Obamanomics is creating a generation of dependency
It’s hard to imagine any sort of culture
of independence and solid work ethics when you have to live with your
parents until you’re 30.
Via IBD, emphasis mine:
We keep hearing the job market is “improving” or even “solid,” with 162,000 new positions created in July and unemployment falling to 7.4%, the lowest since 2008.
But one group is sitting it out. And it’s the one that most enthusiastically embraced Barack Obama in both of his presidential elections: America’s young.
Their unemployment rate is a shocking 16.1%. Increasingly, those ages 18 to 29, the so-called millennials, are being left out of the market, with tenuous or no ties to the workplace. Just 43.6% of this group have full-time jobs, according to Gallup.
So what are they doing? As a new Pew Research report shows, many are just hanging around their parents’ houses; 21.1 million young Americans live with their folks, more than ever.Over at Power Line blog, Joe Malchow crunched some not-very-pretty numbers on youth labor-force participation. Participation among 18-to-19-year-olds has declined 11.3% since Obama took office. For those ages 20 to 24, it has dropped 3.4%.
These are the biggest declines for any age cohort. And if they aren’t bad enough, teen unemployment among blacks is an unbelievable 41%.
This was a key point made during the 2012 election by Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan. But apparently Americans hadn’t learned their lesson yet. Do you think we ever will?
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/08/05/obamanomics-is-creating-a-generation-of-dependency/
Part-time jobs account for 97% of 2013 job growth
Being on vacation last week meant that I missed the jobs report for July, which turned out to be as unremarkable as most of those in the four-plus years of the so-called economic recovery. The media reports I did catch while on the cruise focused mainly on the fact that the jobs added in July missed the expectations of analysts, and not on the fact that adding only 162,000 jobs meant another extension of stagnation, as the US economy needs ~150,000 jobs added each month just to tread water, thanks to population growth. That’s not even a decent maintenance number, let alone the kind of job growth needed to put the chronically unemployed back to work.The media reports also missed another trend in job reports, one caught by a former chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and reported by McClatchy’s Kevin Hall this morning. Almost all of the job growth this year came in part-time work — and when we say “almost all,” we mean 97% of it:
The unemployment rate is measured by the separate Household Survey, and it fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 7.4 percent, its lowest level since December 2008. That’s due in part to slow growth in the labor force. The jobless rate is based on a sample of self-reporting from ordinary people across the nation, and it’s the Labor Department measure that shows a very troubling trend in hiring.
“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “That is really remarkable.”
Hall is no ordinary academic. He ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs report, from 2008 to 2012. Over the past six months, he said, the Household Survey shows 963,000 more people reporting that they were employed, and 936,000 of them reported they’re in part-time jobs.
“That is a really high number for a six-month period,” Hall said. “I’m not sure that has ever happened over six months before.”And Hall says there has to be something driving that kind of trend, and thinks he knows what it is:
“There is something going on if such a large share of the hiring is part time,” Hall said. …
Hall speculated that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, shorthanded as Obamacare, might be resulting in employers shifting workers to part-time status to avoid coming health care obligations.
“There’s been so much talk about the effects of Obamacare on part-time work,” he said. “This is such an unusual thing to see.”Forbes’ Chris Conover wrote about this trend last week, before the BLS published the July jobs report:
Denialism may be too strong a term.[1] But there seem to be a lot of people arguing that Obamacare has little or nothing to do with the rise in part-time employment. Some deny the rise is even happening, while others are content to deny that Obamacare is the culprit. Admittedly, it takes a little detective work, but if we systematically review the available empirical evidence in an even-handed fashion, the conclusion seems inescapable: Obamacare is accelerating a disturbing trend towards “a nation of part-timers.” This is not good news for America. …
Ratio of New PT Workers to New FT Workers Explodes in 2013. For the most part, an examination of metrics measured in millions (e.g., involuntary PT workers or total PT workers) masks what is really going on. A much better sense is given by comparing the changes in PT employment to the changes in FT employment. Because the monthly Current Population Survey are so volatile, it is easier to see what is going on by calculating an average monthly figure for each calendar year to get a sense of whether the number of PT or FT is rising or falling. We only have six months of data for 2013, but this method allows us to compare the average monthly count for the year to date with the average monthly count from prior years on an apples-to-apples basis. We can then calculate the ratio of new PT workers in an average month to new FT workers in an average month. Obviously this ratio will turn negative in years that either FT or PT workers have declined on average. So over the past decade, there’s only 4 other years with which to compare the 2013 experience.
