Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer CNN’s Jake Tapper for calling out the president’s hypocrisy on press freedom. They also react to growing concerns on the left and right that President Obama is bored with his job and cannot wait until he leaves office. And they discuss a new poll showing 26 percent of tea party activists have a positive view of socialism.
Russian hackers recently stole 1.2 billion internet passwords and alarmed millions of people around the world, but one of the Pentagon’s top cyber-security experts says there are far more sinister online threats and you may be leaving you and your family vulnerable through your activities on the world wide web.
Whether it’s an effort to gain access to bank accounts, steal your identity or lure you into divulging volumes of personal information, criminals are looking to exploit Americans at every turn in a practice known as “catfishing”. But what is it?
“What it essentially means is someone is lying to you in the online domain, whether it’s something innocuous like adding a couple of inches to their height or taking away a few pounds from their weight or whether it’s something much more insidious by someone lying to you about who they are, whether it’s a predator or someone trying to lie to you to get information to steal your identity,” said Tyler Cohen Wood.
Wood is a cyber branch chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is also author of “Catching the Catfishers: Disarm the Online Pretenders, Predators and Perpetrators Who Are Out to Ruin Your Life.” She says there several things that should give you pause about your online connections.
“Some of the red flags are simple things like: If this person you’re talking to won’t Skype with you or have a video conversation, that’s a red flag. If someone will not send you a photograph in real time that’s a red flag too. That could indicate they took a photograph from someone else’s site,” said Wood.
“I also recommend if they do send you a photograph and it’s just one photograph, that you do a Google Image Search so you can determine if that photograph appears on someone else’s Facebook site or any other of their social media,” she said, noting there are other warning signs as well.
“You also want to look at their social media and make sure that the social media makes sense. Make sure that they have friends, that they have regular banter with those friends and they don’t just have a bunch of filler friends and it didn’t look like they just created the social media in one day. Those are just some of the red flags you want to look for,” said Wood.
As you take time to scrutinize the validity of your new cyber friends, Wood says you also want to be very protective of your own personal information.
“You want to not put up personal identifying information. You don’t want to have your address or the exact location of where you work. If someone’s trying to steal your identity, all they need is your birthday, your name and an address that you’ve lived at,” warned Wood.
“I go through in my book how to protect yourself from giving away that information. A lot of times we give away this information without even realizing that we’re doing it by using location services or just self-disclosure of information,” she said.
In addition to the obvious information you shouldn’t be sharing with most people, Wood says there are other “digital crumbs” to avoid for individuals and business owners.
“One of the greatest risks to businesses protecting their intellectual property and corporate IP is the fact that we no longer just sit in an office. We’re always on the go. People use their personal smartphones for business or their tablets. There’s something that I’ve called application permission creep. That’s when the personal applications you use on your phone extend the permissions that they should be allowed,” said Wood, who says there are solid ways to address this problem.
“You can go to the permission settings, regardless of android or iPhone and see what permissions the applications that you use have. You would be surprised. A lot of applications on android will have permissions to view your text messages, your contact list, the things that you’ve stored on the phone. They have full access to sell that data. A lot times contact lists or the things you say in text messages are corporate intellectual property, so I recommend businesses really look at the applications their employees are using on their phones and look at the permissions that those have,” said Wood.
But what should you do if those preventative steps fail and your personal information is compromised or you discover a “catfisher?”
“That’s when you contact authorities. You can also contact the social media site that you’re using because a lot of them have bullying or protection laws so they can help disable the account. But i would definitely capture all the information and contact your local authorities,” said Wood.
She says the teenage daughter of a friends was able to spot a fake romantic interest posing as a 17-year-old boy. When confronted, the person stopped communicating, but Wood says the confrontation spoiled a chance to identify the perpetrator.
“If they had chosen to contact the authorities, the social media site they were using or the (internet service provider), a preservation letter could have been sent and we could have determined who this person was if that was the route they decided to go down,” said Wood.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud conservative writers for engaging in an intelligent debate over the actions of rioters and police in Ferguson, Missouri. They also shudder as a former aide to five ambassadors to Iraq believes ISIS could target the U.S. soon. And they react to Simon & Schuster rejecting a book by Bowe Bergdahl’s former platoon mates because she feared it would portray President Obama in a negative light.
A federal appeals court is refusing to stay it’s rejection of Virginia’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman, meaning same-sex marriage will take place and be recognized in the commonwealth next week unless the Supreme Court intervenes.
