Compare Condie and Susan Rice....no comparison.

Believe it or not I took this except from an article in the New York Times - is the lame stream beginning to see the light:

Perhaps the lack of a broader sense of alarm is not all that surprising when President Obama, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, and intelligence officials insist that such surveillance is crucial to the nation’s antiterrorism efforts.

But Americans should not be fooled by political leaders putting forward a false choice. The issue is not whether the government should vigorously pursue terrorists. The question is whether the security goals can be achieved by less-intrusive or sweeping means, without trampling on democratic freedoms and basic rights. Far too little has been said on this question by the White House or Congress in their defense of the N.S.A.’s dragnet.

The surreptitious collection of “metadata” — every bit of information about every phone call except the word-by-word content of conversations — fundamentally alters the relationship between individuals and their government.

I took this from the Daily Kos (credit to oldroy) and it absolutely floored me.

"For all of the carnage and horror it wrought, the terrorist attacks in Boston this past April only resulted in the deaths of 5 people."

ONLY

Kind of like Sebelius referring to the situation involving the 10 yr old girl who needed a lung transplant. "Some live and some die".

You simply cannot make this stuff up.

More like yes I have 10 kids but I have never had sex with my wife. lol

I am sorry to report I lost my bippy when I was fourteen. Since you go to gun shows can I refer to you as AuntiE Oakley. lol

Will I have to shave?

Burning oil sounds good to me. No wait you have to be in or on the building to do that. We couldn't get past security could we. lol

I didn't until just now. This is going to be a Haliburton thing all over again.

AuntiE: Try Wiki

There is a big difference between casting the first stone and launching the first boulder via catapult.

Do you often go Biblical. lol

The current of director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, who issued a stinging attack on the intelligence leaks this weekend, is a former Booz Allen executive

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HOME / War Stories : Military analysis. Fire James Clapper
The Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress about NSA surveillance. What else will he lie about?
By Fred Kaplan|Posted Tuesday, June 11, 2013, at 12:44 PM

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
If President Obama really does welcome a debate about the scope of the U.S. surveillance program, a good first step would be to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.” As we all now know, he was lying.

We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying. In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did. He replied:

“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

Let’s parse this passage. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden had been briefed on the top-secret-plus programs that we now all know about. That is, he knew that he was putting Clapper in a box; He knew that the true answer to his question was “Yes,” but he also knew that Clapper would have a hard time saying so without making headlines.

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But the question was straightforward. It could be answered “yes” or “no,” and Clapper had to know this when he sat there in the witness chair. (Notice that, in his response to Mitchell, Clapper said he came up with the wife-beating analogy only “in retrospect.”) There are many ways that he could have finessed the question, as administration witnesses have done in such settings for decades, but Clapper chose simply to lie. “Truthful” and “untruthful” are not relative terms; a statement either is or isn’t; there’s no such thing as speaking in a “most truthful” or “least untruthful” manner.

Nor was this a spontaneous lie or a lie he regretted making. Wyden revealed in a statement today that he’d given Clapper advance notice that he would ask the question and that, after the hearing, he offered Clapper a chance to revise his answer. Clapper didn’t take the offer.

Clapper’s deceptions don’t stop there. Rambling on in his rationalization to Mitchell, he focused on Wyden’s use of the word “collect,” as in “Did the NSA collect any type of data ... on millions of Americans?” Clapper told Mitchell that he envisioned a vast library of books containing vast amounts of data on every American. “To me,” he said, “collection of U.S. persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.”

If this were true, it would suggest that Clapper wasn’t quite lying when he told Wyden that the NSA doesn’t wittingly “collect” data on Americans. But of course, this is nonsense. Neither in everyday speech nor in tech-intelligence jargon does “collect” mean anything other than what it obviously means: to gather, to sweep up, to bring together. No one says, “I’m going to collect The Great Gatsby from my bookshelf and read it.” Nor does anyone say, “I’m going to collect this phone conversation from my archive and listen to it.”