What should immediately be obvious to even someone without a shred of statistical training is how deviant the 2013 experience is compared to the past. For every new FT job added to the economy, there were 4.3 PT jobs added! In most (non-negative) years, the ratio is the reverse: that is, there are typically 5 FT jobs added for every new PT job. Even in 2004—the year with the second-highest ratio during this time-frame–there were 2 FT jobs for every PT job, yielding a ratio of 0.5. Even if growth in PT vs. FT workers reverted to its historic pattern for the balance of 2013, the year’s average monthly ratio still would be four times as large as the 2nd highest ratio from 2004.The July report only confirms that trend. Only 92,000 full-time jobs were created, while 172,000 part-time jobs got filled (not net numbers). The only major influence in 2013 that differs from the preceding three years of the recovery is the impending ObamaCare mandate on employers, which the Obama administration will try to postpone for a year. The data shows that businesses have already begun to react by minimizing their risk and costs through part-time employment, thanks to the perverse incentives set up by the ACA, and that this will continue as long as the mandate exists.
Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to find ObamaCare defenders these days — at least unpaid ones. OFA tried to stage a rally in Centreville, Virginia yesterday, but only one person bothered to attend, and even the organizer took a powder after less than a half-hour on the job:
That means gatherings like today’s in Centreville — although the slow start here is probably not what OFA organizers had in mind. After a scheduling snafu over the start time, a few people showed up and left before it actually started. Just one volunteer stayed to help work the phone bank for the health law, and the event’s organizer bolted after 20 minutes — although he was bound for another Obamacare event, a house party.Another part-time worker, eh?
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/05/part-time-jobs-account-for-97-of-2013-job-growth/
The Voices of Fort Hood
There was the cry of "Allahu Akbar," a gun fired, mayhem all around, with the end result of thirteen dead and thirty wounded at an Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on November 5th, 2009. The culprit is not just any terrorist but a major in the U.S. Army, Nidal Malik Hassan. He was an officer sworn to protect, a psychiatrist sworn to help, and an American, sworn to the Constitution. American Thinker interviewed victims, their families, and someone who was a college classmate of Hassan.David Wellington in his latest book, Chimera, wrote that those serving in the military need a good officer who "learns to respect them, their hard work, their sacrifice... and he comes to love them. But he can't ever forget he's responsible for them." Hassan had none of these attributes. There were warning signs from his college days at the University of the Health Sciences in Maryland. A college classmate who knew him in 2007 said at that time Hassan had radical beliefs. "Hassan was a Muslim first, held to Sharia Law before the Constitution, believed he had a duty to fellow Muslims before Americans, and justified suicide bombings. I had an Environmental class with him where he did a presentation against the War on Terror, and in support of suicide bombings in the name of Islam. This was so completely off topic that a bunch of us complained to the professor who did nothing because of political correctness."
Was Hassan suspended or thrown out of the Army? No, he was promoted. But there were other warning signs including his contact through eighteen emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, where he referred to the U.S. as the aggressor against Muslims. The FBI dropped the ball and handed it off to the Army, which never considered his radicalization as a perceived threat, instead writing it all off as an aspect of Hassan's religious beliefs.
Political correctness has dominated developments since the shooting. The Obama Administration outrageously designated the attack as "workplace violence" instead of terrorism. Everyone interviewed agrees with Amber Gadlin, a victim: "The classification of workplace violence is the biggest slap in the face we can get as victims. Had it been classified as a terrorist attack we would be getting more benefits and pay. If we do not change the classification the shooting will be downplayed."
Prominent congressmen are working diligently to try to change this classification. American Thinker interviewed two of them, Congressman Mike McCaul (R-TX), the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and Congressman Tom Rooney (R-FLA), a former JAG officer. Congressman McCaul strongly emphasized, "Major Hassan is not the common criminal this administration would like Americans to believe. This administration has gone to great lengths to avoid recognizing this event for what it was, an act of terrorism. Secretary McHugh has made statements implying the DOJ influenced the Army's official designation as workplace violence. We are continuing to put pressure on this administration to change the official designation."
