Fags Giving Reagan the Finger in our White House

Gay activists,  Matthew “Matty” Hart and  Zoe Strauss, are under fire for posting photographs of themselves on Facebook giving the middle finger to President Ronald Reagan’s official portrait while attending the LGBT Pride Reception at the White House.

More after the jump.

The White House didn’t respond Friday to a request for comment on the  photographs, but we're thinking this may mean the activists' future White House invites will probably be lost in the mail.

Matthew Hart didn’t return a call from The Washington Times seeking comment, but he told Philadelphia magazine that he despises Reagan's legacy.

“Yeah,  f– Reagan,” Mr. Hart said. “Ronald Reagan has blood on his hands. The  man was in the White House as AIDS exploded, and he was happy to see  plenty of gay men and queer people die. He was a murderous fool, and I have no problem saying so. Don’t invite me back. I don’t care.”

According to The Washington Times, "Mr. Hart is national director of public engagement at Solutions for  Progress, which receives public and private funds to help 'individuals  and families working to overcome poverty and to build long-term  financial stability,' according to its web site. Ms. Strauss is a  photographer."

President Reagan's role or some would say, lack of a role/inaction during the initial AIDS crisis remains a hot-button issue for the LGBT community, but is it appropriate to flip off his portrait while visiting the White House (at the current President's invitation) and post it on Facebook?

MATTY MAKES AN APPEARANCE HERE WEARING A ”GODDAMN TIE AND WINGTIPS"

Islamic Savagery - Public Whipping of Women

Teenager lashed 100 times in Timbuktu for having child out of wedlock

An 18-year-old pregnant woman and her boyfriend were both lashed 100 times by Islamists in Timbuktu in Mali as punishment for "having a child out of wedlock".

The sentence was carried out on the orders of Ansar Dine, a militant Muslim organisation that has seized territory in the desert north of the West African country.

"People were watching it was like a show," said Mohamed Ould Babby, a local official.

"I was there, I saw the youths arriving at the square, I saw them being whipped, it is the first time I have seen something like that." The woman, who was three months pregnant, has another child with her partner but the couple is not married.

According to Ansar Dine's strict interpretation of Islamic laws, that means the pair have committed the crime of "fornication", which is punishable with 100 lashes.

An Islamic police official in the town said six other women who had had children outside of marriage would soon be "punished by Islamic law”.

People living in Timbuktu, the ancient city in Mali's southern Sahara desert, have reported that the Islamists have ordered women to wear full veils, whipped smokers and destroyed shopkeepers' stocks of cigarettes.

Ansar Dine took control of northern Mali, with help from Tuareg rebels, when army officers mutinied in the capital, Bamako, and ousted the democratically-elected government.

TELEGRAPH

Droning on

Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur

US policy of using drone strikes to carry out targeted killings 'may encourage other states to flout international law'

• Owen Bowcott in Geneva
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 June 2012 12.54 EDT

In his strongest critique of drone strikes yet, Christof Heynes said some may constitute war crimes. Photograph: Getty Images

The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-establishedhuman rights standards.

In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute "war crimes". His comments come amid rising international unease over the surge in killings by remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Addressing the conference, which was organised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a second UN rapporteur, Ben Emmerson QC, who monitors counter-terrorism, announced he would be prioritising inquiries into drone strikes.

The London-based barrister said the issue was moving rapidly up the international agenda after China and Russia this week jointly issued a statement at the UN Human Rights Council, backed by other countries, condemning drone attacks.

If the US or any other states responsible for attacks outside recognised war zones did not establish independent investigations into each killing, Emmerson emphasised, then "the UN itself should consider establishing an investigatory body".

Also present was Pakistan's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Zamir Akram, who called for international legal action to halt the "totally counterproductive attacks" by the US in his country.

Heyns, a South African law professor, told the meeting: "Are we to accept major changes to the international legal system which has been in existence since world war two and survived nuclear threats?"

Some states, he added, "find targeted killings immensely attractive. Others may do so in future … Current targeting practices weaken the rule of law. Killings may be lawful in an armed conflict [such as Afghanistan] but many targeted killings take place far from areas where it's recognised as being an armed conflict."

