DOJ Seizes AP Phone Records, POTUS Knows Nothing

One thing that seems to be missing is the timeline for when the records were seized and when the warrant was provided to the Associated Press. This appears to be a case of delayed notification, what the Left called “sneak and peek” back when Bush was POTUS, if a warrant was even provided. No article mentions the word “warrant”

(AP) The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

Did they have a warrant? What judge signed off on it? Oh, and

(Fox News) Rules published by the Justice Department require that subpoenas of records of news organizations must be personally approved by the attorney general, but it was not known if that happened in this case. The letter notifying AP that its phone records had been obtained through subpoenas was sent Friday by Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney in Washington.

Did he sign off on this? He was bound by law to do so, or delegate the duty, but, either way, he would have had to know about it. One would think that for such a massive intrusion of the 1st Amendment the AG might inform the president

(The Hill) The White House on Monday distanced President Obama from the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press telephone records.

“Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the AP,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.

At what point does the White House actually know something? Obama didn’t seem to be involved with anything while our consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi was assaulted. After his regularly scheduled meeting with SecDef Leon Panetta, Obama disappeared. He knows nothing about the illegal harassment of whistleblowers. He knew nothing of Fast and Furious, a project involving multiple Executive Office agencies that walked guns across the border into a sovereign nation without informing that nation. He seemingly knows nothing of the IRS scandal. What, exactly, does this president know? For someone who complained about Bush and would say “the buck stops here”, nothing ever seems to make it to his desk. Obama is a president divorced from what’s going on around him, or at least says he is.

There will be pointed questions for Eric Holder during the newly announced House hearing on Wednesday, and one of the questions asked should be “did you inform President Obama?” It’s high time to stop the imperial president.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

Read: DOJ Seizes AP Phone Records, POTUS Knows Nothing »

NYC, Bloomberg, To Waste Sandy Funds On “Climate Change” Projects

You won’t believe how much….well, you probably will believe it after all you’ve seen from these insane people, though Joe Romm’s Soros funded Climate Progress has no problem with the wasted money, as the writer, Brad Johnson, discusses

On Friday, the City of New York allocated $294 million of Superstorm Sandy recovery funds for resiliency projects to respond to the threat of fossil-fueled climate change.

(From the press release) The City has set aside $294 million for resiliency investments to be detailed in a report issued by the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency later this month.

“HUD’s approval of our comprehensive Action Plan enables us to take the next critical step toward recovery – launching the programs for home rebuilding and business assistance that will rejuvenate the neighborhoods Sandy hit hardest,” said Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway. “We’ll also take the first steps toward making the City more resilient to the impacts that we know climate change will bring.”

What this looks like is more planning sessions, reports, spreading awareness, and all sorts of measures which won’t actually Do Something, but will also surely increase the cost of living in NYC, all for something that may or may not happen naturally in the far future, instead of spending the money to directly help the citizens of NYC.

Read: NYC, Bloomberg, To Waste Sandy Funds On “Climate Change” Projects »

If All You See…

…is a horrible CO2 infused beer, which should be heavily regulated by Government, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Da Tech Guy, with a post saying the IRS scandal is a bigger danger to Obama than Benghazi.

Read: If All You See… »

Inhofe Drops The “I” Word

We’d probably be talking more about this if the majority of the press was interested in doing their job, instead of being instruments of the Obama campaign

(The Blaze) Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said in a radio interview Thursday that “of all the great cover-ups in history” — including the Pentagon papers, Iran-Contra and Watergate — Benghazi “is going to go down as most serious, most egregious cover-up in American history.”

“We may be starting to use the I-word before too long,” Inhofe said on the Las Vegas-based “Rusty Humphries Show.”

“The I-word meaning impeachment?” Humphries asked.

“Yeah,” Inhofe confirmed.

I’ve said for a long time that the talking points were the 3rd most important thing in the Benghazi issue, yet they may possibly lead to Obama’s downfall.

Read: Inhofe Drops The “I” Word »

Snow Bunnies May Be In Danger From Climate Change

No, not those snow bunnies, the furry ones which hop around

(Wunderground) The snowshoe hare has a biological clock for changing colors at the end of the winter, but that doesn’t really vary, reports Science Magazine. If the winter ends sooner and the snow melts, the white bunnies stick out like a sore thumb on brown ground. Conversely, later snowfalls — also believed by many to be a factor of climate change — leave the ground white long after their fur has changed back to brown.

In either instance, it makes the pursuit much easier for a predator, and lately, the weather has been leaving these creatures vulnerable more often than in the past.

Read: Snow Bunnies May Be In Danger From Climate Change »

New Yorker: Replace Everything That Emits CO2 With Something Else

That’s a fantastic freaking idea! Of course, it won’t stop “climate change”, partly because anthropogenic global warming, if we use the correct scientific term, rather than the political term, is a mostly fake issue, and partly Warmists do not even believe in their own rhetoric enough to practice what they preach (via Tom Nelson)

Terrible News About Carbon and Climate Change

You know you’re in for a doozy of a tale when the headline starts out with scientific illiteracy.

This past Thursday, the daily average atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, as measured by the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, passed four hundred parts per million. In some way it was a meaningless milestone. We know that CO2 is increasing; we knew this moment would come; we know that four hundred is no more different from three hundred and ninety-nine than it is from four hundred and one.

Still, the number should shake us, if not shock us. We’ve got more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any point since the Pliocene, when there were jungles in northern Canada. And the number hurdles ever upward, as ocean levels rise and extreme weather becomes routine. Three-fifty was the old target; four-fifty is the new one. But what indication is there that we’ll stop at five hundred, six hundred, or even more?

What indication is there that it will make any damned difference? This is one of the coldest starts to a year in US recorded history. Tornado and hurricane activity is down. Global temps have only gone up 0.28F since 1990 and 0.14F since 1997.

