Sunday, July 26, 2009
David Smith, R.I.P.
My father-in-law David Smith died today about 1:45 in Clay County. May he rest in peace. Kenneth Stepp.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Whom do you trust?
Who do you trust on ... ?
by BarbinMD
Tue Jul 21, 2009 at 05:56:05 PM PDT
After yesterday's media-wide frenzy to report the demise of the Obama presidency, Matthew Yglesias offers a simple chart:
"Who do you trust on:
by BarbinMD
Tue Jul 21, 2009 at 05:56:05 PM PDT
After yesterday's media-wide frenzy to report the demise of the Obama presidency, Matthew Yglesias offers a simple chart:
"Who do you trust on:
Friday, July 17, 2009
Obama leads McConnell 62% to 21% national approval ratings!
Growing Voter Pessimism
by Steve Singiser
Fri Jul 17, 2009 at 08:06:03 AM PDT
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/13-7/16/2009. All adults. MoE 2% (7/06-7/09/2009 results in parentheses):
FAVORABLE UNFAVORABLE NET CHANGE
PRESIDENT OBAMA 62 (61) 35 (34) 0
PELOSI: 34 (33) 56 (57) +2
REID: 32 (31) 56 (55) 0
McCONNELL: 21 (22) 62 (61) -2
BOEHNER: 15 (16) 62 (62) -1
CONGRESSIONAL DEMS: 42 (43) 51 (50) -2
CONGRESSIONAL GOPS: 12 (12) 72 (71) -1
DEMOCRATIC PARTY: 48 (49) 46 (45) -2
REPUBLICAN PARTY: 21 (22) 73 (72) -2
by Steve Singiser
Fri Jul 17, 2009 at 08:06:03 AM PDT
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/13-7/16/2009. All adults. MoE 2% (7/06-7/09/2009 results in parentheses):
FAVORABLE UNFAVORABLE NET CHANGE
PRESIDENT OBAMA 62 (61) 35 (34) 0
PELOSI: 34 (33) 56 (57) +2
REID: 32 (31) 56 (55) 0
McCONNELL: 21 (22) 62 (61) -2
BOEHNER: 15 (16) 62 (62) -1
CONGRESSIONAL DEMS: 42 (43) 51 (50) -2
CONGRESSIONAL GOPS: 12 (12) 72 (71) -1
DEMOCRATIC PARTY: 48 (49) 46 (45) -2
REPUBLICAN PARTY: 21 (22) 73 (72) -2
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Do you want global government?
Gore: Cap-and-Trade Will Bring Global Government
Monday, July 13, 2009 4:11 PM
By: Rick Pedraza Article Font Size
Former Vice President Al Gore told a British conference on the environment that the energy tax under the so-called cap-and-trade legislation in Congress would bring about global governance.
Speaking at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, England, Gore said the United States is responding to the threat of global warming with the cap-and-trade legislation, Times Online reported.
“Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore told the conference. “[This is] very much a step in the right direction. It achieves real reductions below the 1990 base level by 2020, and that is the threshold that many have said will dramatically increase the prospects for success.”
Gore acknowledged that the bill includes a carbon tax that President Barack Obama supports and is helping to push through the Senate.
“For all of its flaws, [it] does put a price on carbon," he admitted.
Gore, whose film documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," on the claims of global warming won him praise from environmentalists, told the forum that Obama had secured billions of dollars from Congress for renewable energy work.
But, “It is the awareness itself that will drive the change,” he said. “And one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governnance and global agreements.”
Environmental awareness among young people is the great hope for the future, Gore said.
“The average age of scientists in the space center control room was 26, which means they were 18 when they heard President Kennedy say he wanted to put a man on the moon in 10 years. Neil Armstrong did it eight years and two months later.”
Gore urged political leaders and governments around the world to join the battle against climate change. He conceded, however, that the level of awareness and concern among populations has not crossed the threshold where political leaders feel that they must change.
“The only way politicians will act is if awareness rises to a level to make them feel that it’s a necessity,” he said. “We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”
This Rural Democrat opposes global government, and favors that form of government over which the Stars and Stripes fly, and which operates under the United States Constitution.
Monday, July 13, 2009 4:11 PM
By: Rick Pedraza Article Font Size
Former Vice President Al Gore told a British conference on the environment that the energy tax under the so-called cap-and-trade legislation in Congress would bring about global governance.
Speaking at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, England, Gore said the United States is responding to the threat of global warming with the cap-and-trade legislation, Times Online reported.
“Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore told the conference. “[This is] very much a step in the right direction. It achieves real reductions below the 1990 base level by 2020, and that is the threshold that many have said will dramatically increase the prospects for success.”
Gore acknowledged that the bill includes a carbon tax that President Barack Obama supports and is helping to push through the Senate.
“For all of its flaws, [it] does put a price on carbon," he admitted.
Gore, whose film documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," on the claims of global warming won him praise from environmentalists, told the forum that Obama had secured billions of dollars from Congress for renewable energy work.
But, “It is the awareness itself that will drive the change,” he said. “And one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governnance and global agreements.”
Environmental awareness among young people is the great hope for the future, Gore said.
“The average age of scientists in the space center control room was 26, which means they were 18 when they heard President Kennedy say he wanted to put a man on the moon in 10 years. Neil Armstrong did it eight years and two months later.”
Gore urged political leaders and governments around the world to join the battle against climate change. He conceded, however, that the level of awareness and concern among populations has not crossed the threshold where political leaders feel that they must change.
“The only way politicians will act is if awareness rises to a level to make them feel that it’s a necessity,” he said. “We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”
This Rural Democrat opposes global government, and favors that form of government over which the Stars and Stripes fly, and which operates under the United States Constitution.
Friday, July 10, 2009
More than G.Bush era warrantless wiretaps!
Report: Bush surveillance program was massive
11 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program.
The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.
Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.
Bush brought the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.
The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.
The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."
The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.
The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.
Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.
"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.
Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."
In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.
Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.
The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.
The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.
Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.
"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.
House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.
(This version CORRECTS that Bush brought wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006 rather than started the program in 2006.)
11 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program.
The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.
Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.
Bush brought the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.
The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.
The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."
The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.
The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.
Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.
"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.
Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."
In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.
Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.
The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.
The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.
Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.
"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.
House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.
(This version CORRECTS that Bush brought wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006 rather than started the program in 2006.)
Hal Rogers, Jim Bunning and the National Debt.
As shown above, during the time in office of Jim Bunning and Hal Rogers, both Republican Representives from Kentucky in the U.S. Congress, the National Debt has mushroomed. Kenneth Stepp is a Rural Democrat who believes in balanced budgets and in eventually paying off the national debt. Elect more Rural Democrats to the U.S.Senate and to the U.S. House. Kenneth Stepp.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
A Jim Pence salute to the signers of our Declaration of Independence!
Let's keep America Independent. Elect more Rural Democrats to the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. America was created to stop empire, not to participate in it. Neocons out! Rural Democrats in! Kenneth Stepp.
Hal Rogers, the Republicans, and the National Debt.
As the above graph shows, it is largely Hal Rogers and the Republicans that are responsible for the runaway size of our national debt and national deficit. Hal Rogers appeared in Congress in 1981. Shortly after that, during the Reagan-Bush Administration the National Debt and National Deficit set record levels--bigger than ever before every year. Finally, as a check on Republican extravagance came the Clinton Administration, when the annual National Deficit shrunk. Bill Clinton was succeeded by George W. Bush, who, with the help of the other Republicans including Hal Rogers, each year set a record in the size of the National Debt, while the annual National Deficit soared. Reign in excessive governmental waste and excessive governmental spending! Get Hal Rogers and his Republican henchmen out of Federal office. Elect more Rural Democrats to the U.S. Senate and to the U.S. House of Representatives. Kenneth Stepp.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!
I've always enjoyed Independence Day. That is a day we have celebrated with fireworks and other celebrations as long as I can remember since my childhood. I entered politics because of my concern for the Council-on-Foreign-Relations domination of the Republican Party. Every Republican Secretary of State since the 1950's has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The publications of the Council on Foreign Relations, more particular their magazine Foreign Affairs, argues for an end to American Independence, that Congress should no longer have final say on whether America goes to war--that such decision should be made by some international body such as the United Nations. As a result, we have been involved in a never-ending war--a series of undeclared wars since 1992. The Republicans don't believe in Independence for America, they believe that America should be subservient to international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and other such organizations. The United Nations has no respect for the citizens right to own or bear firearms, and they oppose it. While such international organizations are so hostile to basic human rights such as the right to bear firearms, we should maintain our independence from any such attempt to turn such organizations into a government or a taxing authority. Our forefathers sacrificed their lives to get and keep American Independence, yet the Republicans want to get us involved in wars such as the Iraq War, which have nothing to do with American security, but merely act to extend the authority of international organizations such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. It is time to affirm American Independence by replacing Senator Bunning and Representative Hal Rogers with Rural Democrats. Independence now, and Independence forever. Kenneth Stepp.
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