Who Watches The Watchers? Nobody Does

Transparency for Me, but not for Thee
Pajamas Media | 8.17.2010 | Paul Hsieh

When President Barack Obama took office, he pledged to make his administration “the most open and transparent in history.” However, government officials are now demanding ever-increasing amounts of information about ordinary Americans, while preventing citizens from gathering similar information about government operations. If this ominous trend continues, this “transparency” will be in one direction only — which bodes ill for the future of our republic.

One of the biggest new government data-collecting initiatives will be via the new mandatory electronic medical records, passed as part of last year’s “stimulus” package. Starting in 2011, physicians and hospitals must start using electronic systems to record patient information such as blood pressure, smoking status, and current medications. Although these measures are being portrayed as “voluntary,” they will be linked to escalating financial penalties that will make them de facto mandatory by 2015.

Furthermore, the Institute for Health Freedom warns: “Patients’ consent will not be required before personal health information is compiled in EHRs [Electronic Health Records] and exchanged electronically with many third parties including government agencies.”

Nor can government promises of privacy necessarily be trusted. The Transportation Security Agency claimed that data from its new high-tech body scanners “cannot be stored or recorded.” Yet as Declan McCullagh recently reported, the federal government has been surreptitiously storing tens of thousands of such images from a U.S. Marshals Service security checkpoint in Florida. In response, the TSA subsequently acknowledged that its scanners did have the capability of storing data — but that they would only use the recording function in “testing mode.”

In the era of cheap mass storage, it is extremely easy to store data, whereas it takes work to delete it. Plus it is virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to know if their data is truly purged from government archives. As Glenn Reynolds observes, “Whenever the government collects information, it lies about what it will do with it. This is a near-universal law.”

Yet while our government is demanding increasing access to our data, it is also trying to stop us from gathering information about it.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has just declared that under the new “financial reform” regulations, it no longer has to obey Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for public disclosure of its records. Nor is this trend isolated to the SEC. In 2009, major federal agencies claimed exemption from FOIA inquiries 70,779 times, up from the 47,395 times during George W. Bush’s final year in office.

During the Gulf oil spill, the U.S. Coast Guard attempted to prevent television news crews from reporting on recovery efforts by threatening them with fines and criminal penalties.

State and local law enforcement officials have routinely stopped ordinary Americans from taking photographs of public buildings and events on the grounds of “domestic security.” Police have arrested citizens videotaping them during the public performance of their law-enforcement duties on the grounds that it was in violation of wiretapping laws.

In his book The Transparent Society, David Brin predicted that technological advances could lead to a world of great openness and transparency — provided that the citizens could monitor the government as closely as the government monitored the citizenry. This was Brin’s solution to the classic problem, “Who watches the watchers?”

Unfortunately, the current trend is instead towards a system where the transparency is one way only — where the government can watch us, but not the other way around.

In the Internet era, the old saying “knowledge is power” is more true than ever before. Laws requiring citizens to divulge personal information to the government while denying citizens similar access to information about its operations thus threaten to give the government unprecedented power over ordinary Americans.

Read more…

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The Staggering Success of The Department of Education

Meet three generations of Americans.  Two generations, father/mother and son, were educated after the advent of the US Department of Education.  You’ll meet them first.  The third, Grandpa, received his education before the inception of the federal bureau whose mission is “…to formulate federal funding programs involving education and to enforce federal educational laws regarding privacy and civil rights.”

Click to play

Created by the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88), [the Department of Education] was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 17, 1979 and began operating on May 16, 1980.

Heckuva job, Jimmy.  Heckuva job.

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What Color Is Your (Political) Balloon?

Take this short quiz and perhaps surprise yourself.  Or forward it to a confused friend who doesn’t know what he/she really is.

Bloom where you are planted, people.

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Obama DOJ Protects Man Who Wants To “Kill White Babies”

Seriously?

Again, comments anyone?  More and more frequently lately, I find myself at a loss for words.

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American Citizenship Is Not About Blood Or Birth?

I am speechless.  Anyone else care to comment?

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Barbie: Tea Party Candidate

I went to see Toy Story 3 on Monday with my kids.  (Who am I kidding? I would have gone by myself if I had to.)  The movie was, of course, delightful.  I laughed, I cried, I cried some more.

The biggest surprise of the movie was a line delivered by none other than Mattel icon, Barbie.  During an intense scene while perched on the precipice of the trash chute in which the good toys face off with the evil teddy bear character and his brainwashed cohorts , Barbie yells at the nefarious Lots O Hugs bear:

“Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!”

Wow.  Did I hear that right?  Barbie just articulated the argument against tyranny and for liberty on the big screen!

I knew I loved those Pixar flicks.  More on this at Free Frank Warner.

Next question: Did that nut Tom Hanks know about this controversial script before agreeing to voice Sheriff Woody?

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Release the Chakra of the Goracle

I don’t think I’ll be able to eat for days…

"She saved her pants for evidence..."

Sex complaint against Gore is detailed, credible
Byron York | Washington Examiner | 6.29.2010

The allegation that Al Gore sexually assaulted a woman in a Portland, Ore., hotel room nearly four years ago has dealt a serious blow to the former vice president’s story that he and wife Tipper simply “grew apart” after 40 years of marriage.