If it is true, he said, that "there have been secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime".

Heyns ridiculed the US suggestion that targeted UAV strikes on al-Qaida or allied groups were a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. "It's difficult to see how any killings carried out in 2012 can be justified as in response to [events] in 2001," he said. "Some states seem to want to invent new laws to justify new practices.

"The targeting is often operated by intelligence agencies which fall outside the scope of accountability. The term 'targeted killing' is wrong because it suggests little violence has occurred. The collateral damage may be less than aerial bombardment, but because they eliminate the risk to soldiers they can be used more often."

Heyns told the Guardian later that his future inquiries are likely to include the question of whether other countries, such as the UK, share intelligence with the US that could be used for selecting individuals as targets. A legal case has already been lodged in London over the UK's alleged role in the deaths of British citizens and others as a consequence of US drone strikes in Pakistan.

Emmerson said that protection of the right to life required countries to establish independent inquiries into each drone killing. "That needs to be applied in the context of targeted killings," he said. "It's possible for a state to establish an independent ombudsman to inquire into every attack and there needs to be a report to justify [the killing]."

Alternatively, he said, it was "for the UN itself to consider establishing an investigatory body. Drones attacks by the US raise fundamental questions which are a direct consequence of my mandate… If they don't [investigate] themselves, we will do it for them."

It is time, he added, to end the "conspiracy of silence" over drone attacks and "shine the light of independent investigation" into the process. The attacks, he noted, were not only on those who had been killed but on the system of "international law itself".

The Pakistani ambassador declared that more than a thousand civilians had been killed in his country by US drone strikes. "We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the war against terror. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them," he said.

Claims made by the US about the accuracy of drone strikes were "totally incorrect", he added. Victims who had tried to bring compensation claims through the Pakistani courts had been blocked by US refusals to respond to legal actions.

The US has defended drone attacks as self-defence against al-Qaida and has refused to allow judicial scrutiny of the UAV programme. On Wednesday, the Obama administration issued a fresh rebuff through the US courts to an ACLU request for information about targeting policies. Such details, it insisted, must remain "classified".

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's national security project, said: "Something that is being debated in UN hallways and committee rooms cannot apparently be talked about in US courtrooms, according to the government. Whether the CIA is involved in targeted lethal operation is now classified. It's an absurd fiction."

The ACLU estimates that as many as 4,000 people have been killed in US drone strikes since 2002 in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians. The numbers killed have escalated significantly since Obama became president.

The USA is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or many other international legal forums where legal action might be started. It is, however, part of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where cases can be initiated by one state against another.

Ian Seiderman, director of the International Commission of Jurists, told the conference that "immense damage was being done to the fabric of international law".

One of the latest UAV developments that concerns human rights groups is the way in which attacks, they allege, have moved towards targeting groups based on perceived patterns of behaviour that look suspicious from aerial surveillance, rather than relying on intelligence about specific al-Qaida activists.

In response to a report by Heyns to the UN Human Rights Council this week, the US put out a statement in Geneva saying there was "unequivocal US commitment to conducting such operations with extraordinary care and in accordance with all applicable law, including the law of war".

It added that there was "continuing commitment to greater transparency and a sincere effort to address some of the important questions that have been raised".

The face of "Fast and Furious”: Brian Terry

Remember Brian Terry

Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry
1970 - 2010

A True American Hero

On December 14, 2010, Brian was conducting operations as a member of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit in Nogales, Arizona. Brian and his team were targeting a “rip crew” who seek out to rob and assault drug runners. When Brian and his team encountered the 5 individuals in the “Peck Well” area near Rio Rico, Arizona shots were fired and Brian was shot in the lower back and mortally wounded during the exchange of gunfire and succumbed to his death on December 15, 2010.

