Gowdy Goes Ballistic: If You Were Taken Aback by Obama’s ‘Smidgen of Corruption’ Claim, Wait Until You Hear Trey Gowdy

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Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Thursday blasted President Barack Obama’s recent claim that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” involved in the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups.

“The president says there’s not a ‘smidgen’ of criminality or corruption,” Gowdy said during a hearing of the House Oversight And Government Reform Committee on the IRS scandal.

“Do either of you,” he said, addressing two Tea Party leaders who appeared to testify on their experiences with the IRS, “remember seeing a witness named Lois Lerner, sitting at the very table y’all are sitting at?”

Lerner, formerly in charge of the IRS’ tax-exempt organization division, ignited the scandal in May after she apologized for the agency’s handling of conservative groups. She later invoked the Fifth Amendment and resigned her post in September.

“Do you remember her invoking her Fifth Amendment privilege? The same privilege that she targeted some of your groups for trying to educate people about?” Gowdy asked. “Some of your groups just want to simply educate people about the Constitution — the one she availed herself of the very second she was exposed to criminal investigation.”

“So how can the president say there’s not a ‘smidgen’ of criminality when Lois Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment? Forty-one witnesses haven’t been interviewed, including the two who are here right now!” he added. “How can he possibly draw that conclusion?”

Report: 4 in 10 Government Security Breaches Go Undetected

(Washington Free Beacon) — A new report by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) details widespread cybersecurity breaches in the federal government, despite billions in spending to secure the nation’s most sensitive information.

The report, released on Tuesday, found that approximately 40 percent of breaches go undetected, and highlighted “serious vulnerabilities in the government’s efforts to protect its own civilian computers and networks.”

“In the past few years, we have seen significant breaches in cybersecurity which could affect critical U.S. infrastructure,” the report said. “Data on the nation’s weakest dams, including those which could kill Americans if they failed, were stolen by a malicious intruder. Nuclear plants’ confidential cybersecurity plans have been left unprotected. Blueprints for the technology undergirding the New York Stock Exchange were exposed to hackers.”

Nearly every agency has been attacked, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, State, Labor, Energy, and Commerce. NASA, the EPA, the FDA, the U.S. Copyright Office, and the National Weather Service have also been hacked or had personal information stolen.

In one example, hackers breached the national Emergency Broadcast System in February 2013 to broadcast “zombie attack warnings” in several midwestern states.

“Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living,” the message said. “Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.”

“These are just hacks whose details became known to the public, often because the hackers themselves announced their exploits,” the report said. “Largely invisible to the public and policymakers are over 48,000 other cyber ‘incidents’ involving government systems which agencies detected and reported to DHS in FY 2012.”

Even worse, nearly four in 10 intrusions into major civilian agencies go undetected, according to the report.

“Weaknesses in the federal government’s own cybersecurity have put at risk the electrical grid, our financial markets, our emergency response systems, and our citizens’ personal information,” Coburn, ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “While politicians like to propose complex new regulations, massive new programs, and billions in new spending to improve cybersecurity, there are very basic—and critically important—precautions that could protect our infrastructure and our citizens’ private information that we simply aren’t doing.”

The report places much of the blame on basic “lapses by the federal government,” including failures to address routine security, such as changing passwords and installing anti-virus software.

Based on more than 40 audits by agency watchdogs, the report takes a closer look at the worst offenders, including the departments of Homeland Security, Energy, Education, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the IRS.

Each year the Government Accountability Office (GAO) identifies roughly 100 cybersecurity weaknesses within the IRS, whose computers “hold more sensitive data on more Americans than those of perhaps any other federal component.”

IRS computers had over 7,000 “potential vulnerabilities” as of March 2012, due to the failure to install “critical” security software, a problem the agency said would be fixed within 72 hours. Instead, it took an average of 55 days to install the patches.

Vulnerabilities at the agency leave vast amounts of personal information at risk, since the IRS collects Americans’ “credit card transactions, eBay activities, Facebook posts, and other online behavior,” according to the report.

DHS, which was put in charge of government cybersecurity in July 2010, also has hundreds of security flaws, including “failures to update basic software like Microsoft applications, Adobe Acrobat, and Java, the sort of basic security measure just about any American with a computer has performed.”

Only 72 percent of DHS Internet traffic passes through Trusted Internet Connections (TICs), and the agency has failed to install security patches on servers that contain intelligence from the U.S. Secret Service.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which contains volumes of information on the nation’s nuclear facilities, “regularly experiences unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information,” according to the report.

