Ball of confusion..... Part one ....... Just Yikes !

White House denies DNI Clapper will head ‘independent’ NSA review group

Published time: August 13, 2013 16:38
Edited time: August 13, 2013 23:45

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US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.(AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

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After insisting that the government’s unprecedented capability to monitor communications must be assessed by an independent panel with regards to maintaining the trust of Americans, President Barack Obama has announced the formation of a new review group.

A memo issued Monday by the White House said James Clapper, the United States director of national intelligence, is to form a review group tasked to determine if the US “employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.”

However, in a confusing turnabout, the White House said on Tuesday that Clapper is not heading the independent review.

"Director Clapper will not be a part of the group, and is not leading or directing the group’s efforts," Caitlin Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, told The Hill newspaper on Tuesday.

"The White House is selecting the members of the Review Group, consulting appropriately with the Intelligence Community," added Hayden.

Comments by the White House seemed to be aimed at distancing the review from criticism lobbed at Clapper's influence over the NSA review process despite the fact that Monday's memo indicated the report would come "through the director of national intelligence.

The decision to formalize the board and seemingly appoint Mr. Clapper as its head comes three days after Pres. Obama called for its creation during a rare press conference and two months after National Security Agency documents were leaked to the media disclosing the NSA’s deployment of vast surveillance operations to collect data on the everyday communications of American citizens.

That revelation, attributed to former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, initiated widespreaddiscussion in America and abroad about balancing national security with personal privacy.

But at the same time, Mr. Snowden’s disclosures also contradicted a statement made earlier this year by Clapper, which in turn prompted the director of national intelligence to issue a formal apology to high-ranking lawmaker Sen. Dianne Feinstein for lying to Congress.

During a March 2013 hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) asked DNI Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded in the negative, but was forced to correct himself when Mr. Snowden’s revelations three months later proved otherwise. The Guardian newspaper published a leaked NSA document on June 5 suggesting that millions of Americans fall subject to government surveillance on a daily basis through a program that regularly collects call records, or “telephony metadata,” for entire populations. On June 21, DNI Clapper wrote Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to apologize for his “clearly erroneous” statement on Capitol Hill.

As a result of that gaffe, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan) called for Clapper’s resignation. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said the director broke the law, and Sen. Wyden said in a statement, “This job cannot be done responsibly if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions.”

Still waiting for DNI Clapper to resign. He lied under oath & should be prosecuted. Where is U.S. government's commitment to Rule of Law?

1:33 после полудня - 23 июня 2013

But while Clapper escaped more-or-less unscathed from what could have ended in his termination or even prosecution for perjury, his appointment to oversee a review board assigned to guide a group investigating the very topic he lied about is quickly rekindling criticism. During Friday’s presser, Mr. Obama said that in addition to establishing the review group he’d be opening up the NSA’s surveillance programs to more transparency and suggested minor reforms. The administration later published documents showing supposed legal justification for the collection of Americans’ phone records, including one white paper that claimed “the collection of bulk data is relevant to FBI investigations of international terrorism.”

“Only in DC,” Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted Monday, “James Clapper, instead of being prosecuted or fired for lying to Congress, will now lead the review of the programs he lied about.”

Only in DC: James Clapper, instead of being prosecuted or fired for lying to Congress,will now lead the review of the programs he lied about

7:41 после полудня - 12 августа 2013

New oversight board will be "independent" in the same sense that the collected metadata is "relevant." http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/12/this-technical-review-group-brought-to-you-by-the-booz-allen-hamilton-director-of-national-intelligence/ …

6:34 после полудня - 12 августа 2013

According to the president’s directive — signed and ordered during while he vacations at Martha’s Vineyard — DNI Clapper will report back to the White House in 60 days to presenting the findings of the review board and their recommendations.

“Recent years have brought unprecedented and rapid advancements in communications technologies, particularly with respect to global telecommunications,” wrote the president. “These technological advances have brought with them both great opportunities and significant risks for our Intelligence Community: opportunity in the form of enhanced technical capabilities that can more precisely and readily identify threats to our security, and risks in the form of insider and cyber threats.”

“I believe it is important to take stock of how these technological advances alter the environment in which we conduct our intelligence mission,” Obama said.

Mr. Clapper confirmed his new position through a statement issued Monday as well.

Ball of confusion - Part two.... Wondering what actually goes forward at this point....

Who’s up for another arbitrary delay in ObamaCare?

POSTED AT 8:41 AM ON AUGUST 13, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

Actually, I’m up for delaying the whole thing indefinitely, but I’ll get to that a little later today. One of the selling points for ObamaCare was its mandates on insurance companies to keep out-of-pocket costs down for consumers. In fact, next to the promise of universal insurance (which turns out to be illusory, too), the cap on out-of-pocket expenses was supposed to be the best part of ObamaCare for consumers. That, of course, just means that insurer risk pools have to cover more of the actual costs of medical care, which means that the costs will get passed along to consumers in the form of higher premiums. And right now, skyrocketing premiums are the Obama administration’s biggest political headache.

Guess which part of ObamaCare just got delayed now?

First, there was the delay of Obamacare’s Medicare cuts until after the election. Then there was the delay of the law’s employer mandate. Then there was the announcement, buried in the Federal Register, that the administration would delay enforcement of a number of key eligibility requirements for the law’s health insurance subsidies, relying on the “honor system” instead. Now comes word that another costly provision of the health law—its caps on out-of-pocket insurance costs—will be delayed for one more year.

According to the Congressional Research Service, as of November 2011, the Obama administration had missed as many as one-third of the deadlines, specified by law, under the Affordable Care Act. Here are the details on the latest one.

