Imho....
"IRS criticized for plan to pay $70m in bonuses; Money is part of contract with employee union" by Stephen Ohlemacher | Associated Press, June 20, 2013
WASHINGTON — Already reeling from a pair of scandals, the Internal Revenue Service is drawing new criticism over plans to hand out millions of dollars in employee bonuses.
The Obama administration has ordered agencies to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts, but the IRS says it is merely following legal obligations under a union contract.
Oh, I see. Cops, teachers, firefighters, autoworkers, all of those can be opened up, but when it comes to fascist federalis.... sigh.
The agency is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses, said Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over the IRS.
And yet you are getting austerity, taxpayers. Un-f***ing-believable.
Grassley said his office has learned that the IRS was to execute an agreement with the employees’ union Wednesday to pay the bonuses. Grassley said the bonuses should be canceled under an April directive from the White House budget office.
The directive was written by Danny Werfel, a former budget official who has since been appointed acting IRS commissioner.
“The IRS always claims to be short on resources,” Grassley said. “But it appears to have $70 million for union bonuses. And it appears to be making an extra effort to give the bonuses despite opportunities to renegotiate with the union and federal instruction to cease discretionary bonuses during sequestration.”
On Wednesday, the IRS said it was still negotiating with the union over the matter....
The National Treasury Employees Union says the bonuses are legally required as part of the collective bargaining agreement....
Yeah, their are labor contracts, and then there are labor contracts.
The IRS has been under fire since last month, when IRS officials acknowledged that agents had improperly targeted conservative groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections. A few weeks later, the agency’s inspector general issued a report documenting lavish employee conferences during the same time period.
And those have washed right down the old memory hole.
Three congressional committees and the Justice Department are investigating the targeting of conservative groups. The FBI has about 12 agents in Washington working on the case, as well as others around the country, FBI Director Robert Mueller told a congressional hearing Wednesday.
Oh, the FBI is investigating. That makes me feel a whole pile better.
Also, key Republicans in Congress are promising more scrutiny of the agency’s budget, especially as it ramps up to play a major role in implementing the new health care law.
Yeah, this all ought to make you feel better about them getting your medical information.
Much of the agency’s top leadership has been replaced since the scandals broke....
So what? Nothing changes when leadership is replaced.
It's the INSTITUTIONS that are the PROBLEM!
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said paying the bonuses “looks like a payoff to union workers at a time when we’re drowning in a sea of red ink. Given the government guidelines on sequestration, this is certainly an issue that demands further scrutiny.”
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I'm not saying this is unimportant or right; however, we are getting far afield of the law-breaking and impeachable offense of using the IRS against ones political enemies -- which the ma$$ media has done a splendid job of minimizing.
Now about that spying scandal:
"Merkel questions Obama on surveillance; But seems to confirm it helped in Germany" by Jackie Calmes | New York Times, June 20, 2013
BERLIN — Challenged by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany about US intelligence programs that monitor foreigners’ communications, President Obama said Wednesday that German terrorist threats were among those foiled by such operations — a contention that Merkel seemed to confirm.
Their exchanges, in private at the start of his state visit and later at a joint news conference, preceded Obama’s speech to some 4,500 people at the Brandenburg Gate, near where the Berlin Wall once stood and other US presidents — John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton — had paid tribute to the German-American alliance against outside threats from communism to terrorism.
“No wall can stand against the yearning of justice — the yearnings for freedom, the yearnings for peace — that burns in the human heart,” Obama said in his speech.
I yearn for him to shut up.
He used the address to propose that the United States and Russia further reduce their nuclear arsenals. Yet the anticipation of the speech at the historic site was offset by attention to the dispute over the revelations of the breadth of US surveillance programs, which include both Prism, an effort to monitor foreign communications at US Internet companies like Google, as well as a vast database of domestic phone logs. The programs monitor the communications without individualized court orders....
Merkel, who acknowledged that Germany has received “very important information” from the United States, cited the Sauerland cell as an example of such antiterrorism intelligence cooperation.