Congressman Rooney agrees and wants Americans to understand, "Rather than admitting that this was part of the terrorist's global war against us, and that it was something that should have been prevented, they paint it as a simple case of 'workplace violence' by a disgruntled employee that happened to occur at a military base. The problem with the administration's state of denial is that it has real consequences. The administration is denying the victims benefits and the Purple Heart because the Army doesn't consider the attack combat-related."
Yet, this administration is bending over backwards for Hassan. The victims are angry that every time he has asked for an extension or appeal it has been given, that it is now going on four years since the shooting. In fact, they feel he is turning the trial into a circus. He does not want to wear his uniform, has said he wants nothing to do with the Army, and his defense is in support of his people, the Taliban. Yet, he has collected according to Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) close to $300,000 in taxpayer dollars since being charged in the Fort Hood shootings. Kathy Stainaker, a victim's family member, sarcastically emphasized, "It is okay that he still receives Army pay and benefits but does not have to follow Army rules, including being allowed to wear a beard. He never had it until right before the trial started last August. He does not seem to be having a problem accepting a salary from the Army. He is constantly using delay tactics." In fact, Congressman Rooney recently sponsored a bill to suspend Hassan's pay citing, "Our bill is simple, if you're awaiting trial for a serious crime, you can't collect a salary from the American taxpayer."
The victims and their families want Americans to understand that there are faces to this incident. It is very easy to forget there were real people involved and that there is a person behind the statistic. Because of this, American Thinker asked a few to discuss that horrible day.
Shawn Manning was going on his third deployment as part of a combat mental health team. He was at the processing center when Hassan started his premeditated terrorist attack. He was shot in the chest, just above his heart, the arm and the liver. "When I was lying on the ground Hassan shot me another five times to make a total of six times. I cannot believe he was actually in my unit and was going to deploy with me. He violated the oath of any Army officer that is supposed to care for the soldiers under them. I still have bullets in my spine and thigh, have emotions of anger, irritability, and have nightmares. I hope people will go on the website to get information."
Amber Gadlin was waiting for a friend at the processing center. When she heard the words "Allahu Akbar" and the shots ringing out her first impression was that this must be a training drill. "I knew it was not a drill when I saw a laser on the chest of someone sitting across from me. As the shooting continued I dragged and pushed people out the door, but unfortunately tripped and then was shot. I did not know I was shot four times in the back until I tried to sit down in the hospital. Hassan violated the sacred belief that as brothers and sisters we are supposed to trust each other with our life. It's hard for me to trust anyone, which is a big factor as to why I got out. This violation of trust includes my commander-in-chief President Obama, who personally told me at the Fort Hood Memorial Service we would be taken care of."
Michelle Magee Harper, a civilian nurse, one of eight civilians injured, was shot in the neck, back, and both knees. "I cannot sit or stand too long. I suffer from PTSD, nightmares, night sweats, and flashbacks. I have not been back to the site. My life has become a living hell between all the doctors and not being able to work. He was supposed to protect us but now he claims he is one of them, a Taliban. He killed a bunch of innocent people for his own personal beliefs but that is not surprising if you look at the atrocities the Taliban has committed."
Kathy Stainaker's husband Rex was a nurse in the military. He worked on several soldiers while Hassan was still in his shooting spree. Rex has severe chronic PTSD, which was triggered by the shooting, and being forced to deploy to Afghanistan soon afterward. "He was not given any counseling until five days after the shooting. People should remember that Hassan was a psychiatrist who probably treated people like my husband, with PTSD. Can you believe the Army stated that the shooting at Fort Hood was not a stressful situation? I was told 'the Soldier does not have a mental disorder that developed as a result of a highly stressful event that resulted in the Soldier's release from active duty.' Yet, I had to quit work and stay at home to care for Rex."
Gale Hunt is the mother of Specialist Jason Hunt who was killed that day. Jason was shot in the back three times from a short distance. "I consider Hassan an insignificant, glory seeking, crazy person compared to my son who was quiet, funny, kind and witty. I feel the government is negligent for leaving Hassan in a position of authority. Can you imagine him counseling people? He gets to live and my twenty-two year old, at that time, is dead. That is not justice."
