So, maybe there aren’t obvious links in what follows. Just like “metadata”, however, when you start putting together small pieces of information, a large picture emerges.
From Investor’s Business Daily:
While Your Phone Calls Are Tracked & Stored – Obama’s Snooping Excludes Mosques
Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won’t snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are.
That’s right, the government’s sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.
Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.
Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.
We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel’s formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.
Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.[…]
How are you feeling about your metadata these days?
Apparently, only when you are silent can your information be protected.
And then there’s this.
Over at Politico I saw something which alarmed me.
Jeff Duncan questions IRS gun usage
Rep. Jeff Duncan wants to know why IRS law enforcement agents are training with AR-15 rifles.
As chairman of the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee, Duncan (R-S.C.) toured a federal law enforcement facility in late May and noticed agents training with the semi-automatic weapons at a firing range. They identified themselves as IRS, he said.“When I left there, it’s been bugging me for weeks now, why IRS agents are training with a semi-automatic rifle AR-15, which has stand-off capability,” Duncan told POLITICO. “Are Americans that much of a target that you need that kind of capability?”
While Duncan acknowledges that the IRS has an enforcement division, he questions if that level of firepower is appropriate when they could coordinate operations with other agencies, like the FBI, especially in a time of austerity.
“I think Americans raise eyebrows when you tell them that IRS agents are training with a type of weapon that has stand-off capability. It’s not like they’re carrying a sidearm and they knock on someone’s door and say, ‘You’re evading your taxes,’” Duncan said.[…]
This gives new meaning to the IRS “targeting” conservative groups. And there is the whole “If you are conservative, shut up or we’ll get you!” aspect.
In the meantime, the religious freedom of some Americans is being purposely eroded by the Obama Administration. Don’t forget the HHS mandate. “Do you embrace the Catholic Faith? Keep your beliefs out of the public square and obey when we tell you to violate them.”
And while I am at it, I read a piece by Todd Starnes. Get this!
Obama ‘Strongly Objects’ to Religious Liberty Amendment
The Obama Administration “strongly objects” to a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday that would have protected the religious rights of soldiers – including evangelical Christian service members who are facing growing hostility towards their religion.
The amendment was authored by Rep. John Fleming, R-La. It would have “required the Armed Forces to accommodate ‘actions and speech’ reflecting the conscience, moral, principles or religious beliefs of the member.”
The Obama Administration said the amendment would have a “significant adverse effect on good order, discipline, morale, and mission accomplishment.”
“With its statement, the White House is now endorsing military reprimands of members who keep a Bible on their desk or express a religious belief,” Fleming told Fox News. “This administration is aggressively hostile towards religious beliefs that it deems to be politically incorrect.”
Fleming introduced the amendment after a series of high-profile incidents involving attacks on religious liberty within the military- including an Air Force officer who was told to remove a Bible from his desk because it might give the impression he was endorsing a religion.
He said there are other reports of Christian service members and chaplains being punished for their faith.[…]
Boy oh Boy! Where can I sign up to be a military chaplain? These men need our prayers and our support. Use my link on the sidebar.
Good grief? What are we becoming?
Ironically, today is the anniversary of the 1963 SCOTUS decision Miranda v. Arizona!
Happy 50th Birthday Miranda Warning!
Do you still have the right to remain silent even when you haven’t committed a crime?
No surprise. They are getting their ducks in line for the full blown persecution. People refused to see it when he first ran for office, but only the blind can’t see it now.
One post today: “Obama ‘Strongly Objects’ to Religious Liberty Amendment” http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/obama-strongly-objects-to-religious-liberty-amendment.html/print/ While the administration continues to persecute people of faith, especially Christians in the military.
You can have all the Fortnight’s for Freedom you want, but until Catholics start acting like Catholics, we are doomed. Strong reminders of pre-Nazi Germany.
Traditionally the FBI armory has included various sorts of sidearms, a shotgun in every agent car (once officially kept in the trunk, but moved into an official in-car compartment in the 80’s or 90’s), and sniper rifles for FBI snipers. I don’t remember AR-15’s being part of the package before, but the FBI has been known to use non-traditional weaponry against bank robbers, drug dealers, etc. Basically, if the criminals up the arming levels, the FBI is allowed not to bring a knife to a gunfight; and a lot of drug dealers, etc. have AR-15’s these days.
I’m not saying trust the government, because they’ve kinda forfeited that recently. But it’s not necessarily a matter of skullduggery.
[Did you see this was about the IRS, not the FBI? IRS, yes, Treasury Department, but not the FBI.]
iPadre: “You can have all the Fortnight’s for Freedom you want, but until Catholics start acting like Catholics, we are doomed. Strong reminders of pre-Nazi Germany.” And of the French revolution. Please take ten minutes to watch the final of Poulenc’s opera “Dialogues of the Carmelites” . This is what’s happening to Christians in many countries around the World and it’s going to happen to us in the Western World too. Soon.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ubBODy4N0 Salve Regina at ca 03.00
I’m not liking any of this…
The IRS does not need AR-15s. That is so ridiculous as to be nearly unbelievable. That’s the trouble with motivating people to vote these people out of power. The things being alleged are so outrageous, the Church herself always seems to be supporting every single other of these people’s ideas, it is certainly not like any major person has really hit the panic button.