Obamacare contains a blizzard of mandates and regulations that will make health insurance more costly. One of the most significant is its caps on out-of-pocket insurance costs, such as co-pays and deductibles. Section 2707(b) of the Public Health Service Act, as added by Obamacare, requires that “a group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not establish lifetime limits on the dollar value of benefits for the any participant or beneficiary.” Annual limits on cost-sharing are specified by Section 1302(c) of the Affordable Care Act; in addition, starting in 2014, deductibles are limited to $2,000 per year for individual plans, and $4,000 per year for family plans.

Avik Roy explains in more detail just what this means for the White House, and what it means for consumers who now have no choice but to pay for comprehensive health insurance rather than more rational hospitalization insurance. The details of the delay were reported late yesterday by the New York Times, but didn’t garner much attention:

In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.

The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed. When asked in recent days about the language — which appeared as an answer to one of 137 “frequently asked questions about Affordable Care Act implementation” — department officials confirmed the policy.

The discovery is likely to fuel continuing Republican efforts this fall to discredit the president’s health care law.

Actually, ObamaCare doesn’t need Republicans to discredit it. The train wreck of its rollout accomplishes that task all on its own. Furthermore, the White House itself adds to the discredit with each delay it unilaterally imposes for the Democrats’ electoral benefit, showing it to be nothing more than political machinery rather than a real solution to rising health-care costs.

Meanwhile, the White House continues to discredit itself as long as people ask this question:

https://twitter.com/torreymspears/status/367262317416681472

Why is Obama bailing out employers and insurers with delays on mandates, but not consumers?

I’ll have more later today on delays for ObamaCare.

Ball of confusion - Part three..... defeats the purpose of lapdog media stooges if folks can get the truth on their own...

John Kerry: 'This Little Thing Called the Internet ... Makes It Much Harder to Govern'

August 13, 2013 - 5:29 PM

By Terence P. Jeffrey

John Kerry: 'This Little Thing Called the Internet ... Makes It Much Harder to Govern'

Secretary of State John Kerry (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

(CNSNews.com) - Speaking to State Department personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that "this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern."

He also said that "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators."

"I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like [Henry] Kissinger’s book about diplomacy where you think about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was for countries to advance their interests and years and years of wars," Kerry said to a gathering of State Department employees and their families.

"And we sometimes say to ourselves, boy, aren’t we lucky," Kerry continued.

"Well, folks," he said, "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.

"It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest," said Kerry, "and that is complicated by a rise of sectarianism and religious extremism that is prepared to employ violent means to impose on other people a way of thinking and a way of living that is completely contrary to everything the United States of America has ever stood for. So we need to keep in mind what our goals are and how complicated this world is that we’re operating in."

Ball of Confusion - Part Four ..... Free markets ?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-13/us-treasury-finally-admits-truth-its-all-pomo-and-no-one-dares-fight-fed

US Treasury Finally Admits The Truth: It's All POMO (And "No One Dares Fight The Fed")

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/13/2013 18:15 -0400

Ben Bernanke

Capital Markets

Monetary Policy

POMO

Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee

Back in 2010, when few still dared to question that the entire move in the market is predicated on the Fed's daily POMO (then still on QE2), we laid out, in a way so easy even a caveman could grasp it, how every tiny move in the stock market is nothing but a function of the Fed's daily POMO on those days in which Bernanke would be directly injecting liquidity into the capital markets using his Primary Dealer frontmen. Since then nearly three years have passed, and thousands of POMO days. All of which brings us to this quarter's Treasury refunding presentation, and specifically the section "Effects of policy and market structure" from the Presentation to the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, in which we learn that we had in fact been right all along, and that perhaps for the first time ever, the Treasury admitted that not only "no one dares fight the Fed" but that, as expected, it is "all POMO."

There, hidden on page 26, or slide 76 of 100, where the Treasury discusses "The Impact Of Monetary Policy", the biggest "conspiracy theory" of all becomes merely the latest conspiracy fact. First, for corporate bonds...

But just as importantly, for stocks.

But most importantly, and tying it all together, POMO. Only this time, finally, the US Treasury finally admits it.

So, thanks to the US Treasury, we know thatbetween January 2009 and April 2013, on days in which the Fed POMO was more than $5 billion, the stock market rose a total of 570 points, on days in which the POMO was less than $5 billion, the cumulative stock market gain was "only" 141 points, and when there was no POMO, the S&P gained... -51 points.

And like that, another conspiracy theory bites the dust. Are any left? Oh yes, Gold isn't manipulated because alleging "gold manipulation" is unfit for polite, dignified society and is best left to the realms of the conspiracy theorists.

Source: US Treasury

Deutsche Bank Hopes "Not All Margin Calls Come At Once In Case Of A Sell-Off"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/13/2013 - 20:01

A recent survey of asset managers globally, managing USD 27.4 trillion between them, found that 78% of defined-benefit plans would need annual returns of at least 5% per year to meet their commitments, while 19% required more than 8%, "a target of 5% per year can be reached but only by using leverage, shorting, and derivavtives." And sure enough, as Deutsche Bank (DB) reports, in short, investors have rarely been more levered than today! According to DB, a MoM change in NYSE margin debt >10% has to be taken as a critical warning signal as there are astonishing similarities in the sequence of events among all crises. As the S&P 500 just hit a new all-time high, investors might want to ask themselves when it is a good time to become more cautious – yesterday, in our view. Simply put, the higher margin debt levels rise, the more fragile the underlying basis on which prices trade; with even a less severe sell-off in equities capable of triggering a collapse.

Catharsis Ours

Tuesday, August 13, 2013