ET Williams

The Doctor of Common Sense

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Can America forget Newt Gingrich’s ethic case?

By LARRY MARGASAK

WASHINGTON (AP) – On Jan. 21, 1997, one of the most memorable days in congressional history, Newt Gingrich became the first House speaker to be reprimanded by his colleagues for ethical misconduct.

The 395-28 vote, to reprimand him for bringing discredit on the House for failing to ensure his use of tax-exempt groups was legal, was historic by itself. But Gingrich’s peers didn’t stop there. They fined him $300,000 for misleading the House ethics committee and causing it to extend a costly investigation.

Fifteen years later, the case has come back into focus as the fight for next year’s Republican presidential nomination has resuscitated a political career once thought to be all but over.

The ethics committee back then made no finding on whether Gingrich’s use of tax-exempt groups to raise money was illegal. It said it would let the Internal Revenue Service determine if any tax laws were broken. In 1999, the IRS said they were not.

In settling the case, Gingrich acknowledged he gave false information to the ethics committee in denying that a Republican political action committee he led – GOPAC – was connected to a college course he taught that was funded by tax-exempt organizations.

GOPAC, in fact, was involved in developing what was supposed to be a nonpartisan college course, the committee said, and Gingrich’s denial was “inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable.”

Gingrich said in recent comments on the campaign trail that more than 1 million pages of documents were turned over to the ethics committee that investigated him, and that 83 charges were repudiated as false. “The one mistake we made was a letter written by a lawyer that I didn’t read carefully,” he said.

But he also accused the ethics committee of being partisan and said, “The way I was dealt with related more to the politics of the Democratic Party than the ethics.” The committee, then and now, has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans.

The ethics findings, unhappiness of many Republicans with his leadership, and his resignation as speaker after 1998 GOP election losses left Gingrich with scars that seemed to doom his political career. It didn’t revive until last month, when the former speaker surged to the top among Republican presidential hopefuls.

Gingrich’s ethics investigation consumed more than two years. Democrats were rabid in their insistence that the speaker broke House rules. And they wanted revenge. Years earlier, Gingrich and others had filed an ethics complaint against a Democratic speaker, Jim Wright – a case that led to Wright’s resignation in 1989.

If Gingrich wins the GOP nomination, Democrats are certain to remind voters of this piece of baggage. The ethics report in 1997 portrayed him as unethical beyond the case at hand. Without details, it said that “over a number of years and in a number of situations, Mr. Gingrich showed a disregard and lack of respect for the standards of conduct that applied to his activities.”

The genesis of Gingrich’s ethics case goes back to 1990, when he was No. 2 in the House GOP hierarchy. Democrats had a stranglehold on the majority dating back to 1955, and Gingrich knew that If Republicans were ever to take back the House, they had to recruit hundreds of thousands of new voters.

He developed a television show in 1990 and a college course in 1993, using tax-exempt organizations to help finance them and spread his message: Replace the “welfare state” with an “opportunity society” centered in part on Republican, free enterprise economic principles.

“Based on the evidence, it was clear that Mr. Gingrich intended that the (television show and college course) have substantial partisan, political purposes,” the ethics committee found.

That was a problem. U.S. tax law provides a way for people to make tax-deductible donations to certain groups as long as those groups stay away from partisan politics. The groups are often called 501c3s because that’s the section of the IRS code that gives them tax-exempt status.

Gingrich’s TV show and college course originally were a project of his GOPAC political action committee. But after they started consuming a substantial portion of the political committee’s revenues, Gingrich and others transferred the project to the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation. The foundation was a tax-exempt 501(c)3 group that had been dormant but was revived to sponsor the televised workshop.

The foundation operated out of GOPAC’s offices, and virtually all its officers and employers were simultaneously GOPAC officers or employees. The main difference between GOPAC and the foundation was the $260,000 in tax-deductible contributions the foundation raised to fund the TV program and the workshops.

Gingrich tried to protect his donors’ tax deductions by keeping out references to Republicans and partisan politics in the TV show and college course. The course was taught originally at the public Kennesaw State College in Georgia in 1993 and the private Reinhardt College in 1994 and 1995. Gingrich and another professor each taught 20 hours.