The police report of the masseuse’s complaint is 73 pages long and extremely detailed. According to the document, she got a call from the front desk of the trendy Hotel Lucia on the night of Oct. 24, 2006. The hotel had a special guest. Could she come at 10:30 p.m.?

She went to Gore’s room carrying a folding massage table and other equipment. Gore, whom she had never met, greeted her with a warm embrace. “The hug went on a bit long, and I was taken just a bit aback by it,” the masseuse told police. But she went along because Gore “was a VIP and a powerful individual and the Hotel Lucia had made it clear to me by inference that they were giving him ‘the royal treatment.’”

Gore said he was tired from travel and described in detail the massage he wanted. It included work on the adductor muscles, which are on the inside of the thighs. “I mentally noted that a request for adductor work is a bit unusual,” the masseuse told police, because it can be “a precursor to inappropriate behavior by a male client.”

Gore also requested work on his abdomen. When that began, “He became somewhat vocal with muffled moans, etc.,” the masseuse recounted. Gore then “demand[ed] that I go lower.” When she remained focused on a “safe, nonsexual” area, Gore grew “angry, becoming verbally sharp and loud.”

The masseuse asked Gore what he wanted. “He grabbed my right hand, shoved it down under the sheet to his pubic hair area, my fingers brushing against his penis,” she recalled, “and said to me, ‘There!’ in a very sharp, loud, angry-sounding tone.” When she pulled back, Gore “angrily raged” and “bellowed” at her.

Then, abruptly, the former vice president changed tone. It was “as though he had very suddenly switched personalities,” she recalled, “and began in a pleading tone, pleading for release of his second chakra there.”

“Chakra,” in Gore’s new-agey jargon, refers to the body’s “energy centers,” which the masseuse interpreted as having a specific meaning. “This was yet another euphemism for sexual activity he was requesting,” she told police, “put cleverly as though it were a spiritual request or something.”

She wanted to end the session, but Gore “wrapped me in an inescapable embrace” and “caressed my back and buttocks and breasts.” She tried to get away — in the process calling Gore a “crazed sex poodle” — but the former vice president was too strong for her.

A little later, she said, Gore produced a bottle of brandy and mentioned there were condoms in the “treat box” provided by the hotel. “He then forced an open mouth kiss on me,” she said.

At that moment, the masseuse brought up Gore’s long marriage. “How do you rectify this with your wife?” she asked. That brought on another “quick shift” in Gore’s mood. “I never saw anybody’s moods just go like this,” the masseuse told police, snapping her fingers.

The accuser said Gore maneuvered her into the bedroom. His iPod docking station was there, he told her, and he wanted her to listen to “Dear Mr. President,” a lachrymose attack on George W. Bush by the singer Pink.

“As soon as he had it playing, he turned to me and immediately flipped me flat on my back and threw his whole body face down over atop of me,” she said. “I was just shocked at his craziness.”

“He pleaded, grabbed me, engulfed me in embrace, tongue kissed me, massaged me, groped by breasts and painfully squeezed my nipples through my clothing, pressed his pelvis against mine, rubbed my buttocks with his hands and fingers and rubbed himself against my crotch, saying, ‘You know you want to do it.’”

Finally she got away. Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her “to just suck it up; otherwise, the world’s going to be destroyed from global warming.”

She got a lawyer and made an appointment to talk with authorities. She canceled and did not tell police until January 2009 and even then did not press charges.

In 2007, a Portland paper learned what had happened. Gore’s lawyers called the story “absolutely false,” and it wasn’t published.

Now the National Enquirer has made the police report public. And Gore’s family-man image will never be the same.

So, to reiterate, on the word of Gore’s lawyers that the story was “absolutely false” the Portland paper didn’t publish this story in 2007.  Now that’s hard hitting journalism.

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Obama’s Lost To Do List

The Current List

Morning Bell: Obama’s Oil Spill To-Do List

1. Waive the Jones Act
2. Accept International Assistance
3. Lift the Moratorium
4. Release the S.S. A-Whale
5. Remove State and Local Roadblocks
6. Allow Sand Berm Dredging
7. Waive or Suspend EPA Regulations
8. Temporarily Loosen Coast Guard Inspections
9. Stop Coast Guard Budget Cuts
10. Halt Climate Change Legislation

Full details at link.

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Kay Hagan: A Lot Like Lott

Trent Lott…er…Kay Hagan must go.
by Ben Howe | Red State | 6.29.2010

Trent Lott Kay Hagan either meant what he she said, or he she didn’t. In either case, if Lott Hagan does not resign voluntarily as Senate majority leader from the Senate Armed Services Committee, his her Republican Democratic colleagues should fire him her.

At the 100th birthday party for retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond on Dec. 5, Lott discovery that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia had passed away, Lott noted that his home state of Mississippi had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president in 1948 Hagan noted that Senator Byrd was a devoted public servant, skillful orator and champion of the chamber. “We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead,” Lott continued, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either. Soon after I was elected, I had the privilege of presiding over the Senate with Senator Byrd on the floor,” Hagan continued, “I told him of my deep admiration for his service.”

