IRS, that Operates on DOS, yes DOS is Still Targeting Americans

Then there was instant messaging at the IRS that few talk about.

The letter, the testimony, the documentation is found here along with the signatures from Congress.

From Americans for Tax Reform: The IRS used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system that automatically deleted office communications, according to documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. The system appears to have been purposefully used by agency officials responsible for the targeting of conservative non-profits, in order to evade public scrutiny.

The system, known as “Office Communication Server” or OCS was used by IRS officials, including many in the Exempt Organizations (EO) Unit, which was headed by Lois Lerner.

As the Oversight Committee report states, the instant messaging system did not archive any communications, so it is not possible to know what employees of the EO unit discussed on it.

However, in an email uncovered by the Committee Lerner warns her colleagues about evading Congressional oversight:

“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails – so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.”

Lerner then asks whether OCS is automatically archived. When informed it was not, Lerner responded “Perfect.”

While it is possible to set the instant messaging system to automatically archive messages, the IRS chose not to do so, according to one employee interviewed by the Committee. The fact that the agency chose not to archive messages raises questions about the true purpose of OCS and what discussions took place.

Needless to say, the apparent use of OCS to evade Congressional oversight once again shows that the IRS does not want the American people to learn the truth about the Lois Lerner targeting scandal.

 

 

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-27-JC-to-Obama-WH-Koskinen-Resignation.pdf

 

Toggling Internet Speed and Broken Rural Installations

Barack Obama made a pledge to get internet and broadband services to rural parts of the country. Billions were allocated and it has been a long yet failed pledge, resulting in more fleecing of our taxpayer dollars.

President Obama pitches $18 billion wireless broadband plan

Wired to fail

Politico:

How a little known agency mishandled several billion dollars of stimulus money trying to expand broadband coverage to rural communities.

In September 2011, as the U.S. economy continued to sputter in the shadow of the Great Recession, Jonathan Adelstein offered a bold promise on behalf of a tiny federal agency that had long strived to improve the lives of rural Americans.

The administrator of the little-known Rural Utilities Service had just finished announcing $3.5 billion in aid to expand high-speed Internet access to the hardest-to-reach areas of the country. The awards, part of the federal stimulus passed by Congress two years earlier, had been crucial to President Barack Obama’s blueprint for a recovery that would ensure farmers and remote businesses could compete in an increasingly global economy.

“These investments in broadband will connect nearly 7 million rural Americans,” Adelstein pledged in a report to Congress, “along with more than 360,000 businesses and more than 30,000 critical community institutions like schools, health care facilities and public safety agencies, to new or improved service.”

Judged against the agency’s 80-year track record, those numbers didn’t seem unrealistically ambitious. During the Great Depression, after all, RUS had loaned out millions of dollars to string electric lines to distant farms and small towns in parts of the country that private companies refused to serve — a bold and calculated risk that had transformed America in a single generation.

But more recently, the performance of RUS has been much less than stellar. Even the agency’s staunchest defenders in Congress had learned firsthand: When it came to funding broadband projects, RUS never found its footing in the digital age.

Sometimes, RUS ignored its rural mission by funding high-speed Internet in well-wired population centers. Sometimes, it chose not to make any loans at all. Sometimes, RUS broadband projects stumbled, or failed for want of proper management; loans went delinquent and some borrowers defaulted. Yet despite years of costly missteps that left millions of Americans stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, a stable of friendly lawmakers swallowed their doubts about RUS and made sure the politically protected agency wasn’t cut out of the historic stimulus effort.

It should come as little surprise, then, that four years and four directors later, RUS has failed to deliver on Adelstein’s promise.

A POLITICO investigation has found that roughly half of the nearly 300 projects that RUS approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet drawn down the full amounts they were awarded. All RUS-funded infrastructure projects were supposed to have completed construction by the end of June, but the agency has declined to say whether these rural networks have been completed. More than 40 of the projects that RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place.

But a bigger, more critical deadline looms for those broadband projects still underway: If these networks do not draw all their cash by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other words, they altogether may squander as much as $277 million in still-untapped federal funds, which can’t be spent elsewhere in other neglected rural communities.