The agency has “no official process for reporting” breaches, cannot keep track of how many laptops it has, and kept information on its own cybersecurity programs, and its commissioner’s “passport photo, credit card image, home address, and phone number,” on an unsecure shared drive.

The Department of Education is also a concern since it manages $948 billion in student loans made to more than 30 million borrowers. The agency’s computers contain “volumes of information on those borrowers,” including loan applications, credit checks, and repayment records.

The department’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) office reported 819 compromised accounts in 2011 and 2012, and the agency only reviewed 17 percent of those accounts to determine if malicious activity occurred.

The report notes that federal efforts have failed to improve the government’s cybersecurity. The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 requires agencies to implement security safeguards, and the government has spent $65 billion on IT security since 2006, though breaches remain widespread.

“More than a decade ago, Congress passed a law making the White House responsible for securing agency systems,” Coburn said. “It’s still not happening.”

“They need to step up to the job, and Congress needs to hold the White House and its agencies accountable,” he said.

[H/T The Washington Free Beacon]

Obama Vows to Help Democrats in 2014 in Third Day of Talks

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama spent part of a third straight day on Wednesday talking to congressional Democrats about an agenda for the year that party leaders hope will help them make gains or limit losses in November elections.

Obama trooped over to the Washington Nationals baseball stadium for a private session with Senate Democrats in a meeting room in a section of the stadium behind home plate. Former President Bill Clinton also addressed the group.

An atmosphere of worry hangs over Democrats as they gird for congressional elections in November in which they will attempt to hang on to control of the Senate and make gains in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Mid-term elections like this year’s often bring bad results for the party that holds the White House. Republicans are hoping to snatch control of the Senate from Democrats, which would further stymie Obama during his final years in office.

Optimism that 2014 could be a big year for Democrats, after a 16-day government shutdown was blamed on Republicans, has been tempered by the fallout over the botched rollout of Obama’s signature healthcare law in October.

Obama is attempting to keep Democrats united around an agenda directed at helping the middle class and reducing income inequality, issues that were at the heart of his State of the Union address last week.

A source in the room said Obama kicked off the meeting by saying he recognizes that the stakes are high in the upcoming elections.

“He made clear that his agenda, which is focused on expanding opportunity for all, is more likely to advance when the majority of senators support it. So, the president vowed to do what he can to support Democratic candidates in the mid-term elections,” the source said.

Some of Obama’s key policy objectives for the year are to push for Congress to raise the minimum wage for low-income workers from $7.25 to $10.10, work for equal pay for women, take steps to strengthen U.S. manufacturing and improve education and job training.

“The president looks forward to continue working closely with Democrats in Congress to ensure that every American who works hard and plays by the rules has the opportunity to get ahead,” the White House said.

It was the third straight day that Obama talked election issues with Democrats. On Monday he discussed the 2014 elections with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and on Tuesday he talked with House Democrats.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama will be “doing everything he can to assist Democrats” in 2014.

“He’s the head of his party. Of course it’s on his mind,” Carney said. “But it is far from the only thing on his mind.”

Democratic Representative Henry Waxman of California was at the Tuesday meeting at the White House and told Reuters: “It was a good meeting.”

“Of course, people got up and asked questions that are tough so they can go home and say, ‘I said to the president,'” Waxman said with a laugh. “But he came right back at them.”

Asked about the relationship between Democrats and Obama, given that some Democrats in Republican-leaning districts may not want the president to appear with them, Waxman said:

“I think the relationship is very good. Whether they want him in their district or not is each candidate’s decision.

“But they appreciate the fact that he is going to go out there and raise the money for these campaigns. It is essential. He has the bully pulpit. He will articulate the case to the American people.”

[H/T Reuters]

Government Round Up List Revealed: FEMA Camp Conspiracy Confirmed!

Mark Dice shares with us information that is now confirming the ‘theories’ of those who were once considered ‘conspiracy theorists’ in his latest video. After Supreme Court Justice Scalia recently ‘dropped the bomb’ about the existence and FUTURE USE of internment camps here in America, there should BE NO DOUBT about these camps and the uses for them. Are they stocked with guillotines and gas chambers? Only time will tell now…

Will they be used to ’round up’ law abiding American citizens who won’t go along with a ‘New World Order’ and give up their guns and 2nd Amendment rights? We’re quite certain that another Civil War will occur here in America before it gets to that point…

Mark Dice is a media analyst, political activist, and author who, in an entertaining and educational way, gets people to question our celebrity obsessed culture, and the role the mainstream media and elite secret societies play in shaping our lives.  Dice’s YouTube channel has received tens of millions of views and his viral videos have been mentioned on ABC’s The View, the Fox News Channel, CNN, the Drudge Report, TMZ, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and other mainstream media outlets around the world.