Jeri Krueger's daughter Amy was a twenty-nine old Army Staff Sergeant who had joined right after 9/11. "She was very determined to do what she could for her country. She was happy, determined, bright, tenacious, and popular. Just before she died I had spoken with her, and she told me she just finished writing her will. Hassan who used the type of bullet that ripped up her insides shot her three times in her abdomen. I never thought in a million years that she would be shot in an Army base within the U.S. You worry each and every day when they are overseas, but not here."
Eduardo Caraveo Jr. is the eldest son of Major Eduardo Caraveo, the second highest-ranking officer killed. "My dad was shot six times including an injury to his head. My dad came to this country not knowing any English. He bettered himself and eventually received a PhD in psychology. He was intelligent, loving, and a great role model."
What they all want is justice that will include the death penalty. Although they understand that having Hassan dead will not bring back their loved ones or the life they knew before, it will end his manipulation of the system and his ability to act as a spokesman for Jihadi terrorism. As Congressman McCaul concluded, "I used to preside over all the death row appeals for the state of Texas and I saw far less egregious cases than this one that went to the death chamber. I think the death penalty is very much in order for this case," so that Hassan can no longer inflict pain and terrorize the victims and their families.
U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."
THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD."
A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.
But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to "recreate" an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.
A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.
"PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION"
After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."
The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."
A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.
"It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.
Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using "parallel construction" may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.
A QUESTION OF CONSTITUTIONALITY
"That's outrageous," said Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association. "It strikes me as indefensible."
Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer, said any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin "would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional."
Lustberg and others said the government's use of the SOD program skirts established court procedures by which judges privately examine sensitive information, such as an informant's identity or classified evidence, to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense.
"You can't game the system," said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. "You can't create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don't draw the line here, where do you draw it?"
Some lawyers say there can be legitimate reasons for not revealing sources. Robert Spelke, a former prosecutor who spent seven years as a senior DEA lawyer, said some sources are classified. But he also said there are few reasons why unclassified evidence should be concealed at trial.
"It's a balancing act, and they've doing it this way for years," Spelke said. "Do I think it's a good way to do it? No, because now that I'm a defense lawyer, I see how difficult it is to challenge."
CONCEALING A TIP
One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.
"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.
A senior DEA official said he was not aware of the case but said the agent should not have misled the prosecutor. How often such misdirection occurs is unknown, even to the government; the DEA official said the agency does not track what happens with tips after the SOD sends them to agents in the field.
The SOD's role providing information to agents isn't itself a secret. It is briefly mentioned by the DEA in budget documents, albeit without any reference to how that information is used or represented when cases go to court.
The DEA has long publicly touted the SOD's role in multi-jurisdictional and international investigations, connecting agents in separate cities who may be unwittingly investigating the same target and making sure undercover agents don't accidentally try to arrest each other.
SOD'S BIG SUCCESSES
The unit also played a major role in a 2008 DEA sting in Thailand against Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout; he was sentenced in 2011 to 25 years in prison on charges of conspiring to sell weapons to the Colombian rebel group FARC. The SOD also recently coordinated Project Synergy, a crackdown against manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers of synthetic designer drugs that spanned 35 states and resulted in 227 arrests.
Since its inception, the SOD's mandate has expanded to include narco-terrorism, organized crime and gangs. A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit's annual budget. A recent LinkedIn posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.
Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE.
The DICE database contains about 1 billion records, the senior DEA officials said. The majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. Records are kept for about a year and then purged, the DEA officials said.
About 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have access to the DICE database, records show. They can query it to try to link otherwise disparate clues. Recently, one of the DEA officials said, DICE linked a man who tried to smuggle $100,000 over the U.S. southwest border to a major drug case on the East Coast.
"We use it to connect the dots," the official said.
"AN AMAZING TOOL"
Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst.
"They do a pretty good job of screening, but it can be a struggle to know for sure whether the person on a wiretap is American," the senior law enforcement official said.
Tips from domestic wiretaps typically occur when agents use information gleaned from a court-ordered wiretap in one case to start a second investigation.
As a practical matter, law enforcement agents said they usually don't worry that SOD's involvement will be exposed in court. That's because most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial and therefore never request to see the evidence against them. If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement.
