Obama Basically Admits Government Numbers Fudging Nixed Social Security Rate Increase

The last line says it all.

White House says looking to resolve lack of Social Security increase

Oct 15 President Barack Obama is concerned about the "unintended" consequence of a Social Security formula that will keep nearly 65 million older Americans from getting an increase in their benefits next year, the White House said on Thursday.

"The president is aware of this, frankly, unintended policy consequence resulting from the formula for calculating cost-of-living adjustments," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. "There have been discussions that the administration has had with members of Congress about this issue and about our interest in trying to resolve it."

Earnest said that to allow members of Congress to negotiate the U.S. budget in private he would not publicly give details on discussions about changing the formula for increases, which is linked to an inflation measure that currently shows consumer prices are flat.

My bold.

Consumer prices are flat?
Someone needs to get out of their Ivory Tower and go grocery shopping for a family of four tomorrow,
just because gas prices have come down doesn't mean anything else has.

I would recommend that Congress put this a little higher on their To Do list, there are elections coming and pissing off the Gray Hairs is not a great strategy for re electing incumbents.

Former Speaker Hastert (R) To Plead Guilty

Someone had it in for this guy, someone in the right place to make this prosecution happen.
I say this because they went after him and he wasn't able to dodge it by pulling strings. Kind of unusual in D.C. for someone as powerful as he once was.

Watch him walk away with a slap on his limp wrist though.

Ex-U.S. House Speaker Hastert to plead guilty in hush-money case

Federal prosecutors allege he promised to pay $3.5 million to an unnamed individual from his hometown of Yorkville, Illinois, to conceal past misconduct.
The individual who was allegedly receiving hush money from Hastert has not surfaced publicly. But anonymous law enforcement officials have told several media outlets that Hastert was trying to cover up sexual abuse of a male decades ago when he worked as a high school teacher and wrestling coach.
Hastert has not been charged with any past misconduct. He was a teacher at Yorkville High School in the 1960s and 1970s.
Lawyers for both sides said in September they were negotiating a plea deal to keep the case from going to trial. Durkin had asked both sides to bring him an agreement this week, or he would set a trial date.
According to the indictment, Hastert withdrew $1.7 million in cash from his bank accounts from 2010 to 2014. He is charged with "structuring" $952,000 of the withdrawals, taking the funds out in increments of under $10,000 to evade a requirement that banks report large cash transactions.
Hastert then told the FBI he was keeping the cash for himself, which the indictment said was a false statement.
Each of the charges carries a possible maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Source, Reuters News.

You're Gonna Need A Bigger TinFoil Hat--- If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy

If you have ever been accused of being paranoid when it comes to electronic snooping you can stand up and scream your vindication now.
Just be prepared to see little hints come at you from everywhere you turn that indeed, "they" are listening and heard every word of it.

This is a pretty fascinating article from a guy who slowly became aware of just how pernicious and sneaky this constant monitoring of everything you think or do is now and then documents it.
I highly recommend you read the entire piece.
Then have those you love who have accused you of being paranoid go read it.
Tell them to prepare to apologise for doubting you.

All I can say is that this constant nagging, gut feeling that everything we do is being watched, stored and processed for future use against us is not just our imagination run wild anymore.

It's way worse than we imagined.

So Much For That

I came home from work tonight and found the brand fucking new 55 inch television sitting on the floor facing the wall and the old one back up on the stand.
I asked the wife what the fuck that was all about and she told me that she went somewhere and had the Teen Ager watch the Autistic boy for a few minutes. Apparently he got pissed off about something and smashed a plastic toy into the screen and broke a bunch of the LED's inside so that there were streaks of color running across the screen.
The fucking box is still out in the garage.
I didn't even ask if there was insurance on it because if there was, she would have said something.


I just shut my damn mouth and I'll let her decide what she wants to do about it.
To say my wife is pissed is like saying Niagra Falls is wet.

Psychologists Who Designed CIA Torture Tactics Under GW Bush Sued By ACLU

Why Dick Cheney is still a free man mystifies me.
Him, David Fucking Addington and John Yoo should all be in prison. This may be a step towards that though.

ACLU sues psychologists over CIA interrogation tactics

WASHINGTON (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday sued two former Air Force psychologists who designed a CIA program that used harsh interrogation techniques to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorists, saying the pair endorsed and taught torture tactics under the guise of science.

The lawsuit comes 10 months after the release of a damning Senate report that said the interrogation techniques had inflicted pain on al-Qaida prisoners far beyond the legal limits and did not yield lifesaving intelligence.

The suit accuses the psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, of developing an interrogation program that relied on beatings, sleep deprivation, starvation, waterboarding and other methods that caused physical and psychological suffering on prisoners in CIA custody.

Henry Schuelke III, a lawyer who has represented the pair in the past, said Tuesday that he was not yet involved in the case and did not have any comment.

The suit was filed in federal court in Washington state on behalf of three former CIA prisoners. One, Gul Rahman, was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison called the Salt Pit, subjected to isolation, darkness and extreme cold water, and was later found dead of hypothermia. The other two men, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, were held in CIA prisons but were never charged with any crimes and are now free.

