Month: August 2015

Russian jets in Syrian skies | Ynet News |

Russian fighter pilots are expected to begin arriving in Syria in the coming days, and will fly their Russian air force fighter jets and attack helicopters against ISIS and rebel-aligned targets within the failing state.

According to Western diplomats, a Russian expeditionary force has already arrived in Syria and set up camp in an Assad-controlled airbase. The base is said to be in area surrounding Damascus, and will serve, for all intents and purposes, as a Russian forward operating base.

In the coming weeks thousands of Russian military personnel are set to touch down in Syria, including advisors, instructors, logistics personnel, technical personnel, members of the aerial protection division, and the pilots who will operate the aircraft.

Past reports have stated that the Russians were in talks to sell the Syrians a package of MiG-29 fighter jets, and Yak-130 trainer jets (which can also serve as attack aircraft.) The current makeup of the expeditionary force is still unknown, but there is no doubt that Russian pilots flying combat missions in Syrian skies will definitely change the existing dynamics in the Middle East.

The Russians do not harbor offensive intentions towards Israel or other sovereign states in the area, and their main stated goal is battling ISIS and preserving Assad’s rule. However, their presence will represent a challenge to the Israeli Air Force’s freedom of operation in the skies above the Middle East.

Western diplomatic sources recently reported that a series of negotiations had been held between the Russians and the Iranians, mainly focusing on ISIS and the threat it poses to the Assad regime. The infamous Iranian Quds Force commander Major General Qasem Soleimani recently visited Moscow in the framework of these talks. As a result the Russians and the Iranians reached a strategic decision: Make any effort necessary to preserve Assad’s seat of power, so that Syria may act as a barrier, and prevent the spread of ISIS and Islamist backed militias into the former Soviet Islamic republics.

Why Russia still stands by Syria | Global Post – Feb. 2012 |

CAIRO, Egypt — Syria is short on friends these days.

Former allies all around have given up one-by-one on the government of President Bashar al-Assad as his security forces meet a popular uprising with an increasingly harsh crackdown. Turkey, once one of Assad’s most vocal supporters, for instance, is now his most vocal critic. India has also reversed its stance on Syria.

But through it all, in the 11 months since the first protests erupted and the violence began, Russia has stood virtually alone beside its economic partner, emerging as the most ardent supporter of Syria’s embattled regime.

Never was this more apparent than when, despite it all, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov traveled to Damascus to meet with the Syrian leader.

Lavrov’s visit came a day after the United States closed its embassy and withdrew its diplomatic staff, and two days after Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have censured the Syrian government for the violence, a first step toward possible UN-backed economic sanctions and military intervention.

“It is clear that efforts for ending the violence should be accompanied by dialogue between political forces,” Lavrov said in a statement to the Russian press after his visit. “Today we received confirmation from the president of Syria that he is prepared to cooperate in this effort.”

The economic motive

Natural gas and weapons contracts are part of it, as is lingering resentment over the outcome of the military intervention in Libya, which Russia had opposed.

In May 2010, President Dmitry Medvedev was the first Russian head of state to visit Syria, where he cemented political and economic ties between the two countries. Discussions then included Russia’s arms exports to Syria, which have increased dramatically since 2008 as Russia sought to reestablish its sphere of influence in the Middle East.

Russia is now Syria’s largest supplier of arms, contributing 65 percent of Syria’s weapons between 2006 and 2012, according to the Arms Transfers Database, which is compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Over the past several years, Russia has delivered about 2,000 anti-tank missiles for modernized T-72 tanks, 200 Igla (SA-18) portable surface-to-air missiles, and 36 Pantsir-S1 mobile air defense systems, according to Oxford Analytica.

Russia has continued its shipments throughout the current conflict, citing contractual obligations. Among expected deliveries are 200 more SA-19s, additional Igla missiles, 2 MiG-31M interceptors, eight $1 billion Buk-M2E missile system batteries, and Chrysanthemum self-propelled anti-tank missile systems.