Here is what the first African American Presidential Candidate had to say before he was president:

Who is Barack Obama? Who Knows? Maraniss “Barack Obama: The Story”

				©Jack Cashill WND.com - May 19, 2012 In all the talk about David Maraniss’s new book, “Barack Obama: The Story,” the chattering classes seem to have overlooked the most significant of Maraniss’s revelations, namely that the story on which Obama based his 2008 candidacy is “received myth, not the truth.” “My parents shared not only an improbable love,” said Obama famously in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote, “they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” This concept of multicultural romance shaped his persona and his campaigns. At the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver Obama leaped into the story in the very first sentence. “Four years ago,” he began, “I stood before you and told you my story-- of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren't well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.” As Maraniss concedes, these two young people shared very close to nothing. “In the college life of Barack Obama in 1961 and 1962,” writes Maraniss, “as recounted by his friends and acquaintances in Honolulu, there was no Ann; there was no baby.” Although Maraniss talked to many of Obama Sr.’s friends, none of the credible ones ever so much as saw him with Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham. One Obama friend, a Cambodian named Kiri Tith, knew the senior Obama “very well.” He had also met Ann through a different channel. “But he had no idea,” writes Maraniss, “that Ann knew Obama, let alone got hapai (pregnant) by him, married him, and had a son with him. Only Hawaii governor Neil Abercrombie claims to have seen the pair together during the presumed courtship stage, but he is not close to credible. "Maybe I'm the only one in the country," Abercrombie told the Los Angeles Times in December 2010, "that could look you right in the eye right now and tell you, 'I was here when that baby was born.'" This was pure lie, no other word for it. A few days later, Abercrombie clarified to Mark Niesse of the Associated Press that he didn't exactly see Obama's parents with their newborn son at the hospital, but that he "remembers seeing Obama as a child with his parents at social events." Another lie. Maraniss should have quoted Abercrombie with the stated qualifier that he has proved unreliable on all things Obama, but he did not. Abercrombie was too important. Without Abercrombie, there is no contemporary witness to any kind of relationship. Maraniss, however, knew enough not to quote Abercrombie on his claim to having seen the baby with his parents. Despite his Herculean digging into the dung of Obama’s life, Maraniss’s shovel comes up empty on the couple’s alleged February 1961 wedding. He footnotes his comments thusly, “Marriage facts recorded in divorce records.” There is no doubt that both Ann Dunham and Obama claimed a wedding. It suited both their purposes, Obama to extend his visa and Dunham to legitimize her baby with a black husband. As to the divorce, Dunham at the time was desperately trying to keep her future husband Lolo Soetoro in the country. The INS believed her to be married to Obama. Even if she were not married, a divorce would have been useful to clear the way for a marriage to Soetoro. Like all other biographers of either Obama or his parents, Maraniss is totally silent on Dunham’s whereabouts from the February marriage to the August birth. He adds one detail, however, that deepens the mystery. According to the birth certificate and the newspaper announcements, the young family lived at 6085 Kalanianole Highway where Dunham’s parents lived. Obama Sr. clarified to the INS that mother and baby lived there without him. Maraniss definitively states that “[Dunham] and Obama and the infant never lived [at 6085 Kalanianole].” There was no room. The senior Dunhams shared the house with the Pratt family. The Pratt daughter “has no memory of the Dunhams’ daughter bringing an infant home.” And yes, finally, an Obama biographer admits what the blogosphere has known for the last four years: “Within a month of the day Barry came home from the hospital, he and his mother were long gone from Honolulu, back on the mainland . . . . “ “This period, Washington State revisited,” Maraniss writes, “is missing from the memoir the son would write decade later.” In fact, as recently as Father’s Day 2012, Obama was claiming that his father left home when he was two. What Maraniss does not say is that he missed the Seattle hegira story himself in the 10,000-word Washington Post article he wrote on the eve of the 2008 election. He was hardly unique. No one in the mainstream media wanted to blow the whistle on the fraudulent family fable that got Obama elected president. The New Yorker’s David Remnick chose to overlook it in his 2010 Obama bio. The New York Times’s Janny Scott overlooked it in her 2011 bio of Obama’s mother. The Boston Globe’s Sally Jacobs overlooked it in her 2011 bio of Obama’s father, and the Times’s Jodi Kantor overlooked it in her 2012 book on the whole extended family. Worse, conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza chose not to report the fraud in his disingenuous bestseller, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” As D’Souza explains, Obama was “his father’s son.” Dunham served largely as the vehicle through which the absent Obama exercised his will on the young Obama, she being “Obama Sr.’s first convert” to anti-colonialism. D’Souza should have known this was nonsense. Conservative writer Michael Patrick Leahy had broken the Seattle story as early as 2008 in his book, “What Does Barack Believe.” It was accepted knowledge in the conservative blogosphere by 2009. What Maraniss has laid bare, perhaps without meaning to, is a journalistic scandal of historic proportions in which, alas, he himself has played a part. Who is Jack Cashill?