The three-judge panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a request from Prince William County Clerk of Court Michele McQuigg for the judges to hold off enforcing its decision until the legal fight ends,most likely at the Supreme Court. Without action from the Supreme Court, same-sex marriages will be legal and recognized in Virginia starting August 20.
Traditional marriage defenders say Wednesday’s decision by the three judges is clear evidence they see themselves advancing a political cause.
“It’s a clear case of judicial activism. This is a no-brainer that you stay the decision. This has never been heard before in an appellate court like this and never heard before the United State Supreme Court, so the consequences are chaotic,” said Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver, who has defended traditional marriage in several states.
“If in fact they don’t stay the decision and people go get marriage licenses and then the case is overturned, then all those licenses are invalid. They’re not worth the paper they’re written on. So it’s a no-brainer that they would stay this. The only reason they wouldn’t is because they’re ideologues.”
Staver goes even further, saying one of the key pillars of our American system is eroding as this legal debate over marriage persists.
“I think what we’re seeing is not marriage on trial. We’re seeing the judiciary on trial. The only power they have is in the confidence of the people. If the people lose confidence in the courts, then the courts lose their power,” said Staver. “They certainly lose power or gain power only when the people respect their decisions. When they act like this, how can you respect a decision by these activist judges,” said Staver.
The good news for traditional marriage defenders is that the Supreme Court will most likely issue a stay until the justices can consider the many different state cases themselves. That’s the prediction of McQuigg’s attorney.
“Approximately seven months ago, the Supreme Court unanimously stayed a nearly identical federal court decision in a case that is materially indistinguishable from this one,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Ken Connelly.
“By unanimously staying that case, we believe the Supreme Court essentially signaled to all lower federal courts that they must take similar steps to preserve the enforcement of these laws until the Supreme Court itself definitively resolves the issue,” he said.
Connelly says even Virginia Attorney Mark Herring, a fierce advocate for same-sex marriage, supports a stay until the Supreme Court rules on the issue.
Upon taking office in January, Herring immediately announced Virginia would no longer defend the traditional marriage amendment its constitution and would instead be actively pushing for it to be struck down. Connelly says it’s hard to know what impact Herring’s actions have had in this case since many courts around the nation have ruled the same way. However, Staver believes Herring has played a role and considers his actions deplorable.
“I think it’s a big impact. The attorney general of Virginia ought to do his job. His job is to enforce this constitutional amendment. If he has a moral or some other objection to it, then he should step aside and let someone else do an aggressive defense,” said Staver, who says any other lawyer would get in serious trouble for doing what Herring has done to the people of Virginia.
“In any other area, if an attorney actually turned on the client and argued the opposite of what the client wanted, that attorney would be subject to sanctions. That attorney would be subject to professional responsibility ethics challenges and discipline,” he said.
Since the Supreme Court struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 2013, courts across the nation have used the decision as the premise to strike down traditional marriage laws and amendments.
Connelly says those courts are badly misreading the Supreme Court’s ruling, noting the justices found DOMA “unusual” because it was the first time the federal government waded into the issue of marriage. He says that same argument cannot be made in the Virginia case.
“There is absolutely nothing in Virginia’s marriage law regarding man-woman marriage or any other state’s laws regarding man-woman marriage that are unusual. They have been in place, in all cases, before the states even came into existence. The marriage laws come up from the English common law and marriage itself predates the state, not just the United States but states in general around the world,” said Connelly.
“Virginia has always provided for man-woman marriage and only man-woman marriage, so it’s not taking anything away. There’s nothing unusual about Virginia’s laws,” he said.
While Staver agrees that the legal argument strongly favors traditional marriage, he is not confident in the Supreme Court seeing it that way when the case finally gets there.
“I have no confidence in the Supreme Court on this particular critical issue. Frankly, if the Supreme Court were to take up gravity and determine that the laws of gravity were no longer good for us, that they were good for the founders but we’ve evolved past that, what kind of an opinion would that be? I think that’s the same thing with marriage,” said Staver.
Staver also has words of warning for right-leaning politicians and other conservative activists who keep silent on the issue or even consider embracing same-sex marriage as the polls lean in that direction.
“Those who remain silent will ultimately remain accountable, just as much as Democrats who advocate to the contrary. This is not an issue on which you can remain silent, any more than you can remain silent in Nazi Germany. That was a moral issue. There was a moral imperative there of the dignity of the human being. You can’t remain silent there and expect no consequences. Nor can you remain silent or advocate to the contrary with regards to the undermining marriage as the union of a man and a woman,” said Staver.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud Frank Luntz for pointing out many Americans consume media to affirm rather than inform their political beliefs and that media outlets cannot even agree on the facts these days. They shake their heads as a new report show the wages for the jobs created in the Obama years pay far less than the ones that were lost in the recession. And they have fun with the failed push to get actor Jeff Bridges to run for U.S. Senate in Montana.
