Who's Bright Idea Was This?
Waxman-Markey proposes a new national tax of historic proportions
In today’s Cap- and-Trade Calamity, we continue on with our critique of government-mandated energy efficiency standards. The newest target is national lighting efficiency standards – detailed in Section 211 of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.
Waxman-Markey dictates specific efficiency standards and specifications for specific light bulbs (Sec. 211, g); Sets regulations for several kinds of “luminaires,” “outdoor luminaires,” “portable lighting,” “portable light fixtures,” “light fixtures,” “GU-24 base lamps,” “art worth light fixture,” LED light engines – most of which can be found walking through your home (Sec. 211).
The bill also grants the Secretary of Energy tremendous leeway to essentially micromanage the profitability of private enterprise by determining what standards are “technologically feasible and economically justified” (Sec. 211, g4A). It includes details as specific as whether “portable luminaries that have internal power supplies” must have “zero standby power when the luminaire is turned off” (Sec. 211, 71 (20) ii1Cvii).
Dani Doane, Director of Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation, details some of the unintended consequences of light bulb micromanagement. Dani’s story is just one example behind the larger energy efficiency message that has been stated several times, but is worth repeating. If consumers believe a product will save them money, they’ll buy it. They don’t need the government telling them to do so and businesses do not need the government prematurely rushing products that may not be safe or may not work well into the marketplace.
Lights and power supply aren’t the only items up for new mandates. New water regulations may not be very far away. Waxman-Markey also sets forth new regulations for “portable electric spas,” “bottle type water dispensers,” “commercial hot food holding cabinets,” and “warm air furnaces” (Sec. 212). It also sets water efficiency standards for “showerheads, faucets, water closets, and urinals” as well as “clothes washers and dishwashers” (Sec. 213, a). It will be like the episode of Seinfeld when Jerry and Kramer’s building installs new low-flow showerheads and they have to buy high-powered ones on the black market.
Heritage Senior Policy Analyst Ben Lieberman provides an example of effective energy efficiency in the pre-Waxman-Markey days, when the government mandated auto low-flush toilets: “These water-stingy models were mandated under the 1992 Energy Policy Act. After the provisions took effect in 1994, millions of Americans remodeling their bathrooms came in for an unpleasant surprise. Many of the new water-saving toilets cost more and performed worse than the ones they replaced. Homeowners complained that they had to flush more than once, which, in addition to being annoying, cut into the water conservation purpose behind the law. It took many years before the bugs were worked out of the new toilet models and there are plenty of unhappy flushers out there.”
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
The Truth About Obama and Acorn
Unearthed! Obama's twisted ACORN roots
Track timeline of president's ties to group immersed in scandals
By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
While ACORN remains riddled in scandal, lawmakers have voted to cut off federal funding to the group, the U.S. Census Bureau has severed ties to the organization – and the White House has blasted its behavior as "unnacceptable."
But just how extensive are President Obama's personal ties to ACORN?
The following is a timeline outlining some of the purported connections between the president and ACORN through the years:
1990s: Obama meets ACORN
ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, first noticed Obama when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. A March 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times article by Letta Tayler and Keith Herbert, titled "Obama Forged Path As Chicago Community Organizer," explored Obama's pre-law school days as a community organizer in Chicago and his efforts to build a partnership with Chicago's "Friends of the Parks."
"Obama's task was to help far South Side residents press for improvement," the Times article explained.
National Review Online noted, "Part of Obama's work, it would appear, was to organize demonstrations, much in the mold of radical groups like ACORN."
The Times article reveals that Madeleine Talbot, who at the time was a leader at Chicago ACORN, was thoroughly impressed with Obama because "he got people to vote with their feet."
"At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor," the article stated. "But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff."
Talbott personally led Chicago ACORN's campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers, Stanley Kurtz reported.
"Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in 'direct action' – organizers' term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption," Kurtz writes. "Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a 'living wage' law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans."
1992: Project Vote! and training green ACORNs
As WND reported, in 1992, while he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama headed the Chicago operations of Project Vote!, an ACORN effort to register voters nationally. In Chicago, Obama had his biggest impact registering African-American voters on the city's South Side. However, Obama's "Fight the Smears" website disputes this, saying Obama "never organized with ACORN."
After completing his legal education at Harvard in 1991, Obama returned to Chicago to work on the voting project that developed directly out of a radical revolutionary strategy developed by two Columbia University sociologists in the 1960s. In what became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy, the tactic advocated a revolutionary approach to mobilizing the poor in the form of class warfare against capitalist forces viewed as exploiting labor and oppressing the poor. The Cloward-Piven strategy sought to apply the tactics of the revolutionary civil rights movement, including urban riots, to the poor as a whole, transcending interest-group politics defined by race to involve interest-group politics defined by class.
Kurtz wrote, Obama also "conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks."
1993: Woods Foundation
In 1993, Obama joined the board of the Woods Foundation, a non-profit foundation which declares its goal to "increase opportunities for less advantaged people and communities by giving money primarily to not-for-profit groups involved in housing, the arts and other areas." Obama served along with Bill Ayers and remained on the board until 2002.
Pajamas Media reports that during Obama's time there, ACORN received grants of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002) and $40,000 (2002) from the Woods Fund.
1994: Buycks-Robinson v. Citibank
As WND reported, in 1994, Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School then fresh from his Project Vote! experience, represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank case, in which ACORN pressed for Citibank to make more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants "in a race neutral way."
After obtaining a settlement in the Citibank litigation, ACORN used its subsidiary organization ACORN Housing, a nationwide organization with offices in more than 30 U.S. cities, to push the group's radical agenda to get subprime home buyers mortgages under the most favorable terms possible.
1995: ACORN attorney in Illinois lawsuit
In 1995, Obama was hired as a lawyer for ACORN in a major lawsuit. As a lawyer with civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal "motor voter" law.
Also in 1995, as WND's Jerome Corsi reported, Bill Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $50 million grant program for the Chicago public schools. Ayers selected Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the Annenberg Challenge, a position Obama held for eight years, until 2003, a period during which Ayers remained active with the Challenge.
In his Wall Street Journal article, Stanley Kurtz wrote that the Annenberg project funneled money to through various far-left community organizers, including ACORN.
1996: New Party ties
As WND reported, newspaper evidence shows Obama was a member of the New Party, which sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda. While running for the Illinois state Senate in 1996 as a Democrat, Obama actively sought and received the endorsement of the New Party, according to confirmed reports during last year's presidential campaign.
According to Democratic Socialists of America documents, the New Party worked with ACORN to promote its candidates.
In 1995, the DSA's New Ground newsletter stated, "In Chicago, the New Party's biggest asset and biggest liability is ACORN.
"Like most organizations, ACORN is a mixed bag," the newsletter said. "One one hand, in Chicago, ACORN is a group that attempts to organize some of the most depressed communities in the city. Chicago organizers for ACORN and organizers for SEIU Local 880 have been given modest monthly recruitment quotas for new New Party members. On the other hand, like most groups that depend on canvassing for fundraising, it's easy enough to find burned out and disgruntled former employees. And ACORN has not had the reputation for being interested in coalition politics – until recently and, happily, not just within the New Party."
1997-2004: Illinois state senator
Obama meeting with ACORN leaders as an Illinois Senate candidate
In 1997, Obama became an Illinois state senator. ACORN national board member Toni Foulkes bragged of ACORN's long-standing relationship with Obama prior to his election in the 2003-2004 issue of Social Policy.
Foulkes wrote in "Case Study: Chicago – The Barack Obama Campaign":
ACORN noticed [Obama] when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois' refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. .. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).
Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for Senate, we were old friends.
2005: U.S. senator
In 2005, Obama became a U.S. senator.
2007: From Obama's own mouth ...
On Obama's Organizing for America blog, Sam Graham-Felsen, a paid blogger, wrote about Obama's November 2007 speech to ACORN leaders:
When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, "I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work."
Again, on Dec. 1, 2007, Obama spoke at the Heartland Democratic Presidential Forum, a meeting for community organizing groups including ACORN. Obama received wild applause from the crowd as he promised that community organizing groups such as ACORN would help shape the agenda for his presidency.
Naked Emperor News posted the following video of his pledge:
He was asked, "If elected president of the Unites States, would you agree, in your first 100 days, to meet with the delegation of representatives from these various community organizations that campaigned for community values? Could they count on you in your first 100 days to sit down with them?"
Obama responded, "Yes. But let me even say before I even get inaugurated, during the transition, we're going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We're going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America."
2008: ACORN endorses Obama
On Feb. 21, 2008, the Acorn Political Action Committee endorsed Obama over Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries.
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, insisted they had nothing to do with ACORN after the inner-city advocacy group became engulfed in controversy over voter-registration fraud.
But in August 2008, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that the Obama campaign paid $832,598.29 to ACORN "offshoot" Citizens Services Inc. for "get out the vote" projects from Feb. 25 to May 17.
The newspaper revealed that Obama's payments to CSI for services were unusual: "For example, CSI received payments of $63,000 and $75,000 for advance work. Excluding the large payments to CSI, the average amount the Obama campaign spent with other organizations was $558.82 per check on more than 1,200 entries classified as advance work."
According to the report, Citizens Services Inc. is headquartered at the same address as ACORN's national headquarters in New Orleans. A 2006 ACORN publication describes Citizen Services Inc. as "ACORN's campaign services entity."
In 2008, Anita MonCrief, a woman who worked in the Strategic Writing and Research Department of ACORN Political Operations and its affiliate Project Vote from 2005 through January 2008, said ACORN acted as an unofficial arm of the Democratic Party during the election and used cash operations to keep some financial transactions under wraps.
"It has always been a Democrat operation," she recently told WND. "They've never made any secrets about who they support. Their political action committees are usually set up to support these Democratic candidates."
She said political action committees support Democrat candidates, and the at the same time voter registration drives were being conducted, the group was putting out propaganda in communities telling people not to vote for Republicans.
According to a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review report, she further told a Pennsylvania court before the election that the Obama camp provided ACORN with a "donor list" that enabled Project Vote to solicit contributions from Obama supporters who had "maxed out" under federal contribution limits but who could surreptitiously give more to Obama's cause by donating to ACORN and its affiliates.
As WND reported, Project Vote, an affiliate of ACORN, is now suing MonCrief to the tune of $5 million.
2009: Criminal case against ACORN
According to the results of a congressional investigation done in July, ACORN was found to be rife with criminal activity.
A report from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform states that ACORN "has repeatedly and deliberately engaged in systemic fraud. Both structurally and operationally, ACORN hides behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors, to launder federal money in order to pursue a partisan political agenda and to manipulate the American electorate."
Since 1994, ACORN has received more than $53 million in federal funds, according to the report.
"Under the Obama administration, ACORN stands to receive a whopping $8.5 billion in available stimulus funds. Operationally, ACORN is a shell game played in 120 cities, 43 states and the District of Columbia through a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities, to use taxpayer and tax-exempt dollars for partisan political purposes, and to distract investigators. Structurally, ACORN is a chess game in which senior management is shielded from accountability by multiple layers of volunteers and compensated employees who serve as pawns to take the fall for every bad act," the report said.
The report continued, "Lobbying is a substantial part of what ACORN does. It has endorsed Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Representative Albert Wynn (D-MD), and Representative Donna Edwards (D-MD). ACORN keeps donor records from the Clinton, Kerry and Obama campaigns with the intent to engage in prohibited communications
. ACORN receives federal funding yet engages in improper lobbying. ACORN and its nonprofit affiliates do not have separate accounts. Neither ACORN nor any of its affiliates have properly reported their political activities to the IRS. These harms fly under the legal radar because the IRS rarely checks for compliance. The 'no substantial part' test is rarely enforced and the accounts of ACORN and its affiliates are illegally commingled."
ACORN became a hot topic during the 2008 presidential race because of Obama's ties to the group as well as its own admission that more than 400,000 of the 1.3 million voter registrations it claimed to have collected were not valid. ACORN registered 1.3 million new voters last year, and it is now under investigation in numerous states and faces voter fraud charges in nearly two dozen states.
The Obama administration selected ACORN to recruit counters for the 2010 Census, but the Census Bureau severed its ties with ACORN on Sept. 11.The Internal Revenue Service has also indicated that it is conducting a "thorough review" of its agreements with ACORN. According to Bloomberg, ACORN has has helped prepare about 150,000 free tax returns since 2004 for low-income families. Those returns have generated $190 million in tax refunds.
Cutting ties with ACORN?
Obama has tried to publicly disassociate himself from the group.
"The only involvement I've had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs," Obama declared in one of the presidential debates.
"Now, with respect to ACORN, ACORN is a community organization. Apparently what they've done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names," Obama said.
"It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved," he declared.
Today, the House voted 345-75 to eliminate federal funding of ACORN after undercover videos showed counselors giving advice on tax evasion to a undercover reporters posing as a pimp and prostitute.
According to Fox News, the Defund ACORN Act prohibits any "federal contract grant, cooperative agreement or any other form of agreement (including a memorandum of understanding)" from being awarded to or entered into with ACORN. It also prohibits federal funds "in any other form" from being granted to ACORN.
The decision followed a Sept. 14 Senate vote to strip millions of dollars in federal housing funds for ACORN.
House Minority Leader John Boehner has called on President Obama to indicate whether he would sign a bill forbidding ACORN from receiving federal funding, the New York Times reported. The White House is now distancing itself from ACORN and its scandals.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs referenced the video that revealed ACORN employees giving illegal tax advice to a man and woman disguised as a pimp and prostitute.
"Obviously, the conduct that you see on those tapes is completely unacceptable. I think everyone would agree to that," Gibbs said. "The administration takes accountability extremely seriously."
However, Gibbs said he's unsure of whether Obama will ask Democrats to sever ties with ACORN.
"I don't know that I've had any discussion with him about that," he said.
Track timeline of president's ties to group immersed in scandals
By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
While ACORN remains riddled in scandal, lawmakers have voted to cut off federal funding to the group, the U.S. Census Bureau has severed ties to the organization – and the White House has blasted its behavior as "unnacceptable."
But just how extensive are President Obama's personal ties to ACORN?
The following is a timeline outlining some of the purported connections between the president and ACORN through the years:
1990s: Obama meets ACORN
ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, first noticed Obama when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. A March 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times article by Letta Tayler and Keith Herbert, titled "Obama Forged Path As Chicago Community Organizer," explored Obama's pre-law school days as a community organizer in Chicago and his efforts to build a partnership with Chicago's "Friends of the Parks."
"Obama's task was to help far South Side residents press for improvement," the Times article explained.
National Review Online noted, "Part of Obama's work, it would appear, was to organize demonstrations, much in the mold of radical groups like ACORN."
The Times article reveals that Madeleine Talbot, who at the time was a leader at Chicago ACORN, was thoroughly impressed with Obama because "he got people to vote with their feet."
"At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor," the article stated. "But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff."
Talbott personally led Chicago ACORN's campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers, Stanley Kurtz reported.
"Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in 'direct action' – organizers' term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption," Kurtz writes. "Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a 'living wage' law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans."
