Monthly Archives: January 2015

HUD captured by lobbyists

pbDPjE0Corruption?  By officials in the 0bama regime?  That’s unpossible!

HUD captured by lobbyists

A top executive of a trade association that lobbies for local housing authorities was hired by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to regulate those same authorities — and was allowed to keep her paid job at the lobbying association at the same time.

HUD’s Inspector General said the 2011 hiring of Debra Gross, deputy director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, was an “inherent conflict of interest” in the same way it would be to hire an Exxon lobbyist to regulate oil companies.

In taking the job as HUD’s deputy assistant secretary for public housing project policy, Gross insisted on a $200,000 salary, which is higher than the government pay scale. After starting the job, she was also given several performance bonuses without having performance reviews.

And once at HUD she hired other industry advocates onto her staff. She made it a big priority of her office to scrap oversight scrutiny of housing authorities. Gross and her staff then lobbied for the housing authorities to have the power to pay higher salaries to administrators, to let them turn federal dollars into “profit” and to lower performance metrics they had to report, the inspector general says.

Gross was hired by Assistant Secretary Sandra B. Henriquez to head the federal agency’s Office of Policy, Program and Legislative Initiatives for Public and Indian Housing while continuing to hold her post at the industry group, which represents city-run housing authorities that get billions of HUD dollars annually.

There’s more at the link.

Whistleblower: Pelosi Covered Up Gov’t Role In Housing Crisis

Keep this in mind the next time they try to brag about their economic “recovery:”

Whistleblower: Pelosi Covered Up Gov’t Role In Housing Crisis

Subprime Scandal: We’ve long suspected the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wasn’t honest in examining events before the meltdown. But an ex-commissioner says the probe was actually a full-blown political cover-up.

In a just-released book, former FCIC member Peter Wallison says that a Democratic Congress worked with the commission’s Democratic chairman to whitewash the government’s central role in the mortgage debacle. The conspiracy helped protect some of the Democrats’ biggest stars from scrutiny and accountability while helping justify the biggest government takeover of the financial sector since the New Deal.

Wallison’s sobering, trenchantly written “Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again” reveals that the Democrat-led panel buried key data proving that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies pushed the housing market over the subprime cliff. The final FCIC report put the blame squarely on Wall Street.

In 2009, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed her California pal Phil Angelides, a long-time Democrat operative, to lead the commission. The fix seemed to be in, and Wallison’s account of the inner workings of the 10-member body confirms it.

Mayday! Doomsday Clock now three minutes to midnight!

Change!

Mayday! Doomsday Clock now three minutes to midnight!

“It is now three minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, the executive director and publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at a news conference in Washington, D.C. “The probability of global catastrophe is very high. This is about the end of civilization as we know it.”

Three minutes is the closest to midnight the clock has been since 1984 during the Cold War. The closest it has ever been to midnight — two minutes— was in 1953, when the hydrogen bomb was first tested. The closer to a setting of midnight it gets, the closer it’s estimated that a global disaster will occur.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY]

…and there was MUCH rejoicing…

00157F3C00000258-2917170-image-a-8_1421742588621Guess what’s already made a comeback?

The Sun’s Page 3 returns after a week

Baring her breasts and winking at the camera, ‘Nicole from Bournemouth’ today brought to an end speculation that Page 3 had been killed off.

It had been widely thought the controversial segment in The Sun newspaper had been dropped after 44 years – and Government ministers welcomed the move.

The newspaper had not published pictures of topless glamour models since last Friday, instead advising readers the pictures would be available on its website.

But under the headline ‘Clarifications and Corrections’ on page three today, the paper published a topless photograph of the 22-year-old model.

It stated: ‘Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that this is Page 3 and this is a picture of Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth.

Unintended Consequences? Not likely.

With the fools running this sh*tshow, I doubt that anything is unintended.  If you’ve signed up for 0bamaDoesn’tCare through the federal exchange, your information is getting passed around to who knows how many third-party sites.  I guess it’s not a HIPAA violation when the feds do it:

HealthCare.gov Sends Personal Data to Dozens of Tracking Websites

The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more.

EFF researchers have independently confirmed that healthcare.gov is sending personal health information to at least 14 third party domains, even if the user has enabled Do Not Track. The information is sent via the referrer header, which contains the URL of the page requesting a third party resource. The referrer header is an essential part of the HTTP protocol, and is sent for every request that is made on the web. The referrer header lets the requested resource know what URL the request came from. This would for example let a website know who else was linking to their pages. In this case however the referrer URL contains personal health information.

The screencap provided by EFF lists a number of advertising and analytics providers.  These providers end up getting the referrer string, which your browser sends nearly every time it requests something: a webpage, an image, etc.  The referrer will usually be whatever is in your address bar at the moment.