The partisanship came in when Gingrich arranged “workshops” across the country for people to see his lectures and the TV show. A purpose of the workshops was to recruit voters who would support Republicans, the ethics committee said.

It cited documents in which Gingrich describes the purpose of the TV show and college course.

“The objective measurable goal is the maximum growth of news coverage of our vision and ideas, the maximum recruitment of new candidates, voters and resources, and the maximum electoral success in winning seats from the most local office to the White House,” Gingrich wrote.

He said in numerous writings that the college course was part of his “Renewing American Civilization” movement to replace the “welfare state.” The course and the movement had the same name.

In a 1993 document Gingrich said the goal of the movement was “replacing the welfare state, recruit, discover, arouse and network together 200,000 activists including candidates for elected office at all levels” leading to “a sweeping victory in 1996.”

He didn’t have to wait that long. In the 1994 election, Gingrich engineered a Republican takeover of the House. The GOP held the House majority for a dozen years until Democrats regained it in 2006. Last year, Republicans took it back.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20111225/D9RRAOQ80.html

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GOP Candidates Return to Campaign Trail

DES MOINES, Iowa –  Republicans in search of their party’s presidential nomination are returning to campaign mode after a brief Christmas respite, with Rick Santorum planning a bird hunting trip with conservatives in Iowa and Mitt Romney phoning supporters.

With just a week until Iowa holds its leadoff caucuses, candidates are stepping up activities in the state ahead of the Jan. 3 contests.

Many voters are undecided. And while former Massachusetts governor Romney appears stronger in Iowa than he had earlier, he’s facing a continuing challenge from Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the U.S. House.

In Iowa, both Romney and Gingrich must contend with Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who seems to have the most sophisticated network of volunteers ready to organize ahead of the caucuses. Paul, who is popular with conservatives, was to return to Iowa this week to meet with supporters he has kept in touch with since his unsuccessful run in 2008.

Romney, who kept this state at arm’s length for most of the year, seemed to increase his efforts in Iowa as polls found him in a stronger position.

He planned to talk with supporters in a series of telephone calls in Iowa and New Hampshire on Monday between working on a speech that aides described as his final pitch to Iowans.

Romney planned to deliver that speech Tuesday evening and then set out on a bus tour of Iowa.

He will share the highways with Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Gingrich. All scheduled bus tours to start then, too.

Gingrich, who last week criticized the negative tone of the campaign, was ready to directly challenge Romney on the economy, an issue Romney has made central to his campaign.

Gingrich’s standing in public and private polls has slipped as he faced unrelenting criticism from the candidates and their allies.

Santorum, meanwhile, planned to announce support from another wave of Iowa conservatives. He scheduled a pheasant hunting trip for Monday afternoon.

While he trails in polls and has not spent significant money on ads, Santorum is hoping his nonstop courtship of Iowans yields a late surge.

He visited all 99 of Iowa’s counties during the summer — an accomplishment Bachmann has feverishly tried to replicate.

Meanwhile, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman kept his focus on New Hampshire, which votes for a Republican presidential candidate on Jan. 10. Early in the campaign, he said he would not compete in Iowa and instead would make his start in New Hampshire, which comes second on the nominating calendar.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/26/candidates-return-to-campaign-trail-after-short-christmas-break/

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Obama Administration Adopts Resolution to Kill Free Speech

The Religion Of Peace

By Patrick Goodenough

Flags of member nations flying at United Nations headquarters inNew York City. (U.N. Photo by Araujo Pinto)

(CNSNews.com) – The U.N. General Assembly on Monday adopted a resolution condemning the stereotyping, negative profiling and stigmatization of people based on their religion, and urging countries to take effective steps “to address and combat such incidents.”

No member state called for a recorded vote on the text, which was as a result adopted “by consensus.”

The resolution, an initiative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), is based on one passed by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council in Genevalast spring. The State Department last week hosted a meeting to discuss ways of “implementing” it.