[H/T YouTube]

Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, And This Guy Proves It!

The interests of full disclosure require me to acknowledge that I have never liked Bill O’Reilly (BOR).

This said, I will nevertheless comment, not on his interview of Barack Obama Sunday night, but rather on a critique of his work offered by a Marc Ambinder, who was sent careening off the walls by BOR’s “ridiculous” interview of Obama. Fair enough; let’s take a look at what Ambinder had to say.

After the obligatory liberal attack on Fox News and a completely incongruent, but equally obligatory swipe at Sean Hannity, Ambinder attempted to establish that he was disappointed because BOR’s questions were not sufficiently tough.  He smugly babbles about “the real world,” betraying the liberals’ insistence that the world is actually liberal and conservatism is an aberration.

When BOR asked Obama when he knew the Obamacare website would fail–something that public record shows he knew months before and was increasingly warned of as the opening date grew closer–Ambinder recoiled in righteous indignation.  In doing so, he either feigns ignorance of the possibility that Obama wanted Obamacare to fail so that he could stampede Americans into a single payer system, or shows that he has not actually given the question much thought. Either way, that alone disqualified him as an honest judge of BOR’s work. Coming to the prevaricating Obama’s defense over his inability to coherently answer the question, he pats Barack on the head and asserts that the question was so ridiculous as to be unanswerable. Clearly, he believes everything his president says.

Having exhausted the small bit of grownup criticism he could muster, Ambinder then fell back on the liberals’ favorite defense of  “Nuts and sluts.” If their conservative target is a woman, she is called a “slut” (Sarah Palin); if a male conservative is the target, he is called a “nut.” Ambinder’s showed us this with this line: “But instead, O’Reilly entered the imaginary world of conspiracies and cover-ups and let the president off easy.”

He then addressed BOR’s questioning of Obama over the Benghazi murders. Apparently satisfied that Obama’s Administration had told the truth about how he let four Americans die to prove there was no al Qaeda, Ambinder insists “investigation after investigation” has apparently cleared Obama of guilt in the matter, and Americans have no interest in getting to the truth behind Obama’ and Hillary Clinton’s lies about Benghazi.

Ambinder offers a “better” question, one he thinks is on the mind and lips of all Americans: “Did arms provided to Libyans end up in Syria?” (and you thought you were “on top” of the news.)

Not content to have quit while he could be seen at least as just a wrongheaded liberal cheerleader, Ambinder plunges into a pit that even willfully blind liberals should know enough to tiptoe around.

He insists there is no scandal in Obama’s “Nixonian” use of the IRS to punish conservatives for attempting to exercise our rights to assemble and peacefully demand Constitutional government. This liberal sycophant actually addressed the matter by putting the word “scandal” in quotes. Don’t you love it when liberals try to talk like big boys and girls?

Ambinder suggested that instead of an honest question designed to elicit an honest answer from a dishonest president, BOR should have thrown him a softball set-up like this: “… ask him whether he endorsed the tougher enforcement because of imbalances created by the Citizens United campaign finance decision.”

Liberalism is indeed a mental disorder, and this guy proves it.

[H/T Western Journalism: Dr. Kevin “Coach” Collins]

Obama’s ‘Action’ on Retirement Accounts Fails to Anger or Impress

(PJ Media) — WASHINGTON – President Obama wasted little time implementing one of the major initiatives he proposed during his State of the Union address – a retirement savings plan aimed at workers who don’t qualify for pension benefits.

The president sidestepped Congress to sign an executive order creating myRA, which permits workers to have money deducted tax-free from their paychecks and invested in bonds. The accumulated funds will then be available to the worker when he or she retires.

“It’s a new savings bond that encourages folks to build a nest egg,” Obama said in the State of the Union. “MyRA guarantees a decent return with no risk of losing what you put in.”

Republicans have had practically nothing to say about the initiative even though it was executed via executive order, a process that GOP lawmakers maintain Obama uses to excess in general defiance of the Constitution. But the new program has failed to draw objections from lawmakers.

Even without the Republican denouncement, myRA has attracted only tepid enthusiasm from organizations that might normally be expected to hail a new benefit for future retirees.