And either way, scores of rural residents who should have benefited from better Internet access — a utility that many consider as essential as electricity — might continue to lack access to the sort of reliable, high-speed service that is common in America’s cities. Even RUS admits it’s not going to provide better service to the 7 million residents it once touted; instead, the number in the hundreds of thousands.

The checkered performance of RUS offers an all-too-familiar story of an obscure federal agency that has grown despite documented failures, thanks in large part to its political patrons in Congress. The massive infusion of stimulus money, which required RUS to disperse record sums faster than it ever had, further exposed its weaknesses — troubles that, in many ways, remain unaddressed, despite repeated warnings — even as RUS continues lending.

“We are left with a program that spent $3 billion,” Mark Goldstein, an investigator at the Government Accountability Office, told POLITICO, “and we really don’t know what became of it.”

* * *

It took a bigger economic crisis, more than eight decades earlier, to bring RUS into existence. The agency, known then as the Rural Electrification Administration, had been a centerpiece in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic New Deal. But the effort was controversial from the start. Private companies derided the government’s investments in rural energy as “Bolshevik” and “un-American,” but within several years, hundreds of public utilities were operating, and within 20 years, almost all U.S. farms had electricity. The model was so successful that REA shifted shortly after World War II to providing low-interest loans for rural telephone cooperatives.

Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House, vowing to abolish the REA, which he derided as “creeping socialism.” Within two years, however, even he was extolling the agency’s performance, praising its “great advances for rural America.” The program grew under Kennedy and Johnson, who in 1937, had led the formation of an electricity cooperative in the Texas Hill country. Richard Nixon again tried to kill it, arguing that the program had outgrown its usefulness and at that time only served “country clubs and dilettantes.” But an outraged farm bloc in Congress, led by senators such as George McGovern of South Dakota and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, forced Nixon to back down.

By the end of the 20th century, REA’s original electricity mission was more or less accomplished. And in 1994, REA and another agriculture program that had backed water and sewer projects were combined to form the Rural Utilities Service. Yet it was late in the Clinton administration that the agency’s portfolio expanded in a way that would be as dramatic — and ultimately, as controversial — as when it began.

Nations like Japan and South Korea had quickly achieved nearly universal and affordable broadband coverage, but the United States was lagging. “Internet access ought to be just as likely as telephone access,” President Bill Clinton said in April 2000. That year, Clinton’s budget included $102 million for a pilot broadband program to be administered by RUS, building on its previous telecom work.

Bolstered by a 2001 Brookings Institution study that estimated widespread adoption of basic broadband could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy, Congress approved permanent funding for the program. In the eyes of allies like Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, robust, widespread Internet access “would be as important to the national destiny as the railroads in the 19th century. … Universal broadband should be the national priority … (the) same way as putting a man on the moon was.” And low-interest federal loans, he believed, were the best way to do it. “The RUS telecom program has never issued a bad loan in over 50 years,” Burns said. “The government has actually made money off of those loans.”

In 2004, President George W. Bush proposed that broadband coverage should be universally available within three years. His support touched a nerve with Iowa’s Sen. Tom Harkin, a powerful Democrat who knew that one of the government’s primary mechanisms for meeting that goal was not up to the task. At a confirmation hearing for James Andrew, who eventually would take over RUS under Bush, Harkin recalled an encounter with the president in which he confided that universal broadband would never happen if RUS didn’t start spending money.

“We put in $2 billion (to the farm bill) to do that,” the senator grumbled to Bush, “but the Department of Agriculture has been dragging its feet.” By making onerous demands on its applicants and keeping them waiting months for approval, Harkin said RUS had managed to leave $1.6 billion on the table.

“I don’t want to sound too cynical,” Harkin told Andrew, “but it almost sounds like the cable companies and the big phone companies have gotten to somebody and said, ‘We don’t want this program to work.’”