Comment: So you want to intervene in Syria? | SBS – April 2013 |

WASHINGTON — Ever more credible claims by France, Britain, and some Israeli officials that the Bashar Assad regime has used chemical weapons have upped the pressure on the Obama administration to respond more decisively to the situation in Syria, and specifically to act on the president’s chemical weapons “red line” warning. And the administration appears to be reconsidering its previous hesitancy. During a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that the United States would be sending some 200 troops to Jordan from the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, to work alongside Jordanian personnel to “improve readiness and prepare for a number of scenarios” relating to the conflict in neighboring Syria. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to possibly expand the force significantly.

And yet the chances are, in today’s political environment, that U.S. involvement in the region will not be of the massive, long-term sort seen in Iraq. U.S. military assistance is more likely to entail moving equipment, distributing humanitarian supplies, enforcing no-fly zones, coordinating or executing attacks on terrorists, and punishing the regime (in some fashion) for its violation of the chemical weapon “red line.”

When, as is increasingly likely, the United States plays a military role in the Syrian conflict, it will not just have to worry about inadvertently strengthening local Islamists or getting bogged down in another Middle East quagmire. Washington must also consider the significant geostrategic consequences to Iran, Russia and China, particularly if our intervention brings about the demise of their ally in Damascus. In diplomacy, as in physics, every action generates a reaction. Any U.S. engagement in Syria will not be different, and the Obama administration must be prepared.

Iran, Russia and China have deep stakes in the preservation of the Assad regime. Iran provides the Assad regime with financial and military assistance, and aids in organizing the Alawite militia. In return, Tehran gets a significant forward operating base on the Mediterranean in which Iranian weapons can be modified, manufactured and sent to their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. But, equally important, the alliance with Syria strengthens Iran’s claim as a leader in the resistance against Israel and a protector of the world’s Shiites.

Author: James F. Jeffrey, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).  

○ Incitement: Washington Institute for Near East Policy applauds covert war on Iran | Mondoweiss – Jan. 2012 |

(I originally started this as a reply to a comment by Brian K on Booman’s article Getting Bullied. It grew.)

______________________________________________________________________

Brian K wrote:

As soon as I first heard Trump refer to Jeb Bush as “low energy,” I knew it was one of the best political attacks of my politically conscious life. Trump didn’t use surrogates, didn’t use any dog whistles or implications, he just insulted him in the most potent and unusual way imaginable.

I have been referring to Trump in my circles as the Issac Newton of Republican politics since then. Not that I respect Trump, but it’s like he has the equivalent of the Principia of how to run a Republican campaign in these times, and no else has developed a full understanding of the language yet. Josh Marshal had a couple of articles about tactics that get at the same basic idea.

Expanding out a bit from that premise, I think one of the non-explcitly stated reasons Trump has so upset the GOP and the other candidates specifically is that he has totally disrupted the official established order of operations as to how the Repubican process was supposed to go. By this I mean Jeb Bush and his people had sized up the field and assessed their threats and their plans of action around fundraising, the debates, the first caucuses and primaries, etc. Same for Huckabee, Walker, Rubio down the line. They had their expectations about the order of things, and Trump came in and quickly and shockingly lit the whole thing on fire. That’s what we are seeing with Walker specifically, in my opinion. He and his people had no sense of what was coming, and they have no answer. In contrast, Carson and Fiorina have just ridden the Trump wave, and will do so until the sharp winds of reality blow them akimbo.  

The only candidate on the Republican side squarely set to accept the reality Trump brought was Cruz, who stood to lose the most if the establishment order had held.

Lastly, and on a side note, this weekend I listened to both Mark Levin and Michael Saveage’s response to the Republican debate on 8/6/15, and I’m sure now that that is why Megan Kelly had to take a break. Those two junkyard dogs, let alone the countless other talk radio goons gave approval to their awful audiences to go after her, and I bet she received, and continues to receive vileness we cannot fully comprehend in her inbox. Funnily enough, Glenn Beck was the one sounding the voice of reason there. Strange times.

This got me to thinking.

My response:

Indeed. Compared to Trump, they are all low-energy. Dems too, so far….including Unca Bernie. Elizabeth Warren could stand up to him, though. Biden? I dunno.

