Joe Biden on Government Spying (when Bush was president)

ACLU Sues Over Vast Spying

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the U.S. government’s surveillance program that collects from U.S. phone companies the call records of tens of millions of Americans.

It is the first substantive lawsuit following reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian last week detailing two sweeping surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency under laws authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

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Limited Posting This Weekend

Catching up on some reading over the next few days and taking a break from the keyboard. Urgent stuff may be posted, otherwise see you on Monday. In the meantime please enjoy the musical intermission.

The Red Carpet Treatment

The New York Central Railroad's Twentieth Century Limited gave us the modern expression "the red carpet treatment' from their use of a red carpet on their trains. The Limited was an overnight all First Class express train that ran between New York and Chicago until the late 1960's. Each night at exactly the same time a train departed each city, one westbound and one eastbound. The Limited's exacting standards of luxury and service made it the preferred mode of transport for film and stage stars, millionaires, political big shots and just about anyone who wanted to see and be seen in high society. The above infomercial was produced in 1935.

D-Day

New York, June 6, 1944. ALLIED ARMIES LAND ON COAST OF FRANCE. GREAT INVASION OF CONTINENT BEGINS

It's almost impossible to imagine what it was like on the home front June 6, 1944. But you can get an idea by listening to some of the wall to wall news coverage that was broadcast periodically interrupted by patriotic music and prayer from famous clergy and FDR. It must have been gut wrenching for families with loved ones in the service. Radio coverage...
CBS
NBC
 HT: Shorpy

Prayers Please

Word has come via Fr. Aidan (Al) Kimel that Fr. Stephen Freeman has suffered a serious illness. Please keep him and his family in your prayers.

Greeks Furious Over IMF Apology

(Reuters) - Greeks reacted with an air of vindication and outrage at the International Monetary Fund's admission it erred in its handling of the country's bailout, berating an apology that comes too late to salvage an economy and countless lives in ruins.

Anger was palpable on the streets of Athens, where the EU-IMF austerity recipe that the Washington-based fund says it sharply misjudged has left rows of shuttered stores and many scrounging for scraps of food in trash cans.

"Really? Thanks for letting us know but we can't forgive you," said Apostolos Trikalinos, a 59-year old garbage collector and a father of two.

"Let's not fool ourselves. They'll never give us anything back. I'm sorry for all the people who killed themselves because of austerity. How are we going to bring them back? How?"

Read the rest here.

Prince Phillip Admitted to Hopsital Again

The Duke of Edinburgh is expected to spend up to a fortnight in hospital after undergoing an abdominal operation on Friday in a development that has prompted fresh concerns for his health.

The Duke, who will turn 92 on Monday, attended the London Clinic by previous appointment for an exploratory operation to be carried out under general anaesthetic [sic].

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U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

Read the rest here.

China Hacked Obama and McCain Campaigns

The U.S. secretly traced a massive cyberespionage operation against the 2008 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain to hacking  units backed by the People’s Republic of China, prompting  high level warnings to Chinese officials to stop such activities,  U.S. intelligence officials tell NBC News.

The disclosure on the eve of a two-day summit between the U.S. and Chinese presidents highlights what has become a persistent source of tension between the two global powers: Beijing’s aggressive, orchestrated campaign to pierce America’s national security armor at any weak point – in this case the computers and laptops of top campaign aides and advisers who received high-level briefings.

Read the rest here.

Obama's Dragnet

Within hours of the disclosure that the 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. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive 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 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Read the rest here.

Obama has violated his oath of office and should be impeached.

Putin to Divorce Wife

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Thursday that he plans to divorce his wife of 29 years, Lyudmila, who for years has barely appeared in public, prompting widespread chatter about the secretive leader’s private life.

The couple made the announcement to a television crew after attending a ballet performance at the Kremlin together — an unusual event in itself, since in recent years Lyudmila Putin has appeared in public only rarely.

Read the rest here.

