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Paul Merrell

Spies Among Us: How Community Outreach Programs to Muslims Blur Lines between Outreach ... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ur-lines-outreach-intelligence

surveillance state FBI community-outreach-funding intelligence-front terrorists™

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • ast May, after getting a ride to school with his dad, 18-year-old Abdullahi Yusuf absconded to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to board a flight to Turkey. There, FBI agents stopped Yusuf and later charged him with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization—he was allegedly associated with another Minnesota man believed to have gone to fight for the Islamic State in Syria. To keep other youth from following Yusuf’s path, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger recently said that the federal government would be launching a new initiative to work with Islamic community groups and promote after-school programs and job training–to address the “root causes” of extremist groups’ appeal. “This is not about gathering intelligence, it’s not about expanding surveillance or any of the things that some people want to claim it is,” Luger said. Luger’s comments spoke to the concerns of civil liberties advocates, who believe that blurring the line between engagement and intelligence gathering could end up with the monitoring of innocent individuals. If past programs in this area are any guide, those concerns are well founded.
  • Documents obtained by attorneys at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and shared with the Intercept, show that previous community outreach efforts in Minnesota–launched in 2009 in response to the threat of young Americans joining the al-Qaeda-linked militia al-Shabab, in Somalia—were, in fact, conceived to gather intelligence.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Jan 15
     
    Feed Bag, Inc. targeting Muslims in the name of battling terrorists™. Heads should roll for this but they won't. Cluestick: the root cause of Islamic "terrorism" in the U.S. has proven, over the years, to mostly be attributable to the FBI and its sting operations that walk the fine legal line of entrapment. What to do when you're showered with billions of dollars to catch terrorists in the U.S. and you can't find any? Send the money back and say "we don't need this?" Or go out and invent some terrorists by persuading young and dumb Muslims to prepare to commit an act of terrorism, then swoop in and arrest them before their "attack" happens, then advertise that you've saved the U.S. from another terrorist attack? I bet that approach would be just as effective with young and dumb white Christians too.  But no need, young and dumb white Christians never commit acts of terr .... er, ulp! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh
Gary Edwards

ObamaCare suckers needed, inquire within | RedState - 0 views

www.redstate.com/...-suckers-needed-inquire-within

ObamaCare-TAX ObamaCare-Exchanges Healthcare

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The exchanges need roughly 2.7 million healthy 18-t0-35-year-olds to sign up to be solvent.
  • The majority of that group is nonwhite and male, according to Simas’ data, and a third are located in just three states: California, Texas and Florida.
  • If too few choose to enroll because they don’t know about the law, don’t like it, or feel they don’t need insurance, the exchanges will fail. And so will the law.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • In other words, ObamaCare needs an army of young dupes to pay through the nose, in order to make this ridiculous program appear solvent while it showers other people with benefits.  
  • It’s a wonder young folks are lining up around the block to pay those 50 to 150 percent increases in their health insurance premiums.
  • he latest Government Accountability Office report says ObamaCare implementation remains months behind schedule, even though the insurance exchanges are supposed to go live in just four months.
  • Under Obamacare, insurance companies can no longer turn away people with preexisting conditions.
  • And so a crucial aspect of implementation is getting enough young, healthy people to enroll to offset the cost of insuring older, less-healthy enrollees.
  • The Congressional Budget Office expects some 7 million people to sign up when the exchanges open on Oct. 1, eventually reaching 22 million.
  •  The embarrassing degeneration of ObamaCare into a wealth transfer program that feeds off healthy people is a perfect inversion of the insurance concept.
  • Normally, the young and hearty folks would pay a low fee for health insurance, because providers would make the reasonable actuarial gamble that most of those customers would not be filing expensive claims.
  • The notion of selling “insurance” to someone with an pre-existing condition, guaranteed to make big claims, would be absurd.  
  •  Older people with higher risks pay more.
  • Instead, we’ve got another corrupt, inefficient redistribution system powered by the liquefied assets of chumps.
  • It’s starting to visibly panic over not being able to pump enough chumps to fill its gas tank.
  • And I do mean corrupt, because it’s not as if most of this money is going to doctors or medical supplies.
  •  Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York, describes the billion dollars flowing into the California health insurance exchange as tax money laundered into Democratic party-building funds:
  • The Obama administration granted a whopping $910 million to California to set up its insurance exchange. That money is not for bandages, surgery, nurses and doctors to care for the sick. Nor is it for insurance plans, though $910 million could buy generous coverage for at least 113,000 people!
  • Shockingly, the $910 million is slated for bureaucracy, including rich compensation packages for exchange employees ($360,000 a year for the executive director) and contracts for computer equipment, public relations and “outreach. “
  • Outreach is the largest expenditure and where the real monkey business occurs.
  • Amazingly, California legislators passed a law that the exchange could keep secret for a year who received the contracts and indefinitely how much they were paid. California’s open-records laws would otherwise prohibit such secrecy.
  • McCaughey describes six- and seven-figure grants to the California NAACP, the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO, and Community Health Councils, “a California organization with a long history of political activism against fracking, for-profit hospitals, state budget cuts and oil exploration.”
  • I can’t imagine why young people are reluctant to plow their money into a racket like this!
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
     
