The OPM Hack and Obama’s Politicization of the Federal Bureacracy

By now, it’s clear that hackers — believed to be tied to the Chinese government – stole files from the Office of Personnel Management that amount to a giant “how to blackmail anyone in the federal government” manual. This was America’s “cyber 9/11,” exposing an administration full of true believers in the expansion of government who can’t handle the most basic tasks of secret-keeping. 

How does a government failure so consequential — a foreign power accessing 18 million confidential records, including the intimate personal details of federal workers’ infidelity, drug abuse, and personal debts uncovered during the background-check process for security clearances — happen?

For many Obama critics on and off the Hill, the answer lies in a troubling pattern of incompetent management from Obama appointees selected more for their political loyalty than for their expertise, skill, or leadership abilities.

 RELATED: Why Are We Ignoring a Cyber Pearl Harbor? Before becoming the head of OPM, 

Katherine Archuleta had no background in the kind of work the agency does. Archuleta, a lawyer and former Clinton administration official, was national political director for President Obama’s reelection campaign. She served as the chief of staff to Secretary of Labor Hilda Solís, and was the City of Denver’s lead planner for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Like the president, she has roots in “community organizing”: She co-founded the Latina Initiative, a Colorado organization aimed at getting more Hispanic voters involved in politics. (In 2011, the Latina Initiative suspended its operations, citing insufficient funding.) Nothing in this record suggests any expertise in the vitally important human resources and record-keeping functions OPM is supposed to serve.

Before the hack, Archuleta’s primary goals at OPM appeared to be increasing the diversity of the federal workforce and implementing Obamacare’s changes to federal workers’ health-insurance options.

Via: National Review

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Ghost From Clintons’ Past Surfaces In Explosive, Newly-Discovered Audio Sure To Haunt Hillary

Newly uncovered audio sheds light on the state of mind of the White House during the Clinton administration toward a “right-wing conspiracy” years before Hillary Clinton ever uttered the phrase.

Former Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Donna Shalala, interviewed in 1994 by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Haynes Johnson, shed light on the early attitudes of the Clinton White House. “They’ve become paranoid. Paranoia. They think people are out to get them – this right-wing conspiracy stuff,” Shalala said at the time.

The audio, which you can listen to below, was first acquired by The Washington Free Beacon from the Wisconsin Historical Society at the University of Wisconsin. Quotes from the interview were featured in the 1996 book, The System, written by Johnson with David Broder, which focused on the 1990s health care debate, but were not attributed to any specific person until now.

“There is a feeling in the White House,” Shalala said, “and I don’t know whether it’s [James] Carville or [Paul] Begala or who’s giving them the materials. But sitting on the desks of their staff there’s these materials on this right-wing conspiracy. My reaction to that is, ‘So what? So what’s new?'”

“[The Clintons are] feeling sorry for themselves. They talk about [conspiracies] all the time,” she added. “That there really is a conspiracy out there to get us. That we don’t have a chance, people don’t understand how much good we’ve done. Our message isn’t getting across because these people are beating us up.”

Via: Western Journalism

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Declassified CIA memo shows Bill Clinton crippled anti-terrorism efforts in lead-up to 9/11

In a classic Friday-afternoon document dump, a CIA memo written by then-agency head George Tenet in 2005 has been released, incriminating the Bill Clinton administration in crippling anti-terror efforts.  Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times writes:

The Clinton administration had bankrupted the intelligence community and refused to let the CIA prioritize anti-terrorism over other major priorities in the late 1990s, leaving the agency stretched too thin in the days ahead of the 2001 terrorist attacks, former Director George J. Tenet said in a 2005 document declassified Friday. 

Mr. Tenet, who was head of the agency at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks and has taken severe criticism for not anticipating and heading them off, said in the document that he took the threat of Osama bin Laden very seriously, and put major effort into trying to penetrate al-Qaeda, beginning as far back as 1998.

Clearly, Tenet is covering his posterior.  But:

“Even though senior policy makers were intimately familiar with the threat posed by terrorism, particularly those in the previous administration who had responded to major attacks, they never provided us the luxury of either downgrading other high priority requirements we were expected to perform against, or the resource base to build counterterrorism programs with the consistency that we needed before September 11,” Mr. Tenet wrote.

Via: American Thinker

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George Clintonopoulos!

By: Larry Elder

What took so long?

The question isn't whether George Stephanopoulos compromised his credentials as a "journalist" by failing to reveal his donations to the Clinton Foundation. The question is why, immediately after Stephanopoulos left the Clinton administration, ABC hired this partisan in the first place.

In 1996, when ABC hired him, the initial press release said he would "serve both as a political analyst and as a correspondent." The "correspondent" role caused such an uproar -- even in liberal mainstream media -- that a few days later ABC quickly retreated: "I don't know how that got into the press release," said a spokeswoman. "He will not report the news."

Then-ABC News Vice President Joanna Bistany said Stephanopoulos would be a commentator like ABC contributor William Kristol, Republican Dan Quayle's former chief of staff. "I view it the same way as Kristol," she said. "He has a point of view, a political persuasion." Bistany also said, "We want a mix of voices," assuring that Stephanopoulos wouldn't "do anything that has any appearance of conflict."