Government by Waiver

Barack Obama's Executive Unilateralism

Obama's latest move underscores just how easy it is for modern presidents to "change the laws unilaterally."

Gene Healy | June 19, 2012 REASON

In a Rose Garden speech Friday, President Obama announced that per a "Homeland Security Directive," his administration had called a halt to deportation proceedings for certain unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors. The eligibility criteria stated in the order roughly tracks the requirements of the Dream Act, which has never quite been able to make it through Congress. A mere technicality, the president suggested: it's "the right thing to do for the American people."

In an interview with a panel of Latino journalists last fall, the president had a different take: "This notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true. We live in a democracy," he insisted. "You have to pass bills through the legislature and then I can sign it." That's why, despite the urging of immigration activists, he could not implement the Dream Act via executive diktat.

But that explanation is no longer operative, to borrow the old Clinton administration euphemism for "I lied." Obama's latest move underscores just how easy it is for modern presidents to "change the laws unilaterally."

As it happens, Obama's "royal dispensation" for young immigrants is hardly the most terrifying instance of administration unilateralism. In fact, as a policy matter, it's a humane and judicious use of prosecutorial resources.

But given the context, it stinks. It looks uncomfortably like implementing parts of a bill that didn't pass, and -- carried out as it was with great fanfare and an eye to the impending election -- the move sits uneasily with the president's constitutional responsibility to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

The University of Chicago's Richard Epstein warns that "government by waiver" is "among the most serious challenges to the rule of law in our time." The growth of the administrative state has concentrated enormous discretionary power in the president's hands, and he can use that power to reward political allies and legislate by decree without the inconvenience of democratic deliberation.

Consider the conditional waivers the administration has granted to 10 states, freeing them from the strictures of the No Child Left Behind Act -- but only if they adopt certain reforms, nowhere to be found in the law.

As The Examiner's Michael Barone noted last year, the president's union allies were suspiciously overrepresented in Obamacare waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, loosening administrative cost limits in employer health plans.

"What about employers who do not have the resources to navigate the waiver process?" Epstein asks. "What about those lacking the political connections to make their concerns heard in Washington?"

Many of the major provisions of Obamacare are slated to come on line in 2014, Epstein notes: "Written with only the vaguest legislative language, it will be up to HHS bureaucrats to interpret these mandates and turn them into regulations. Inevitably, those rules will come with some waiver authority -- and with it great potential for the differential application of generally applicable laws. The danger posed to the basic principles of the rule of law, therefore, is immense."

Looking abroad, the dangers to the rule of law are equally grave. In an interview with CBS's Bob Schieffer on Sunday, Gov. Romney announced that, when it comes to preventive strikes on Iran, the Constitution's "Declare War" clause is optional.

"I don't believe at this stage, therefore, if I'm president that we need to have a war powers approval or special authorization for military force," he said, "The president has that capacity now."

That's Obama's position on war powers as well -- as his Libyan adventure proved. Unfortunately, executive unilateralism is a bipartisan vice.

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute, the author of "The Cult of the Presidency," and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, where this article originally appeared. 

Another Creepy Intrusion by the Internet

Facebook buys Israeli facial recognition firm Face.com

Face.com is a 11-person start-up based in Tel Aviv, Israel

Continue reading the main story

Social networking giant Facebook has decided to buy an Israeli startup specialising in facial recognition technology - Face.com.

BBC - The firm already provides software that allows Facebook's members to identify and tag photos of their friends.

The terms of the deal are not known, but Reuters quotes estimates of $55-60m (£35-38m).

Tagging is a popular feature on Facebook, but privacy advocates have raised concerns about the technology.

Face.com's software scans photos Facebook users upload, and suggests friends they may wish to tag with just one click.

