Monthly Archives: April 2013

04.26.13
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Business Insider: CISPA ‘Dead For Now’: ‘Privacy Killer’ Bill Hits A Wall In The Senate

Sen. Jay Rockefeller

 

The controversial Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is likely  to die in the Senate, according to US  News.

The bill, which has stirred up internet privacy watchdogs and sites like Reddit,  followed closely in the footsteps of the last unsuccessfully proposed privacy  bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect I.P. Act (PIPA). SOPA and  PIPA met their end last year after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid canceled debate following pressure and protests from Internet companies such as Wikipedia, Google, and  Reddit.

The heat  on CISPA hasn’t been as hot as the pressure put on SOPA and PIPA last year,  but Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) who is the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee  on Commerce, Science and Transportation says that CISPA’s privacy protections  are “insufficient” and a committee aid confirmed to CNET that “Rockefeller believes the Senate will not take up  CISPA.”

Coupled with President Barack Obama’s threatened veto, CISPA as it is now  could be all but dead, at least according to Michelle Richardson, legislative  council with the American Civil Liberties Union.

“I think it’s dead for now,” she told US News. “CISPA  is too controversial, it’s too expansive, it’s just not the same sort of program  contemplated by the Senate last year. We’re pleased to hear the Senate will  probably pick up where it left off last year.”

Why the uproar over CISPA?  The bill allows companies to pass along what the government calls “cyber threat”  data which includes personal information like user data to the United Sates  Government. If the bill passed, they could legally give data over to law  enforcement and not face legal repercussions.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.businessinsider.com/cispa-hits-a-brick-wall-in-the-senate-2013-4#ixzz2RcN2BNqS

04.26.13
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Upworthy: What People Who Get Bombed All The Time Have To Say To Boston

Boston filmmaker Beth Murphy is in Afghanistan working on a documentary. Usually her family sends her anxious messages every time there’s a bombing in Kabul. That was until the Boston Marathon attack, and then the roles were reversed. Beth’s Afghan friends were so upset by the news that they helped her make some picture postcards to send back to Boston… from Kabul, with love.

Boston filmmaker Beth Murphy is in Afghanistan working on a documentary. Usually her family sends her anxious messages every time there’s a bombing in Kabul. That was until the Boston Marathon attack, and then the roles were reversed. Beth’s Afghan friends were so upset by the news that they helped her make some picture postcards to send back to Boston… from Kabul, with love.

04.25.13
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Forbes: Congress Seeks to Opt Out of Participating in Obamacare’s Exchanges

As Obamacare was winding its way through the Senate in 2009, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) slipped in an amendment requiring that members of Congress, and their staff, enroll in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. The idea was simple: that if Congress was going to impose Obamacare upon the country, it should have to experience what it is imposing firsthand. But now, word comes that Congress is quietly seeking to rescind that provision of the law, because members fear that staffers who face higher insurance costs will leave the Hill. The news has sparked outrage from the right and left. Here’s the back story, and why this debate is crucial to the future of market-based health reform.

Sen. Grassley’s original idea was to require all federal employees to enroll in the exchanges, instead of in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, where most gain coverage today. Indeed, a previous Senate Finance Committee amendment proposed putting members and staffers on Medicaid. But “fierce opposition from federal employee unions” sank Grassley’s effort, and he had to water his amendment down to only apply to Congress and congressional staff.

Staffers grumble about being stuck on the exchanges

Ever since Obamacare became law, this has been a source of grumbling among the congressional staffers I talk to. One aspect of the Grassley amendment is that it originally appeared to exempt staffers who worked for congressional committees, and congressional leadership, because those staffers didn’t work for specific Members of Congress. (My understanding is that the Office of Personnel Management has since clarified the regulations to include all staff, including committee and leadership.)

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It is always fascinating when politicians pass unconstitutional laws that are supposedly good enough for the people but not good enough for them.  Click below for the full article.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2013/04/25/congress-fearing-brain-drain-seeks-to-opt-out-of-participating-in-obamacares-exchanges/?partner=yahootix

04.25.13
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National Consitution Center: Six things you may not know about the killer drone controversy

The Obama administration’s use of weaponized drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas was under a Senate microscope this week, as six different witnesses revealed some interesting facts about the controversial policy.

Predator_droneSenator Richard Durbin, an Obama supporter (on issues other than drones), chaired the subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.

Durbin was openly disappointed that the Obama administration didn’t send a witness to talk about the secretive program.

“I do want to note for the record, my disappointment that the administration declined to provide a witness to testify at today’s hearings. I hope that in future hearings we’ll have an opportunity to work with the administration more closely,” he said.

Durbin also said he hoped the administration understood its newfound technological killing power “is still grounded in words written more than 200 years ago.”

Political opponents Ted Cruz and Al Franken agreed with Durbin that the scope of the executive branch’s power was under question.