    Excellent summary of where ObamaCare sits today.  Obama has to convince millions of young, healthy "chumps" to pay massive amounts of their income into ObamaCare Exchanges if the greatest socialist redistribution plan ever conceived is to continue. "At the White House, health care implementation has become an obsession. Chief of Staff Denis McDonough spends two hours a day on Obamacare implementation, staffers said, and senior aides like Simas and Tara McGuinness, who joined the White House in April as a senior communications adviser, work on the issue nearly full-time. Hardly a week goes by without Obama finding some way to plug the effort as well. The reason: the law is increasingly unpopular. According to an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this month, 49% of Americans now believe the law is a bad idea, the highest percentage recorded, with only 37% saying it is a good thing. Many states have already opted out of key provisions to expand Medicaid. In Washington, Republicans continue to lay siege to the law; they have voted to repeal it 37 times in the U.S. House."
Paul Merrell

Hacked Emails Prove Coordination Between Clinton Campaign and Super PACs - 0 views

theintercept.com/...hillary-superpac-coordination

Auction 2016 Super-PACs Hillary Trump Podesta-emails Citizens-United

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The fact that political candidates are closely coordinating with friendly Super PACs — making a mockery of a central tenet of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington. Super PACs are only allowed to accept unlimited contributions on the condition that the money is spent independently of specific campaigns. The Federal Election Commission hasn’t reacted for a variety of reasons, including a lack of hard evidence, vague rules, and a partisan divide among the commissioners so bitter they can’t even agree to investigate obvious crimes. But newly disclosed hacked campaign documents published by WikiLeaks and a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 reveal in stark terms how Hillary Clinton’s staffers made Super PACs an integral part of her presidential campaign.
  • The emails show consistent, repeated efforts by the Clinton campaign to collaborate with Super PACs on strategy, research, attacks on political adversaries and fundraising. The cache also reveal meetings between the campaign and Priorities USA Action, and that campaign officials have helped with the group’s fundraising. The files were apparently hacked from a variety of Clinton staffers and have been posted online in recent weeks by Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0. Obama administration intelligence officials have alleged, without providing evidence, that the email hacks were conducted on behalf of the Russian government in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. elections.
  • Super PACs, known technically as “Independent Expenditure-Only Political Committees,” are a direct result of the Citizens United court decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of the decision, proclaimed that deregulating outside money would have no corrupting effect upon candidates because there would be strict firewalls between candidates and outside groups
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Correct the Record has long argued it could work directly with the Clinton campaign. When the group launched, it said it would only produce and distribute communications online, and that its work would therefore be exempt from FEC coordination rules. The Super PAC was recently the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Elections Commission by the Campaign Legal Center, which called on regulators to investigate whether Clinton’s campaign has illegally coordinated with the group. The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, has also alleged that officials working for Donald Trump have similarly blurred the line between the campaign and one of its largest Super PACs, Make America Number 1, by employing common vendors. The Campaign Legal Center argued that Correct the Record has likely made “coordinated expenditures” that could be considered in-kind contributions to the Clinton campaign — such as its spending on “opposition research, message development, surrogate training, reporter pitches, media booking, video production, ‘rapid response’ press outreach, and other ‘earned media.’” “These documents affirm what we’ve been saying all along about Correct the Record,” said Brendan Fischer, an associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “They are basically operating as an arm of the Clinton campaign.”
  • While Correct the Record has argued it is exempt from FEC rules, Clinton herself has said she does not work with Priorities USA Action. That Super PAC has spent millions of dollars on independent expenditures, including six-figure media advertising buys, to boost Clinton’s candidacy. The group has raised over $133 million through individual donations as large as $6 million. As other media outlets have reported, Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign attorney, provided a memo with guidance on how the campaign could solicit funds for Priorities USA Action. The memo notes that campaign staffers would have to use certain language when trying to raise money for the Super PAC:
  • Elias’s law firm, Perkins Coie LLP, has provided legal services to the Clinton campaign, Correct the Record and Priorities USA Action, making it a central node in the campaign infrastructure.
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