Every year since 1999 the OIC has steered through the U.N.’s human rights apparatus a resolution condemning the “defamation of religion,” which for the bloc of 56 Muslim states covered incidents ranging from satirizing Mohammed in a newspaper cartoon to criticism of shari’a and post-9/11 security check profiling.

Critics regard the measure as an attempt to outlaw valid and critical scrutiny of Islamic teachings, as some OIC states do through controversial blasphemy laws at home.

Strongly opposed by mostly Western democracies, the divisive “defamation” resolution received a dwindling number of votes each year, with the margin of success falling from 57 votes in 2007 to 19 in 2009 and just 12 last year.

This year’s text was a departure, in that it dropped the “defamation” language and included a paragraph that reaffirms “the positive role that the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the full respect for the freedom to seek, receive and impart information can play in strengthening democracy and combating religious intolerance.”

The nod to freedom of expression won the resolution the support of theU.S.and other democracies, with the Obama administration and others hailing it as a breakthrough after years of acrimonious debate.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the opportunity of the State Department-hosted talks with foreign governments, the OIC and other international bodies last week to stress the importance of freedom of speech in the U.S.She argued that “the best way to treat offensive speech is by people either ignoring it or combating it with good arguments and good speech that overwhelms it.”

Saudi initiative singled out for praise

Nonetheless, the resolution adopted in New York on Monday does contain elements that concern some free speech and religious freedom advocates.

It calls on states “to take effective measures to ensure that public functionaries in the conduct of their public duties do not discriminate against an individual on the basis of religion or belief.”

Governments also are expected to make “a strong effort to counter religious profiling, which is understood to be the invidious use of religion as a criterion in conducting questionings, searches and other law enforcement investigative procedures.”

“Effective measures” to counter cases of religious stereotyping and stigmatization include education, interfaith dialogue and “training of government officials.”

And in the worst cases, those of “incitement to imminent violence” based on religion, the resolution calls on countries to implement “measures to criminalize” such behavior.

Also of note is the fact that the resolution singles out for praise only one interfaith initiative – and that initiative was established bySaudi Arabia, a leading OIC member-state with a long history of enforcing blasphemy laws.

The resolution commends the establishment of the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue, “acknowledging the important role that the Centre is expected to play as a platform for the enhancement of interreligious and intercultural dialogue.”

(Another clause welcomes “all international, regional and national initiatives aimed at promoting interreligious, intercultural and interfaith harmony and combating discrimination against individuals on the basis of religion or belief,” but the Saudi one alone is recognized specifically.)

Monday’s adoption of the text took place without a debate. Earlier, when a General Assembly committee considered the draft resolution, a delegate of Poland – speaking on behalf of the European Union – raised concern about the fact it mentioned by name only one center for interreligious dialogue, even though there were numerous such facilities around the world.

The E.U. was also concerned that the resolution considered the world as “monolithic religious blocs,” while religious hatred was primarily a threat to individual freedoms, he said.

Despite those concerns, the E.U. was prepared to join consensus and support the resolution.

TheU.S.representative, John Sammis, said the United States was pleased to join the consensus.

It had been unable to support previous resolutions of this type because they sought to restrict expression and were “counterproductive,” he said, but the new one upholds respect for universal human rights.

“The United States welcomes all international, national, and regional initiatives that respect universal human rights and that recommend these types of measures to promote interfaith harmony and combating discrimination against individuals on the basis of religion or belief,” Sammis said. “Such initiatives can promote respect for religious diversity in a manner that respects universal human rights.”

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/un-adopts-religious-intolerance-resolution-championed-obama-administration

 

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Hugo Chavez calls Obama’s a Clown

 

By: MACKENZIE WEINGER

Hugo Chávez blasted President Barack Obama as a “clown” and an “embarrassment” who has turned theUnited States into a “disaster” after Obama criticizedVenezuela’s ties withIran andCuba, according to a report Tuesday.

Chávez’s comments came in the wake of Obama’s Monday written interview with the Caracaspaper El Universal, where the U.S. president questioned Venezuela’s connections to those countries. Chávez hit back strongly at Obama on state TV Monday, according to The Guardian, saying the president gave the interview only to “win votes” in the 2012 election.