In that case, four Islamic militants were sentenced to up to 12 years in jail in 2010 for plotting terrorist attacks against US targets in Germany. They were apprehended in 2007 and confessed in 2009.
Obama, repeating defenses he has made to Americans, described how he had made sure when he took office that the intelligence programs “were examined and scrubbed.”
It's such a shame to see this president degenerate into the level of liar that was his predecessor, a one George W. Bush.
The reason he's having to defend it over there is because the NSA has stored ALL WORLDWIDE COMMUNICATIONS for DECADES. Look up a little program called ECHELON sometime.
Funny thing how people don't like being spied on, 'eh?
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The interplay between the leaders reflected a mutual respect that they have developed over recent years, despite some of their policy differences.
On some of the other issues — particularly regarding efforts to provide more aid to the Syrian insurgency, and plans for international forces to leave Afghanistan next year — the two leaders agreed, reflecting discussions they had Monday and Tuesday in Northern Ireland with other heads of state at the meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.
Related: US, Germany, Italy vow key Afghan roles
Yeah, they aren't leaving, so chalk up another lie in your newspaper.
Also see: G8 Update
Turns out the Brits surveilled that meeting.
Merkel agreed with Obama that Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, had lost legitimacy because of his government’s bloodshed and should not be part of the new government that the United States, Germany, and other European allies sought in Syria.
Then AmeriKa and Israel have lost theirs.
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Did she really question him? She agreed with him.
But hey, what is ONE MORE DECEPTIVE HEADLINE in a newspaper filled with them?
Of course, we need those spying programs that scoop up every single thing (including this blog) to protect us from the "terrorists.":
"FBI director warns against changes to NSA surveillance
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned Wednesday that dismantling the National Security Agency’s once-secret program that is keeping records of billions of domestic phone calls by Americans would slow down investigators as they seek to stop terrorist attacks.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mueller addressed a proposal to require phone companies to retain calling logs for five years — the period the NSA is keeping them — for investigators to consult, rather than allowing the government to collect and store them all. He cautioned that it would take time to subpoena the companies for numbers of interest.
“The point being that it will take an awful long time,” Mueller said....
I really don't want to respond to this kind of horse shit anymore. These lame-ass excuses they come up with for furthering tyranny is getting f***ing old.
In his testimony, Mueller provided more details about why national security officials were reluctant to take such a step. First, he said, under current law companies are not required to retain such records, and some dispose of them much sooner than five years. Second, rather than being able to instantly query the complete database to see who a suspect has been in contact with, he said, investigators would have to present legal paperwork to a half-dozen carriers and wait for them to gather and provide the records.
Yeah, who wants to be bothered with the law when the information is only a keystroke away?
Lawmakers pressed Mueller to explain what attacks, if any, had been prevented by the NSA program. Mueller referred to newly declassified information linking the program to a case in which several men in San Diego were discovered to have sent about $8,500 to Al Shabab, a terrorist group in Somalia.
Related: "Al-CIA-Duh" School in Somalia
Specifically, he said, the NSA identified a terrorist-linked phone number in East Africa and decided to run the number against the domestic calls database, discovering that the suspect number had been in contact with a telephone number in San Diego. Investigators then obtained an individual warrant to start monitoring that line.
“That is one case where you have 215 standing by itself,” he said, referring to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the statute that a secret court ruling has said permits the vast collection of calling logs.
He mentions one case when the NSA puke told us there were 50 plots foiled.
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Also see: Government Snow Job?
I think so now as the coverage recedes.
"Snowden seeking asylum in Iceland" by Malin Rising | Associated Press, June 20, 2013
STOCKHOLM — In an interview published shortly after he outed himself as the source behind reports on the US spy agency’s online surveillance programs, Snowden floated the idea of heading to Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. He told the Guardian newspaper that he was inclined to seek asylum in a country that shared his values — and “the nation that most encompasses this is Iceland.”
Snowden, who used to live in Hawaii, initially fled to Hong Kong and is now in hiding.
It is not clear whether Iceland could protect a leaker like Snowden from US demands for his return.
Iceland has a longstanding extradition treaty with the United States, though it has never been used to deport a US citizen.