Thurmond Byrd, then the governor of South Carolina the Senator from West Virginia, was the candidate of the Dixiecrat Party a member of the Ku Klux Klan, whose  sole reason for being was to preserve segregation. So more than a few people wonder what “problems” “service” Lott Hagan had in mind that he she thought would have been averted had Thurmond been elected in 1948 were so worthy of admiration?  Blacks not being allowed in public schools? Blacks voting being taken away? Blacks not being allowed to buying a home in Lott’s Hagan’s neighborhood?

“Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong,” President Bush Rush Limbaugh said yesterday. “Recent comments by Sen. Lott Hagan do not reflect the spirit of our country.”

I don’t believe Lott Hagan is a bigot who longs for the “good old days” when blacks in the South were denied civil rights. I think he she went overboard in an oleaginous tribute to a remarkable man who long ago (at least in public) repented of his segregationist ways.

But I’m not entirely sure. The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., reported this week that in 1980 Lott, a member of the House of Representatives at the time, had made a very similar remark at a campaign event at which Thurmond spoke. And Lott did get his start in politics as an aide to Sen. James Eastland, D-Miss., arguably the biggest racist in Congress at that time.

And Doug Thompson, in his web log, The Rant, quotes two former Senate staffers who said they have heard Lott utter racial slurs in private. Senator Byrd was openly racist and uttered racist slurs as a matter of policy when he was a member in good standing with the Ku Klux Klan.

The only possible defense for Lott Hagan — that he she is an idiot, not a bigot — is an insufficient reason to keep him her in a leadership position the committee.

It was conservative webloggers like Thompson who first expressed No one has expressed indignation over Lott’s Hagan’s remark.

Reporters for mainstream journals largely overlooked it in their accounts of the birthday party for Thurmond her press statement today., but Glenn Harlan Reynolds(www.instapundit.com) and Andrew Sullivan(www.andrewsullivan.com) immediately called for Lott’s head, swiftly to be joined by David Frum and Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online, and Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard. Seriously, like barely anyone has said anything about it.

Lott Hagan made his her remark on a Thursday Monday. After Reynolds, Sullivan et al. had been banging on him over the weekend, No one has really said a word, least of all Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the rest of the usual suspects. joined in the criticism the following Monday.

Some have noted more than a little hypocrisy in the belated non-existent outrage being expressed by Jackson and Sharpton. In an interview with Fox News on March 4, 2001, Sen. Robert Byrd spoke of “white [epithet deleted].” This passed with barely a word of criticism from black leaders. because he’s a Democrat. On Oct. 22 of this year, Bill Clinton traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., for a dedication of a statue to the late Sen. William Fulbright, D-Ark., the Vietnam War dove who was also a rabid segregationist. Again, not a peep from Jackson or Sharpton. once again most likely a result of Clinton’s standing as a Democrat.

But what Byrd and Clinton said can be distinguished from what Lott Hagan said. Byrd issued a prompt and abject apology. “The phrase dates back to my boyhood, and has no place in today’s society,” he said. “As for my language, I had no intention of casting aspersions on anyone else’s race.”  And of course his affiliation with the KKK in no way affected the legitimacy of this statement given his standing as a Democrat.

Compared with what Byrd said, Lott’s apology has been lame Hagan’s admiration seems misplaced.

And Clinton praised Fulbright the man without giving the appearance of endorsing Fulbright’s noxious views on race. which gives him a total free pass.

Trent Lott Kay Hagan is a nice guy gal. There is no other way to explain why he in a leadership position she is a Democrat in a traditionally Red State. It certainly isn’t competence. When last Lott was majority leader, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., routinely ate his lunch.

It’s a harsh punishment to lose one’s job because of what I hope and pray was a stupid but innocent remark, misconstrued.

But it is better that Lott Hagan suffer for what he she said than that the Republican Democratic Party be tainted because of what he she said.

P.S. Mocked article located here.

I can think of better reasons to say buh-bye to Kay Hagan, but this will do.

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Cold Comfort

I’m Sure Bobby Jindal Feels More Reassured Already
Jim Geraghty | Morning Jolt – NRO | 6.30.2010

A minor Gulf disaster averted: “‘We are going to stay until this thing is taken care of,’ [Vice President Joe] Biden said. . . . Biden was speaking in New Orleans during his first visit to the area since the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, setting in motion the events that have led to millions of gallons of oil being leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. He seemed impressed by the efforts underway at a downtown command post, the first stop on his New Orleans itinerary. Biden was greeted just after 10 a.m. at Armstrong International Airport by Gov. Bobby Jindal and Rep. Joseph Cao, then traveled by motorcade to the unified command center in a Poydras Street office building.”

The “minor Gulf disaster” that was avoided? That Biden didn’t express surprise to Jindal that the governor wasn’t working at a 7-11. Then again, Jindal doesn’t have the “slight Indian accent” that then-Senator Biden declared to be a prerequisite to working at the convenience-store chain.

I’m so relieved that the White House is taking care of business.

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