“Mr. Obama decided to attack us,” Chávez said. “Now you want to win votes by attackingVenezuela. Don’t be irresponsible. You are a clown, a clown. Leave us in peace … Go after your votes by fulfilling that which you promised your people.”

“Focus on governing your country, which you’ve turned into a disaster,” Chávez said, according to The Guardian.

Chávez’s comments were prompted by Obama’s response to an El Universal question about what theU.S.government thinks ofVenezuela’s ties toIranandCuba. Obama told the paper, “It seems to me that the ties betweenVenezuela’s government andIranandCubahave not served the interests ofVenezuelaand its people.”

“We are concerned about the government’s actions, which have restricted the universal rights of the Venezuelan people, threatened basic democratic values and failed to contribute to the security in the region,” Obama said, according to The Guardian.

ReferencingIran, Obama wrote, “Sooner or later,Venezuela’s people will have to decide what possible advantage there is in having relations with a country that violates fundamental human rights and is isolated from most of the world.”

On Tuesday, Chávez landed inUruguayfor a summit ofSouth America’s trade bloc, Mercosur. This is the Venezuelan president’s first trip abroad since he was diagnosed with cancer.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70694.html

 

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Occupy Movement Supporters Hack into Cop’s Personal Information

I'm a Occupy Wall Street Idiot

Computer hackers are avenging the Occupy movement by exposing the personal information of police officers who evicted protesters and threatening family-values advocates who led a boycott of an American Muslim television show.

In three Internet postings last week, hackers from the loose online coalition called Anonymous published the email and physical addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, salary details of thousands of law enforcement officers all over the country.

The hackers said they were retaliating for police violence during evictions of Occupy protest camps in cities around the country, but law enforcement advocates slammed the disclosures as dangerous.

“I hope the individuals behind these cyberattacks understand the consequences of what they are doing,” said John Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. “There are very dangerous criminals out there who might seek retribution” against any of these police officers.

Another hacker calling himself ihazcAnNONz struck the website of the Florida Family Association. The group opposes gay marriage and has promoted a successful but highly controversial boycott of advertisers on the reality TV show “All-American Muslim.”

Occupy D.C. protesters stand off with police as they block 14th and K streets NW inWashingtonon Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/TheWashingtonTimes)

The group says the show is “propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Shariah law.”

Supporters of the show say it depicts ordinary Muslim-American families living their normal lives, and they accuse its critics bigotry.

The hacker, ihazcAnNONz, warned theFloridafamily group, “Your hatred, bigotry and fear mongering towards Gays, Lesbians and most recently Muslim Americans has not gone unnoticed!”

In an Internet posting, he told the family association he was reading its email, and he provided email addresses and partial credit-card information of two dozen or so of the group’s supporters. He referred to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan about the “1 percent” and the “99 percent.”

“I am going to assume most of the people who receive your newsletter, email you and make donations are potentially part of the 99 percent … who have been mislead by all of your [expletive] and god talk,” he wrote, adding that he therefore would not post confidential information on them.

The family association did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Last week, a hacker calling himself Exphin1ty posted the email and physical addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords of more than 2,400 police officers and corporate security executives.

“We have seen our fellow brothers and sisters being teargassed for exercising their fundamental liberal rights,” he wrote.

He urged fellow hackers with access to greater computing power to crack the encryption on passwords and see if the victims had used the same password for any other accounts.

Websites that require users to register typically store data such as names, email addresses and passwords on their servers.

Many websites encrypt passwords and credit-card details, but passwords can be decrypted with sufficient computer-processing power if users have employed a word that can be found in a dictionary. People often use the same password for multiple accounts, a practice security experts decry.

“We encourage all of our […] friends to deface and leak [the officers’] twitters, facebooks and private email accounts,” Exphin1ty said.

The targeted police officers and security personnel were members of the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR), a nonprofit group that promotes cooperation between local police forces and retail corporations throughout theUnited States.

The group did not respond to an email requesting comment.

A hacker called Abhaxas also posted 18,000 emails, names and passwords of customers from Specialforces.com, a website that sells military-styled clothing and weapon accessories. A brief review suggested that many of them might be police officers or military personnel and identifiable as such by their emails.

