jpdice_Fox6
James-Paul Dice
Take a look at the 3D view of the Moore Oklahoma tornado. The tornado is just SW of the city in this image.#fox6wbrc pic.twitter.com/tpu5VSwycR
3D Rendering Of Oklahoma Tornado
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
DOJ -- 'Fast and Furious', lied about it
Watchdog report says DOJ official retaliated against ‘Furious’ whistle-blower, lied about it
Published May 20, 2013
FoxNews.com
The former U.S. Attorney for Arizona could be disbarred, after an investigation found he lied to the Justice Department about his role in trying to discredit the federal whistle-blower who exposed the botched gun-running scheme known as Fast and Furious.
An Office of Inspector General report showed that Dennis Burke -- the former chief of staff for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed as U.S. Attorney for Arizona by President Obama in September 2009 -- lied when asked if he leaked sensitive documents to the press meant to undermine the credibility of ATF whistle-blower John Dodson.
The IG report also said Burke likely leaked the memo in retaliation for Dodson's whistle-blowing, and challenged the credibility of statements he made to congressional investigators. Dodson first went to Congress in 2010 after his own agency and the Justice Department refused to investigate his complaints that Operation Fast and Furious, an anti-gun-trafficking effort, was out of control.
"We also concluded that Burke's disclosure of the Dodson memorandum was likely motivated by a desire to undermine Dodson's public criticisms of Operation Fast and Furious. Although Burke denied to congressional investigators that he had any retaliatory motive for his actions, we found substantial evidence to the contrary," the IG report, released Monday, said.
Dodson appeared before Congress in June 2011. At the time, the Department of Justice denied his claim that the federal government approved a plan to knowingly assist criminals in smuggling thousands of guns to the Mexican drug cartels.
Dodson's credibility was crucial since nearly everyone above him denied the allegation. The report found that Burke leaked information that sought to undermine Dodson's story to a Fox News producer.
"The report brings into question, yet again, the treatment that whistle-blowers receive from this administration," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Monday. "Instead of examining the allegations that came forward, the Justice Department almost immediately began to attack the credibility and good name of a dedicated federal agent upset with what he was ordered to do."
Burke used his private email account to leak the information to a friend in Washington who then hand-delivered the information to the Fox producer. The IG said in its report it used an "administrative subpoena" to identify the personal email of relevant Department employees to confirm the leak.
Once contacted by IG staff, Burke admitted he was the source. The IG's office had asked 150 Justice Department employees to affirm they were not the leak.
But the report said he gave misleading information to congressional investigators. Asked about the issue by congressional investigators, Burke said: "I was under the impression that (the Dodson memo) had gone to the Hill and that I was basically giving (the Fox producer) a time advantage."
He also allegedly misled his own superior in Washington, Assistant Attorney General James Cole.
At the time, Cole had seen a New York Times story about Fast and Furious. In it, the paper published a picture which showed the document had been faxed from the U.S. attorney's office in Arizona. When confronted, the report said Burke told Cole, "I don't think we have a fax machine."
The IG report claims Burke was "admonished by Deputy Attorney General Cole for lying to him ... and had been put on notice such disclosures should not occur."
After speaking with Burke, Cole wrote "another horrible incident of bad judgment." The following day, Aug. 13, Burke resigned.
Fox News tried unsuccessfully to contact Burke, who recently formed a security and lobbying firm with former Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bulls Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano's Chief of Staff Noah Kroloff.
The Office of Inspector General is an investigative arm that monitors the Justice Department. It tried to interview Burke, but he resigned.
The IG said Burke violated numerous federal and professional rules of conduct and it would forward a copy of its report to the Arizona State Bar Association for disciplinary conduct.
IRS Pleads the Fifth
Top IRS official will invoke Fifth Amendment
The man who led the IRS when
the agency gave extra scrutiny to conservative groups tells Congress he
knew little about what was happening.
WASHINGTON – A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.
Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd.
Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee Wednesday.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Tornado
Up to TWENTY-FOUR children feared dead in rubble of flattened elementary school after giant TWO-MILE tornado rips through densely-populated suburb of Oklahoma City
- Two entire schools flattened in Moore, Oklahoma after monster tornado touched down just after 3pm local time
- Up to two dozen children are trapped under debris at one of the schools, Plaza Towers Elementary
- At least 51 people confirmed dead, authorities say, and at least another 120 injured in local hospitals
- Children told to hold on to the walls, while teachers shielding the students with their bodies
- Hundreds of homes wiped out and more than 8,000 people left without power after up to 200 mph winds pulverized a 30-square-mile stretch
- Reports that the devastating tornado appeared larger than 1999 storm in the area that left 36 people dead
- More tornadoes now heading east towards Meaker, Ryan and Wilson in Oklahoma
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2328000/US-tornadoes-Yet-heartbreak-Oklahoma-massive-tornado-touches-highly-populated-suburb.html#ixzz2TtIE3589
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Justice Department
Report: Justice Department targeted TWO Fox News Channel reporters and a producer for talking with government sources
- Inspector General report found agents read emails, tracked phone records
- Reporters James Rosen and William La Jeunesse, producer Mike Levine were the subject of subpoenas but never notified by the government
- Fox News says U.S. journalism 'up until now has always been a free press'
- An FBI agent swore out an affidavit claiming that Rosen had broken the law, 'at the very least, either as an aider, abetter and/or co-conspirator'
- New allegations add fuel to the fire started with a DOJ investigation into the Associated Press
|
The Fox News Channel is outraged over new revelations that three of its reporting staffers were targeted by the U.S. Department of Justice in criminal investigations related to their attempts to obtain information from government sources.
James Rosen, the network's chief Washington correspondent, has become a First Amendment cause celebre over his treatment by the Obama administration. But the DOJ, Fox says, also investigated the Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter William La Jeunesse and Fox News producer Mike Levine.
Rosen, according to affidavits filed by FBI agents, was considered a possible criminal co-conspirator.
SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO
Fox News's Shannon Bream (R) and Megyn Kelly (L)
broke the news Monday that the DOJ had targeted three of their
journalist colleagues in criminal investigations for seeking classified
information from willing government sources
An FBI agent filed an affidavit in that case claiming that he thought Rosen had broken the law, 'at the very least, either as an aider, abetter and/or co-conspirator.'
None of the three journalists targeted by the Obama administration was notified that the government was spying on his records and emails.
'All three of our colleagues say they were never contacted by the government,' Fox News Channel correspondent Shannon Bream reported on Monday afternoon.
James Rosen (L) attracted the Justice
Department's attention in 2009 when he reported on North Korea's plans
to engage in additional nuclear tests following new UN sanctions.
William La Jeunesse (R) broke news about Operation Fast and Furious,
allegedly with the help of willing informants from inside the U.S.
government
La Jeunesse and Levine were targeted in a separate Department of Justice investigation into leaks related to Operation Fast and Furious, a scandal-plagued DOJ program that sent illicit guns across the Mexican border to drug cartels in the hope of tracing the guns' path to the narcotics gangs.
The federal government lost track of the majority of approximately 2,000 firearms that were allowed to cross the southern U.S. border. More than 300 deaths in Mexico, and the death of at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent, were linked to those weapons.
La Jeunesse broke stories outlining several key elements of the Fast and Furious scandal. Monday's Inspector General report from the DOJ directly quotes his emails, as well as some from Levine, the Fox News producer.
'What we don't know at this point,' Bream reported, 'is if the sources within the Justice Department may have shared those emails with investigators, or if the Fox employees' accounts were directly accessed by investigators. It's simply a question we cannot answer at this point.'