1992: Project Vote! and training green ACORNs
As WND reported, in 1992, while he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama headed the Chicago operations of Project Vote!, an ACORN effort to register voters nationally. In Chicago, Obama had his biggest impact registering African-American voters on the city's South Side. However, Obama's "Fight the Smears" website disputes this, saying Obama "never organized with ACORN."
After completing his legal education at Harvard in 1991, Obama returned to Chicago to work on the voting project that developed directly out of a radical revolutionary strategy developed by two Columbia University sociologists in the 1960s. In what became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy, the tactic advocated a revolutionary approach to mobilizing the poor in the form of class warfare against capitalist forces viewed as exploiting labor and oppressing the poor. The Cloward-Piven strategy sought to apply the tactics of the revolutionary civil rights movement, including urban riots, to the poor as a whole, transcending interest-group politics defined by race to involve interest-group politics defined by class.
Kurtz wrote, Obama also "conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks."
1993: Woods Foundation
In 1993, Obama joined the board of the Woods Foundation, a non-profit foundation which declares its goal to "increase opportunities for less advantaged people and communities by giving money primarily to not-for-profit groups involved in housing, the arts and other areas." Obama served along with Bill Ayers and remained on the board until 2002.
Pajamas Media reports that during Obama's time there, ACORN received grants of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002) and $40,000 (2002) from the Woods Fund.
1994: Buycks-Robinson v. Citibank
As WND reported, in 1994, Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School then fresh from his Project Vote! experience, represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank case, in which ACORN pressed for Citibank to make more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants "in a race neutral way."
After obtaining a settlement in the Citibank litigation, ACORN used its subsidiary organization ACORN Housing, a nationwide organization with offices in more than 30 U.S. cities, to push the group's radical agenda to get subprime home buyers mortgages under the most favorable terms possible.
1995: ACORN attorney in Illinois lawsuit
In 1995, Obama was hired as a lawyer for ACORN in a major lawsuit. As a lawyer with civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal "motor voter" law.
Also in 1995, as WND's Jerome Corsi reported, Bill Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $50 million grant program for the Chicago public schools. Ayers selected Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the Annenberg Challenge, a position Obama held for eight years, until 2003, a period during which Ayers remained active with the Challenge.
In his Wall Street Journal article, Stanley Kurtz wrote that the Annenberg project funneled money to through various far-left community organizers, including ACORN.
1996: New Party ties
As WND reported, newspaper evidence shows Obama was a member of the New Party, which sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda. While running for the Illinois state Senate in 1996 as a Democrat, Obama actively sought and received the endorsement of the New Party, according to confirmed reports during last year's presidential campaign.
According to Democratic Socialists of America documents, the New Party worked with ACORN to promote its candidates.
In 1995, the DSA's New Ground newsletter stated, "In Chicago, the New Party's biggest asset and biggest liability is ACORN.
"Like most organizations, ACORN is a mixed bag," the newsletter said. "One one hand, in Chicago, ACORN is a group that attempts to organize some of the most depressed communities in the city. Chicago organizers for ACORN and organizers for SEIU Local 880 have been given modest monthly recruitment quotas for new New Party members. On the other hand, like most groups that depend on canvassing for fundraising, it's easy enough to find burned out and disgruntled former employees. And ACORN has not had the reputation for being interested in coalition politics – until recently and, happily, not just within the New Party."
1997-2004: Illinois state senator
Obama meeting with ACORN leaders as an Illinois Senate candidate
In 1997, Obama became an Illinois state senator. ACORN national board member Toni Foulkes bragged of ACORN's long-standing relationship with Obama prior to his election in the 2003-2004 issue of Social Policy.
Foulkes wrote in "Case Study: Chicago – The Barack Obama Campaign":
ACORN noticed [Obama] when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois' refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. .. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).
Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for Senate, we were old friends.
2005: U.S. senator
In 2005, Obama became a U.S. senator.
2007: From Obama's own mouth ...
On Obama's Organizing for America blog, Sam Graham-Felsen, a paid blogger, wrote about Obama's November 2007 speech to ACORN leaders:
When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, "I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work."
Again, on Dec. 1, 2007, Obama spoke at the Heartland Democratic Presidential Forum, a meeting for community organizing groups including ACORN. Obama received wild applause from the crowd as he promised that community organizing groups such as ACORN would help shape the agenda for his presidency.
Naked Emperor News posted the following video of his pledge:
He was asked, "If elected president of the Unites States, would you agree, in your first 100 days, to meet with the delegation of representatives from these various community organizations that campaigned for community values? Could they count on you in your first 100 days to sit down with them?"
Obama responded, "Yes. But let me even say before I even get inaugurated, during the transition, we're going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We're going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America."
2008: ACORN endorses Obama
On Feb. 21, 2008, the Acorn Political Action Committee endorsed Obama over Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries.
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, insisted they had nothing to do with ACORN after the inner-city advocacy group became engulfed in controversy over voter-registration fraud.
But in August 2008, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that the Obama campaign paid $832,598.29 to ACORN "offshoot" Citizens Services Inc. for "get out the vote" projects from Feb. 25 to May 17.
The newspaper revealed that Obama's payments to CSI for services were unusual: "For example, CSI received payments of $63,000 and $75,000 for advance work. Excluding the large payments to CSI, the average amount the Obama campaign spent with other organizations was $558.82 per check on more than 1,200 entries classified as advance work."
According to the report, Citizens Services Inc. is headquartered at the same address as ACORN's national headquarters in New Orleans. A 2006 ACORN publication describes Citizen Services Inc. as "ACORN's campaign services entity."
In 2008, Anita MonCrief, a woman who worked in the Strategic Writing and Research Department of ACORN Political Operations and its affiliate Project Vote from 2005 through January 2008, said ACORN acted as an unofficial arm of the Democratic Party during the election and used cash operations to keep some financial transactions under wraps.
"It has always been a Democrat operation," she recently told WND. "They've never made any secrets about who they support. Their political action committees are usually set up to support these Democratic candidates."
She said political action committees support Democrat candidates, and the at the same time voter registration drives were being conducted, the group was putting out propaganda in communities telling people not to vote for Republicans.
According to a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review report, she further told a Pennsylvania court before the election that the Obama camp provided ACORN with a "donor list" that enabled Project Vote to solicit contributions from Obama supporters who had "maxed out" under federal contribution limits but who could surreptitiously give more to Obama's cause by donating to ACORN and its affiliates.
As WND reported, Project Vote, an affiliate of ACORN, is now suing MonCrief to the tune of $5 million.
2009: Criminal case against ACORN
According to the results of a congressional investigation done in July, ACORN was found to be rife with criminal activity.
A report from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform states that ACORN "has repeatedly and deliberately engaged in systemic fraud. Both structurally and operationally, ACORN hides behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors, to launder federal money in order to pursue a partisan political agenda and to manipulate the American electorate."
Since 1994, ACORN has received more than $53 million in federal funds, according to the report.
"Under the Obama administration, ACORN stands to receive a whopping $8.5 billion in available stimulus funds. Operationally, ACORN is a shell game played in 120 cities, 43 states and the District of Columbia through a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities, to use taxpayer and tax-exempt dollars for partisan political purposes, and to distract investigators. Structurally, ACORN is a chess game in which senior management is shielded from accountability by multiple layers of volunteers and compensated employees who serve as pawns to take the fall for every bad act," the report said.