Concerned Veterans for America CEO Pete Hegseth says President Obama needs to decide whether he wants to degrade or defeat the terrorist army controlling much of Syria and Iraq and he says defeat will require American troops returning to Iraq.
Hegseth’s comments come just four days after Obama authorized limited air strikes to protect U.S. assets and personnel in the Kurdish capital of Irbil and humanitarian missions to aid religious minorities persecuted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
“It is very narrowly tailored right now. The question is whether or not it is enough to turn back an ISIS threat which is growing and gathering,” said Hegseth, a former U.S. Army officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
He says this threat must be addressed if we hope to avoid the development of a radical state that poses a threat to the rest of the world.
“ISIS is a well-equipped, radical organization that has stated its desire to attack the American homeland and our interests. In many ways, it is a worse environment than pre-9/11 Afghanistan,” said Hegseth, who says the terrorists are poised to consume a lot more territory if they are not stopped very soon.
“These ISIS folks are modern-day Nazis. They are dedicated to killing anyone who doesn’t believe exactly what they believe and exterminating them. You would see substantial consolidation of gains in the north and I think you would see a renewed focus on Baghdad,” he said.
According to Hegseth, the choice facing the Obama administration is whether to contain or eliminate the threat posed by ISIS. And he says those options require very different actions.
“There’s a big difference between degrade and defeat. In order to stop and degrade their momentum, you’re going to have to continue air strikes. You’re going to have to send equipment to the Peshmerga, and you’re going to need to embed advisers. It’s not enough just to have advisers on post gathering intelligence. You need to have them targeting in the field alongside indigenous forces, whether that’s the Peshmerga or the Iraqi army,” said Hegseth.
Hegseth admits degrading ISIS would be far less of a commitment than wiping them off the map, but he says allowing ISIS to exist in any form carries significant threats.
“We could degrade and deny them for a substantial amount of time. The problem is you’ve got a lot of places where they can still plot, train and execute. The fear for us as Americans or western Europeans is that you have hundreds of Americans and many, many hundreds of western Europeans with passports who have traveled to Syria and Iraq through Turkey. We don’t have a full account of how many there are getting training, getting intelligence, getting expertise and then heading back to their home country. That’s what makes this such a scary scenario,” said Hegseth.
Hegseth believes ISIS need to be obliterated, but says it will mean taking steps the vast majority of Americans don’t want to take.
“If you want to defeat them, if you believe this is a threat that is too significant to ignore and just degrade, you’re going to need U.S. boots on the ground. That’s just a fact. Now whether that’s divisions, I leave that to generals who do the war planning, but a significant level of troops on the ground will be required to displace ISIS from what they’ve gathered so far,” said Hegseth, who believes total defeat of ISIS is the only realistic policy goal.
He also says the previous gains in Iraq were worth fighting for and worth pursuing again. He says the failure of the Obama administration to secure a status of forces agreement in 2011 was catastrophic.
“When we left and didn’t leave a residual force and gave away our diplomatic leverage, you saw (Iraqi Prime Minister ) Maliki hedge toward Iran and start to marginalize opponents. When ISIS made their march on Iraqi elements with no U.S. support, they faded away,” said Hegseth.
Hegseth, who saw some of the worst of the sectarian violence in Iraq, says he knows the public has little stomach for troops to return to Iraq and most soldiers aren’t eager to go back either. Still, he says those who served recognize what’s at stake.
“I think the folks that are the least war weary are the folks who have seen war, not because we want it but because we understand how if you don’t meet these threats head-on, they just manifest themselves more dangerously,” said Hegseth, who says Obama needs to decide soon what his policy goal is with respect to ISIS.
“The longer we we wait, the more we defer the problem, the worse the consequences are down the road, which is why I hope this administration will take this more seriously and make some tough choices but that’s not been in their DNA so far,” said Hegseth.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud Cory Gardner’s new anti-Obamacare ad in the Colorado Senate race. They also discuss President Obama’s frequent leisure pursuits while major crises rage. And they remember the work of comedian and actor Robin Williams and discuss the horrors triggered by suicide.
The southern U.S. border is largely unprotected and American leaders simply lie to the public when they claim otherwise, according to a new video from Project Veritas.
The report also depicts a border county sheriff in Texas declaring the border fence to be a joke, border patrol agents doing everything but patrolling the border and wondering if President Obama even cares that there is even an unguarded footbridge in his county that connects the U.S. and Mexico across the Rio Grande.
