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Congressman Ed Markey

July 9, 2012 - Congressman releases first-ever accounting of responses from wireless carriers that indicate sweeping personal data requests from law enforcement agencies.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the first-ever accounting of its kind, Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass) has found that in 2011, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies made more than 1.3 million requests of wireless carriers for the cell phone records of consumers, and that number is increasing every year. Last month, Rep. Markey queried nine mobile wireless carriers about their policies and practices for sharing their customers’ mobile phone information with law enforcement agencies after a report in the New York Times reported that law enforcement was routinely requesting consumers cell phone records, sometimes with little judicial oversight and no consumer knowledge. The responses received by Rep. Markey were startling in the volume and scope of requests made by law enforcement, including requests for “cell tower dumps” in which carriers provide all the phones numbers of cell users that connect with a tower during a discreet period of time, including information on innocent people. According to the carriers, all requests were made pursuant to a legal warrant or granted due to an emergency situation in which an individual was in imminent danger.

"We cannot allow privacy protections to be swept aside with the sweeping nature of these information requests, especially for innocent consumers,” said Rep. Markey, senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and co-Chair of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus. “Law enforcement agencies are looking for a needle, but what are they doing with the haystack? We need to know how law enforcement differentiates between records of innocent people, and those that are subjects of investigation, as well as how it handles, administers, and disposes of this information.” {Read More}

The Thinker Believes It Time For the Alternative

THE HILL - Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.

A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.

The results signal broad voter unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection this fall.

Conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, the poll comes in the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decision that upheld the primary elements of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation.

It found 68 percent of likely voters — regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of Obama — believe the president has substantially transformed the country since his 2009 inauguration.

The feeling that Obama has changed the country for the worse is strongest among Republicans, at 91 percent, compared to 71 percent of Democrats who support Obama’s brand of change.

Strikingly, 1-in-5 Democrats say they feel Obama has changed the United States for the worse.

Compared to the sentiment about Obama’s impact, fewer people see presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney as a candidate who will change the country dramatically if elected.

Still, 50 percent of people think Romney will bring a “significant” level of change — a finding that may reflect the desire among anti-Obama voters for a reversal of the president’s policies. {Read More}

DNC Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) on Sunday dismissed the idea that sluggish job growth would discourage minority voters from the polls this November.

Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said that the policies of the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, on issues like immigration reform would be even worse for minorities.

“When it comes to policies like immigration reform, Mitt Romney is the most extreme presidential candidate on immigration policy and that is why there is a 40-point deficit between him and President Obama among Hispanic-Americans,” Wasserman Schultz said on Fox News Sunday.

She also said that African-Americans would have been “devastated” by Romney’s preference to not rescue the U.S. auto industry.

The Labor Department said Friday that the economy added only 80,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate stayed steady at 8.2 percent. But the unemployment rate for blacks was 14.4 percent, and stood around 11 percent for Hispanics.

Wasserman Schultz acknowledged, like President Obama on Friday, that the economy still has a ways to go. {Read More}

The Salt Lake Tribune - ... former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman won’t attend next month’s Republican National Convention or future GOP gatherings until the party starts to tackle the "bigger" issues.

"I will not be attending this year’s convention, nor any Republican convention in the future," Huntsman said, "until the party focuses on a bigger, bolder, more confident future for the United States — a future based on problem solving, inclusiveness, and a willingness to address the trust deficit, which is every bit as corrosive as our fiscal and economic deficits."

Huntsman had racked up two national delegates with his third-place finish in New Hampshire and another from the Texas primary, a point that could have guaranteed him a speaking role.

The former Utah governor was uninvited to a Republican National Committee event in Florida in March after he suggested that the nation needed a third-party candidate who offered an alternative to the Republican and Democratic options.

In a statement this week, Huntsman said he wanted his party to return to its moorings that mirrored his last-minute campaign theme of "Country First." {Read More}

Reuters

NPR - Judge Richard Posner, a conservative on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, has long been one of the nation's most respected and admired legal thinkers on the right. But in an interview with NPR, he expressed exasperation at the modern Republican Party, and confessed that he has become "less conservative" as a result.

"I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy," he said.

Posner, who was appointed to the appeals court by Reagan, speculated that the leaks about the deliberations over the national health care law — which are apparently designed to discredit Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion upholding the law — would backfire. "I think these right-wingers who are blasting Roberts are making a very serious mistake," he said.

"Because if you put [yourself] in his position ... what's he supposed to think? That he finds his allies to be a bunch of crackpots? Does that help the conservative movement? I mean, what would you do if you were Roberts? All the sudden you find out that the people you thought were your friends have turned against you, they despise you, they mistreat you, they leak to the press. What do you do? Do you become more conservative? Or do you say, 'What am I doing with this crowd of lunatics?' Right? Maybe you have to re-examine your position."

Reuters - A conservative federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan said in an interview published Thursday that the Republican Party has gone “goofy” and that “these right-wingers who are blasting [Chief Justice John] Roberts are making a very serious mistake.”

“I mean, what would you do if you were Roberts?” Judge Richard Posner, of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, told NPR. “All of a sudden you find out that the people that you thought were your friends have turned against you, they despise you, they mistreat you, they leak to the press, what do you do? Do you become more conservative? Or do you say, ‘What am I doing with this crowd of lunatics?’”

He was referring, of course, to conservative backlash over Roberts’s opinion upholding President Barack Obama’s health care law.

Posner said “there’s been a real deterioration in conservative thinking” over the past 10 years...