The report continued, "Lobbying is a substantial part of what ACORN does. It has endorsed Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Representative Albert Wynn (D-MD), and Representative Donna Edwards (D-MD). ACORN keeps donor records from the Clinton, Kerry and Obama campaigns with the intent to engage in prohibited communications
. ACORN receives federal funding yet engages in improper lobbying. ACORN and its nonprofit affiliates do not have separate accounts. Neither ACORN nor any of its affiliates have properly reported their political activities to the IRS. These harms fly under the legal radar because the IRS rarely checks for compliance. The 'no substantial part' test is rarely enforced and the accounts of ACORN and its affiliates are illegally commingled."
ACORN became a hot topic during the 2008 presidential race because of Obama's ties to the group as well as its own admission that more than 400,000 of the 1.3 million voter registrations it claimed to have collected were not valid. ACORN registered 1.3 million new voters last year, and it is now under investigation in numerous states and faces voter fraud charges in nearly two dozen states.
The Obama administration selected ACORN to recruit counters for the 2010 Census, but the Census Bureau severed its ties with ACORN on Sept. 11.The Internal Revenue Service has also indicated that it is conducting a "thorough review" of its agreements with ACORN. According to Bloomberg, ACORN has has helped prepare about 150,000 free tax returns since 2004 for low-income families. Those returns have generated $190 million in tax refunds.
Cutting ties with ACORN?
Obama has tried to publicly disassociate himself from the group.
"The only involvement I've had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs," Obama declared in one of the presidential debates.
"Now, with respect to ACORN, ACORN is a community organization. Apparently what they've done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names," Obama said.
"It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved," he declared.
Today, the House voted 345-75 to eliminate federal funding of ACORN after undercover videos showed counselors giving advice on tax evasion to a undercover reporters posing as a pimp and prostitute.
According to Fox News, the Defund ACORN Act prohibits any "federal contract grant, cooperative agreement or any other form of agreement (including a memorandum of understanding)" from being awarded to or entered into with ACORN. It also prohibits federal funds "in any other form" from being granted to ACORN.
The decision followed a Sept. 14 Senate vote to strip millions of dollars in federal housing funds for ACORN.
House Minority Leader John Boehner has called on President Obama to indicate whether he would sign a bill forbidding ACORN from receiving federal funding, the New York Times reported. The White House is now distancing itself from ACORN and its scandals.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs referenced the video that revealed ACORN employees giving illegal tax advice to a man and woman disguised as a pimp and prostitute.
"Obviously, the conduct that you see on those tapes is completely unacceptable. I think everyone would agree to that," Gibbs said. "The administration takes accountability extremely seriously."
However, Gibbs said he's unsure of whether Obama will ask Democrats to sever ties with ACORN.
"I don't know that I've had any discussion with him about that," he said.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Media Refuses To Cover Acorn
ACORN Watch: A "Sting"-ing Indictment of Media Hypocrisy
by Michelle Malkin
Undercover journalism is only acceptable when it fits a liberal agenda. That is the message from "professional" reporters and left-wing activists outraged about three successful video stings targeting President Obama's old friends at the left-wing tax-subsidized outfit ACORN.
Conservative documentarian James O'Keefe and writer Hannah Giles, working for the BigGovernment.com website, posed as a pimp and prostitute during visits to ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn. ACORN housing officials and tax advisers offered them brazen suggestions on how to lie on their applications, disguise their income, obscure their child sex-ring business and hide cash from abusive johns. ("When you buy the house with the backyard, you get a tin," an ACORN counselor in New York told Giles, "and you bury it down in there, cover it and put the grass over it.")
Summing up the ACORN Housing Corporation philosophy, another Brooklyn ACORN official told the undercover pair bluntly: "Honesty is not going to get you the house."
ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson blasted the investigation as "gotcha journalism." Echoing ACORN's defenders, MSNBC anchor Norah O'Donnell fretted on Tuesday that Giles and O'Keefe's methods "might be viewed as entrapment. That some conservative activists used hidden cameras to get this stuff on camera."
O'Donnell has apparently forgotten the inglorious history of news "entrapment" by her betters at NBC News.
This is the network that surreptitiously rigged GM pickup trucks in staged crash tests in 1993 to show that the vehicles were unsafe -- and failed to inform viewers that the simulations used incendiary devices to ignite the explosions. Jane Pauley admitted in a nationally televised apology that "NBC's contractor did put incendiary devices under the trucks to ensure there would be a fire if gasoline were released from the gas tank. NBC personnel knew this before we aired the program, but the public was not informed because consultants at the scene told us the devices did not start the fire. We agree with GM that we should have told the viewer about these devices."
This is the network that pioneered the "To Catch a Predator" series -- an investigative sting operation to nab Internet pedophiles. Until last year, the journalists worked with activist group Perverted Justice, whose members posed as children in web chat rooms to lure alleged pedophiles to a residential home.
This is the network that sent out an intrepid NBC News reporter in a canoe to cover treacherous New Jersey flooding in 2005 -- only to be shown up by passers-by who sloshed in front of the camera and demonstrated that the water was only a few inches deep.
This is the network that tried to arrange Islamophobia stings at NASCAR events in 2006 to try to "expose" racism among Southerners. The network worked with a Muslim activist who sent a recruitment notice across the Internet:
"I have been talking with a producer of the NBC Dateline show, and he is in the process of filming a piece on anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination in the USA. They are looking for some Muslim male candidates for their show who would be willing to go to non-Muslim gatherings and see if they attract any discriminatory comments or actions while being filmed. … NBC is willing to fly in someone and cover their weekend expenses. The filming would take place all day on Saturday and Sunday."
The same sting tactics were adopted by ABC News' Primetime Live news show in Alabama and Texas.
"Professional" undercover journalists see their work as serving the public and national interests, exposing wrongdoing, and blowing the whistle on illicit activities that would not otherwise see the light of day. But this is exactly what the ACORN stings have done.
Taxpayers deserve to know how ACORN and its vast web of nonprofit, tax-exempt affiliates are using their money (40 percent of the group's revenue comes from the government). The flagship group trains publicly funded ACORN tax advisers and mortgage counselors across the country. In fact, ACORN is now managing apartments in Bedford-Stuyvesant, N.Y., for the newly completed Atlantic Avenue Apartments. Yet, ACORN Housing Corporation has a long history of abusing federal housing funds and AmeriCorps grants for political activities.
Head-in-the-sand ABC News anchor Charles Gibson claimed he "didn't know" about the ACORN scandal this week and snarked that "maybe this is just one you leave to the cables."
Giles and O'Keefe's investigations (and there are more to come, according to BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart) have exposed not one but two protection rackets: ACORN's -- and the ostrich media's.
by Michelle Malkin
Undercover journalism is only acceptable when it fits a liberal agenda. That is the message from "professional" reporters and left-wing activists outraged about three successful video stings targeting President Obama's old friends at the left-wing tax-subsidized outfit ACORN.
Conservative documentarian James O'Keefe and writer Hannah Giles, working for the BigGovernment.com website, posed as a pimp and prostitute during visits to ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn. ACORN housing officials and tax advisers offered them brazen suggestions on how to lie on their applications, disguise their income, obscure their child sex-ring business and hide cash from abusive johns. ("When you buy the house with the backyard, you get a tin," an ACORN counselor in New York told Giles, "and you bury it down in there, cover it and put the grass over it.")
Summing up the ACORN Housing Corporation philosophy, another Brooklyn ACORN official told the undercover pair bluntly: "Honesty is not going to get you the house."
ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson blasted the investigation as "gotcha journalism." Echoing ACORN's defenders, MSNBC anchor Norah O'Donnell fretted on Tuesday that Giles and O'Keefe's methods "might be viewed as entrapment. That some conservative activists used hidden cameras to get this stuff on camera."