Instead, the small island nation has a tradition of providing a haven for the outspoken and the outcast, and has previously welcomed eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer and WikiLeaks secret-spiller Julian Assange.
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Snowden is being represented by Wikileaks now? Then this is a psyop snow job because Wikileaks is nothing more than Israeli communication spying made public for blackmail and extortion purposes, and a potential dragnet for whistleblowers and leakers.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"NSA leak details citizen records; Can be retained in some cases" by Richard Lardner | Associated Press, June 21, 2013
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency can keep copies of intercepted communications from or about US citizens if the material contains significant intelligence or evidence of crimes, according to exemptions in NSA’s top secret rules published Thursday.
I always thought they did. This government doesn't throw anything away, despite what their mouthpiece is telling you. Of course, you are free to believe them.
The top secret documents were published by The Guardian in the latest leak of classified US materials.
The documents describe how the NSA must first build a case in order to target a foreigner for phone or Internet surveillance.
Uh-huh. That's why they scooped up all communications for the last seven years at least, but whatever. Just belieeeeeeeve!
They also describe how the agency is to make sure the person is outside the United States — and not an American.
But if the target is communicating with an American, the record of contact can be kept indefinitely.
I always thought it was.
Administration officials have said material the NSA inadvertently gathers on Americans is destroyed.
Yeah, right. They just change the name of the program and store the information there.
The NSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Intelligence officials have said the surveillance of intercepted communications has helped thwart at least 50 plots in 20 countries worldwide, including 10 to 12 plots against the United States.
All with intelligence agency instigators and interlocutors I'm sure.
But the numbers have been questioned by many in Congress, as lawmakers grapple with how to assure Americans that their privacy rights are protected amid the security risks they face.
I'm tired of the tyranny justified by lies. Just damn tired of it.
Obama administration officials are considering whether they should modify the NSA’s routine collection of data on most telephone calls made in the United States, the most controversial aspect of the programs.
One proposal would require the phone companies to store the call data for five years and make it available to government investigators. FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III, said Wednesday that such a change would slow investigators as they seek to stop terrorist attacks.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a federal panel that is reviewing the NSA programs, said it would sponsor a public discussion next month on the privacy issues raised by the surveillance programs.
In a separate development Thursday, a government watchdog said the government contractor that performed a background investigation of the man who says he disclosed two NSA surveillance programs is himself under investigation.
Patrick McFarland, the inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management, said during a Senate hearing that the contractor USIS is being investigated and that the company performed a background investigation of Edward Snowden.
McFarland also told lawmakers that there may have been problems with the way the background check of Snowden was done, but McFarland and one of his assistants declined to say after the hearing what triggered the decision to investigate USIS and whether it involved the company’s check of Snowden.
Translation: they have found a scapegoat and agenda-advancing opportunity at the same time! Yup, gotta tighten up background checks meaning more intelligence collection of data and more databanks to be sifted for security. What a great system of propaganda where you frame an issue to advance interests.
‘‘To answer that question would require me to talk about an ongoing investigation. That’s against our policy,’’ Michelle Schmitz, assistant inspector general for investigations, told reporters after the hearing. ‘‘We are not going to make any comment at all on the investigation of USIS.’’
USIS, based in Falls Church, Va., did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said she and her staff have been told that the inquiry is a criminal investigation related ‘‘to USIS’s systemic failure to adequately conduct investigations under its contract’’ with the Office of Personnel Management.
McCaskill said that USIS conducted a background investigation in 2011 for Snowden, who worked for government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden says he is behind the disclosures about the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records and Internet data from US Internet companies.
‘‘We are limited in what we can say about this investigation because it is an ongoing criminal matter,’’ McCaskill said. ‘‘But it is a reminder that background investigations can have real consequences for our national security.’’
And CUI BONO?
A background investigation is required for federal employees and contractors seeking a security clearance that gives them access to classified information.
Of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access ‘‘confidential and secret’’ government information, 1.1 million, or 21 percent, work for outside contractors, according to a January report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: NSA Scandal a Mess For McConnell
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It's a blizzard of a snow job at this point.