A. Barry Rand, the chief executive officer of AARP, said the creation of starter retirement accounts like myRA “could help encourage more private retirement savings for those without employer plans.” But he further noted the program could prove even more effective if workers were provided with more options and enhanced investor protections.

“It’s not what I would describe as an earth-shattering move,” said Brian Graff, executive director and chief executive officer of the American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries. “It’s going to help some people without a plan save for retirement.”

But that in itself covers a lot of territory. Most American workers don’t have a pension benefit related to their jobs. Social Security was intended to supplement retirement income and, despite advances, the monthly check doesn’t generally meet a retiree’s needs.

Obama in the past voiced support for automatic employee enrollment in employer-run Individual Retirement Accounts – IRAs – but opted instead for the voluntary plan. The administration has long sought to increase savings, citing a number of statistics establishing that American workers aren’t properly prepared for retirement.

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found that 53 percent of households are at risk of not having enough invested money to maintain their living standards in retirement. The accounting firm of Ernst & Young maintains 59 percent of new middle-class retirees will outlive their savings. While 68 percent of U.S. workers have access to some retirement benefits, only 54 percent participate in those available plans.

Obama said in remarks delivered at the United States Steel Corp.’s Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, Pa., during a signing ceremony on Wednesday, that “for those of you who don’t have a 401(k) on the job, don’t have a pension on the job, don’t have a mechanism to start saving — especially younger workers — you can get started now. And in an emergency, you can withdraw contributions without paying a penalty. So it’s a pretty good deal. And what I’m hoping is that working Americans will take a look, because I want more people to have the chance to save for retirement through their hard work. And this is just one step that we can take to help more people do that.’”

[H/T PJ Media]

Teen Fights Back in a Big Way After Atheists Force Teacher to Remove Christian Poster From Her Classroom

A Texas student is standing up and helping his peers publicly show their faith after one of his teachers was recently forced to remove a Christian poster that was hanging in her classroom.

Officials at Rusk Independent School District asked the teacher to remove the poster after receiving a complaint from The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a church-state separatist group.

A student who was reportedly offended by its presence sent a picture of the poster, which featured a cross and a message about “the power of God,” to the atheist group, sparking a complaint and a successful effort by school officials to have it removed.

But not everyone agreed with the decision to take it down.

Cameron Franks, a senior at Rusk High School in Rusk, Texas, has spoken out against the poster’s removal, deciding to stand for his Christian beliefs by creating a faith-affirming T-shirt and marketing it to his local community, KTRE-TV reported.

“We’ve walked our halls for four years and we’ve been persecuted and called hypocrites and everybody that’s a Christian, I’m sure they’ve had that time in their life when they’ve been persecuted and I knew it was time to take a stand,” Franks told the outlet.

At first, he had hesitations about responding, but he inevitably decided that creating the T-shirt was the right step to help encourage his fellow Christians to stand up for their beliefs.

“I didn’t think this was such a good idea at first but then I was like you know what I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of it,” he said. “I’m tired of hiding in the corner and so I was like I’m going to do it and I’m going to see how the reactions are and if they’re negative so-be it and if they’re positive so-be it.”

The shirts, which read, “Let GOD rule your world if you want GOD to ROCK your world,” are on sale for $5 and are already a huge hit. People have been ordering them locally and, as KTRE-TV reported, there has been more than 2,000 orders from across the country.

And more than 4,100 people have “liked”Franks’ Facebook page advertising the effort, helping spread the word even more broadly.

Image credit: Facebook

“We are taking a stand as Christians,” reads the “about” section of the Facebook page. “We are tired of our Christian rights always being violated because someone takes offense to something religious.”

Franks is simply hoping the shirts help students stand up for their faith.

“It’s not about me. It’s about God,” Franks added. “This is for the school. This is the Lord’s will and this is what needed to be done a long time ago.”

KTRE.com | Lufkin and Nacogdoches, Texas

[H/T TheBlaze]

College Students Sign Petition To Imprison All Registered Gun Owners in FEMA Camps!

Media analyst Mark Dice has once again documented how many young Americans are completely disconnected from reality, capturing California college students signing a fake petition to imprison all legal gun owners in concentration camps (and even to have them executed.)

Dice goes to a college campus in hopes of getting signatures to repeal the Second Amendment keep guns off the campus in keep everybody safe who just want to make sure that we support Obama Bilderberg Group and disarm the citizens.

Keep up the good work Mark Dice exposing the ignorance plaguing this country.