O'Donnell has apparently forgotten the inglorious history of news "entrapment" by her betters at NBC News.
This is the network that surreptitiously rigged GM pickup trucks in staged crash tests in 1993 to show that the vehicles were unsafe -- and failed to inform viewers that the simulations used incendiary devices to ignite the explosions. Jane Pauley admitted in a nationally televised apology that "NBC's contractor did put incendiary devices under the trucks to ensure there would be a fire if gasoline were released from the gas tank. NBC personnel knew this before we aired the program, but the public was not informed because consultants at the scene told us the devices did not start the fire. We agree with GM that we should have told the viewer about these devices."
This is the network that pioneered the "To Catch a Predator" series -- an investigative sting operation to nab Internet pedophiles. Until last year, the journalists worked with activist group Perverted Justice, whose members posed as children in web chat rooms to lure alleged pedophiles to a residential home.
This is the network that sent out an intrepid NBC News reporter in a canoe to cover treacherous New Jersey flooding in 2005 -- only to be shown up by passers-by who sloshed in front of the camera and demonstrated that the water was only a few inches deep.
This is the network that tried to arrange Islamophobia stings at NASCAR events in 2006 to try to "expose" racism among Southerners. The network worked with a Muslim activist who sent a recruitment notice across the Internet:
"I have been talking with a producer of the NBC Dateline show, and he is in the process of filming a piece on anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination in the USA. They are looking for some Muslim male candidates for their show who would be willing to go to non-Muslim gatherings and see if they attract any discriminatory comments or actions while being filmed. … NBC is willing to fly in someone and cover their weekend expenses. The filming would take place all day on Saturday and Sunday."
The same sting tactics were adopted by ABC News' Primetime Live news show in Alabama and Texas.
"Professional" undercover journalists see their work as serving the public and national interests, exposing wrongdoing, and blowing the whistle on illicit activities that would not otherwise see the light of day. But this is exactly what the ACORN stings have done.
Taxpayers deserve to know how ACORN and its vast web of nonprofit, tax-exempt affiliates are using their money (40 percent of the group's revenue comes from the government). The flagship group trains publicly funded ACORN tax advisers and mortgage counselors across the country. In fact, ACORN is now managing apartments in Bedford-Stuyvesant, N.Y., for the newly completed Atlantic Avenue Apartments. Yet, ACORN Housing Corporation has a long history of abusing federal housing funds and AmeriCorps grants for political activities.
Head-in-the-sand ABC News anchor Charles Gibson claimed he "didn't know" about the ACORN scandal this week and snarked that "maybe this is just one you leave to the cables."
Giles and O'Keefe's investigations (and there are more to come, according to BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart) have exposed not one but two protection rackets: ACORN's -- and the ostrich media's.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Sunstein Is Too Stupid To Have Morals
Sunstein: Embryos are 'just a handful of cells'
Argues cloning ban 'silly,' scoffed at those who find it morally repugnant
By Aaron Klein
There is no moral concern regarding cloning human beings since human embryos, which develop into a baby, are "only a handful of cells," argued President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.
"If scientists will be using and cloning embryos only at a very early stage when they are just a handful of cells (say, before they are four days old), there is no good reason for a ban (on cloning)," wrote Sunstein, who was confirmed by the Senate last week as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
"It is silly to think that 'potential' is enough for moral concern. Sperm cells have 'potential' and (not to put too fine a point on it) most people are not especially solicitous about them," Sunstein wrote in a review of the 2003 book "Our Posthuman Future" by Francis Fukuyama.
Sunstein's comparison is not firm, however, as sperm cells, unlike embryos, do not have the potential to develop into life on their own.
Sunstein, nevertheless, expounded on his attitude toward human cloning in a 2002 paper for the Harvard Law Review, "Is there a constitutional right to clone?"
WND obtained and reviewed Sunstein's 17-page article in which he scoffed at those who find human cloning morally repugnant.
"Moral repugnance might well be a response to vaguely remembered science fiction stories or horror movies, or to perceptions based on ignorance and confusion (as in the idea that a clone is a complete "copy" of the original, or a "copy" that is going to be evil)," he wrote.
Sunstein eventually determined there is no constitutional right for each citizen to clone themselves, but he seemed to argue for all states to allow cloning. Currently, while federal regulations prohibit federal funding for research into human cloning, there is no federal law banning cloning. Some individual states imposed a ban.
Wrote Sunstein: "For some people, cloning might be the only feasible way to produce a biological offspring. It would certainly not be ludicrous to say that as a matter of constitutional law, the state has to produce a strong justification for intruding on that choice in cases in which it is the only realistic option."
In addition to Sunstein's moral disregard for human embryos, WND reported last weekthe Obama czar several times has quoted approvingly from an author who likened animals to slaves and argued an adult dog or a horse is more rational than a human infant and should, therefore, be granted similar rights.
A brief video on YouTube captures Sunstein at a 2002 event using the writings of Jeremy Bentham, a 19th Century social reformer and animal-rights pioneer.
"You've heard a reference to Bentham, so let's listen to him, shall we," he begins in the video.
He then quotes from Bentham's 1789 primer, "Introduction to Principals of Morals and Legislation," written just after slaves had been freed by the French but were still held captive in the British dominions:
"The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor," Sunstein states, quoting Bentham.
Sunstein continues quoting the author: "A full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise."
The rest of Bentham's sentence, not captured in the video, continued, "what would it avail? The question is not, can they (animals) reason or can they talk? But, can they suffer?"
While the YouTube video offers only a brief sound bite with no context, a WND review of Sunstein's academic writings find he used the same verses from Bentham to push for animal rights.
In the footnotes to a 2002 academic paper for Harvard University, "The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer," Sunstein expresses his approval of Bentham's arguments:
"I suggest that Bentham and Mill were not wrong to offer an analogy between current uses of animals and human slavery," he wrote.
Several other works by Sunstein, including his books, quote approvingly of Bentham's statements comparing adult dogs and horses to human infants.
In the Harvard paper, Sunstein even suggests animals could be granted the right to sue humans in court.
"We could even grant animals a right to bring suit without insisting that animals are in some general sense 'persons,' or that they are not property," he wrote.
The Senate last week confirmed Sunstein as Obama's administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs overcoming months of delay due to Republican concerns that he would push a radical animal-rights agenda.
Argues cloning ban 'silly,' scoffed at those who find it morally repugnant
By Aaron Klein
There is no moral concern regarding cloning human beings since human embryos, which develop into a baby, are "only a handful of cells," argued President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.
"If scientists will be using and cloning embryos only at a very early stage when they are just a handful of cells (say, before they are four days old), there is no good reason for a ban (on cloning)," wrote Sunstein, who was confirmed by the Senate last week as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
"It is silly to think that 'potential' is enough for moral concern. Sperm cells have 'potential' and (not to put too fine a point on it) most people are not especially solicitous about them," Sunstein wrote in a review of the 2003 book "Our Posthuman Future" by Francis Fukuyama.
Sunstein's comparison is not firm, however, as sperm cells, unlike embryos, do not have the potential to develop into life on their own.
Sunstein, nevertheless, expounded on his attitude toward human cloning in a 2002 paper for the Harvard Law Review, "Is there a constitutional right to clone?"
WND obtained and reviewed Sunstein's 17-page article in which he scoffed at those who find human cloning morally repugnant.
"Moral repugnance might well be a response to vaguely remembered science fiction stories or horror movies, or to perceptions based on ignorance and confusion (as in the idea that a clone is a complete "copy" of the original, or a "copy" that is going to be evil)," he wrote.