And just to show you how valuable all the self-created, scripted, and staged tyranny is we get this absolute laugher:
"New York pair accused of trying to build x-ray weapon; The two planned to use device to sicken enemies of Israel, authorities say" by Michael Virtanen | Associated Press, June 20, 2013
ALBANY, N.Y. — Federal authorities accused two upstate New York men Wednesday of assembling a portable X-ray weapon that they intended to use to secretly sicken opponents of Israel.
The indictment charged Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, of Galway, and Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, with conspiracy to provide support to terrorists with the weapon.
Investigators said Crawford approached Jewish organizations last year looking for funding and people to help him with technology that could be used to surreptitiously deliver damaging and even lethal doses of radiation against those he considered enemies of Israel.
He and Feight assembled the mobile device, which was to be controlled remotely, but it was inoperable and nobody was hurt, authorities said.
Oh, the hallmark of psyop prop.
‘‘Crawford has specifically identified Muslims and several other individuals/groups as targets,’’ investigator Geoffrey Kent said in a court affidavit.
This is such a wonderful piece of propaganda. It shows this Zionist-controlled government is nothing of the sort, right?
According to the indictment, Crawford also traveled to North Carolina in October to solicit money for the weapon from a ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan, who informed the FBI. Crawford claimed to be a member....
Well, that makes sense since it is the FBI that staffs the KKK. I mean, this has reach the point of absurdity, folks. I read that this morning and just started laughing. The KKK guy called the FBI! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!
‘‘This case demonstrates how we must remain vigilant to detect and stop potential terrorists, who so often harbor hatred toward people they deem undesirable,’’ US Attorney Richard Hartunian said in a statement.
The AGENDA--PUSHING PROPAGANDA doesn't get any better than this!
The damaging effects of the radiation would have appeared only days later, authorities said.
You know, like the radiation spew from Fukushima or the corexit contamination in the Gulf.
The investigation by the FBI in Albany and police agencies began in April 2012 after authorities received information that Crawford had approached the Jewish organizations.
The KKK guy went to the Je... ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!
Crawford, an industrial mechanic for General Electric in Schenectady, knew Feight, an outside GE contractor with mechanical and engineering skills, through work, authorities said. Feight designed, built, and tested the remote control, which they planned to use to operate an industrial X-ray system mounted on a truck.
On, no, these are smart guys who worked for a military contractor?
STINK!
According to the indictment, the investigators had a confidential undercover source in place within weeks after learning of Crawford’s attempts to solicit money and later an undercover investigator introduced by the source.
Oh, no, it is ANOTHER PATSY PLOT SET-UP!!
They recorded meetings and conversations, and in December investigators got court authorization to tap Crawford’s phones, the indictment said.
Yup, all that spying was necessary, yup.
Last June, the undercover investigator brought Crawford X-ray tubes to examine for possible use in the weapon, followed by their technical specifications a month later.
Oh, the FBI INSTIGATOR PROVIDED the MATERIAL AGAIN, 'eh?
Yup, this is what YOUR TAX DOLLARS are being spent on in this AGE of AUSTERITY!
Crawford brought Feight to a November meeting in an Albany coffee shop with undercover investigators, and both said they were committed to building the device and named the group ‘‘the guild,’’ the indictment said.
Investigators gave Feight $1,000 to build the control device and showed the men pictures of industrial X-ray machines they said they could obtain.
They planned to provide him access to an actual X-ray system to assemble with the remote control on Tuesday.
According to court documents, the sealed indictment was filed the same day and both men were arrested.
GE spokesman Shaun Wiggins said they were informed Tuesday of Crawford’s arrest and he has been suspended from his job.
They have no information that any employees’ safety was compromised or the act he’s accused of occurred there.
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NEXT DAY UPDATE:
I'm not surprised that ludicrous piece of laughable propaganda was a one-day wonder.
Someone else had the same reaction I did when I read it.
Nothing on Benghazi-gate, nothing on AP-gate -- and yet I have at least a handful of Islamic terrorist or war stories.