Current and former federal agents said SOD tips aren't always helpful - one estimated their accuracy at 60 percent. But current and former agents said tips have enabled them to catch drug smugglers who might have gotten away.
"It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."
DEA officials said that the SOD process has been reviewed internally. They declined to provide Reuters with a copy of their most recent review.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130
Secret DEA program funnels intel to local authorities in order to investigate Americans
Just
incredible. Sure, they are going after drug dealers - or at least,
suspected druge dealers. But the fact that they try to cover up where
these investigations originated is absolutely chilling.
Associated Press:
I suppose there's a logic to it, but it appears to me that the program skirts the edge of violating due process and the constitutional right of the accused to confront their accuser.
One can imagine how lawyers for drug dealers serving time will now demand information on whether their clients were sucked up into the vortex of these DEA investigations.
"Recreating" investigative steps already taken by the SOD program would probably constitute manufacturing evidence and you would think that at least some of those convictions would be thrown out.
There's got to be a better way.
Associated Press:
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD."I'm all for fighting the drug cartels but is this the way to go about it? "Phonying up" investigations? Trying to cover the tracks of agents involved in the program?
I suppose there's a logic to it, but it appears to me that the program skirts the edge of violating due process and the constitutional right of the accused to confront their accuser.
One can imagine how lawyers for drug dealers serving time will now demand information on whether their clients were sucked up into the vortex of these DEA investigations.
"Recreating" investigative steps already taken by the SOD program would probably constitute manufacturing evidence and you would think that at least some of those convictions would be thrown out.
There's got to be a better way.
Great news: Obama to give Capitol Hill an ObamaCare waiver
As Erika wrote last Friday, the White House has decided to rescue Congress from ObamaCare, but the new plan will cost taxpayers plenty — and ignore the statutes of the bill Barack Obama himself demanded. New details in the Wall Street Journal of the plan to exempt Congress and its staffers from the consequences of its own law show that the rescue will come in the form of substantial subsidies to cover the skyrocketing cost of lower coverage thanks to the ACA. And, like the waiver for the employer mandate, it also comes at the expense of statutory law:President Obama told Democrats in a closed-door meeting last week that he would personally moonlight as HR manager and resolve the issue.
And now the White House is suspending the law to create a double standard. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that runs federal benefits will release regulatory details this week, but leaks to the press suggest that Congress will receive extra payments based on the FEHBP defined-contribution formula, which covers about 75% of the cost of the average insurance plan. For 2013, that’s about $4,900 for individuals and $10,000 for families.
How OPM will pull this off is worth watching. Is OPM simply going to cut checks, akin to “cashing out” fringe benefits and increasing wages? Or will OPM cover 75% of the cost of the ObamaCare plan the worker chooses—which could well be costlier than what the feds now contribute via current FEHBP plans? In any case the carve-out for Congress creates a two-tier exchange system, one for the great unwashed and another for the politically connected.
This latest White House night at the improv is also illegal. OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in congressional pay in return for less overall compensation. Those things require appropriations bills passed by Congress and signed by the President.Obviously, this isn’t the first time that Obama has solved the Gordian knot it created on Capitol Hill by simply ignoring the law he championed. The addition of the Congressional mandate was to ensure that the two-tiered system did not get created by politicians unwilling to absorb the consequences they impose on everyone else. Like it or not, that’s how the ACA became law. This is nothing more than a political ploy to protect the governing class from the laws it creates, an unconscionable move in any case, and certainly from the administration that both pushed this unpopular law onto the American people and which promised to clean up the way Washington worked.
If Congress was so adamant about getting a waiver, why didn’t they pass the laws necessary to create it? Republicans wanted to use that as a lever for a full repeal, which means that the waiver never would have made it past the House. Democrats were too embarrassed to publicly appeal for the rescue, for obvious reasons, which is why they went to the White House rather than pass a waiver or exemption in the US Senate, which they control. Instead of changing the statutes by which the rest of us have to live, Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have simply decided not to apply it to themselves.
That may be a lot of things, but democratic it ain’t.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/05/great-news-obama-to-give-capitol-hill-an-obamacare-waiver/
When Government Acts Illegally
Today's lead editorial at The Wall Street Journal ("Congress's ObamaCare Exemption") is a breakthrough in the battle against big, corrupt government.