The lawsuit was brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to sue in U.S. courts over human-rights violations. A 2010 Associated Press report, citing former U.S. officials, said the CIA had promised to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for the psychologists if the program ran into trouble.

"They claimed that their program was scientifically based, safe and proven, when in fact it was none of those things. The program was unlawful and its methods barbaric," Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, said in a statement.

The suit repeats many of the allegations that surfaced in an exhaustive Senate investigation issued last year and that identified sweeping flaws in the CIA's approach to interrogations.

Set Up Another Round Of Panty Droppers

We are almost there.

Obama Defends Hillary, Email Scandal, "Ginned Up By Politics"

This from the guy who just used a group of grieving people in Roseburg Oregon as a political opportunity to push for gun control.

He knows, she knows and everybody else knows that politics is a Blood Sport.

Hillary Clinton has been wounded and is bleeding over this Benghazi affair and it's gotten bad enough that between that and this Email scandal she is double digits behind Bernie Sanders in the polls right now.

This has obviously gotten worrisome enough to the Democratic puppet masters to beg Obama to step up and try and take some of the heat off.

Fuck him and Fuck her, both.

Obama says Clinton email server a 'mistake', but denies national security jeopardized

President Barack Obama said Sunday that Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server to conduct her correspondence while secretary of state was a "mistake", but denied that U.S. national security had been jeopardized as a result.

"She made a mistake. She has acknowledged it. I do think that the way it's been ginned up is in part because of politics,"Obama said in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes". "I think she'd be the first to acknowledge that maybe she could have handled the original decision better and the disclosures more quickly."

Obama added that he was not initially aware that Clinton was using the private server, which was kept at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. as opposed to a professional data center. When CBS' Steve Kroft pointed out that the Obama administration has prosecuted people for having classified material on their private computers, the president said he didn't get the impression there was an intent to "hide something or to squirrel away information."

The elections are still a year away and her falling so fast this early in the game has got to be keeping TPTB up at night.

Good.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

I don't know why anyone should be surprised by this little tidbit.

Just 158 families, clustered around 9 U.S. cities, have already donated more than $175 million dollars towards candidates running in the next Presidential election.

They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

My bold.

Don't forget to vote for whichever candidate they finally buy, they are counting on it to give this sham credibility.

Remember, corporations are people too, the Supreme Court says so.

The Wife Goes "Shopping"

So I get home from work the other night and my wife informs me that she is going "Shopping" the next day.

She just went grocery shopping earlier so this is a statement of intent here for something else.

Really, I says, what for?

She hesitated for a few seconds, never a good sign.

Rugs, she finally says.

Rugs?

Yeah, rugs.


Hmmm.

I'll admit that some of our throw rugs are getting pretty shitty looking, threads hanging off the corners and just generally worn the hell out.

OK honey, have a good time.

All the while wondering just what the fuck she is up to because that pause tells me there is more to this story coming.

So I come home from work last night and go through the kitchen, there is a wall between it and the front room.

Bigger than shit, there is a bag with some throw rugs in it on the table.
One of her sisters is here and they are out in the garage yakking away like they always do.

So I see ya found some rugs.

Yes.

Then the sister pipes up and says didn't you see what's in the living room?

Uh, no. So I turn around and find this sitting there.

Ho-leee shit!

Of course she had to buy the new TV cabinet to go with it and not shown is the new computer desk.

Jayzus.
My worst nightmare has just been realized.


She wakes me up this morning banging on shit with a hammer.

I come staggering out of the bedroom wondering what the fuck all the hammering is about and badly needing a cup of coffee.

Putting the cabinet together.

Already?

I had to help a little bit with the door slides but other than that she is throwing that sucker together by herself.

Then she informs me that she is going to go get a new dining table set too. This means I will be conscripted to haul that shit and most likely put that together.

She got a little bit of back pay from a ten year old lawsuit against the State who was fucking over the In Home Care Givers that are licensed by them.
Normally my wife is pretty damn frugal, almost miserly as a matter of fact, so this came clear out of left field.

If she is happy, I am happy so I am just going to shut my mouth and let her do her thing here.

The only problem I see coming is that it is going to get really cold out in that garage this Winter but that is the only place I will be able to escape to in order to be able to ignore this giant fucking television that is now going to dominate the wall right across from my recliner.

Either that or get a new lap top with a huge assed screen on it.

She watches television constantly and it is not uncommon for two or more to be on at the same time with no one really watching either one. Drives me crazy.

Television is something I try to avoid. I actually gave the last one I owned away five years ago. Mind pollution and drivel is all that comes out of the fucking things but she has to have them on even if it's just back ground noise.

I only half ass watch it because the fucking thing is constantly on while I am sitting here and it is hard to avoid, even with the headphones on. Now it is going to be impossible. It's going to be like having a Drive In movie screen eight feet away, right in front of me.

I'm going to have to figure something out here because televisions irritate the shit out of me.

Idiot box indeed, now Super Sized and most definitely, Must See.

YOLO Baby

Might as well have a good time while ya can eh?