Sunstein eventually determined there is no constitutional right for each citizen to clone themselves, but he seemed to argue for all states to allow cloning. Currently, while federal regulations prohibit federal funding for research into human cloning, there is no federal law banning cloning. Some individual states imposed a ban.
Wrote Sunstein: "For some people, cloning might be the only feasible way to produce a biological offspring. It would certainly not be ludicrous to say that as a matter of constitutional law, the state has to produce a strong justification for intruding on that choice in cases in which it is the only realistic option."
In addition to Sunstein's moral disregard for human embryos, WND reported last weekthe Obama czar several times has quoted approvingly from an author who likened animals to slaves and argued an adult dog or a horse is more rational than a human infant and should, therefore, be granted similar rights.
A brief video on YouTube captures Sunstein at a 2002 event using the writings of Jeremy Bentham, a 19th Century social reformer and animal-rights pioneer.
"You've heard a reference to Bentham, so let's listen to him, shall we," he begins in the video.
He then quotes from Bentham's 1789 primer, "Introduction to Principals of Morals and Legislation," written just after slaves had been freed by the French but were still held captive in the British dominions:
"The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor," Sunstein states, quoting Bentham.
Sunstein continues quoting the author: "A full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise."
The rest of Bentham's sentence, not captured in the video, continued, "what would it avail? The question is not, can they (animals) reason or can they talk? But, can they suffer?"
While the YouTube video offers only a brief sound bite with no context, a WND review of Sunstein's academic writings find he used the same verses from Bentham to push for animal rights.
In the footnotes to a 2002 academic paper for Harvard University, "The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer," Sunstein expresses his approval of Bentham's arguments:
"I suggest that Bentham and Mill were not wrong to offer an analogy between current uses of animals and human slavery," he wrote.
Several other works by Sunstein, including his books, quote approvingly of Bentham's statements comparing adult dogs and horses to human infants.
In the Harvard paper, Sunstein even suggests animals could be granted the right to sue humans in court.
"We could even grant animals a right to bring suit without insisting that animals are in some general sense 'persons,' or that they are not property," he wrote.
The Senate last week confirmed Sunstein as Obama's administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs overcoming months of delay due to Republican concerns that he would push a radical animal-rights agenda.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Obama Logging All You Do On Computer
GOVERNMENT AND COMPUTER MANUFACTURERS CAUGHT INSTALLING HARD-WIRED KEYSTROKE LOGGERS INTO ALL NEW LAPTOP COMPUTERS!
Devices capture everything you ever type, then can send it via your ethernet card to the Dept. of Homeland Security without your knowledge, consent or a search warrant each time you log onto the internet!
Freedom Of Information Act Requests For Explanation From DHS, refused.
I was opening up my almost brand new laptop, to replace a broken PCMCIA slot riser on the motherboard. As soon as I got the keyboard off, I noticed a small cable running from the keyboard connection underneath a piece of metal protecting the motherboard.
I figured "No Big Deal", and continued with the dissasembly. But when I got the metal panels off, I saw a small white heatshink-wrapped package. Being ever-curious, I sliced the heatshrink open. I found a little circuit board inside.
________________________________________
Being an EE by trade, this piqued my curiosity considerably. On one side of the board, one Atmel AT45D041A four megabit Flash memory chip.
________________________________________
On the other side, one Microchip Technology PIC16F876 Programmable Interrupt Controller, along with a little Fairchild Semiconductor CD4066BCM quad bilateral switch.
Looking further, I saw that the other end of the cable was connected to the integrated ethernet board.
What could this mean? I called the manufacturer's tech support about it, and they said, and I quote, "The intregrated service tag identifier is there for assisting customers in the event of lost or misplaced personal information." He then hung up.
A little more research, and I found that that board spliced in between the keyboard and the ethernet chip is little more than a Keyghost hardware keylogger.
The reasons a computer manufacturer would put this in their laptops can only be left up to your imagination. It would be very impractical to hand-anylze the logs, and very CPU-intensive to do so on a computer for every person that purchased a laptop. Why are these keyloggers here? I recently almost found out.
I called the police, as having a keylogger unknown to me in my laptop is a serious offense. They told me to call the Department of Homeland Security. At this point, I am in disbelief. Why would the DHS have a keylogger in my laptop? It was surreal.
So I called them, and they told me to submit a Freedom of Information Act request. This is what I got back:
.
Under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) the only items exempt from public disclosure are items relating to "law enforcement tools and techniques" and "items relating to national security."
The real life implications of this are plain: Computer manufacturers appear to be cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to make every person who buys a new computer subject to immediate, unrestricted government recording of everything they do on those computers! EVERYTHING!
This information can be sent to DHS, online, without your knowledge or consent, without a search warrant or even probable cause! That's why this device is hard-wired directly into the ethernet card, which communicates over the internet!
I am not certain how long this information will be permitted to remain online for all the world to see before the government takes some type of action to attempt to have it removed from public view. I URGE you to take copy of this page immediately and spread this information to everyone you know immediately! The more people who find out about this, the more can protect themselves and raise a HUGE outcry to force government and computer manufacturers to immediately CEASE installing these devices in new computers!
Devices capture everything you ever type, then can send it via your ethernet card to the Dept. of Homeland Security without your knowledge, consent or a search warrant each time you log onto the internet!
Freedom Of Information Act Requests For Explanation From DHS, refused.
I was opening up my almost brand new laptop, to replace a broken PCMCIA slot riser on the motherboard. As soon as I got the keyboard off, I noticed a small cable running from the keyboard connection underneath a piece of metal protecting the motherboard.
I figured "No Big Deal", and continued with the dissasembly. But when I got the metal panels off, I saw a small white heatshink-wrapped package. Being ever-curious, I sliced the heatshrink open. I found a little circuit board inside.
________________________________________
Being an EE by trade, this piqued my curiosity considerably. On one side of the board, one Atmel AT45D041A four megabit Flash memory chip.
________________________________________
On the other side, one Microchip Technology PIC16F876 Programmable Interrupt Controller, along with a little Fairchild Semiconductor CD4066BCM quad bilateral switch.
Looking further, I saw that the other end of the cable was connected to the integrated ethernet board.
What could this mean? I called the manufacturer's tech support about it, and they said, and I quote, "The intregrated service tag identifier is there for assisting customers in the event of lost or misplaced personal information." He then hung up.
A little more research, and I found that that board spliced in between the keyboard and the ethernet chip is little more than a Keyghost hardware keylogger.
The reasons a computer manufacturer would put this in their laptops can only be left up to your imagination. It would be very impractical to hand-anylze the logs, and very CPU-intensive to do so on a computer for every person that purchased a laptop. Why are these keyloggers here? I recently almost found out.
I called the police, as having a keylogger unknown to me in my laptop is a serious offense. They told me to call the Department of Homeland Security. At this point, I am in disbelief. Why would the DHS have a keylogger in my laptop? It was surreal.
So I called them, and they told me to submit a Freedom of Information Act request. This is what I got back:
.
Under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) the only items exempt from public disclosure are items relating to "law enforcement tools and techniques" and "items relating to national security."
The real life implications of this are plain: Computer manufacturers appear to be cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to make every person who buys a new computer subject to immediate, unrestricted government recording of everything they do on those computers! EVERYTHING!
This information can be sent to DHS, online, without your knowledge or consent, without a search warrant or even probable cause! That's why this device is hard-wired directly into the ethernet card, which communicates over the internet!
I am not certain how long this information will be permitted to remain online for all the world to see before the government takes some type of action to attempt to have it removed from public view. I URGE you to take copy of this page immediately and spread this information to everyone you know immediately! The more people who find out about this, the more can protect themselves and raise a HUGE outcry to force government and computer manufacturers to immediately CEASE installing these devices in new computers!