It is irrelevant whether Clapper really believes his definition of “collect” or made it up on the spot. Either way, this is a man who cannot be trusted to hold an honest discussion about these issues. If he lied about what he thinks “collect” means, he will lie about lots of things. If he really thinks the English language is this flexible, it is unwise to assume that any statement he makes means what it appears to mean.

This is crucial. We as a nation are being asked to let the National Security Agency continue doing the intrusive things it’s been doing on the premise that congressional oversight will rein in abuses. But it’s hard to have meaningful oversight when an official in charge of the program lies so blatantly in one of the rare open hearings on the subject. (Wyden, who had been briefed on the program, knew that Clapper was lying, but he couldn’t say so without violating the terms of his own security clearance.)

And so, again, if President Obama really welcomes an open debate on this subject, James Clapper has disqualified himself from participation in it. He has to go.

I should like to also point out in the name of fairness that Clapper was the Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence under Bush and was appointed just prior to 9/11. He was also Under Secretary of Defense under GWB from 2007 to 2010 until he was promoted to be Obama's Director of National Intelligence in that same year. In 2012 Clapper announced an initiative to create a common information technology desktop for the entire Intelligence Community. Until then they operated under unconnected networks. It was at this time that things began to go downhill.

Clapper at the very least was not truthful in his recent appearance on Capitol Hill. Is it Ok to lie and say it is in the best interests of this country to do so. Who is the judge of that. The bigger point is that our national security is beginning to infringe on individual rights. That requires some give and some take, not just take. Something has changed since Obama took office and it is across the board not just the NSA. We need to get back on track. At the top we have veterans like Clapper and at the bottom we have new guys like Snowden. Somethings have changed since Obama took office, you can be the judge of what, but changes are needed and not at the expense of our individual freedoms. I believe in a greater good, not a greater bad. This is bad.

Follow me and tell me where I am wrong. There is a lot to sort out on the security scandals but it still bothers me that many call it partisan. I am no fan of Obama, like you did not do that, and I am not a Bush defender either, much to some’s surprise. Yet I think some things happened during the Obama administration that cannot be pinned onto Bush.

The system the NSA uses to gain access to the private communications of at least nine popular internet services. Access to do that is governed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which was enacted in 2008. James Clapper became Director of National Intelligence in 2010. In 2012 Clapper announced an intiative to create a common information technology network for the entire intelligence community which prior to that had not been connected. This was done of his own initiative with Obama at the held. Now I am not sure how the republican party can be blamed for that since that was done while a Democratic POTUS was in office and could not have been enacted without his approval.

I have no idea what the Bush administration did or did not do while administering under the Patriot Act and I am not giving them a pass. My point is simply this, that everything seems to have changed in 2010 when Clapper came on board and not for the better. This is not a partisan matter, it concerns us all but some from the Democratic party want to blame Bush and his administration and they did not operate under the same framework as Clapper set up in 2010 and embellished in 2012.

Clearly creating the common information technology network is where everything began to go south. Now Clapper may have to suffer the consequences for having misled Congress if not actually lying to them. I wish that was just his problem but one thing is for sure and that that way too many things point in Clappers direction. He was appointed by Obama not Bush. Sure these are probably the most political times I have ever seen in my 67 years but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. I am not a registered republican and I did not vote for Obama but that stands alone. When it comes to national security all politics should be put aside. 9/11 changed everything and the Boston bombings were a recent reminder that security is every bit as important now as ever.
So politics aside what has been done cannot be undone but we can move forward. I don’t remember national security being a big talking point during the recent presidential campaigning. But I would say now that national security is now at the top of the list and individual rights and freedoms is right there with it. Somehow we have to put politics aside and do what is best for this nation and still protect the rights and freedoms of each and every American citizen.

Exactly - the republican party has not evolved and old schoolers have to go. It is time to reorganize and find a way to fold in libertarians. The establisment is so far off base it is not funny. If we did not learn anything from the last elelction we did learn that it is all about voter turn out. What good does it do to be well informed if you don't vote and it is all about numbers, electroral numbers.

It all goes to character. I was not a big Romney guy but I think he has character. That was a common trait that could be found in our forefathers. Politics is like a giant eraser, it strips men of character and exposes them for what they really are. Power does corrupt those with no character. History has proven that time after time.