “public” even though each individual antenna is rented out to only a single individual person?

I could have seen this case going either way, but in the end the majority decided the case based on their conclusions about (a) the intent of Congress and (b) whether Aereo is so similar to a cable TV operator that it falls under the same laws. In the end, they decided that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And Aereo lost.

Read the article: 

Supreme Court: Aereo Looks Just Like Cable TV, So It Has to Follow the Same Laws as Cable TV

Posted in Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supreme Court: Aereo Looks Just Like Cable TV, So It Has to Follow the Same Laws as Cable TV

TV Strike Against Dodgers May be the Straw That Breaks the Sports Bubble

by PaulettPearl Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez thinks it’s long past time for everyone to figure out a way to end the Dodgers TV blackout in Southern California:

This all began in 2012 when the Guggenheim Group, or whatever they call themselves, paid too much money — about $2 billion — to buy the Dodgers from the hated Frank McCourt….The new owners then managed to dupe Time Warner Cable into spending an even more obscene amount — $8.4 billion — for the rights to broadcast the games on SportsNet LA.

….They figure they’ll get all of it back from you and me by raising the price of tickets and hot dogs and the fees for getting the games on TV….But in the case of the Dodgers, there was a snag along the way. DirecTV and other companies didn’t like Time Warner’s asking price for the right to carry the games, and they told the cable giant to stuff it. So the standoff continues, with half the season gone and no relief in sight.

Actually, I don’t think this is quite right. It’s not the asking price per se that cable companies don’t like, it’s the fact that Time-Warner is demanding that their spiffy new all-Dodgers channel be added to the basic cable menu. Other broadcasters aren’t willing to do this. If Time-Warner wants to set a carriage fee of $5 or $10 or whatever, that’s OK as long as it’s only being paid by people who actually want to watch the Dodgers. It’s not OK if every single subscriber has to pay for it whether they like it or not. At that point, it basically becomes a baseball tax on every TV viewer in Southern California.

Of course, this is just another way of saying what Lopez said: Everyone involved in this fiasco has overpaid. Time-Warner is demanding that their Dodgers channel be added to basic cable because they know they can never justify their purchase price if they can only get subscription revenue from the one-half or one-third of all households who actually care about the Dodgers. So they’re holding out for the tax.

I’d like to see the Dodgers on TV, but I hope everyone holds out forever anyway. It’s time for a revolt against the absurd spiral in prices for sports teams, and maybe historians will eventually point to this as the straw that finally broke the sports bubble. But that all depends on how long everyone can hold out.

Continue at source:  

TV Strike Against Dodgers May be the Straw That Breaks the Sports Bubble

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on TV Strike Against Dodgers May be the Straw That Breaks the Sports Bubble

Read the Supreme Court’s Unanimous Decision Telling Cops They Need a Warrant to Search Your Cellphone

by Kyle3094ioyoxj Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Read our explainer of the decision here.

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1208240-supreme-court-cell-phone-search-decision.js”,
width: 630,
height: 820,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1208240-supreme-court-cell-phone-search-decision”
);

Supreme Court Cell Phone Search Decision (PDF)

Supreme Court Cell Phone Search Decision (Text)

See original article here:  

Read the Supreme Court’s Unanimous Decision Telling Cops They Need a Warrant to Search Your Cellphone

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Read the Supreme Court’s Unanimous Decision Telling Cops They Need a Warrant to Search Your Cellphone

Supreme Court Unanimously Supports Common Sense in Cell Phone Search Case

by JamaalChampagne Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

The latest from the Supreme Court:

Police may not search the smartphones of people who are put under arrest unless they have a warrant, the Supreme Court has ruled, a unanimous and surprising victory for privacy advocates.

The justices, ruling in cases from California and Massachusetts, said the 4th Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” prevents a police officer from examining a cellphone found on or near a person who is arrested.