According to the social network, the acquisition does not mean there will be changes to Facebook's current face detection and recognition systems for photos.

"People who use Facebook enjoy sharing photos and memories with their friends, and Face.com's technology has helped to provide the best photo experience," said Facebook's spokesperson in a statement to the BBC.

Continue reading the main story

"This transaction simply brings a world-class team and a long-time technology vendor in house."

Privacy issues

But UK campaign group Privacy International warned of what it described as the potential pitfalls of the technology.

"Facebook are in the process of building the largest and most accurate facial recognition database in the world, and with great power comes great responsibility," the organisation's head of communications, Emma Draper, told the BBC.

"We would hope to see very strict safeguards on how this information is stored and who has access to it, particularly if - as seems increasingly likely - Facebook is going to start making money from it."

Face.com is an 11-employee startup located in the heart of Tel Aviv's startup community on Rothschild Boulevard, locally known as the Silicon Boulevard.

The firm could not be reached for comment, but in a statement on its website it said that "by working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we'll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers - that's all we've ever wanted to do".

Face.com launched its first product in 2009, and also supports third-party apps such as Photo Finder, Photo Tagger, and CelebrityFindr, which allows Twitter users to search for photos of celebrities.

Facebook has recently been expressing great interest in mobile and photo-sharing - in April, it bought Instagram for $1bn, and weeks later launched a photo sharing smartphone app called Camera.

Both apps allow users to add filters and make other tweaks to photographs.

Barack Hussein Obama - A domestic enemy of the US Constitution?

CURL: Obama: A domestic enemy of the U.S. Constitution

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

By Joseph Curl

-

The Washington Times

“Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation — I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.*

“* Unless, you know, 224 years from now, whoever happens to president simply decides he really doesn’t want to do that.”

- Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of Barack Obama’s U.S. Constitution

The Founders set the course in a simple, concise, 35-word affirmation — the president’s top job is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. The chief executive does, of course, have other responsibilities, but his guardianship of the document they had just written was deemed by the Founders to be of such great import that they made him swear it — aloud, in front of witnesses.

In 1884, Congress, having no set oath of office, wrote its own: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same …”

Little did they know then that 128 years later, America would face just that: a domestic threat to the U.S. Constitution.

From the very beginning, the president and his administration made clear they had no intention of enforcing laws they didn’t like. Mr. Obamaand his minions decided that they would simply stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act, no longer prosecute growers of “medical” marijuana, and let some states walk away from provisions in the No Child Left Behind law (which, by the way, was co-authored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and passed the Senateby a 91-8 vote).

Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has even more flagrantly flouted the laws of the land. Out of the blue, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, reinterpreted America’s gambling laws (and dumped the decision on Christmas Eve so as to avoid scrutiny). More recently, Mr. Holder has decided to thwart congressional oversight by refusing to release documents on the disastrous “Fast and Furious” gun-running scheme, and he is actively fighting Florida for trying to expunge dead people from its voter rolls.

Now comes Mr. Obama’s decision to stop enforcing America’s immigration laws. The new policy states that illegal immigrants who were younger than 16 when they entered the country are eligible for a two-year exemption from deportation. Of course, the “deferred action process,” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano called it, will apply to illegals up to age 30. (Think when they legally get their driver’s licenses they will also be handed a voter registration card?)

The increasingly desperate Mr. Obama, once a constitutional professor, knows full well he is circumventing Congress. In March 2011 he told a group of young Hispanics: “America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job.

“Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws,” he said. “There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”

So why now? Politics. The Hispanic population in Florida, Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado may well decide the November election, and with working-class whites, religious blacks, disenchanted young people and Jews fleeing in droves, Mr. Obama is looking to shore up his support, even if that means violating his oath to protect the Constitution.

Continuing his nonstop campaign of division — black against white, rich against poor, straight against gay, religious against secular, race against race — the president is seeking to build whatever loose coalition of support he can. Forget bipartisanship; a coalition of the middle, Mr. Obama’s sole path to victory, he thinks, is to stir up so much discontent within different strata that he can win re-election.

Of course, the liberals who whined about President George W. Bush’s signing statements haven’t made a peep about Mr. Obama’s Napoleonic power grab.