Fox News Channel producer Mike Levine's emails
were read by DOJ investigators, but his employer isn't certain whether
it was the result of a subpoena, or of agents swapping information
inside Main Justice
'We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,' Clemente said. 'In fact, it is downright chilling.'
'We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.'
The news broke as White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was preparing to deliver his daily briefing to reporters, but with correspondents away from their television sets and unaware of the development, questions focused on the first incarnation of the Obama administration's press freedom scandal, involving the Associated Press.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney fended
off questions about the press freedom scandal on Monday, claiming
President Obama aims to balance the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution with the need to protect state secrets
Holder claimed in a congressional hearing last week that he had recused himself from the investigation since he himself was interviewed as a possible suspect or witness.
Carney has denied that Obama was informed about that probe, and said Monday that the president 'is committed to the press's ability to pursue information and protecting the First Amendment.
Obama is 'also mindful,' he added, 'of secret and classified information needing to stay secret and classified for national security reasons.'
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Friday, May 17, 2013
PEGGY NOONAN--- Weekend News
This Is No Ordinary Scandal
Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.
Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.
As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.
Corbis
The president, as usual, acts as if all
of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable,
he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just
like you. But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.
A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is to too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.
The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.
In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the second amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.
All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.
It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents.
This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.
The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so high-handed, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone number.
And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate.
We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.
But that bias does not fit these circumstances.
Peggy Noonan's Blog
Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Physically & political views
Men who are physically strong are more likely to have right wing political views
- Weaker men more likely to support welfare state and wealth redistribution
- Link may reflect psychological traits that evolved in our ancestors
- Strength was a proxy for ability to defend or acquire resources
- There is no link between women's physical strength and political views
|
Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim.
Their study discovered a link between a man’s upper-body strength and their political views.
Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark collected data on bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution from hundreds in America, Argentina and Denmark.
Men who are physically strong - like Arnold Schwarzenegger - are more likely to take a right wing political stance
Men with less upper body strength are more likely to support the welfare state - like Labour leader Ed Miliband
The researchers found no link between upper-body strength and redistribution opinions among women.
Professor Michael Petersen said: ‘In all three countries, physically strong males consistently pursued the self-interested position on redistribution.
‘However physically weak males were more reluctant to assert their self-interest – just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation between individuals.
‘While many people think of politics as a modern phenomenon, it has, in a sense, always been with our species.
‘Political views are designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.’
The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.
Professor Petersen added: ‘Many previous studies have shown that people's political views cannot be predicted by standard economic models.
‘This is among the first studies to show that political views may be rational in another sense, in that they're designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2325414/Men-physically-strong-likely-right-wing-political-views.html#ixzz2TVUKHTqa
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
IRS Official Runs Health Care
IRS Official in Charge During Tea Party Targeting Now Runs Health Care Office
Email
May 16, 2013 6:15pm
(Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.
Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.
Grant announced today that he would retire June 3, despite being appointed as commissioner of the tax-exempt office May 8, a week ago.
As the House voted to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act Thursday evening, House Speaker John Boehner expressed “serious concerns” that the IRS is empowered as the law’s chief enforcer.
“Fully repealing ObamaCare will help us build a stronger, healthier economy, and will clear the way for patient-centered reforms that lower health care costs and protect jobs,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said.
“Obamacare empowers the agency that just violated the public’s trust by secretly targeting conservative groups,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. “Even by Washington’s standards, that’s unacceptable.”
Sen. John Cornyn even introduced a bill, the “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act of 2013,” which would prohibit the Secretary of the Treasury, or any delegate, including the IRS, from enforcing the Affordable Care Act.
“Now more than ever, we need to prevent the IRS from having any role in Americans’ health care,” Cornyn, R-Texas, stated. “I do not support Obamacare, and after the events of last week, I cannot support giving the IRS any more responsibility or taxpayer dollars to implement a broken law.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also reacted to the revelation late Thursday, stating the news was “stunning, just stunning.”
ABC News’ Abby D. Phillip contributed to this report.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)