See? I told you the Supreme Court was a remarkably agreeable place. And in this case, they were remarkably agreeable even though lower courts had split on this issue and it could easily have broken down along normal left (yay civil liberties!) and right (yay law enforcement!) lines. Instead, all nine of the justices did the right thing. For a brief moment, we can all celebrate.

See original article – 

Supreme Court Unanimously Supports Common Sense in Cell Phone Search Case

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supreme Court Unanimously Supports Common Sense in Cell Phone Search Case

We just had the hottest May on record (until next May)

by RochelleQuinter Posted on June 24, 2014

Spring record breakers

We just had the hottest May on record (until next May)

By

Shutterstock

NOAA’s monthly State of the Climate report came out and, spoiler alert, it wasn’t good. It turns out May 2014 was the hottest May on record, which shouldn’t really come as a surprise as four of the five hottest Mays in the recorded history of May came in the last five years. More good news: After a blazing first five months of the year, the impending El Nino could push 2014 to the top of the climate charts as the warmest year in recorded history. Terrell Johnson and Jon Erdman at Weather.com had this to say:

Last month was the hottest May in more than 130 years of recorded weather history, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Monday in its monthly state of the climate report, as May 2014 surpassed the previous record high for the month set in 2010. The world’s combined land and ocean temperature for May was 1.33°F above the 20th century average of 58.6°F, NOAA reported, adding that four of the five warmest Mays have occurred in the past five years. In the report, NOAA separates out temperature records for the world’s land and ocean areas. On land last month, the world saw its fourth-hottest May on record with a global surface temperature 2.03°F above the 20th century average. The oceans saw their hottest May on record, with a temperature 1.06°F above the 20th century average.

So this was the hottest May, but more frightening is the pattern. We haven’t had a May with a below average temperature since 1976. Gerald Ford was president, parachute pants were still from the distant future, and your grandmother had literally just bought those bicentennial collectors plates you recently found in the attic. It begs the question: How long can temperatures be above average before we have to admit that average has changed?

I’d suggest we all pack our undershorts with ice, but the way things are going, ice could be hard to find.


Source
World’s Hottest May Is Now May 2014: NOAA, Weather.com

Jim Meyer is a Baltimore-based stand-up comedian, actor, retired roller derby announcer, and freelance writer. Follow his exploits at his website and on Twitter.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

Continue reading – 

We just had the hottest May on record (until next May)

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We just had the hottest May on record (until next May)

Is ISIS a Monster of Our Allies’ Creation?

by ClementZ93 Posted on June 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On her show last night, Rachel Maddow highlighted a piece by Steve Clemons claiming that the rise of ISIS in Syria—and, more recently, in Iraq—has been largely due to financial and arms assistance from Saudi Arabia:

The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the “moderate” armed opposition in the country, receives a lot of attention. But two of the most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)….Qatar’s military and economic largesse has made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra….But ISIS is another matter. As one senior Qatari official stated, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

….The United States, France, and Turkey have long sought to support the weak and disorganized FSA, and to secure commitments from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to do the same….In February, the Saudi government appeared to finally be endorsing this strategy.

….The worry at the time, punctuated by a February meeting between U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice and the intelligence chiefs of Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, and others in the region, was that ISIS and al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra had emerged as the preeminent rebel forces in Syria. The governments who took part reportedly committed to cut off ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, and support the FSA instead. But while official support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia appears to have dried up, non-governmental military and financial support may still be flowing from these countries to Islamist groups.

Clemons’ piece is vaguely sourced, and Saudi Arabia has strongly denied accusations that it has supported ISIS. Nonetheless, it’s a fairly commonly held view, and it certainly demonstrates the dangers of trying to pick sides in Middle East conflicts. The US may have been doing its best to support the FSA, but that doesn’t mean our allies are doing the same. Unfortunately, there are inherent limits to just how precisely you can pinpoint aid in conflicts like this, and that means the possibility of blowback is never far away. That sure seems to have been the case here.

See original:  

Is ISIS a Monster of Our Allies’ Creation?

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is ISIS a Monster of Our Allies’ Creation?