Disrupting the Narrative of the New Left, its allies in Academia, Hollywood and the Establishment Media, and examining with honesty the goals of cultural Marxism and the dangers of reactionary and abusive political correctness.
THE NARRATIVE AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”-George Orwell
Showing posts with label Obama vs 1st Amendment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama vs 1st Amendment. Show all posts
I love it! Here's the top man at the Associated Press talking to Bob Schieffer, the dean of Establishment Media talking heads, about the bad behavior of the Obama regime. The Soros drones at Media Matters are freaking out, trying to find a Fox News angle to this story...
A Big Chill on Free Speech IRS and AP lesson: The government can come after you for exercising your rights.
The chill threatens to get even colder. It turns out that Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as head of the IRS office handling tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012 - when the targeting was going on - is now head of the IRS division in charge of the IRS office policing Obamacare.
She's a career IRS lawyer, and we don’t know whether she was aware of the targeting - though it would be a little surprising if she wasn't. She'll have a big job. The IRS is assigned a lot of work by the Obamacare law. It will impose penalties on Americans who can afford health insurance but choose not to buy it. It will impose penalties on companies with more than 50 employees who work 30 hours a week and don't provide government-mandated policies. It will give tax credits to non-affluent purchasers of health insurance on state exchanges. The IRS says it can also give tax credits to such people in states that have federally run exchanges, though many argue the law does not authorize that.
In other words, the IRS is going to possess and process a large amount of information not only on your income but also on your health insurance and perhaps your health.
The IRS was given these tasks by the drafters of Obamacare because no other government agency had the capability to gain access to people's personal financial information. They may have thought that taxpayers would trust an agency that they had gotten used to dealing with.
That level of trust may not be as high as it was ten days ago. Chilling effect, indeed.
Worst. Leak. Everrrrrrr!!! Or was it? You be the judge.
For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.
The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.
Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.
The reality is that the AP did not blow a CIA operation nor did it put any American citizen, even a covert one, in danger by publishing the story. They simply spoiled a propaganda victory lap by the Obama regime. And that kind of thing gets you investigated these days.
AP's story about the foiled plot was at odds with the calming message the White House had been conveying on the eve of the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. On April 30, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement saying that there was "no indication of any specific, credible threats or plots against the US tied to the one-year anniversary of Bin Laden's death."
AP reporters had learned in the spring of 2012 that the CIA had infiltrated the al-Qaeda branch behind the plot, according to the individuals familiar with the story, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the record. The plot centered on an attempt to get a bomb into an assailant’s underwear, like the bomb that failed to detonate on a Christmas Day 2009 flight to Detroit.
The news service was prepared to publish its scoop on May 2, 2012. But in discussions with government officials, the CIA stressed to AP that publishing anything about the operation to obtain the bomb and thwart the plot would create grave national security dangers and compromise a "sensitive intelligence operation."
Michael J. Morell, the CIA’s deputy director, gave AP reporters some additional background information to persuade them to hold off, Vietor said. The agency needed several days more to protect what it had in the works.
Then, in a meeting on Monday, May 7, CIA officials reported that the national security concerns were "no longer an issue," according to the individuals familiar with the discussion.
When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?
The reporters left the meeting to discuss the idea with their editors. Within an hour, an administration official was on the line to AP's offices.
The White House had quashed the one-hour offer as impossible. AP could have the story exclusively for five minutes before the White House made its own announcement. AP then rejected the request to postpone publication any longer.
Note the first sentence of that passage: "AP's story about the foiled plot was at odds with the calming message the White House had been conveying..." That is the same "message" that the Obama regime was attempting to protect in September when they pretended that Benghazi had nothing to do with terrorists retaliating against Americans on the anniversary of 9-11 but was a spontaneous outbreak of rioting due to an insulting video. There is literally nothing that Obama and his minions will not politicize. Naturally they blame others for it...and retaliate whenever possible.
The justification for the secret subpoenas was that the AP story revealed sensitive information. We now know that it was a lie. There were no national security concerns at that point.
Since the information was no longer sensitive, and the regime was more interested in turning the story into a campaign PR event, the use of a special exemption when it was no longer needed (AP was already working with the government by holding off on publishing) is simply one more indication of the regime's Nixonian attitude. In their vindictive and paranoid little minds, the AP had spoiled the party, via a leak, and so retaliation was in order.