The administration says it has the power to undertake the drone tactics per a 2001 congressional resolution in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

The Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights has released the official testimony of the six witnesses, which show a cross-section of concerns and justifications about the program. here’s a brief look at what they said.

General James Cartwright

The retired general, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained that drones are cheap, at an average cost of $4 million to $5 million, compared with a conventional jet fighter, at $150 million. They are also cheap to fly and have advanced optics.

“[They’re] not hard to see why military operations are significantly improved by this technology. Drones offer many advantages over other conventional forces in counterterrorism,” he said.

“Legitimate questions remain about the use, authorities, and oversight of armed drone activities outside an area of declared hostility,” he acknowledged. “While I believe based on my experience all parties involved in this activity have acted in the best interests of the country, as with other new technologies, adaptation of policy and law tends to lag implementation of the capability.”

Farea Al-Muslimi

Al-Muslimi, a Yemini activist who was partly educated in the United States,  told the committee how drone attacks hurt the reputation of the United States in his country.

“Just six days ago, my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple poor farmers. The drone strike and its impact tore my heart much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine,” he said.

Al-Muslimi said the drone attacks, especially those that killed innocent civilians, made his job as an advocate for America in Yemen “almost impossible.”

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Click below for the full article.

http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2013/04/six-things-you-may-not-know-about-killer-drone-controversy/

04.25.13
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Live Science: Why Boston Marathon Bombings Ignited Conspiracies

Like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Sandy Hook massacre and other tragedies, the recent Boston Marathon bombing has spawned several conspiracy theories. Some of the more cynical conspiracy theorists do it simply for attention and ratings, or to promote their books, DVDs and seminars promising to reveal the truth that no one else would dare.

These days most conspiracy theories are promoted by one or two (relatively) high-profile people. A man named Alex Jones was at the forefront of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sandy Hook school attack last year — including the claim that the shooting didn’t really happen. This time around, former Fox News host Glenn Beck is among those leading the charge that a conspiracy is afoot in the Boston bombing case that left several dead and one suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in the hospital.

Beck is apparently not denying that the Boston bombings took place — the thousands of eyewitnesses, countless videos and forensic evidence is too overwhelming to be dismissed. No, instead the conspiracy seems to center around what Beck believes is the suspicious government handling of a Saudi national named Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, who was supposedly investigated (and cleared) of some connection to the Boston attack, but whose student visa had expired, and who may or may not be in the process of being deported back to Saudi Arabia.

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.livescience.com/29038-why-boston-bombings-ignited-conpsiracies.html

04.25.13
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CBS News: Newtown, Conn. residents reject budget with extra school security

A child gazes from a school bus as it passes by the St. Rose of Lima Catholic church while mourners gathered for a funeral service for shooting victim Jessica Rekos, 6, on December 18, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut.
Residents have rejected a budget that included money for extra school security in the wake of the December school shootings, with town leaders suggesting the spending and required tax increases were a hard sell.Voters on Tuesday turned down the $72 million school budget by 482 votes and rejected the $39 million town government budget by 62 votes. Nearly 4,500 residents voted on the plans, which would have represented an increase of more than 5 percent next fiscal year.

First Selectwoman Patricia Llodra said the killings of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School had an impact on the vote, the first since the massacre.

“We’re very fragile as a community,” she said. “We’ve lost some of our confidence.”

Officials had put an extra $770,000 in the school and town budgets to hire extra police officers and unarmed security guards in each of Newtown’s public and private schools. The plan was spurred by the Dec. 14 shootings.

Jeff Capeci, chairman of the Legislative Council, said the higher school budget also would have expanded half-day kindergarten to full-day and allowed for the hiring of a new high school administrator and for capital spending and technology.

“I thought it was an incredibly high increase for this economy,” Capeci said. “At the end of the day, Newtown voters thought it was too much of an increase.”

Llodra called the spending increases substantial.

“It’s just beyond the ability of our community to grapple with,” she said.

In contrast, the current budget is up by a fraction of 1 percent over the previous year.

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Some may find it interesting that people would be willing to throw away the most sublime constitution ever written by man in the history of the world and sacrifice their liberty for the sake of security……yet they don’t want a local tax hike to pay for school security.  Click below for the full article.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57581137/newtown-conn-residents-reject-budget-with-extra-school-security/

04.25.13
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Forbes: Big Brother Has A New Face, And It’s Your Boss

Recently, the CVS Caremark Corporation began requiring employees to disclose personal health information (including weight, blood pressure, and body fat levels) or else pay an annual $600 fine. Workers must make this information available to the company’s employee “Wellness Program” and sign a form stating that they’re doing so voluntarily.

CVS argues this will help workers “take more responsibility for improving their health.” At one level, this makes a certain sense. Because the company is paying for their employees’ health insurance, they naturally prefer healthier workers. But at a deeper level, CVS’ action demonstrates a growing problem with our current system of employer-provided health insurance. If our bosses must pay for our health care, they will inevitably seek greater control over our lifestyles.