Harkin then delivered to Andrew a brief sermon on the mission of RUS: “We were not risk averse when we put telephone lines out to farmsteads and our small towns in America. We knew there was risk in doing that, but we managed it. RUS manages risk. And that is what I am asking in broadband, manage risk. Don’t be so risk averse that you say, ‘We cannot give a loan out there because we want to make 100 percent certain that the company we give it to will not default and will not fail. Some of them will …”   Read more here.

 

Read more:

Video #3 Planned Parenthood, Incentive for More Money

Technician details harvesting fetal parts for Planned Parenthood in latest video

FNC: A technician who said she worked for a company that partnered with Planned Parenthood to harvest fetal tissue said there’s “incentive to try and get the hard stuff ‘cause you’re going to get more money,” in the latest undercover video targeting Planned Parenthood.

“For whatever we could procure, they would get a certain percentage,” said Holly O’Donnell, identified as an ex-procurement technician for StemExpress, LLC. “The main nurse was always trying to make sure we got our specimens. No one else really cared, but the main nurse did because she knew that Planned Parenthood was getting compensated.”

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: Click to see latest undercover Planned Parenthood video

The new, graphic video from the Center for Medical Progress appears to show technicians using tweezers to pick through aborted fetal tissue for baby parts. After one person in the video picks out a pair of intact kidneys someone off-camera laughs and says, “Five stars!”

O’Donnell said she fainted the first time she was part of this process and was told by someone in the room, “some of us don’t ever get over it.”

“If you can somehow procure a brain or a heart you’re going to get more money than just Chorionic villi or umbilical cord.”

– Holly O’Donnell

O’Donnell said she worked for six months identifying pregnant women at Planned Parenthood who met the standards for fetal tissue orders and then helped to harvest fetal body parts after abortions at Planned Parenthood facilities.

StemExpress, based in Placerville, Calif., “supplies human blood, tissue products, primary cells and other clinical specimens to biomedical researchers around the world,” according to its website.

O’Donnell describes the company a different way.

“StemExpress is a company that hires procurement techs to draw blood and dissect dead fetuses and sell the parts to researchers,” she said. “They’ve partnered with Planned Parenthood and they get part of the money because we pay them to use their facilities. And they get paid from it. They do get some kind of benefit.”

Planned Parenthood has denied selling fetal tissue for a profit, which is against federal law.

“If you can somehow procure a brain or a heart you’re going to get more money than just Chorionic villi or umbilical cord,” O’Donnell said.

The video is the third to be released by the Center for Medical Progress. Like the first two, it contains undercover video of Planned Parenthood officials and associates, but is heavily reliant on an interview with O’Donnell.

Previous videos show Dr. Mary Gatter, a Planned Parenthood medical director in Southern California, meeting with people posing as buyers of fetal specimens. The conversation focuses on how much money the buyers should pay, although Planned Parenthood insists that it only sought to cover its expenses. The videos have brought investigations of Planned Parenthood’s policies on aborted fetuses by three Republican-led congressional committees and three states.

Federal law prohibits the commercial sale of fetal tissue, but it allows the not-for-profit donation of tissue if the women who underwent abortions give their consent. Planned Parenthood says the payments discussed in the videos pertain to reimbursement for the costs of procuring the tissue — which is legal.

Qaddafi Sentenced to Death

The failure today of Libya is directly owned by Hillary Clinton as noted by emails released from the State Department and Sidney Blumenthal due to the Benghazi investigation.

The emails between Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal about the inner-workings of Libya following the death of the North African country’s dogged dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, included one correspondence that suggested new Libyan leader, Mohamed Magariaf, would “seek a discrete relationship with Israel.”

Clinton, encouraged by the news, forwarded the message to her deputy Jake Sullivan — a current adviser to the Obama administration for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program — saying he “should consider passing to Israelis,” according to the Times report that was released on Monday.

The Guardian: Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam sentenced to death by court in Libya

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and other senior members of former Libyan regime sentenced by court in Tripoli after trial mired in controversy

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libya’s former dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has been sentenced to death by a court in Tripoli.

Saif, once seen as his father’s heir apparent, was condemned to death along with eight other figures from the former dictatorship, including the former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi and Gaddafi’s last prime minister, Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi.

The trial, which opened in Tripoli in April last year, has been mired in controversy after human rights groups and the international criminal court questioned its standards.