But seriously, what is going on?
How many such signs must we see before people recognize that quite sinister changes have occurred? What does it take to make people understand that tyranny is close at hand?
Even more than secularism, complacency is the disease of contemporary America.
As relates to the IRS and the AR-15s, one thought that came clear to me this morning while listening to the radio news was that in watching the “President” speak about the NSA scandal and in observing pictures of Congress Critters make utterances upon the same topic, I’d registered an odd expression of near fear on their parts. And I believe that ties in with the IRS and their weapons training. As one reporter noted this morning, the NSA is a decades old institution; since 2001 their role has been expanded and as well, their budget has balooned exponentially. With Obamacare, the IRS has been greatly enlarged and of course, there’s the growing numbers of thousands working for the Department of Homeland Security. As this fellow noted, there are now hundreds of agencies with thousands new employees and most all with way too much time on their hands. And they’re being courted by thousands of contractors with services, software, hardware, and programs to sell along with contract employees, (Booz Allen/Blackwater, etc.). Now amidst this backdrop of “boom time” in governement, there are of course Protocols to be written and a myriad of Contingency Planning conferences and seminars and presentations all dealing with “what if” situations. So much so that employees and managers, directors and assitants and countless analysts scurry about planning how to counter the next possible threat from this quarter or that quarter and lo and behold, you create an atmosphere and a culture of rampant paranoia. And its a paranoia that feeds itself……….daily, and minions are paid fat bonuses to feed that paranoia each day with “what-if” scenarios about how this or that might be attacked. I can easily see them working themselves into a near panic on a weekly if not daily basis. Next we may well see US Postal employees delivering the mail from Mine Resistant Armored Personel Carriers under Black Hawk Helicopter or missile carrying drone protection. And as I watch Obama and the Congress Critters under the stress of another debacle, I can see this pervailing fear rising up through the ranks into their very offices.
So, the IRS at the range with AR-15s? Doesn’t surprise me, its clearly obvious this governement is expecting and planning for a calamaty of biblical proportions and they have for some time. It is quite obvious they are expecting mass civil unrest to breakout somewhere at some point. Now what’s curious about this of course is its obvious they are looking in the wrong directions. They had the Boston bombers under surveilance for a year prior to the event and entirely dropped the ball on that. And that begs the question, just what are they afraid of? What are they looking at? Who are they suspicious of? Or perhaps the question should be, if there’s a particular event they’re concerned will tip everything into a panic state, what event are they worried about? My guess is……………..several, if not dozens or more.
Now, having said far more than I probably should do, I will allow this. If you happen upon IRS dudes/duddettes at the range this weekend with AR-15s; leave! I’m very well familiar with that weapon; its dangerous and in the wrong hands, lethal. Imagine, Barney Fife with a full auto, modern gattling gun at a Carnival! With all these heavily armed government alphabet agencies responding to a particular emergency, they’re likely to find their highest casualty rates caused by friendly fire mishaps!
Some thoughts.
Didn’t this administration tell us that No One needs an AR-15?
Not looking at mosques for terrorists violates the Willie Sutton Rule.
Just finished watching Crusade in the Pacific on Netflix. Issued in 1951 it was replete with scenes of Catholic priests (as well as Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis) administering to the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen before, during and after combat.
The country I grew up in is not the country I now live in.
How far we have fallen. Did you know that on August 12, 1861, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national “day of humiliation, prayer, and fasting for all the people of the nation”? Listen to this language from his proclamation:
Whereas it is fit and becoming in all people at all times to acknowledge and revere the supreme government of God, to bow in humble submission to His chastisements, to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and to pray with all fervency and ocntrition for the pard on of their past offenses and for a blessing upon their present and prospective action; and
Whereas our own beloved country, once, by the blessing of God, united, prosperous, and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals to humble ourselves before Him and pray for His mercy — to pray that we may be spared further punishment, though must justly deserved, that our arms may be blessed and made effectual for the re-establishment of order, law, and peace throughout the wide extent of our country, and that the inestimable boon of civil and religious liberty, earned under His guidance and blessing by the labors nad sufferings of our fathers, may be restored in all its original excellence.
This was President Lincoln, speaking as President. Would that our bishops came out with pronouncements as Catholic-sounding as this proclamation.
Re: Boy oh Boy! Where can I sign up to be a military chaplain? These men need our prayers and our support.
Yes they do!
A priest at my NJ parish (almost 40 years old) is leaving us at the end of this month as he will be a new US Navy Chaplain. Father ‘Lieutenant Jr Grade’ and all our military chaplains are in serious need of our prayers and support!
What anyone with internet access can find out about any one of us ought to tell us how much more the government can find out about us, if there is only an interest. As I told my boys, I’m sure if I dropped a Ping-Pong ball in our backyard that interested the Pentagon, the Pentagon could find it. Add to that anyone who barely knows us can post anything their snoopy nose finds out about us–oh, and everyone from the nine year olds to the grandmothers have phones with video capability!–to Facebook or YouTube without our even knowing, such that literally millions of people could see whatever some mere acquaintance decided to post about us, and the picture becomes clearer and clearer.
It is not just that we have a government that snoops. It is that we live in the world of nosy blabber-mouths, every one of whom has electronic surveillance and transmission capacity at their fingertips at all times. How anyone can expect any amount of privacy?