Project Veritas President and Founder James O’Keefe crossed the shallow, narrow river a total of five times and twice in video, one dressed as Osama bin Laden to emphasize how terrorists could exploit lax border security.
In his first crossing out of costume, O’Keefe takes just a few seconds to cross the Rio Grande.
“I don’t see a single federal officer anywhere, no walls, no guns, no people” says O’Keefe upon reaching shore on the American side in the video.
His efforts are shown immediately after video clips of Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano all insisting the border was very secure. In our subsequent interview, O’Keefe says the message of the video should be pretty clear.
“I think the message here is that border security is national security and that the American people don’t really understand just how bad it really is. The political representatives are lying to them. The president is lying. Senator Reid is lying. Members of Congress are lying and misleading people. If a person who’s dressed up as a terrorist can walk across the border in broad daylight with no federal Border Patrol agents to be found, I think the president is violating his oath,” said O’Keefe.
The video was shot in Hudspeth County, Texas, in the western part of the state. O’Keefe says the county is a microcosm of security problems across the southern border, ranging from small, separate components of the unfinished border fence to a footbridge connecting the U.S. to Mexico to a river that takes only a few seconds to cross.
O’Keefe is joined in the video by Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West. The sheriff didn’t directly answer when asked by O’Keefe whether President Obama is aware of the security problems in his county.
“It doesn’t matter whether he knows it’s here. Does he care? says West.
As for the border fence that President Obama once declared to be almost finished, O’Keefe says Sheriff West and other border security advocates know that’s not true.
“The sheriff intimated the fence is a joke. They don’t think there’s a fence. If you watch the video, there are these 20-foot high iron pillars that are attached to a concrete base. That goes on for about three miles and then just abruptly stops. You can walk around it,” said O’Keefe, who says Sheriff West believes he knows exactly what it would take to secure the border in his county.
“He said we could secure this border with about 75 guys. He currently has 12 deputy sheriffs in Hudspeth Couty for a 78-mile stretch. Remember, Congress is thinking about allocating three billion dollars. With just 75 deputies, that’s far, far less than three billion. He could secure an entire stretch of that border. So he’s giving a practical solution. Of course, given the way this government works and the way this country works, they’ll never look for that practical solution because they don’t want to actually secure the border,” said O’Keefe.
O’Keefe says another alarming result of his conversation with Sheriff West was to learn there are plenty of Border Patrol agents on the payroll, but most of them are nowhere near the border.
“The federal border patrol is not on the border. They’re inland, they’re elsewhere. They’re not actually protecting the border,” said O’Keefe.
Some observers of the video accuse O’Keefe of breaking the laws of two countries by publicly depicting how to illegally cross the border. He’s not sure what Mexican officials might do but says the U.S. Border Patrol has already issued a statement claiming they simply cannot be everywhere at once. O’Keefe isn’t worried about prosecution in the U.S. at all.
“What laws are people referring to? What law has been enforced on our border? There is no law,” he said.
Project Veritas is well-known for its hidden-camera investigations of Planned parenthood, ACORN, National Public Radio and how easily voter fraud can be committed without photo identification. As with those probes, critics say O’Keefe is finding the exception rather than the rule when it comes to our borders. He says that’s ludicrious.
“It’s pretty amazing the lengths my adversaries will go to undermine and discredit me and what we expose at Project Veritas. I don’t think that people are necessarily surprised by the notion that people can cross the border. I think it’s important to show people in the most outrageous way that this is the way it is,” said O’Keefe.
O’Keefe says Project Veritas hopes to act as a uniting force in the country because he believes people of all political stripes do not want to perpetuate a system that allows terrorists to waltz unimpeded into the country. He hopes people will demand answers from their lawmakers and from the president. O’Keefe says Obama is facing an important moment and his group will be ready to hold him accountable.
“What is his response to what we’ve shown? How is he addressing the issue of terrorists sneaking across the border? How are his solutions going to prevent what I just did from happening again? Maybe I’ll go and do it again. Maybe after his solution, I’ll go across, pose as ISIS or as if I have Ebola and we’ll see what happens then,” said O’Keefe.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review discuss Hillary Clinton’s first public criticism of President Obama’s foreign policy and enjoy the prospect of much more sniping as 2016 draws closer and Obama’s approval remains low. They also set the record straight as Obama tries to argue Iraqi leaders prevented a Status of Forces Agreement in 2011. And they wonder why Iraqis are deciding the best time for domestic political chaos should be right when the nation’s very existence is at stake.