We’ve failed collectively. As Ryan Lizza explained in miserable detail in 2010, the United States government couldn’t pass a tepid, eviscerated law. Activists have failed. We’ve all failed morally: a problem created by the world’s rich will now crush the world’s poor. In a grand sense it’s also a failure of the creators, and deniers, of climate change: the Exxon-Mobils, say, or the Wall Street Journal editorial page. A victory isn’t worth much if your children and grandchildren will one day think of you with anger and shame.

Or they’ll thank us for not blowing massive amounts of money and instituting far left fascistic controls in order to supposedly control the weather.

…We should design our cities for a future with terrible weather. But solving the problem of climate change through the U.N. is like a small man with olive oil on his hands trying to pull a whale from the water.

Except, the weather isn’t terrible. It’s simply weather. But, Progressives want everyone in cities. Easier to control them.

Ultimately, we have to invent our way out. Everything we use that emits carbon dioxide needs to be replaced with something that doesn’t, whether a car or a cooking stove. Many people are working toward this goal. Many more need to.

Should we replace the lungs of every living being on the planet? How about we start with the mouthbreathers who yammer on about “climate change” but refuse to give up their own high CO2 lives? We should certainly replace the New Yorker, which would eliminate Nicholas Thompson’s (the fable writer) job, because producing a web and paper magazine puts out CO2.

And then there’s the dangerous, fraught, and potentially essential prospect of geoengineering. Can we suck carbon dioxide or methane down from the atmosphere? Can we shoot something up there that reduces the temperature? Every option is dangerous and complicated. But every option should be studied and tested. Geoengineering, as Michael Specter wrote last year, is the scientific equivalent of chemotherapy: it’s dreadful but it may be the only way to prevent mass calamity.

Silly, silly people.

Read: New Yorker: Replace Everything That Emits CO2 With Something Else »

MSNBC: Just Give Poor People Money To End Poverty

It’s really just that easy!

(The Blaze) Is Melissa Harris-Perry—the MSNBC host who recently declared that kids belong to whole communities— stirring up controversy again?

On today’s episode on finding solutions to poverty, Newsbusters noticed that Harris-Perry’s colleague Chris Hayes appeared in a quick video clip at the end of one segment holding up a handwritten sign with his answer: “Giving people money. It’s actually that easy.”

The video appeared during Harris-Perry’s show, and Newsbusters’ Mark Finklestein was probably the only person who saw it, being MSNBC and their awesome ratings (sic). Mark points out

Perhaps Hayes hadn’t tuned in to hear Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute make the point that the U.S. already has 126 federal anti-poverty programs that spend $688 billion every year, with state and local programs spending another $280 billion.  Almost a trillion given to poor people each year–with no significant impact on reducing poverty!

Liberals have been fighting the “war on poverty” since the 1960’s, and it seems as if their policies continuously make things worse, which makes Chris Hayes’ idea perfect for liberals. Perhaps Melissa and Chris could give most of their cushy salaries away to poor people.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

Read: MSNBC: Just Give Poor People Money To End Poverty »

Watcha Reading?

Finished Silas: A Supernatural Thriller which I started last Sunday. If you’ve read any of these “Watcha Reading?” posts, you know they are more about “what I am reading” and “what are you reading” than about reviews. Let see about Silas, though, that this was a pure 5 star book. I really, really, really enjoyed it. If you’ve ever read Marley And Me, this is a SciFi/supernatural version, with an ending that will melt your heart and have you telling your significant other that your allergies are bothering you. It’s about a man who’s having issues in life, marriage is a bit rocky, never wanted a dog, fighting with his wife. But the dog, Silas, wins him over. His best friend. His boy. Then it gets all scifi-ee. One of the best books I’ve read this year. Inspirational.

Just finished Nine-Tenths, which is kinda political scifi with a bit of time travel. No big surprise at the end, I figured it would end the way it did at some point, but it was a satisfactory end. Involved what comes from Marxist society. 4 out of 5 stars.

Now on to….not sure. I have a couple of samples of books in series. Probably go with Darkest Hour (The Lockman Chronicles #3)

Read: Watcha Reading? »

Warmists Offer Up A Missive For Mother’s Day

You really didn’t think the New Climate Deniers would miss an opportunity to push their cult on a holiday, did you?

A Mother’s Day Climate Change Message from the Moms Clean Air Force

It is time to fight with your mom—about something important. That’s my Mother’s Day message to daughters—and sons, moms and dads, aunts and uncles.

Running Moms Clean Air Force has been eye-opening in many ways, not the least of which is combating the sadness, if not paralysis, that afflicts us, from time to time, in the face of a planet-altering problem: climate change. We don’t believe there’s anything we can do until we actually begin to feel the power of our voices.

Sigh. 0.28F increase since 1990. 0.14F since 1997. One of the coldest starts to a year in the lower 48 on record.

My friends and I have been talking recently about…prison. Do we have to go to jail to prove our commitment to fighting climate change? Is a hunger strike a measure of how much you care? Many of us can’t leave work, leave children, leave home—that doesn’t mean we aren’t serious.

I bet mom would be really proud that you’re wasting your time and thinking about committing crimes for a made up issue. She’d also tell you that if you truly believe, you’d match your life to your rhetoric.

Oh, and for more climastupidity, the article was posted at the Energy Collective by hyper-partisan Warmist Joe Romm.

Read: Warmists Offer Up A Missive For Mother’s Day »

If All You See…(Mother’s Day Edition)

…is a flooded world caused by women failing to use contraception and bringing babies into the world, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Blogmocracy, with a post showing Michelle Bachmann going of the rails.

Read: If All You See…(Mother’s Day Edition) »

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