The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free
markets and individual liberty
"There is but
one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington
To
subscribe, see note below
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Drudge Goes Ballistic Over the Feds’ Snooping
by Gary North
Matt
Drudge knows what his readers like to read. Today’s headlines are all on one
theme: the federal government’s domestic spying.
He
was just getting warmed up.
This
was choice.
This
will in no way reverse the process. The cost of monitoring everyone continues
to fall. Economics teaches that when the price of anything falls, more is
demanded.
Only
one thing can reverse this: budget cuts for the offending agencies. Congress
never imposes budget cuts, especially on the NSA (No Such Agency).
Most
voters know that this invasion of their privacy is illegitimate. They also know
that Congress will do nothing about it. It will hold hearings — maybe even
closed-door hearings. But nothing will change.
Nevertheless,
headlines like these are always positive. They help lower the public’s
assessment of the federal government’s legitimacy. Ultimately, civil government
is about power, but legitimacy increases voluntary compliance by the public.
Every time the government loses a little legitimacy, it’s positive. In 2012,
the Drudge Report had over 11 billion hits. Total number of employees:
two. Let’s hear it for Drudge. For a
multimillionaire who wears 1945-era hats, he inflicts a lot of pain on federal
bureaucrats.
~~~~~~
U.S. Collects Vast Data Trove
The
National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records
from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the
agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with
the agency’s activities. The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S.
court for Verizon Communications Inc.’s VZ +3.46% phone records set off the
latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA’s
operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T
Inc. T +1.56% and Sprint Nextel Corp., S +1.94% records from Internet-service
providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.
~~~~~~
Report: 9 Internet Firms Giving Data to Government
By Greg Richter
It's
not just your cell phone calls. Nine Internet companies have been giving your
emails, videos, photos and more to the NSA and FBI, The Washington Post
reports. The classified program PRISM began in 2007 and has signed on
Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.
Cloud storage website Dropbox is set to join soon. PRISM has become the biggest
contributor to President Barack Obama's Daily Brief, the Post reports, with a
total of 1,447 articles in 2012. One in seven intelligence reports are based on
PRISM data. The program descends from a program in the 1970s in which 100
American companies worked with the government, though PRISM is more like the
controversial warrantless surveillance efforts undertaken after the Sept. 11,
2001 terrorist attacks. PRISM attempts to use formulas to avoid gathering data
from Americans, but the system isn't perfect. And while compliance by the
companies is voluntary, the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court can force
compliance. Apple resisted participation for five years, and Twitter has never
joined. The Post said it obtained information on the program from a career
intelligence officer who believes the program is a serious invasion of privacy.
"They
quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type," the officer told
the Post. Reuters reports that both Apple and Facebook deny knowing
anything about the PRISM program and say they do not allow any government
agency "direct access" to their servers.
~~~~~~
President Obama’s Dragnet By Andrew Rosenthal
Within
hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on
phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a
counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same
platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught
overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you
should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms
(that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your
rights. Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on
secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to
kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president
who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all
credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive
branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is
one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of
fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had
not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad
surveillance powers. Based on an article in The Guardian
published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret
warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on
every single call that went through its system. We know that this
particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on
for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business
division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been
collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except
the words actually exchanged in those calls.
Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by
which the N.S.A. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from
the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions
about whether the N.S.A. separated foreign communications from domestic ones. A
senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon
about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does
not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest
difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical
tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the
government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in
contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities,
particularly people located inside the United States.”
~~~~~~
Paul “Shovel Ready” Krugman Calls for More Federal
Spending, More Debt. by Gary North
The
PBS headline announces: “Krugman Says Forget Debt, Help the Unemployed .” Paul Krugman is the world’s
leading spokesman for Keynesianism. He won a Nobel Prize. He writes a blog for
the New York Times. He is
Keynesianism’s go-to guy. He is Dr.
Boondoggle. He wants more, way more, government spending.
The
recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic
Research, which officially announces such things. In Krugman’s view, five years of
trillion-dollar federal deficits have not yet produced prosperity. He says
this: “. . . aid to state and local governments is time-limited. It expires once
the economy is, you know, back in the zone where we no longer need to use that
kind of support.”How much government spending of borrowed money is needed to
get the economy back in the 2007 mode? More. Lots more. But don’t worry. Debt
is not a threat yet.
"I
mean, the notion that government spending is per se evil is a big mistake. We
actually need quite a lot of it, and I think if you ask, “What would it do to
the U.S. debt outlook?” I think it would actually improve it because we would
improve the prospect of the currently long-term unemployed. People finally do
eventually get back into the work force.