Friday, September 11, 2009
Healthcare Lies Exposed
Obama Healthcare Speech Fact Check
Fact checking President Barack Obama’s health care speech from last night, the Associated Press reports: “The president’s speech to Congress contained a variety of oversimplifications and omissions in laying out what he wants to do about health insurance.” That is an understatement. We counted no less than 10 spurious claims made by the President, including:
1. OBAMA: “There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”
THE FACTS: On August 8th, President Obama said: “Reform is obviously essential for the 46 million Americans who don’t have health insurance.” So did 16 million uninsured people just disappear in the span of two months? Not quite. The problem is that the 46 million number was always highly misleading and the new 30 million number isn’t much better. According to an analysis based on the 2007 Census data there were 45.7 million uninsured people in the U.S. in 2007. But 9.3 million of those were non-citizens. Another 6.4 million actually are enrolled in Medicaid but mistakenly tell the Census they have no health insurance. Another 4.3 million are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP but have not signed up. Another 10 million have no insurance, but also make more than 3X the poverty level. That means only 15.6 million U.S. citizens with incomes below 300% of poverty and that are nor already eligible for taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, are uninsured.
2. OBAMA: “First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”
THE FACTS: First, the statement is just false. According to the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) 4.5 million Americans are covered by Health Savings Accounts. H.R. 3200 gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services the authority to make such plans illegal. In both the House Energy and Commerce Committee mark up and the House Ways and Means Committee mark up, Republicans offered amendments that would have guaranteed Americans’ right to keep their Health Saving’s account. All of these amendments were defeated by Democrats on their respective committees. These 4.5 million Americans will lose their insurance under Obamacare
Second, Americans should never forget that Obama is a lawyer. Here is how Obama used to issue the same promise: “Under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” See the difference? Obama used to promise that under his plan “you can keep your doctor.” But now Americans are only promised that nothing in the plan “requires you to change what you have.” This is a night and day difference. Obama is correct that nothing in H.R. 3200 requires people to change their insurance. But H.R. 3200 does allow all businesses to shift their employees into the public plan over time. Under a strong public plan 88.1 million people would be shifted from their employer-sponsored coverage to the federal plan.
3. OBAMA: “And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care … That makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives.”
THE FACTS: Preventative care does not save money. So says the Congressional Budget Office and so says the New England Journal of Medicine.
4. OBAMA: “That’s why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance – just as most states require you to carry auto insurance.”
THE FACTS: No states require all adults, let alone all citizens, to carry auto insurance. Only those who choose to exercise their privilege to drive are required to purchase auto insurance. Even with that requirement, many still don’t. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a federal individual mandate for health insurance would be unique and unprecedented because it would “impose a duty on individuals as members of society” and would “require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated” by the government. According to President Barack Obama HHS nominee Dr. Sherry Glied: “Developing a system to promptly identify and penalize scofflaws will take effort and ingenuity, particularly in our diverse and mobile country. It may require a degree of intrusiveness and bureaucracy that some will find unpalatable.”
5. OBAMA: “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”
THE FACTS: H.R. 3200 does not explicitly pay for health benefits for illegal immigrants. It never has, and no one has ever said that it did. The issue is enforcement and the provisions in H.R. 3200 are completely inadequate to ensure that illegal immigrants do not illegally obtain health care through the bill. In the House Ways and Means mark up of H.R. 3200, Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) introduced an amendment that would use two citizenship status verification systems, the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) programs, to establish an individual’s eligibility to obtain the bill’s proposed affordability credits or enroll in the public insurance option. Both programs are currently used to determine citizenship status and eligibility for other public assistance programs. The Heller amendment failed on a straight party-line vote.
6. OBAMA: “And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”
THE FACTS: In all four mark-ups of health care legislation (three in the House and one in the Senate), Conservatives have offered amendments that would have specifically prohibited federal funds from being used to cover abortion. None of them passed. Instead, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed an amendment by Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) that actually requires at least one insurance plan to cover abortion in every geographical region and requires the newly-created public plan to cover all abortion services. Furthermore, President Obama told Planned Parenthood on July17, 2007: “We’re going to set up a public plan that all persons and all women can access if they don’t have health insurance. It will be a plan that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services.” Candidate Obama either was not telling the truth to Planned Parenthood then or President Obama is not telling the truth to the American people now.
7. OBAMA: “They argue that these private companies can’t fairly compete with the government. And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won’t be. I have insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.”
THE FACTS: Obama refutes his own argument in the same paragraph: “It would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.” No public university is self-sufficient. None of them rely solely on student tuition. All of them require taxpayer subsidies every year.
8. OBAMA: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.”
THE FACTS: According to the Congressional Budget Office, not only does H.R. 3200 increase the deficit by $239 billion in just the first ten years, but CBO director Doug Elmendorf told Congress that the bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee “significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.” And according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, H.R. 3200 would run a $1,010 billion deficit in the second decade.
9. OBAMA: “Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan.”
THE FACTS: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that Title VI of the House bill dealing with Medicare program integrity will save just $1.3 billion over ten years. That is roughly how much Medicare spends in a single day. CBO estimates ZERO savings from Subtitle F in the House bill that deals with Medicaid program integrity.
10. OBAMA: “This reform will charge insurance companies a fee for their most expensive policies, which will encourage them to provide greater value for the money – an idea which has the support of Democratic and Republican experts. And according to these same experts, this modest change could help hold down the cost of health care for all of us in the long-run.”
THE FACTS: These “fees” are nothing more than taxes hidden behind a thin veil of “fairness” rhetoric. They would actually fall on ordinary Americans, not insurance executives or stockholders. When you buy something that is subject to a sales tax who pays the tax – you or the vendor? Just look at the line “sales tax” on your bill. And if you tax insurance companies the cost is passed through in the same way.
Fact checking President Barack Obama’s health care speech from last night, the Associated Press reports: “The president’s speech to Congress contained a variety of oversimplifications and omissions in laying out what he wants to do about health insurance.” That is an understatement. We counted no less than 10 spurious claims made by the President, including:
1. OBAMA: “There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”
THE FACTS: On August 8th, President Obama said: “Reform is obviously essential for the 46 million Americans who don’t have health insurance.” So did 16 million uninsured people just disappear in the span of two months? Not quite. The problem is that the 46 million number was always highly misleading and the new 30 million number isn’t much better. According to an analysis based on the 2007 Census data there were 45.7 million uninsured people in the U.S. in 2007. But 9.3 million of those were non-citizens. Another 6.4 million actually are enrolled in Medicaid but mistakenly tell the Census they have no health insurance. Another 4.3 million are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP but have not signed up. Another 10 million have no insurance, but also make more than 3X the poverty level. That means only 15.6 million U.S. citizens with incomes below 300% of poverty and that are nor already eligible for taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, are uninsured.
2. OBAMA: “First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”
THE FACTS: First, the statement is just false. According to the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) 4.5 million Americans are covered by Health Savings Accounts. H.R. 3200 gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services the authority to make such plans illegal. In both the House Energy and Commerce Committee mark up and the House Ways and Means Committee mark up, Republicans offered amendments that would have guaranteed Americans’ right to keep their Health Saving’s account. All of these amendments were defeated by Democrats on their respective committees. These 4.5 million Americans will lose their insurance under Obamacare
Second, Americans should never forget that Obama is a lawyer. Here is how Obama used to issue the same promise: “Under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” See the difference? Obama used to promise that under his plan “you can keep your doctor.” But now Americans are only promised that nothing in the plan “requires you to change what you have.” This is a night and day difference. Obama is correct that nothing in H.R. 3200 requires people to change their insurance. But H.R. 3200 does allow all businesses to shift their employees into the public plan over time. Under a strong public plan 88.1 million people would be shifted from their employer-sponsored coverage to the federal plan.