Warren would have three things going for her.

1-She actually believes in what she is saying. Never discount the power of the truth.

2-She is a national figure. Name recognition is a huge part of national politics, and she already has a good start..

3-She appears to be strong enough physically, mentally and emotionally to make it through the grind.

Read on for more.
No one else currently in real contention…not HRC, not Trump, not Sanders, not Biden…has all three of those strengths. HRC is running on fumes. She’s just about all used up physically and emotionally. Plus she is caught in a massive web of lies that date back to Bill’s presidency and maybe even further. Every time she opens her mouth she has to backcheck to see if she’s giving away some damaging info. Spontaneity? Difficult under the circumstances, to say the least. Trump? He doesn’t believe a word of what he is saying. Not really. Most of it has no basis in fact whatsoever. No plans, no nuthin’. Just winging it. Bernie? Sorry…he’s too damned old. End of story. Look what the presidency did to Obama, and he was young and strong when he moved into the White House. Biden? He’s in great shape for his age and he’s a pro, so I think he’d handle the rigors of the presidency pretty well. Plus he has the emotional wherewithal to battle Trump with real joy.

Like dis:

Now, take our magnificent RAF lads.  They grin when they fight.  Ah, yes, they grin when they fight.  I like a man who grins when he fights. -Winston Churchill

But…he has his share of lies with which to deal. More than his share after decades in the Senate and 8 years as VP. Lies a’plenty. Bet on it. That’s the name of that game, longterm. Bet on it.

If Trump manages to make it through the convention and wins the nomination, only Warren stands a chance of saving the day for the Dems. And she’s not exactly a PermaGov fave.

Is she.

—snip—

So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi[group]. I agree with you Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces!

If this Congress is going to open up Dodd-Frank in the months ahead, then let’s open it up to get tougher, not to create more bailout opportunities. If we’re going to open up Dodd-Frank, let’s open it up so that once and for all we end too big to fail and I mean really end it, not just say that we did.

Instead of passing laws that create new bailout opportunities for too big to fail banks, let’s pass… something… that would help break up these giant banks.

A century ago Teddy Roosevelt was America’s Trust-Buster. He went after the giant trusts and monopolies in this country, and a lot of people talk about how those trust deserved to be broken up because they had too much economic power. But Teddy Roosevelt said we should break them up because they had too much political power. Teddy Roosevelt said break them up because all that concentrated power threatens the very foundations of our democratic system.
And now we’re watching as Congress passes yet another provision that was written by lobbyists for the biggest recipient of bailout money in the history of this country. And its attached to a bill that needs to pass or else the entire federal government will grind to a halt.
Think about that kind of power. If a financial institution has become so big and so powerful that it can hold the entire country hostage. That alone is reason enough to break them up.

Enough is enough.

Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch. Enough is enough with Citigroup passing 11th hour deregulatory provisions that nobody takes ownership over but everybody will come to regret. Enough is enough

Washington already works really well for the billionaires and the big corporations and the lawyers and the lobbyists.

—snip—

Wow!!! Talk about truth-telling!!!

I wonder if she’s having second thoughts about running. If I were her, I would. She’d beat the pants off of Trump.

Like I said…never discount the power of the truth. Especially when the opposition is the King of Lies.

Let us pray.

AG

In the 2015 Washington Monthly College Guide, Jamie Merisotis, the president and CEO of Lumina Foundation for Education, has a feature article on the urgent need for a new cabinet-level department of the federal government that he calls the “Department of Talent.”

But this wouldn’t be simply a new cabinet position. It’s responsibilities would encompass and replace the responsibilities of pre-existing departments.

What should be included in this new Department of Talent? Avoiding the wonkish issues of congressional committee jurisdiction (turf is a real impediment to change) and agency capacity, I’d propose three main entities as a starting point:

· the current functions of the Department of
Education in their entirety;
· the Employment and Training Administration
(ETA) of the Department of Labor; and
· the talent recruitment functions of the Citizen-
ship and Immigration Service (USCIS) under
the Department of Homeland Security.