There are two ways you can provide information to a website.  With an HTTP PUT request, form information is stuffed into a blob of data which is sent to the server along with the rest of the request.  With an HTTP GET request, form information is appended to the URL that is submitted to the server.  PUT requests are somewhat more secure than GET requests; they’re not as open to user tampering, and whatever form data they contain won’t get passed around to other services in the referrer, as it’ll be a much simpler-looking URL (such as https://alfter.us/wp/).  GET requests end up looking more like this example EFF retrieved from its interactions with healthcare.gov:

https://4037109.fls.doubleclick.net/activityi;src=4037109;type=20142003;cat=201420;ord=7917385912018;~oref=https://www.healthcare.gov/see-plans/85601/results/?county=04019&age=40&smoker=1&parent=&pregnant=1&mec=&zip=85601&state=AZ&income=35000&&step=4?

Look at what kind of personal information (in bold) is getting sent along with that.  In this case, the request to DoubleClick (an advertising outfit owned by Google) included the referring URL.  In all, EFF counted 14 domains that receive personally-identifiable information from healthcare.gov, including Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and YouTube.  Another excerpt:

Sending such personal information raises significant privacy concerns. A company like Doubleclick, for example, could match up the personal data provided by healthcare.gov with an already extensive trove of information about what you read online and what your buying preferences are to create an extremely detailed profile of exactly who you are and what your interests are. It could do all this based on a tracking cookie that it sets which would be the same across any site you visit. Based on this data, Doubleclick could start showing you smoking ads or infer your risk of cancer based on where you live, how old you are and your status as a smoker.1 Doubleclick might start to show you ads related to pregnancy, which could have embarrassing and potentially dangerous consequences such as when Target notified a woman’s family that she was pregnant before she even told them.

You could ask why healthcare.gov is using third-party analytics and advertising.  You could ask why they’re passing sensitive information around in HTTP GET requests.  (Considering the botched rollout of “404Care,” that they’d make rookie mistakes like these shouldn’t be too surprising.)  The better question to ask, though, is this: why on God’s green earth did anybody ever think this would ever turn out any differently?  0bamaDoesn’tCare was a solution in search of a problem, and a pretty piss-poor solution at that.

…because it takes good people with guns to stop bad people with guns

Armed Women and Mothers Drive Back Boko Haram Attack

Several Nigerian media outlets have been reporting on local women in the villages of Attagara and Kawuri in Borno State who recently disarmed nearly a dozen Boko Haram terrorists. The notorious pseudo-Islamic [sic] terror groups tried to attack the Attagara and Kawuri communities over the weekend but the insurgents were instantly repelled by a group of armed women.

My only nitpick: there’s nothing “pseudo” about Boko Haram’s motivation.

Perhaps they should’ve asked the girls first

They’re not taking the SJWs’ latest victory lying down, it would seem:

Page 3 models lead backlash against ‘comfy shoe-wearing, no bra-wearing, man-haters’

Page 3 girls have led the backlash against The Sun’s decision to end its topless tradition, claiming the move has been “dictated by comfy shoe-wearing, no bra-wearing, man-haters”.

Model Rhian Sugden, 28, criticised at the move, suggesting it was “only a matter of time” before everything they did was dictated by such people.

Former glamour model Jodie Marsh insisted that “telling girls they shouldn’t do Page 3 is not being a feminist”.

She said she “loved” posing for Page 3 and that it made her feel powerful and earned her good money.

“Women should empower and encourage other women,” she wrote on Twitter. “For that is the only way to truly be ‘equal’ and have rights…”

She said campaigners should focus on more important issues that affect women, such as female genital mutilation.

Former glamour model Nicola McLean said she did not think Page 3 was a “sexual equality” issue.

She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “It has been going for many years, which is one of the reasons I feel so sad that it has seemingly come to an end.

“I don’t think it is outdated. I think the girls still look fantastic on the page, they still clearly enjoy what they are doing, people still want to see it.

A sniper responds to the Michigan Manatee

team-america-michael-moorePwnage:

GREEN BERET SNIPER: ‘Michael Moore’s A Crisco Sweating Waste Of Space Not Worthy To Be In The Presence Of A Sniper’

It’s typical of “men” like you to criticize the intestinal fortitude, focus, discipline and patriotism of a sniper. It must stem from an inferiority complex or something. But hey, it’s okay cupcake. We snipers are thick skinned and the efforts of world class turds such as yourself to portray us in a negative light only makes us laugh. If you and I were in the same room, I’d throw you a smile and gently pat you on the head knowing you’re nothing more than a mouth breathing, Crisco sweating waste of space not even worthy of being in the presence of a sniper. It’s almost funny how people like you preach things like ‘acceptance’ and ‘not passing judgement’ or ‘labeling people’, but then are the first to do so when a person is in some way dissimilar from you.

The Michigan Manatee beclowns himself in epic fashion

Mr. Creosote has issues with moral equivalence:

Lardass Michael Moore Trashes American Snipers

Michael Moore, America’s lardass, could not resist a jab at deceased hero, Chris Kyle:

My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren’t heroes. And invaders r worse
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 18, 2015

Can’t wait for him to get what’s coming to him:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhbHTjMLN5c]