3. OBAMA: “And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care … That makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives.”
THE FACTS: Preventative care does not save money. So says the Congressional Budget Office and so says the New England Journal of Medicine.
4. OBAMA: “That’s why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance – just as most states require you to carry auto insurance.”
THE FACTS: No states require all adults, let alone all citizens, to carry auto insurance. Only those who choose to exercise their privilege to drive are required to purchase auto insurance. Even with that requirement, many still don’t. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a federal individual mandate for health insurance would be unique and unprecedented because it would “impose a duty on individuals as members of society” and would “require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated” by the government. According to President Barack Obama HHS nominee Dr. Sherry Glied: “Developing a system to promptly identify and penalize scofflaws will take effort and ingenuity, particularly in our diverse and mobile country. It may require a degree of intrusiveness and bureaucracy that some will find unpalatable.”
5. OBAMA: “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”
THE FACTS: H.R. 3200 does not explicitly pay for health benefits for illegal immigrants. It never has, and no one has ever said that it did. The issue is enforcement and the provisions in H.R. 3200 are completely inadequate to ensure that illegal immigrants do not illegally obtain health care through the bill. In the House Ways and Means mark up of H.R. 3200, Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) introduced an amendment that would use two citizenship status verification systems, the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) programs, to establish an individual’s eligibility to obtain the bill’s proposed affordability credits or enroll in the public insurance option. Both programs are currently used to determine citizenship status and eligibility for other public assistance programs. The Heller amendment failed on a straight party-line vote.
6. OBAMA: “And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”
THE FACTS: In all four mark-ups of health care legislation (three in the House and one in the Senate), Conservatives have offered amendments that would have specifically prohibited federal funds from being used to cover abortion. None of them passed. Instead, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed an amendment by Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) that actually requires at least one insurance plan to cover abortion in every geographical region and requires the newly-created public plan to cover all abortion services. Furthermore, President Obama told Planned Parenthood on July17, 2007: “We’re going to set up a public plan that all persons and all women can access if they don’t have health insurance. It will be a plan that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services.” Candidate Obama either was not telling the truth to Planned Parenthood then or President Obama is not telling the truth to the American people now.
7. OBAMA: “They argue that these private companies can’t fairly compete with the government. And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won’t be. I have insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.”
THE FACTS: Obama refutes his own argument in the same paragraph: “It would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.” No public university is self-sufficient. None of them rely solely on student tuition. All of them require taxpayer subsidies every year.
8. OBAMA: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.”
THE FACTS: According to the Congressional Budget Office, not only does H.R. 3200 increase the deficit by $239 billion in just the first ten years, but CBO director Doug Elmendorf told Congress that the bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee “significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.” And according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, H.R. 3200 would run a $1,010 billion deficit in the second decade.
9. OBAMA: “Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan.”
THE FACTS: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that Title VI of the House bill dealing with Medicare program integrity will save just $1.3 billion over ten years. That is roughly how much Medicare spends in a single day. CBO estimates ZERO savings from Subtitle F in the House bill that deals with Medicaid program integrity.
10. OBAMA: “This reform will charge insurance companies a fee for their most expensive policies, which will encourage them to provide greater value for the money – an idea which has the support of Democratic and Republican experts. And according to these same experts, this modest change could help hold down the cost of health care for all of us in the long-run.”
THE FACTS: These “fees” are nothing more than taxes hidden behind a thin veil of “fairness” rhetoric. They would actually fall on ordinary Americans, not insurance executives or stockholders. When you buy something that is subject to a sales tax who pays the tax – you or the vendor? Just look at the line “sales tax” on your bill. And if you tax insurance companies the cost is passed through in the same way.
Czar Has Plans To Reshape America Starting
Obama's regulatory chief pushes new 'bill of rights'
Cass Sunstein part of effort to change interpretation of Constitution by 2020
By Aaron Klein
A government that is constitutionally required to offer each citizen a "useful" job in the farms or industries of the nation.
A country whose leadership intercedes to ensure every farmer can sell his product for a good return.
A nation that has the power to act against "unfair competition" and monopolies in business.
This is not a description of Cuba, communist China or the old USSR. It's the vision of the future of the U.S, as mandated by a radical new "bill of rights" drawn up and pushed by President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein. Until now, Sunstein's proposal has received little scrutiny.
In 2004, Sunstein penned a book, "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR'S Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever," in which he advanced the radical notion that welfare rights, including some controversial inceptions, be granted by the state. His inspiration for a new bill of rights came from President Roosevelt's 1944 proposal of a different, new set of bill of rights.
WND has learned that in April 2005, Sunstein opened up a conference at Yale Law School entitled "The Constitution in 2020," which sought to change the nature and interpretation of the Constitution by that year.
Sunstein has been a main participant in the movement, which openly seeks to create a "progressive" consensus as to what the U.S. Constitution should provide for by the year 2020. It also suggests strategy for how liberal lawyers and judges might bring such a constitutional regime into being.
Just before his appearance at the conference, Sunstein wrote a blog entry in which he explained he "will be urging that it is important to resist, on democratic grounds, the idea that the document should be interpreted to reflect the view of the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party."
In his book, Sunstein laid out what he wants to become the new bill of rights, which he calls the Second Bill of Rights:
Among his mandates are:
• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.
On one page in his book, Sunstein claims he is "not seriously arguing" his bill of rights be "encompassed by anything in the Constitution," but on the next page he states that "if the nation becomes committed to certain rights, they may migrate into the Constitution itself."
Later in the book, Sunstein argues that "at a minimum, the second bill should be seen as part and parcel of America's constitutive commitments."
Cass Sunstein part of effort to change interpretation of Constitution by 2020
By Aaron Klein
A government that is constitutionally required to offer each citizen a "useful" job in the farms or industries of the nation.
A country whose leadership intercedes to ensure every farmer can sell his product for a good return.
A nation that has the power to act against "unfair competition" and monopolies in business.
This is not a description of Cuba, communist China or the old USSR. It's the vision of the future of the U.S, as mandated by a radical new "bill of rights" drawn up and pushed by President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein. Until now, Sunstein's proposal has received little scrutiny.
In 2004, Sunstein penned a book, "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR'S Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever," in which he advanced the radical notion that welfare rights, including some controversial inceptions, be granted by the state. His inspiration for a new bill of rights came from President Roosevelt's 1944 proposal of a different, new set of bill of rights.
WND has learned that in April 2005, Sunstein opened up a conference at Yale Law School entitled "The Constitution in 2020," which sought to change the nature and interpretation of the Constitution by that year.
Sunstein has been a main participant in the movement, which openly seeks to create a "progressive" consensus as to what the U.S. Constitution should provide for by the year 2020. It also suggests strategy for how liberal lawyers and judges might bring such a constitutional regime into being.
Just before his appearance at the conference, Sunstein wrote a blog entry in which he explained he "will be urging that it is important to resist, on democratic grounds, the idea that the document should be interpreted to reflect the view of the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party."
In his book, Sunstein laid out what he wants to become the new bill of rights, which he calls the Second Bill of Rights:
Among his mandates are:
• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.
On one page in his book, Sunstein claims he is "not seriously arguing" his bill of rights be "encompassed by anything in the Constitution," but on the next page he states that "if the nation becomes committed to certain rights, they may migrate into the Constitution itself."
Later in the book, Sunstein argues that "at a minimum, the second bill should be seen as part and parcel of America's constitutive commitments."
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