In effect, the goal is to rationalize and streamline the federal government’s goal of creating a workforce to meet the demands and requirements of a new economy. For example, it’s a worthy goal to get low-income people access to a college education through the Pell Grant program, but we want to make sure that, first, they actually graduate, and second that they gain marketable skills. Currently, these goals are divided between the Department of Labor and the Department of Education, and the result is that neither does a particularly good job of achieving the overall goal.

Here’s what Merisotis envisions as a replacement:

The Department of Talent would create the possibility of several important outcomes. One is greater efficiency and focus. Think about an agency that could develop and implement strategies for high-quality, locally managed workforce development programs, and highly focused global recruitment strategies for meeting the nation’s workforce gaps. Ideally, there would be a coordinated approach that seamlessly relates K-12 standards to learning outcomes frameworks for education and training beyond high school.

Greater efficiency also ties to the issue of effectiveness—the actual success of the programs and strategies being managed by the agency. The Department of Talent would tie together approaches that have been disconnected, and bureaucratically entrenched, and replace them with ones focused on outcomes. The net result would be an agency actually aimed at the true outcome of the policies inherent in the current disconnected mess—talent—rather than an agency that is focused on processes and tools like “education,” “training,” “visas,” and so on.

This may seem like a final capitulation to the idea that our education system should be strictly utilitarian, and that the end goal of higher learning should be to feed the workforce needs of the country. But, let’s remember that the topic of discussion isn’t some abstract debate about the true, noble purpose of getting an education. The topic is what the proper role of the federal government should be in this process and how it should organize itself to fulfill that role.

On that question, Merisotis has opened an interesting debate. We’re already investing tremendous amounts of money getting people into college where they can hopefully gain the skills to be upwardly mobile. That does seem to be the primary idea beyond these investments, so what’s wrong with being honest about it and organizing around it?

In any case, Merisotis has opened a worthwhile debate. You should read the whole thing.

I’m struggling to get started today. The youngster is home today, no camp and kindergarten doesn’t start until Wednesday. And I have other work obligations that I need to attend to. When I can get a chance, however, I am going to explore the greater meaning of the following quote:

“Look, Jeb Bush was a very successful governor, he’s a thoughtful man, he was a good, conservative governor. But every day, Donald Trump is emasculating Jeb Bush, and Republican primary voters are not going to default to the establishment candidate who is being weakened by these attacks that go unresponded to.”

— GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, quoted by Politico.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a candidate as badly emasculated as Jeb Bush has been over the last several months, and he seems uniquely ill-suited to respond.

Do you think there is anything even mildly offensive about saying that you’d like to treat undocumented people living in our country exactly like FedEx treats packages? It’s stuff like this that makes minority outreach so unsuccessful for Republicans. Because, you know, the rest of us can hear you when you think you’re just talking to your base.

A short drive from Acapulco, you can find one of the main sources of our heroin epidemic.

Not that anyone in Calvario much cares for — or even knows — of the broader debate over the drug trade. Villagers see little harm in cultivating opium. No one here uses the drug, or its derivative heroin, and the day rate for labor in the poppy fields is many times what is paid for shucking corn.

Isolation breeds a certain detachment. Calvario, though just a few miles from the state capital, is marooned an hour’s drive up unpaved mountain switchbacks littered with boulders and ruts. In the village of around 100 people, there is limited awareness of the outside world. Some farmers are not entirely clear what opium is even used for.

José Luis García, a farmer in Calvario who leases his land for opium cultivation, asked more than once what exactly it was about poppies that drove Americans so crazy. After hearing of the epidemic of addiction in the United States, Mr. García paused for a moment to reflect on the ethics of growing poppies.

“The fault is not with those who cultivate the opium,” he said. “It’s with the idiots who consume it.”

Ah, yes, this is the same rationalization you’ll get from any of the open-air heroin dealers in the Badlands of Philadelphia. If they don’t sell these kids their bundle, they’ll just get it from someone else. Nine times out of ten, this is true.

