The BigAss 2nd term thread: Part II

[KevinNYC]

So I went to a neighborhood Christmas party last night and Paula Broadwell shows up dressed as a flapper. Strange thing is it wasn't a theme party. Anyway she was very much the social butterfly while her husband stood alone in the corner near the bar. Since I frequented the bar quite often during the night I wanted to ask him why he puts up with her but I never got the nerve.

That's pretty awesome.

[KevinNYC]

So one guy walks away from a $150,000 job and a week later the other guy walks away from a $290,000 job? This story has legs.

Both of Christie's guys just lawyered up.Wildstein hired the lawyer who defended Newark Mayor Sharpe James in a federal corruption case brought against him by Chris Christie who was US Attorney for NJ at the time. Ah Jersey Politics.

Also MSNBC's Steve Kornacki said yesterday that Wildstein gave him his first job as political reporter. Wildstein used to be a blogger in NJ under a pseudonym. The job interview was over IM and Kornacki only learned Wildstein's real name when he left the job. He said he knew he would be asked all the time "Who is Wally Edge?" He wanted to answer truthfully that he didn't know.

[KevinNYC]

White House task force report on NSA spying recommends sweeping reforms

—An end to the government's collection and storage of bulk telephone metadata. Instead, it urges leaving them in private (phone company) hands, with court orders mandated for certain investigations.

A panel of outside advisers urged President Obama on Wednesday to impose major oversight and some restrictions on the National Security Agency, arguing that in the past dozen years its powers had been enhanced at the expense of personal privacy.

The panel recommended changes in the way the agency collects the telephone data of Americans, spies on foreign leaders and prepares for cyberattacks abroad.

But the most significant recommendation of the panel of five intelligence and legal experts was that Mr. Obama restructure a program in which the N.S.A. systematically collects logs of all American phone calls — so-called metadata — and a small group of agency officials have the power to authorize the search of an individual’s telephone contacts. Instead, the panel said, the data should remain in the hands of telecommunications companies or a private consortium, and a court order should be necessary each time analysts want to access the information of any individual “for queries and data mining.”

Sen. Wyden, the guy who asked the question about collecting "any data on Americans" that DNI Clapper answered with a lie that he had to later correct likes this report.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been an outspoken critic of N.S.A. surveillance, said it echoed the arguments of the N.S.A.’s skeptics in significant ways, noting that it flatly declared that the phone-logging program had not been necessary in stopping terrorist attacks.

[East_Stone_Ya]

White House task force report on NSA spying recommends sweeping reforms





Sen. Wyden, the guy who asked the question about collecting "any data on Americans" that DNI Clapper answered with a lie that he had to later correct likes this report.

and all this because of Snowden?