Although most Americans take it for granted that they receive health insurance through the workplace, this is an artifact of federal tax rules from World War II. When the U.S. government imposed wartime wage controls, employers could no longer compete for workers by offering higher salaries. Instead, they competed by offering more generous fringe benefits such as health insurance. In 1943, the IRS ruled that employees did not have to pay tax on health benefits provided by employers; in 1954, the IRS made this permanent.

The federal government thus distorted the health insurance market in favor of employer-based plans. If a company paid $100 for health insurance with pre-tax dollars, the employee enjoyed the full benefit. But if the employee received that $100 as salary, he could only purchase $50-70 of insurance after taxes. Over time, this tax disparity helped employer-based health insurance dominate the private insurance market. In 2008, over 90% of non-elderly Americans with private insurance received it through their workplace.

Hence, government policy artificially injects the employer into the relationship between a patient and the health insurance system. Normally, what a worker ate or whether he smoked at home would be of no concern to his boss (unless it affected job performance). But U.S. government policy makes it the employer’s business.

To make matters worse, ObamaCare reinforces this status quo. ObamaCare requires large employers to offer health insurance to workers (or else pay a penalty). As a result, more people are discussing how best to link employment to healthy behavior. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine recently featured a pair of high-profile editorials debating the merits of allowing companies to discriminate against smokers, “for their own good.”

Furthermore, ObamaCare pays government grants to encourage companies to implement these “wellness programs.” Hence, employers who wouldn’t otherwise concern themselves with workers’ lifestyles now have an incentive to do so in order to collect federal funds.

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This is very well written and informative article.  For those that wonder why employers are involved in health insurance (and not home owners insurance, car insurance, etc.) it was simply because of government intervention.  Salary freezes caused the creation of “benefit packages.”

What do you think about government intervention like price freezes and the constitutionality of them?  Click below for the full article.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2013/04/25/big-brother-has-a-new-face-and-its-your-boss/

04.24.13
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Truthout: Ex-Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.”

During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, “all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” are “terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden’s] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker.”

But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.

And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners “are the worst of a very bad lot” and “dangerous” and “devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort.”

Now, in a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush’s first term in office, said Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew the “vast majority” of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.

“By late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantanamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review,” Wilkerson’s declaration says. “Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantanamo. By that time, I also understood that the deliberate choice to send detainees to Guantanamo was an attempt to place them outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system.”

He added that it became “more and more clear many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military.”

For Cheney and Rumsfeld, and “others,” Wilkerson said, “the primary issue was to gain more intelligence as quickly as possible, both on Al Qaeda and its current and future plans and operations but increasingly also, in 2002-2003, on contacts between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s intelligence and secret police forces in Iraq.”

“Their view was that innocent people languishing in Guantanamo for years was justified by the broader war on terror and the capture of the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks, or other acts of terrorism,” Wilkerson added. “Moreover, their detention was deemed acceptable if it led to a more complete and satisfactory intelligence picture with regard to Iraq, thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country.”

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Click below for the full article.

http://www.truth-out.org/article/item/713:exbush-official-willing-to-testify-bush-cheney-knew-gitmo-prisoners-innocent

 

04.24.13
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Daily Ticker: The Economic Argument Is Over — And Paul Krugman Won (Big Surprise, Some Keynesian Claims Victory)

For the past five years, a fierce war of words and policies has been fought in America and other economically challenged countries around the world.

On one side were economists and politicians who wanted to increase government spending to offset weakness in the private sector. This “stimulus” spending, economists like Paul Krugman argued, would help reduce unemployment and prop up economic growth until the private sector healed itself and began to spend again.

On the other side were economists and politicians who wanted to cut spending to reduce deficits and “restore confidence.” Government stimulus, these folks argued, would only increase debt loads, which were already alarmingly high. If governments did not cut spending, countries would soon cross a deadly debt-to-GDP threshold, after which growth would be permanently impaired. The countries would also be beset by hyper-inflation, as bond investors suddenly freaked out and demanded higher interest rates. Once government spending was cut, this theory went, deficits would shrink and “confidence” would return.

This debate has not just been academic.

Those in favor of economic stimulus won a brief victory in the depths of the financial crisis, with countries like the U.S. implementing stimulus packages. But the so-called “Austerians” fought back. And in the past several years, government policies in Europe and the U.S. have been shaped by the belief that governments had to cut spending or risk collapsing under the weight of staggering debts.

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Of course Keynesians are claiming victory.  When the bill comes due on the national debt, inflation goes wild, and a dollar crisis happens, what will they claim then?  What do you think about this writers victory claim?

Click below for the full article.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/economic-argument-over-paul-krugman-won-150247189.html