Search Results for: obama

And the winner is…American cluelessness.

  NEW YORK TIMES: The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials. The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official. While it has […]

THE GUARDIAN: A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet. The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10. “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, […]

  PHILLY POST: President Obama wants your favorite websites—Facebook and Google, and more —to revamp their systems so that government agents can easily plug into them via a backdoor and monitor your IMs, your DMs, your emails, and all the other communication you use on the Internet. Basically: He wants the Internet rebuilt, piece by piece, so the government can more easily spy on you. Charlie Savage outlines the proposal in today’s New York Times: The new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving […]

From last night’s White House Correspondents Association dinner. RELATED: Do you know who knows that the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is a shameful display of whoredom that makes the “average American” vomit in disgust, or, more likely, simply continue to disregard the findings of any ostensibly neutral journalistic outlet in favor of their own ideology of choice, because they have a fully solidified belief that the “mainstream media” is little more than a bunch of ball-lapping lapdogs to whoever’s in power? Everyone. Everyone knows this. Even the members of the media who attend the White House Whores Despondence Dinner […]

Intro to Mad Men retrofitted with POTUS. Very cool.

  MOTHER JONES: Glenn Beck [has]unveiled plans for a new planned community—inspired by the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged—to be built at an undisclosed location somewhere in the United States MORE THE BLAZE: What are the American Dream Labs building towards? Glenn gave a look at the big picture that everything is building towards: Independence, USA! While Independence is very much a dream at this point, the proposed city-theme park hybrid would bring several of Glenn’s seemingly disconnected projects into one place. Media, live events, small business stores, educational projects, charity, entertainment, news, information, and technology R&D – all of […]

  ROLLING STONE: The war over pot may be far from over. Legalization has set Colorado and Washington on a collision course with the Obama administration, which has shown no sign of backing down on its full-scale assault on pot growers and distributors. Although the president pledged to go easy on medical marijuana – now legal in 18 states – he has actually launched more raids on state-sanctioned pot dispensaries than George W. Bush, and has threatened to prosecute state officials who oversee medical marijuana as if they were drug lords. And while the administration has yet to issue a […]

  GLOBAL NEWS: Memorable moments? Well, before the debate was over, a Twitter hash tag was born: #horsesandbayonets. It came as Romney complained that the navy had the fewest ships since 1916, to which Obama noted there were also fewer horses and bayonets. MORE WASHINGTON POST: Wondering if the Obama “horses and bayonets” line was planned? The Obama campaign moved quickly after it was delivered to take out a promoted tweet on the hashtag #horsesandbayonets, which suggests his team may have known it was coming. MORE RELATED: Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family […]

WASHINGTON POST: “Binders Full of Women” is this week’s Big Bird. The minute Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said the phrase, social media exploded. And women’s issues, which were absent in the first debate on Oct. 3, were front and center Tuesday night as the first woman in 20 years – CNN’s Candy Crowley – moderated the town hall forum. Romney said the phrase while answering a question that first went to President Barack Obama about inequalities in the workplace and fair pay for women. Obama answered the question by focusing on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which […]

  Dear President Obama, I’m writing to tell you about the $15 my family just donated to your 2012 campaign. It was $15. That’s really all we could give. My husband Steve is currently a student at Temple University. Since starting his degree, three years ago, we’ve been living considerably below the poverty level (I keep forgetting which percent … does it matter?). But we aren’t complaining. Two healthy daughters; dusty, well-travelled backpacks in the basement; a house full of memories—a future full of hope. We’re the lucky ones. So—we’re currently “poor on money—rich in life” (as we like to […]