CAN OBAMACARE KEEP ITS RECORDS SECRET?

Given what has happened at the NSA and IRS, Investor's Business Daily is questioning whether all of the personal data Obamacare collects will remain secret.

BUSH & OBAMA

From Buzzfeed:  "7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out about if Bush Had Done Them."

IRS AND THE TEA PARTY

Research indicates that IRS harassment of Tea Party activists may have swayed past elections.  The IRS prevented the Tea Party from organizing voter turn out.

In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3 million-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum.

Update 6/27/2013:  "IRS Auditor Reaffirms that Conservatives, Not Liberals, Were Targeted."  

IRS targeted 292 Tea Party groups and only 6 progressive groups. 

"A NATION GOVERNED BY FEAR. . ."

From the ACLU to Obama! We are tired of living in a nation governed by fear.

SITUATION IN TURKEY

Fouad Ajami always seems to have insight into the Middle East.  In this article he discusses the struggle in Turkey between Ataturk's secular vision and Erdogan's drive to return to a more Islamic state.

In every way, Ataturk was the nemesis of what Erdogan stands for. Where Erdogan is severe on drinking and alcohol, Kemal was addicted to raki, the country’s anise-flavored liquor. In fact, Ataturk had died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 57. He was a military officer and a conqueror, and he took drinking as a manly prerogative. Erdogan had all but called Ataturk a drunkard, and that kind of blasphemy had not been well received by a population raised to a tradition of reverence for the founder.

Ataturk, it should be recalled, had sought nothing less than the extirpation of the old cultural order: He had abolished the old Ottoman order and declared a republic; he had abolished the caliphate; he had outlawed the fez and the turban; he had shifted the calendar from the Muslim to the Christian era; he had changed the alphabet from Arabic script to Latin letters; and he had declared null and void the provision that Islam was the religion of the state. No Westernization program was more ambitious. He saw himself as a man of the Enlightenment, and Turkey was to partake of Western culture. He was no Democrat. He lived by an authoritarian creed: “For the people, despite the people.”

SECURITY SCANDAL

You have to love this tweet:   In the new world of the NSA, the only secret left is Barack Obama's college grades.

MEDIA KILLED STORIES IN 2008 ELECTION

From the Daily Caller:  Stories about Jeremiah Wright were not published.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

SECURITY CLEARANCES

The question has been raised about how could Edward Snowden received a security clearance.  This article discusses the broken security clearance system. The Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee details the problems, but in brief here is the summary:

But the hearing did prove what McCaskill said in her opening statement: OPM is a “government agency where there is rampant fraud, limited accountability, and no respect for taxpayer dollars.” It also revealed how easy it was for Snowden to get access to the nation’s most sacred secrets.

MORE ON OBAMA GAFFES

They seem to be more common.  And even his friends are trying to defend his misstatements.  Here is one justification.

Note also that Obama doesn't actually seem to know anything about Northern Ireland. Viewed in context, his comments are actually a homily about civil rights in America. His criticism of Catholic and Protestant "schools and buildings" is just a poorly thought out analogy: It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that while there's no good reason to segregate schools by race, there are differences in content between the education offered by Protestant, Catholic and secular schools.

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SPYING ON AMERICANS

Michael Hastings on why Democrats are big on spying on Americans. Are they really just civil liberty opportunists who say one thing and then practice another?  In the Bush administration Democrats were speaking quite differently than they are today.

CHUCK HAGEL, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

Chuck Hagel never impressed me when Obama appointed him as Secretary of Defense.  Now he is discovered asking an Indian professor if he is a member of the Taliban.

IRS MISSTATEMENTS

The number of misstatements (lies) by the IRS is beginning to stretch the imagination.  Now we find out the IRS had a "political" test to determine the approval of various groups applying for tax exemption status.

The Internal Revenue Service used a numerical test for deciding whether nonprofit groups were too political to qualify for a tax exemption, said an agency employee, contradicting a former IRS executive’s statement.

Groups that devoted no more than 49 percent of their activities to politics were deemed acceptable, IRS employee Elizabeth Hofacre told congressional investigators, according to a transcript reviewed by Bloomberg News. Those decisions are at the center of the controversy about the agency’s extra scrutiny of anti-tax Tea Party groups’ applications. 

OBAMA FAUX PAS

At the recent G8 Summit Obama kept confusing the British Chancellor George Osborne with the popular singer Jeffrey Osborne. Not the greatest diplomacy.

According to the Sun and the Financial Times, Mr Obama apologised to the chancellor for calling him Jeffrey three times during the meeting - saying: "I'm sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favourite R&B singer".

ARCHAEOLOGY IN BIBLICAL TIMES

A "new" archaeology find indicating proof for King David is finally getting into the news. But the article also shows the "politics" of trying to substantiate historical truth in modern Israel and the Middle East.

Pictures on archaeology in biblical times.

REPORTER'S COMPUTER COMPROMISED

A CBS news reporter's computer was breached.  It may not be known who did it but it looks like a very sophisticated job which points to someone at the NSA or Department of Justice.  Of course, denials of such activity are being made.

COLLEGE DEGREES vs. VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

Students in China and India are finding the jobs are not in fields with requiring university degrees, but in positions that would be considered more vocational.  And college degrees don't always qualify a person for work.

JFK SECRETLY ADMIRED HITLER

From the Telegraph. An article summarizes comments JFK made about Germany, Hitler, and fascism on his trips through pre-war Germany.  His father, Joe Kennedy, was noted for his pro-German feelings so I assume the young son would have been grown up with those influences.  But diaries are only one source in considering a person's beliefs.

MORE IRS LEAKS

The list of conservative groups who had their IRS returns leaked to opponents keeps growing.  Now a group who opposes gay marriage comes forward with its story of how opponents got its tax returns.

The wife of the former IRS commissioner, Max Shulman, worked for a liberal group which opposed conservatives.  There sure seem to be a large number of potential conflicts of interest.