Except, I was talking to a heroin addict just last week. He’s got about eight months clean, and the turning point came when he snuck out of a rehab center dressed all in black in the dead of night and walked ten miles into Reading to score. When he couldn’t find any smack, he turned around and got back in bed unnoticed by the guards.

Two of the guys he left with were more successful, however, and after they subsequently failed a drug test and were kicked out of rehab, one of them overdosed and died.

My recovering addict acquaintance may well be alive today for the simple reason that on one particular night, no one sold him a bag of heroin.

It seems like no one in Washington County, Pennsylvania is having trouble finding someone to sell them a bag of heroin.

“It’s absolutely insane. This is nuts,” said District Attorney Eugene A. Vittone, a former paramedic who is trying to hold back the tide of drugs washing across Washington County, a Rust Belt community 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. On any day, Vittone said, the county averages five to eight overdoses, almost all from heroin. More are recorded each day in towns just over the county line.

Or, to put it another way:

On the streets here, prescription drugs are selling for about $1 per milligram, or $20 for a single dose. Heroin is much cheaper, at about $8 a stamp bag, [Rick] Gluth [supervising detective on District Attorney Eugene A. Vittone’s drug task force], said. It is also much more potent than the heroin of previous eras, [Neil] Capretto [an addiction psychiatrist and medical director of Gateway Rehabilitation Center] said. Users often start with a single bag, but as their resistance grows, they need increasing amounts.

All of which signals more overdoses and deaths, at least until authorities can find ways to stem the demand and the supply.

“If we had a serial killer killing one-tenth as many [people], we’d have the National Guard here,” Capretto said. “We’d have CNN here every night.”

He’s not exaggerating, at all.

Here’s a recent three-day spell in suburban Pittsburgh:

By 8:42 — 69 minutes after the first report — a county of slightly more than 200,000 people had recorded eight overdoses, all believed to be caused by heroin. There would be a total of 16 overdoses in 24 hours and 25 over two days. Three people died. Many of the others were saved by a recent decision to equip every first responder with the fast-acting antidote naloxone.

The three people who died weren’t shot on live television by a deranged man, but the people who killed them were just as indifferent to any value their lives may have had.

If you give someone heroin, you’re guilty of depraved indifference at a minimum. You might as well put one bullet in a revolver and pull the trigger. And if you don’t kill them today, you’re setting up someone else to kill them tomorrow.

And, virtually no one becomes a heroin addict before becoming addicted to some other opioid first, which means that the real pusher men are the ones that give out the pain medication.

You know, doctors.

Doctors like the one that gave Sonny Mack opioids despite everyone knowing he had an addictive personality.

Sammy Mack had long had problems with alcohol and was not unknown to law enforcement authorities. But as so many others have, his sister said, he turned to heroin after treatment with narcotic painkillers prescribed for an ankle injury he suffered a few months ago. Mack’s divorce was recently finalized, she said. His four children are living with his ex-wife not far away.

Good job, doctor, you killed him. Only took a couple of months, too.

Maybe the fact that he was a well-known alcoholic whose wife was leaving him might have given you a warning sign that a prescription for powerful opioids would fucking kill him within a few months?

We can’t stem this problem by going into switchback villages in Mexico and preventing poor farmers from scraping poppies. We have to get the doctors to stop creating so many addicts.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the large gabled Victorian. The photo I am using is seen directly below. I will be using my usual acrylics on an 10 by 10 inch gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Starting on the left side bay window, the trim below the roof is now seen in a color consistent with other areas of the house.  Above, the angled shadow has now been straightened.  It had a curve previously.  To the far right side, the first floor window appears for the first time.  To its left, the lit area now pokes through into the shadow of the porch.  Finally, I repainted the brown of the stone foundation sections as well as the far right portion.

     
The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

 

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Which, of course, is the refrain of petty authoritarian bureaucrats.

(Another in a continuing series on public communications monitoring.)

Baltimore police have been using “cell phone trackers” or Stingrays for a
 wide variety of criminal investigations; from murder to harassing phone
 calls.  Problem is, they didn’t disclose their use during trial to defense
 attorneys nor the court; as Maryland law states.  As a result, about 2000
 convictions are now in jeopardy.