Someone in the conservative media has finally summoned the strength to call government's illegal actions "illegal." As the editorial states:
Conservatives seem to have a mental block, some psychological abhorrence to using the "I" word whengovernment breaks the law, which it does every day and in many ways affecting millions of Americans.
We hear about government "overreach" and "lawlessness." Conservatives will write that the Obama administration is undermining the rule of law, or the Constitution. In using those terms, however, we pull our punches and soften the blows.
When President Obama says he won't wait for Congress to act, and has turned his presidency towards an unconstitutional dictatorship, he is acting illegally. Republicans in Congress have yet to mutter the "I" word about Obama's actions. Instead, they pussyfoot around in ways that show weakness if not cowardice in the face of Obama's illegal "transformation" of our republican form of government.
If that is done out of respect for the American institution of the presidency, rather than some lesser motive, then it is actually disrespectful. Our constitutional institutions have been protected by the blood of patriots, and we dishonor them and the Constitution that they fought to defend by being anything less than candid and accurate.
Before the American Revolution, the British Parliament declared that certain acts of the King in contravention of the laws were "illegal." Some 19th century judicial opinions in America used the "I" word in describing actions of government that violated the Constitution.
We conservatives like precedent. There is precedent for calling out government's illegalities.
It is up to conservatives on the outside to change the lexicon. We haven't yet. Conservatives cannot properly address and treat the problem until we admit what it is. When government breaks the law and violates the Constitution, that is 'illegal.'
Someone in the conservative media has finally summoned the strength to call government's illegal actions "illegal." As the editorial states:
"This latest White House night at the improv is also illegal. OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in congressional pay in return for less overall compensation. Those things require appropriations bills passed by Congress and signed by the President."
Conservatives seem to have a mental block, some psychological abhorrence to using the "I" word whengovernment breaks the law, which it does every day and in many ways affecting millions of Americans.
We hear about government "overreach" and "lawlessness." Conservatives will write that the Obama administration is undermining the rule of law, or the Constitution. In using those terms, however, we pull our punches and soften the blows.
When President Obama says he won't wait for Congress to act, and has turned his presidency towards an unconstitutional dictatorship, he is acting illegally. Republicans in Congress have yet to mutter the "I" word about Obama's actions. Instead, they pussyfoot around in ways that show weakness if not cowardice in the face of Obama's illegal "transformation" of our republican form of government.
If that is done out of respect for the American institution of the presidency, rather than some lesser motive, then it is actually disrespectful. Our constitutional institutions have been protected by the blood of patriots, and we dishonor them and the Constitution that they fought to defend by being anything less than candid and accurate.
Before the American Revolution, the British Parliament declared that certain acts of the King in contravention of the laws were "illegal." Some 19th century judicial opinions in America used the "I" word in describing actions of government that violated the Constitution.
We conservatives like precedent. There is precedent for calling out government's illegalities.
It is up to conservatives on the outside to change the lexicon. We haven't yet. Conservatives cannot properly address and treat the problem until we admit what it is. When government breaks the law and violates the Constitution, that is 'illegal.'
Government to buy back land for Native Americans
The U.S. government is gearing up to spend nearly $2 billion on 10 million acres of land that will in turn be given back to Native American tribes.The plan entails buying back reservation land from willing sellers and distributing that land among 150 tribes across the nation, the McClatchy Newspapers reported Sunday.
Congress agreed to the buyback in 2010 to settle a lawsuit.
"We can improve Indian Country if people will go along with this program and sell their interests back to their tribes," Kevin Washburn, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said in an interview.
Meanwhile, tribe leaders say 45 percent of the land will go to just seven tribes, while other tribes will have to fight over the rest.
"We're all going to be fighting for scraps," said Chief James Allan of Idaho's Coeur d'Alene Tribe
And, many believe that property owners are expected to be reluctant sellers.
"This is a modern day retaking of the land and, given the historical implications of that, they don't want to relive it," said Les Riding-In, assistant dean and director of graduate studies at the University of Texas-Arlington and a member of the Comanche Tribe. "It's reminiscent of how the government took the land back when colonization was happening."
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