There is uncertainty about whether the sentence will be carried out, as Saif is being held by a militia in the mountain town of Zintan that is opposed to Libya Dawn, the militia coalition in control of Tripoli.

Saif has been held in Zintan since he was caught trying to flee Libya in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. The militia has refused to hand him over to Tripoli.

The international criminal court has refused permission for Libya to try Saif, who has been indicted by the Hague, along with Senussi, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Judges in the Hague have given permission for Senussi to be tried.

There are unlikely to be immediate executions after Sadiq al-Sur, head of the investigation department of the attorney general, said lawyers could appeal against the sentences.

In June last year, militias controlling the prison where Saif is being held briefly arrested a United Nations monitor, accusing him of black magic. He was later released.

 

Civil war engulfed the country last July, with Libya Dawn militias seizing the capital and the internationally recognised government fleeing to eastern Libya and losing control of the trial process.

***

Qaddafi was instrumental is several nefarious actions in Libya being a large part of his father’s inner circle.

There was the weapons of mass destruction program in Libya.

There was the case of HIV infecting 400 children.

There was the Lockerbie bombing, yet there is some linkage to Iran.

There was the disco bombing in Berlin.

The most interesting scandal of the Qaddafi family was their deep relationship to the British Royal family, the Rothchilds and Prime Minister Tony Blair.

 

Immigrants Globally a Boon to Mafia and Gangs

Given civil wars, drug cartels, failed states, lawlessness and financial crises, refugees, asylum seekers and those fleeing their home countries for countless reasons are falling prey to gangs and organized crime operations like the Mafia.

This is a building phenomenon not only globally but here in the United States. Consider Libya, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico are noted to be failed states.

Every action has a reaction and the Obama administration is not facing any conditions or consequences here at home.

Italy’s Mafia is Profiting From the Immigration Crisis
The Mafia in Italy have demonstrated devious ingenuity in everything from drug trafficking to counterfeiting. Now they’re exploiting the immigration crisis.

The care and feeding of such migrants may end up costing the Italian government as much as €800m per year, with it offering private individuals, companies and non-profit organisations up to €35 a day per person to host them. That includes a daily pocket money allowance of €2.50 that hosts are supposed to pay directly to the refugees.

Those funds have proven irresistible to the Mafia, according to Italian prosecutors and watchdog groups, who say criminal groups have succeeded at rigging the awarding of the contracts for the management of migrant reception centres in several high-profile cases.

Then here at home, let us look no farther than Long Island.

Gangs on LI trying to recruit newly arrived Central American children

Latino street gangs led by MS-13 have tried to lure Long Island’s newest child immigrants into their ranks, police said, causing concern among local investigators as well as immigrant advocacy groups.

The violent, drug-dealing gangs have been vying for new members among the more than 3,000 children younger than 18 who resettled in Nassau and Suffolk counties between September 2013 and September 2014.

MS-13 has gone international as their syndicate is appearing in Australia.

FreeBeacon: Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council Shawn Moran told Fox News that the violent MS-13 gang is exploiting the chaos on the U.S. border to recruit new juvenile members.

“We know the cartels were exploiting this and continue to exploit this crisis in south Texas, it makes sense that MS-13 and other gangs would do the same,” said Moran.

According to Moran, the gang has been using a Red Cross phone bank on the border, originally intended for unaccompanied minors to use to contact relatives: “These phones are being utilized by gang members to recruit, to enlist, to pressure people, other juveniles into joining the MS-13 gang.”

And, Moran explained, border security is unable to isolate these gang members because they are juveniles, and they are required to treat all juveniles a certain way. “We’re being told we have to look the other way. If we see gang tattoos, we’re not allowed to treat them any differently than anybody else applying to be allowed to stay here or to apply for asylum.”

“It’s a security issue that we feel could really snowball out of control and it would put agents at risk. It puts the other detainees at risk,” Moran said.

Moran described MS-13 as “one of the biggest threats we face on our southern border. They do not hesitate to use extreme violence if necessary. They are considered one of the top threats to border patrol agents.”