Some are pooh-poohing the revelations, others are taking them more
 seriously, including the city prosecutor’s office which prosecuted those
 cases and would have to retry if they are ruled “mistrials”.

”  The city’s prosecutors took a different view. Brown, the spokeswoman for
 the State’s Attorney, said Maryland court rules require the authorities to
 tell defendants about stingrays in every case in which one was used. She
 said the office is working with the police to make sure they inform judges
 before they use a stingray, and inform prosecutors after they make an
 arrest.

“It’s something we’re very committed to resolving,” Brown said.”…..

As a previous USA Today article makes clear, Baltimore is not the only PD
 using this technology for non- War on Drugs/War on Terror activities.

Much more blow-
——————————-

“Baltimore is hardly alone. Police in Tallahassee used their stingray to
 track a woman wanted for check forging, according to records provided to the
 ACLU last year. Tacoma, Wash., police used theirs to try to find a stolen
 city laptop, according to records released to the website Muckrock. Other
 departments have acknowledged that they planned to use their stingrays for
 solving street crimes.”…

“”The problem is you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have it be some
 super-secret national security terrorist finder and then use it to solve
 petty crimes,” Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Hanni Fakhoury said…

http://www.usatoday.com/...

——————————-

However, even if they are used for serious crimes, the charges are often
 dropped or reduced as the revelation of Stingray use can be considered a
 security breach so severe that it can not be discussed in open court.

“In 2010, police used a stingray to track a man they suspected had kidnapped
 his girlfriend’s two daughters, ages 3 and 5, and demanded half of her
 $6,000 tax refund as a ransom “in exchange for her older daughter’s life.”
He threatened in text messages to throw the older daughter off a bridge if
 he didn’t get the money, according to court records. Detectives quickly
 recovered the children unharmed. Prosecutors quickly dropped the kidnapping
 charges against the man, Kwame Oseitutu; he was convicted only of
 misdemeanor misuse of a telephone. Prosecutors did not explain that
 decision…….

http://www.usatoday.com/...

That attitude is encouraged by the FBI and emphasized by the training PDs
 get from elements of US law enforcement.

“Officers rely on reports from phone companies to track a suspect’s phone to
 a particular neighborhood, then use their tracker, known as a Hailstorm, to
 pinpoint his location. In one court filing in 2013, an officer said Advanced
 Tactical Team detectives received 40 hours of training on using the tracker
 and an additional eight hours of “cellular theory” training from the U.S.
 Secret Service…”

In Baltimore, the USAToday logs showed that “barely” half ended in
 convictions.  Even when pressed in court by a judge, prosecutors have been
 willing to dis-allow evidence rather than disclose Stingray use , citing the
 FBI non-disclosure agreements.

So we have to consider, the FBI has made it easy for local PDs to purchase
 this equipment, which is akin to wired telephone tapping.  Several states
 have discovery requirements that mandate if a suspect was under electronic
 surveillance, it be disclosed to defense and in court.  However, even in
 heinous crimes, police and prosecutors (if made aware) are willing to drop
 prosecutions rather than have this equipment’s capabilities be made public
 in court.  Plus their use is expanding from the supposed use in WoT/WoD to
 more common, petty crimes.   Even there, cases are dropped so as not to
 compromise the secrecy surrounding this equipment.

Like everything else, the FBI-

-Wants to co-op local PDs with equipment; band new whizbangs, so as to have
 them on hand if really needed.  A Federal Law Enforcement auxiliary so to
 speak.  Same might be said about the Pentagon and the militarization of
 local police.

-But you can’t put a toy like that in front of police and not have them use
 it.  Like asking a little girl not to open that Barbie Irish Princess doll
 package as it may be valuable as a collector item sometime in the future.
 So anything involving a cell phone gets a call to the Advanced technical
 Team.  But by trying to keeping the lid on its capabilities (in case we need
 it sometime in the future), the FBI is forcing local law enforcement to toss
 some serious criminal prosecutions.  And they play along because if they
 don’t, then they might not get the Next brand new whizbang coming down the
 pike from the Feebeees.