Saturday marks 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned the presidency over the Watergate scandal. The saga began more than two years earlier, in June 1972. A group of political operatives known as the plumbers broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Northwest Washington.
What many Americans do not know, however, is how the plot started, what the plumbers were looking for in the DNC headquarter, why they got caught, and how the man lionized by liberals for breaking the scandal wide open actually deserves much of the blame.
The leader of the plumbers was G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI special agent and official in the office of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). In 2012, while a talk show host and colleague of mine at the Radio America network, Liddy detailed how the road to the Watergate break-in began.
“I was down in the office of what came to be known as the plumbers. I was called by Egil Krogh, who was an assistant to John Ehrlichman, and he said, ‘(White House Counsel) John Dean wants to pitch you on something and I think I ought to be there.’ That’s because nobody trusted John Dean. So I went up to Dean’s office. He said that he wanted an intelligence operation to operate against the Democratic Party in the 1972 election,” said Liddy.
“He wanted me to be in charge of it and Mr. E. Howard Hunt, whose background was CIA, to be assisting me. He said he wanted an all-out, full-bore offensive and defensive intelligence operation,” he said.
Liddy and Hunt came up with multiple elaborate plans to gather intelligence on the Democrats, but their superiors rejected most of them simply because they were too expensive. Finally, a pared-down plan received the green light.
So what were they looking for? In 1972, President Nixon was bracing for a re-election fight against Democratic Sen. George McGovern. While many believe the plumbers were looking for campaign secrets and strategies, Liddy says the break-in had a very different goal.
“The FBI was investigating not one, not two, but three separate call girl operations back then. The assistant United States attorney who was in charge of that was a man named John Rudy. He testified that the FBI came to him and said, ‘We have found a connection between (the DNC and) the call girl ring that’s being run out of the Columbia Plaza Apartments, which is across the street from the Democratic headquarters,” said Liddy.
The plumbers carefully scouted for a way to slip into the DNC offices without being noticed. They soon determined the nighttime cleaning crew was the weak link in the security because they failed to use a key to lock and unlock the headquarters every time they came in and out of the offices. That provided a way in but also led to the team being discovered.
“We watched what they did and they put tape across the spring-loaded lock so they could bump it back and forth and that’s what we did. The security guard came by and he saw the tape. And he said, ‘Oh geez, they’ve done it again.’ He ripped it off and started making his rounds again. We put the tape back on and that was our mistake. He came around again and saw the tape a second time. He knew the clean-up crew had left. So then the question in his mind was, ‘Who put the tape on there? Wait a minute, we’ve got a problem.’ And he called the police,” said Liddy.
While Watergate did not engulf President Nixon until after his re-election, Liddy was arrested and later convicted on multiple counts. He was sentenced to prison in January 1973. Between his arrest and his sentencing, Liddy became a household name for refusing to say a word about the Watergate plotting. Liddy says his silence was based on a very simple premise.
“It concerned me that it was a threat to the administration. I wanted to preserve the administration of Richard Nixon and I knew that if I didn’t talk, it would secure those above me. So I didn’t talk but Dean cracked and talked. That’s what brought down Richard Nixon,” said Liddy.
Through his eventual testimony to Congress, the Watergate plot was exposed by the very man Liddy says ordered the “all-out, full bore offensive and defensive intelligence operation” in the first place. Liddy already held Dean in exceedingly low esteem. when word of Dean’s actions reached Liddy in prison, he says it simply confirmed what he already knew.
“I said to myself, ‘This is consistent with what we’ve always known about Dean.’ What do I mean by that? When I first went over to the White House, Donald Santarelli, the deputy attorney general, said, ‘Beware Dean. Beware Dean.’ He said, ‘Dean’s the type of guy that you’ll be typing away on an idea you have. Dean will come over and ask what you’re doing and then you’ll tell him. Then it’s lunchtime and everybody will go to lunch except Dean. Dean will stay back, not have lunch, type up a memo with your idea and submit it. He’s an idea thief,” said Liddy.
G. Gordon Liddy served more time in prison than any other figure associated with Watergate. His sentence was commuted by President Carter after nearly five years of incarceration. He soon became a prolific author, actor and then a radio talk show host for some 20 years.
More than 40 years after the Watergate saga began, Liddy made it clear he has few regrets about the episode. He says he had good reasons to break the law and those reasons have since been validated again and again.
“I saw Democrats as being dangerous to the country. I see the Democrats now as being even more dangerous to the country. I wanted to prevent them from being able to damage the country further. So I chose to make use of the special knowledge that I had as a result of the FBI and so forth. That was it,” said Liddy.