[H/T Mark Dice]

A Cruel Obama Hoax: “Improve Education at All Levels”

(American Thinker) — A recent AP story about Obama and education appeared in scores of American newspapers.

According to the report, “President Barack Obama is promising to improve American education from preschool to college.”

The story appears in the midst of a drumbeat for pre-K, or “quality pre-K,” as the ever-sycophantic New York Times puts it.  One problem: if K-12 is wracked by mediocrity now, why is pre-K, or anything else, suddenly going to be conducted at a high level?  That would be most unlikely.  Here’s why:

In his State of the Union last week. Obama made a laundry list of promises.  Some of them are concerned with technology and grants.  These he might be able to fulfill.

But the promise of improving education at all levels is mocked by the fact that Common Core, his signature effort in this area, is now devastating education at all levels in all states that have embraced it.

Simultaneous with the AP story, there was a new Breitbart story about Governor Huckabee backtracking on his support for Common Core.  Apparently his fans and supporters have screamed and booed at such volume that Huckabee has been forced to pay attention.  His new line is that he’s in favor of it but he isn’t.  He wants some new terminology.  He wants rebranding, as if that would change the nature of the beast.

Indeed, many states are now changing the jargon.  This is precisely what our Education Establishment has always done.  As soon as the public discovers that a new idea is a bad idea, our education experts don’t change the idea; they change the name.

Common Core was never something the public asked for.  It was schemed and dreamed by the Education Establishment.  It became a reality only because Obama had “stimulus money” that he could channel into grants (in effect, bribes) for semi-bankrupt states circa 2009.  Lots of glorious excuses and rhetoric were thrown at the country to make this hot-air balloon fly.  Many intelligent people such as Huckabee supported it.  Many people who should know better, such as the business community, supported it.  Many liberal newspapers, to no one’s surprise, supported it in their usual robotic fashion.  So for a few years there was a genuine Common Core tsunami flooding across the country.

Then individual citizens learned what was inside this thing.  They realized, for one thing, it was an exact parallel with ObamaCare.  A huge overreach by the federal government, packed with untested theories and methods, the whole thing sort of scaffolded up with popsicle sticks.

As famed educator Siegfried Engelmann explained, “Common Core is a perfect example of technical nonsense. A sensible organization would rely heavily on data about procedures used to achieve outstanding results; and they would certainly field test the results to assure that the standards resulted in fair, achievable goals? How many of these things did they do? None.”

The essential problem with Common Core is that there’s nothing new.  It’s really a repackaging of all the bad ideas that John Dewey and his progressive educators came up with in the last 80 or 90 years.  The basic idea is to teach children less because that’s considered fairer.  Johnny can’t feel superior to Jack if neither one knows very much.  Now, this approach may lead you to socialism, but it will definitely not lead you to an educated country.

So President Obama’s lofty claims in his State of the Union speech are obliterated by what is actually happening in K-12 education in most cities in America.  Charlotte Iserbyt’s famous phrase “the deliberate dumbing down of America” seems more apt than ever.

The paradox we see in education is the same as that in the economy.  The president talks about progress and success, but his political philosophy militates against success.  Success would mean that rich people would get richer in some cases, and it would mean that smart people learn a lot more in some cases.  And we can’t have those outcomes.  Indeed, they are carefully prevented.  So Obama’s rhetoric notwithstanding, his policies lead to intellectual and economic stagnation.

As Robin Eubanks asserts in Credentialed to Destroy (which may well be the most important book on education published in many years), “[w]hat is being marketed as the Common Core national standards and accompanying ed reforms is actually a planned, centrally coordinated, interrelated, complete reorganization of American education. Designed to change students from the inside-out so they will lobby for social change now. And vote for it later. These so-called ‘reforms’ eliminate practices, like the transmission curriculum, that evolved because they worked and created prosperous practices and useful, marketable knowledge and skills. And a spirit of individualism that has created great innovations. … Common Core would be a bad idea if the intentions of its planners were for the best. But they are not.”

[H/T American Thinker]

Dinesh D’Souza: Today’s U.S. Government Would Terrify Founders

Dinesh D’Souza — who made a documentary critical of Obama and has since been indicted for arranging excessive campaign contributions — says he is just one of many being penalized for criticizing Obama, and says the Founding Fathers would be terrified of what’s happening.

Dinesh D’Souza is a political commentator and author. D’Souza is a affiliated with a number of conservative organizations and publications, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and Policy Review.

D’Souza also served as a policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan and, during 2010–2012, as president of The King’s College, a small Christian school in New York City.

[H/T Western Journalism]