So far, all that’s been disclosed is that the Stingrays are directional with limited
content monitoring, picking out one phone out of hundreds in its “cell”.  As discussed elsewhere,
 DRT (Dirtboxes) are much more capable and not only pick out and locate a
 phone, but break the encryption of  LTE 4G phones  and monitor its content
 in real time.  This is NSA/Pentagon equipment used overseas and now available
 to PDs in LA and Chicago (at least known publically)

Getting a chance at that is something to keep quiet about.

Its been obvious for sometime, but the symbiotic relationship between local
 and Fed law enforcement has really corrupted the concept of “local” law
 enforcement.

R

——————-excerpt—————

Defense lawyers in Baltimore are examining nearly 2,000 cases in which the
 police secretly used powerful cellphone tracking devices, and they plan to
 ask judges to throw out “a large number” of criminal convictions as a
 result.

“This is a crisis, and to me it needs to be addressed very quickly,” said
 Baltimore’s deputy public defender, Natalie Finegar, who is coordinating
 those challenges. “No stone is going to be left unturned at this point.”

The move follows a USA TODAY investigation this week that revealed that
 Baltimore police have used cellphone trackers, commonly known as stingrays,
 to investigate crimes as minor as harassing phone calls, then concealed the
 surveillance from suspects and their lawyers. Maryland law generally
 requires that electronic surveillance be disclosed in court.

Finegar and others said they do not know how many criminal cases they
 ultimately will seek to reopen because of the secret phone tracking, but she
 expects it to be “a large number.” The public defender’s office is reviewing
 a surveillance log published by USA TODAY that lists more than 1,900 cases
 in which the police indicated they had used a stingray. It includes at least
 200 public defender clients who were ultimately convicted of a crime.

Stingrays are suitcase-sized devices that allow the police to pinpoint a
 cellphone’s location to within a few yards by posing as a cell tower. In the
 process, they also can intercept information from the phones of nearly
 everyone else who happens to be nearby.

At least 53 police departments from Miami to Los Angeles own one of the cell
 trackers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. But few have
 revealed when or how the devices are used, in part because they signed
 non-disclosure agreements with the FBI.

As a result, Baltimore’s surveillance log provides a rare window into the
 secret surveillance. That log, matched with court records, showed that the
 authorities had used stingrays to hunt everyone from killers to petty
 thieves, usually did so without obtaining search warrants, and routinely
 sought to hide that surveillance from the people they arrested.

http://www.usatoday.com/...

Based on the imagery and the language, which one of the following presidential candidates looks like they are primed to replace Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

I’m not going to blame the media for all of this, but let’s be frank and admit they they play a big part in how these candidates are perceived by the public.

Here’s my advice for Martin O’Malley and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders. If you’re talking about process, you’re losing. I don’t know how the presently planned debate schedule compares to prior years, but we don’t need 19 debates before New Hampshire. To be clearer, it makes sense to complain about process if you can thereby get the process changed in a way that favors you, but if you can’t change a thing then you just come off looking weak and ineffectual, and you lose an opportunity to say something that might distinguish yourself from Hillary Clinton.

Jim Webb did better than O’Malley in Minneapolis simply by not going. He went with his daughter to set her up in college rather than getting headlines about how “the debate schedule is rigged.” Lincoln Chafee understood what his job was and used his brief moment in the spotlight to point out that he isn’t mired in controversy or scandal. That’s a pretty incomplete platform for a run for the Democratic nomination, but it was a shot at the frontrunner that people actually care about. It was also risky since most Democrats aren’t pleased to see people pile on Hillary Clinton over what they consider to be overhyped concerns about her State Department email server. The reason it made sense for Chafee is that Democrats are nervous that Clinton will get torn apart over her reputation for concealment and dishonesty. It doesn’t have to be a deserved reputation to sink her chances in the general election, and it’s a risk that is worth mentioning.

Running to be a candidate with less drama attached is a starting point. Running to be the candidate who got shortchanged on the debate schedule by the DNC?

That’s just incompetent campaigning.