China’s next manned mission is now scheduled for launch tomorrow, Tuesday, June 11.
The spacecraft will travel in the space for 15 days and go through two docking tests with the orbiting space lab module Tiangong-1, one automatic and the other manual.
The whistleblower who leaked the NSA surveillance program to the press has gone public and is talking. Key quote:
Q: Does your family know you are planning this?
A: “No. My family does not know what is happening … My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner. Anyone I have a relationship with …
I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. I am not going to be able to communicate with them. They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.” [emphasis mine]
It tells us how far the United States has fallen if this man fears our government so much he thinks that government will go after his family.
Read the whole interview. It is quite horrifying, especially now that we know there are federal agents willing to use their power to target specific people solely because of their politics.
The National Security Agency can secretly access user data provided by as many as fifty American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers.
The furor this week over this NSA snoop scandal is fascinating to me. The snooping really isn’t news, as it has been known for years that the NSA delves into these kinds of records in its effort to identify terrorist activity.
So, why the sudden furor and outrage? Up until a few weeks ago, most Americans assumed the federal government restricted this kind of snooping to foreign sources and to specifically hunting for terrorists. Now, however, after the IRS scandal, the public realizes that this government, under Obama at least, is quite willing to abuse its power for partisan political reasons. Under Obama, the IRS was used to target innocent Americans, merely because they disagreed with Obama. The public now realizes that it is also likely that this administration will abuse its access to the private information gathered by NSA, and that sends chills up people’s spines.
Thus, the furor. This kind of snooping is suddenly perceived as a real threat to Americans.
The new freedom: A Texas high school cut off the mike of a valedictorian during his speech when he deviated from his approved speech and began to talk about the Constitution.
The school absolutely has the right in this context to cut off his microphone. I just find it a terrible approach to teaching.
“The IRS scandal is much worse than anyone realizes.”
How did I know this was a coordinated attack on conservative critics and donors? Because just in my small inner circle of friends, virtually every businessman that I met was getting hit with IRS audit notices only weeks after writing checks to the GOP and Mitt Romney. Strange coincidence, huh?
In one case, a friend of mine who is a hedge fund CEO attended the first major Wall Street fundraiser for Mitt Romney. Only a select few Wall Street big shots attended. After they went home, almost every one of them in the room that wrote a check to Romney later reported receiving IRS audit notices.
In another case, a friend of mine wrote a big check to Romney. He called me to report his suspicions when only weeks later he received an IRS notice. In another case, my next-door neighbor (who is a big GOP donor) reported being under vicious IRS attack. In another case, my accountant was suddenly audited only months after my first IRS attack. Even my publicist received an IRS audit notice.
The author of this article — a well known conservative critic of Obama — was himself audited twice, and exonerated twice. The second audit notice came five days after he had won in court the first time.
The KGB comes to America: A senator asks Attorney General Holder if the Obama administration has spied on Congress with its access to Verizon phone records and Holder refuses to answer.
Video below the fold.
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Despite the failure of any climate model to predict the climate, the Obama administration is increasing the cost and strictness of regulation because of what it sees as the “social cost of carbon dioxide.”
[E]ssentially, the government is now incorporating newer climate models that capture the future damage from sea-level rise more explicitly. Those models also project that agriculture will suffer more heavily in a hotter world. So, in its central estimate, the federal government now assumes a ton of carbon-dioxide emitted in 2013 does roughly $36 in damage, rather than its previous estimate of $22, with the value rising each year.
Meanwhile, new data also suggests increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might actually be beneficial, not damaging.
Shouldn’t the EPA and the Obama administration get their heads out of the sand?
Two IRS employees in Cincinnati have told congressional investigators that officials in Washington directed and established the policy of harassing conservative groups that began in 2010.
I especially like this quote:
Hofacre said she was outraged last month when IRS higher-ups, including Lois Lerner, then the head of the IRS tax-exempt division, blamed the problem on employees in Cincinnati. “I was furious,” Ms. Hofacre told interviewers. “It looked like Lois Lerner was putting it on us.”
Yup, that is exactly what Lerner was doing — looking for a fall guy.
Two more IRS agents have been put on leave.
Both are charged with accepting free food and other items inappropriately. One is also implicated in the IRS harassment scandal and is the deputy to Sarah Hall Ingram, who now runs the IRS Obamacare office and was in charge of the enforcement division when it was implementing the harassment policy.
The EPA has acknowledged that it illegally released personal information of farmers to several leftwing environmental organizations.
Mistakes do happen, but like the IRS scandal, this mistake was all one way, helpful to the left and harmful to their opponents. And like the IRS scandal, this one way harm suggests this was not a mistake, but quite intentional.
The new freedom: An eleven-year-old in Maryland was suspended from school for merely talking about guns.
Hmm: A liberal campaign finance reform activist, who had called for the targeting of conservative organizations, had meetings with Obama about the time the IRS harassment began.