US Engaging in Massive Domestic Spying

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” 

Read the rest here.

Two Intervenionists Move Up in the White House

WASHINGTON — In naming Susan E. Rice and Samantha Power to key national security posts, President Obama has turned to two prominent advocates of liberal interventionism, a foreign-policy credo that calls for the United States to act aggressively to defend human rights – by military means, if necessary. 

Both are veterans of his 2008 campaign and have strong personal relationships with Mr. Obama. But they will be working for a president who has consistently resisted intervening in the most dire human-rights calamity of the day, the civil war in Syria. Given Mr. Obama’s fixed views, it is not clear whether even Ms. Rice and Ms. Power could prod him into action. 

Read the rest here.

Group calls criminalizing drug use "Human Rights violation"

On the eve of a major conference on drug problems in the Western Hemisphere, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday that jailing people for personal drug use constitutes a human rights violation and called for abolishing criminal penalties.

“To deter harmful drug use, governments should rely instead on non-penal regulatory and public health policies,” the organization said in a statement released at a news conference in Guatemala, where the annual general assembly of the Organization of American States this week will focus on the drug policies of member governments. “Subjecting people to criminal sanctions for the personal use of drugs, or for possession of drugs for personal use, infringes on their autonomy and right to privacy.”

Read the rest here.

Prohibition...

Unbelievably stupid? Yes.
Human Rights violation? Not even close. These people are trivializing a very weighty legal concept.

Obama Picks 3 for Top Appeals Court, Setting Up Battle

WASHINGTON — President Obama set a confrontation with Senate Republicans in motion on Tuesday morning by naming a slate of judges to a top appeals court and daring his rivals to block their confirmations. 

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Remembering the Fall of Constantinople and Turkey's Continuing Siege Against Christians

Today marks the 560th anniversary of the fall and capture of the magnificent Christian city of Constantinople, the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, to the forces led by the Ottoman Turkish Sultan, Mohammed (Mehmet) II. Mehmet took the title "the Conqueror" for himself, as a sign of the Turks' conquest of what was Europe's most glorious city of the Middle Ages and as recognition of the Ottoman jihadi victory over Christianity.

Nearly half a millennium later, the government of the Republic of Turkey continues to celebrate the fall of the city, today's Istanbul, with religious, sports, and media festivities. Kemalist governments long understood the fall of Constantinople as a signature event for Turkish nationalism. Visitors to Istanbul on May 29th could hardly mistake the nationalist message of the city draped in Turkish flags for as far as the eye could see, and under the current Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, secular nationalism has been augmented with a religious message about the fall of Constantinople as a sign of Islam's triumph over Christianity.

Last year, Erdogan floated the idea of designating May 29th as a Turkish national holiday. More recently, he suggested the possibility of a referendum on the conversion of the historic Byzantine Christian Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, captured by Mehmet when he rode on horseback through the colossal entry doors into the heart of the sanctuary, from its current status as a museum into a functioning mosque.

Ankara has consistently critiqued the European Union as a Christian Club keeping Turkey at arm's length because of religious prejudice against Islam. Yet, the fall of Constantinople on May 29th in 1453 began an unrelenting, centuries-long pattern of persecution and discrimination against the city's Christian population. This policy of religious cleansing lays bare the lie of the Ottoman Empire as a benign, multi-cultural polity, and also highlights the violations of human rights and religious freedom that are the hallmark of Turkey's treatment of its Christian minority populations. The anniversary of the fall of Constantinople is a reminder that the siege against Turkey's Christians continues to this day -- most egregiously, against the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the tiny Greek Orthodox Christian community (fewer than 2,000 in number), as well as against the small Armenian Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox Christian communities (their combined numbers total about 80,000). All of these Christians are survivors tracing their roots to Constantinople when it fell to the Ottoman Turks.

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

Many (more) Years!

Sixty years on and still showing up for work every day. God Save The Queen!

Britain: Nervously thinking about the unthinkable

A world after The Queen.