Obama: Maybe not "actually abusing" our brainzzz

from da Washington Bozoes:

We now know that President Obama’s assurances that the NSA wasn’t “actually abusing” its surveillance programs are untrue. A leaked audit shows the NSA violated its own privacy rules, and in some cases the law, thousands of times over a one-year period.

A lot of people are assuming this means the president was lying — that he’s known about the scale of the NSA’s privacy problems all along and was trying to mislead the public. But there’s another possibility that could be even more troubling: He might not have known about the extent of the NSA’s privacy problems until this week.

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. We know that Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, only learned about the NSA privacy audit when The Washington Post asked her staff about it. And the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has admitted that the court has limited ability to police NSA misconduct.

Moreover, an internal NSA document Edward Snowden provided to The Washington Post advises NSA analysts that “while we do want to provide our FAA overseers with the information they need, we DO NOT want to give them any extraneous information.”

"We don't need to ask who you're talking to. We know."

[T]he Obama administration...has brought more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined. [...]

“The Justice Department has always taken seriously cases in which government employees and contractors entrusted with classified information are suspected of willfully disclosing such classified information to those not entitled to it,” a department official explained. “As a general matter, prosecutions of those who leaked classified information to reporters have been rare, due, in part, to the inherent challenges involved in identifying the person responsible for the illegal disclosure and in compiling the evidence necessary to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Even The Google is ready to get this Christmas party started

Showing results for live-blogging the end times.
Search instead for the original terms: live-glogging the end times

Which reminds me, there is a critical shortage of Pennsylvania Dutch Egg Nog (the One True Egg Nog) in the Chicago area this year. (I blame Obama.) Thank God I stocked up early, though I may still run out before New Year's. Evanston First had none ... none!

In past years it's been more of a self-regulating supply, as I tend to run out at about the same time that I can no longer fit through the door to go out and buy more.

Yep, they all look alike....

Better than Fred Armisen, i guess...

Porn Valley "samurai sword" slasher played Obama in adult film

~

Does Lou Dobbs ever get tired of being right all the time?

LOU DOBBS: “[T]he stock market has lost 20 percent since this president was sworn in. He has his own bear market. That’s the definition of a bear market, a 20 percent decline. This is now the Obama bear market.” [CNN, 3/9/09]


News item: "The stock market soared to its highest level since November Thursday..."


J.P. Freire: ‘I Can’t Remember Anyone Saying’ The Bear Market Was Obama’s Fault

Bill Kristol: new front-page editor?

NYT A1 today. Spot the logical flaw, or just be attuned to my boldfacing:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year [that is, during 2009].

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

So, according to the New York Times's Robert F. Worth: The way the Bush administration let a terrorist go scot-free back to Saudi Arabia in 2007 "underscores the potential complications" in Obama's plan to handle detainees in a completely different way than Bush did.