David Thomas, who responded to an email sent to the website, said Specialforces.com had secured the site and alerted all its customers to the breach.

Hackers under the banner “Operation Pig Roast” posted the names, phone numbers, home addresses and salaries of nearly 70 senior members of the Houston Police Department after an eviction there. However, they insisted that they did not “condone nor do we wish violent behavior against families of these officers.”

They claimed they got the information legally and not by hacking into websites. One computer expert said they probably broke no law.

“Publishing personal details about people — if it doesn’t involve hacking — is, on its face, legal,” said Aaron Titus of Identity Finder, a firm that sells software to help companies secure or destroy personal data. “It’s not illegal to compile and publish information that’s available in public records.”

Alan Brill, senior managing director for Kroll Inc.’s cybersecurity practice, said he is seeing an increasing number of attacks aimed at illegally getting personal data from websites.

He said many small- and medium-sized businesses assumed they would not be targets or wrongly thought they lacked the resources to address security questions.

With “‘hacktivism’ growing on a global scale, it is the height of folly to presume you won’t be a target,” he said, referring to a term for hacker-activists.

He noted that the tools for hacking website databases and for automated scanning of thousands of sites, searching for vulnerabilities, are available commercially, meaning almost anyone could accomplish this kind of computer attack.

Mr. Brill and Mr. Titus agreed that database hacking for financial rewards or just vandalism is growing even faster than politically motivated hacking, making it impossible to predict who might become a target.

“People say, ‘Why would they attack us?’ The answer is, ‘Because you’ve got a website,’” Mr. Titus said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/20/hackers-post-cops-personal-data-online/?page=2

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Why are The North Korean’s Crying over Kim Jong-IL

 

Communism Is Good

 

 

Governments should mark North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il’s death with a clear demand that the new leader choose a path of reforming the country’s abysmal human rights situation, Human Rights Watch said today. 

Kim Jong-Il exercised total control for 17 years over one of the world’s most closed and repressive governments. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of North Koreans through widespread preventable starvation, horrendous prisons and forced labor camps, and public executions. Kim family rule, starting with his father, Kim Il-Sung in 1948, is projected to continue with Kim Jong-Il’s son, Kim Jong-Un. 

“Kim Jong-Il will be remembered as the brutal overseer of massive and systematic oppression that included a willingness to let his people starve,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “When he assumes leadership, Kim Jong-Un should break with the past and put the human rights of North Koreans first, not last.”

Kim Jong-Il’s legacy includes the fate of the tens of thousands who have died in the kwanliso camps for alleged enemies of the state, where today an estimated 200,000 North Koreans continue to work and die in conditions of near starvation and brutal abuse. In this system, the sins of one member of the family condemn an entire generation to imprisonment. A steady stream of former prisoners who escaped North Korea have testified to Human Rights Watch and other organizations how even children born inside such camps grow up to inherit their parents’ prisoner status.

Leaving the country without official permission is considered an act of treason, punishable by torture and imprisonment, yet tens of thousands have fled in the last two decades, and thousands more continue to risk their lives every year to escape.

“North Korea under Kim Jong-Il has been a human rights hell on earth,” said Roth. “Kim Jong-Il ruled through fear generated by systematic and pervasive human rights abuses including arbitrary executions, torture, forced labor and strict limits on freedom of speech and association.” 

In his final report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Vitit Muntarbhorn, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republicof Korea, rightly classified the human rights situation in North Koreaas “horrific and harrowing” and as sui generis, or in its own category. There have been growing calls from governments and civil society organizations for the establishment of a UN commission of inquiry to examine whether crimes against humanity have been committed in North Korea. 

“The international community should take this transitory period of power inNorth Korea to press for the country’s new leader to steer the country in a new direction and cease repression of its citizens,” said Roth. “Pressing North Korea to comply with human rights demands contained in the latest UN General Assembly resolution onNorth Korea, and allowing the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea to visit the country, would be a good start.”

http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/19/north-korea-kim-jong-il-s-legacy-mass-atrocity-0