What
should the federal government spend on? On making the government larger. Send
it to state and local governments, he says. He wants the federal government to
go back to 2009, when it sent $300 billion to the states. “Rehire school teachers, fill
potholes, resume infrastructure projects that have been put on hold.” It’s
pothole-filling time! It’s shovel-ready time! Also, fix those railroad tracks.
The railroad companies’ executives don’t think it’s worth the money, but what
do they know? There’s a lot we can be doing on the rail system, not grandiose
stuff. I’m not gonna say, “let’s build a vacuum tunnel from the East to the
West Coast,” but there are a lot of, you know, just sort of bad stretches of
track that need to be fixed that would accelerate stuff quite a lot. Then
there is money creation.
The
Federal Reserve has tripled the monetary base from $900 billion to $3.2
trillion. But
Bernanke is a piker. A wimp.
. . . have
the Fed do more of what it has done recently, announce that it is actually
going to raise its inflation target some, maybe. I mean, I say let’s make it 3
percent not 2 percent. That may be more than they’re willing to do, but that’s
what I would do. I think all of those things would bring us a long way. A long
way. A very long way. But that means debt. Lots of debt. No problem. We’re
talking government debt. The day of reckoning is a long way off. A very, very
long way off. It’s a long way off, and it’s not a problem. I mean, the government is a long
way from having a debt problem. The household sector has too much debt — that’s
clear. We see that’s what’s driving our depressed economy. So, it’s not
that debt is never a problem. The question is, is government debt a
problem right now and is it enough of a problem even in the future to mean that
you shouldn’t be doing whatever it takes to get full employment now.
That’s
the latest word from Dr. Boondoggle, the shovel-ready man. Like the Energizer Bunny, he
keeps on banging the Keynesian drum.
~~~~~~
Will Natural Gas Take Over the U.S. Economy?
By Meghan
Foley
During
President Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, soaring production of natural
gas from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking has pushed supplies to record
highs in each of the past four years. Less than ten years ago, domestic supplies
of natural gas were so limited that facilities were constructed in U.S. ports
to import natural gas. But fracking changed the supply situation. Now,
the United States produces more natural gas than it can use, and as a result,
prices have plummeted to approximately $4 per million British thermal units, on
average. Keeping with recent trends, the nation’s natural gas supplies rose
last week, according to the Energy Information Administration’s weekly report. Natural
gas in storage grew by 111 billion cubic feet to 2.252 trillion cubic feet for
the week ended May 31. At this level, inventories are 3 percent below
the five-year average of 2.321 trillion cubic feet and 21.5 percent below last
year’s level of 2.868 trillion feet. Last
week’s increase surpassed even analysts’ expectations; industry experts at
Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill, had predicted a rise of 93
billion to 97 billion cubic feet. After the data was released Thursday morning,
natural gas future fell 14 cents, or 3.6 percent, to $3.86 per million British
thermal units, a pattern that future have followed for much of this year.
Relatively
inexpensive natural gas prices have wrought a change in the United States
energy market. As
Citigroup’s (NYSE:C) head of commodities research Edward L. Morse
wrote in a report on Tuesday, cars, trucks, trains, and ships will increasingly
run on natural gas now that the fuel’s price has broken a traditional link with
crude oil. Since 2010, the price of gas for immediate delivery has
fallen 32 percent at the Henry Hub — a distribution hug on the natural gas
pipeline in Erath, Louisiana that lends its name to the pricing point for
natural future contracts traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Comparatively, crude oil has increased 18 percent, based on the spot price for
West Texas Intermediate crude. Switching to natural gas from oil could reduce
the demand for crude by as much as 1.8 million barrels per day by 2020,
according to the report. That figure represents about 5 percent of what is
currently used for transportation fuels. Falling gas prices have benefited U.S.
utilities, which have taken advantage of cheap natural gas to close coal
plants, a move that has helped them comply with new environmental regulations
aimed at reducing pollution and carbon emissions. Low prices — meaning cheap
power — have also helped American manufacturers. [All of this in spite of the government and
the left wing agenda of killing off fossil fuels]
~~~~~~
Miss World Pageant Scraps Bikinis Because They Offend
Muslims
Miss
World is synonymous with scantily clad women strutting their stuff on stage. But
this year the pageant will be significantly more subdued, after organizers
announced that they are scrapping the traditional bikini round in a
bid to avoid offending the Muslim hosts. The contest, which will crown
a global beauty queen chosen from 137 participants, will take place in
September on the island of Bali in Indonesia. Are you tired of appeasing a so
called religion of peace that kills more people in a day than we can count? Oh, yea!
Forgot, women are property in the Muslim world.
~~~~~~
"If individuals be not influenced by moral principles; it
is in vain to look for public virtue; it is, therefore, the duty of legislators
to enforce, both by precept and example, the utility, as well as the necessity
of a strict adherence to the rules of distributive justice."--James Madison, in response to
Washington's first Inaugural address, 1789
No comments:
Post a Comment