Then came the double cross.

By 1999, Stephanopoulos was a regular contributor on "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America" and had co-anchored ABC's overnight news program. Still, ABC assured viewers that he'd stay away from partisan political stories. "We're all conscious of the sensitivity with him having been part of the news in Washington," said then-ABC News President David Westin. "We wouldn't have him be the beat reporter on the (Al) Gore campaign." An ABC spokeswoman added, "He will not be the beat reporter assigned to a campaign," although that "does not mean that we won't have him doing more general political stories."

In 2002, Stephanopoulos became host of "This Week," and two years later ABC named him "chief Washington correspondent."

Via: Townhall

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Bitterly clinging to Obamacare

Campaigning during his first presidential run over five years ago, then Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) was overheard at a private fund raiser among the extremely wealthy in San Francisco infamously stating: 

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So how is the now President Obama (still D) helping these bitter clingers?  He's not.  As a matter of fact he is making their lives worse with Obamacare and his other laws and policies.  As the New York Times discovered about the (Un)Affordable Care Act.

Via: American Thinker

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Myths about Government Shutdowns

Young people often don't realize that government shutdowns used to be common, until the middle of the Clinton administration. The George W. Bush presidency was an exception to the rule. The Miami Herald's Glenn Garvin debunks the myths promoted by the left-leaning "chattering classes" to people too young to remember earlier shutdowns, and people with bad memories.

Myth: "This kind of thing never used to happen." Reality:

"Actually, it used to happen all the time. What's unusual is the quiet stretch since the last shutdown, when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were facing off in 1995. Before that, there were 18 shutdowns in 19 years as various Congresses and presidents squabbled over raising the national debt limit. My personal favorite is the one in 1982, when Congress didn't feel like working late to pass a spending bill the night before the new fiscal year started. The Republicans were all going to a barbecue at the White House, while the Democrats had a $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner to attend."

Myth: "it wouldn't happen if not for all these crazy ideologues who've been elected the last few years. In the old days, Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill would have just had a drink after work and settled everything." Reality:

"More likely they would have broken some bottles over one another's heads. The federal government shut down seven times while Reagan was president and O'Neill speaker of the House. No wonder, the way they talked about each other.

"O'Neill called Reagan 'an absolute and total disgrace' and added that it was 'sinful that this man is president of the United States.' Reagan, in his diary, wrote that budget negotiations with the speaker were an ordeal because 'Tip O'Neill doesn't have the facts of what was in the budget. Besides he doesn't listen.'"

Via: CNS News

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Obama’s EPA Planning To Crush Coal Industry With Avalanche Of New Regulations After Election…

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has devoted an unprecedented number of bureaucrats to finalizing new anti-coal regulations that are set to be released at the end of November, according to a source inside the EPA.

More than 50 EPA staff are now crashing to finish greenhouse gas emission standards that would essentially ban all construction of new coal-fired power plants. Never before have so many EPA resources been devoted to a single regulation. The independent and non-partisan Manhattan Institute estimates that the EPA’s greenhouse gas coal regulation will cost the U.S. economy $700 billion.

The rush is a major sign of panic by environmentalists inside the Obama administration. If Obama wins, the EPA would have another four full years to implement their anti-fossil fuel agenda. But if Romney wins, regulators will have a very narrow window to enact a select few costly regulations that would then be very hard for a President Romney to undo.

Environmentalists at the EPA pulled this trick before in 2000 when the Clinton administration rushed out a finding that Mercury emissions from power plants were a growing public health threat pursuant to the Clean Air Act. That finding did not regulate power plants itself, but it did force the Bush administration to begin a lengthy regulatory process. The Obama EPA has estimated that this regulation alone will cost the U.S. economy $10.9 billion a year.

Reached for comment, Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said:

President Obama won’t tell the voters of the Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania the truth about his plans to shut down the coal industry. Even after he loses on Tuesday, it appears that the President will still try to continue his efforts to kill their jobs and drive up their energy prices. Mitt Romney is committed to reversing the damage caused by the Obama Administration’s disastrous liberal agenda as soon as he takes office.

Via: Washington Examiner

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Majority in U.S. Still Say Government Doing Too Much

But fewer Americans now say government has too much power

PRINCETON, NJ -- A majority of Americans (54%) continue to believe the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses, although that is down from the record high of 61% earlier this summer. About four in 10 Americans (39%) say the government should do more to solve the nation's problems.

Track the 2012 race and compare it to past elections >

Only a few times in Gallup's 20-year history of asking this question has a higher percentage of Americans said the government should do more to solve the nation's problems than said the government is doing too much. Two of these were in the fall of 1992 and again in early 1993, as Bill Clinton ran for and took office as president. Another was in October 2001, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and at a time when Americans were especially supportive of government and its efforts to help the nation recover from the attacks and retaliate against those who were responsible.

Americans have been most likely to say the government was attempting to do too much during the middle years of the Clinton administration, and in recent years during the Obama administration.

Via: Gallup

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