The investigation involves Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department employee, who has been under investigation for possibly leaking classified information on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen.

The Washington Post characterizes the case as one that “bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.” Except, it is worse.

The FBI conducted extensive surveillance of Rosen:

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

An affidavit apparently indicates that Rosen communicated to Kim, “What I am interested in, as you might expect, is breaking news ahead of my competitors” including “what intelligence is picking up.” Also, “I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses.”

Not only did investigators seize “two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal emails—and all of his email exchanges with Kim,” but they managed to convince a federal judge he could be a “co-conspirator.” As the judge was convinced there was “probable cause” he had broken “the law against unauthorized leaks,” the judge approved a search warrant.

But, as the Post notes, “It remains an open question whether it’s ever illegal, given the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information. No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so.”

This is but another example of how the Obama administration is, as I thoroughly detailed last week, chilling the news gathering process through its actions. It may be even more zealous than the pursuit of New York Times reporter James Risen’s sources because it suggests journalists do not only have to fear being forced to give up their sources but could also be criminalized for “conspiring” with their source. (Risen won in court, but the Obama Justice Department appealed.)

If the Justice Department was willing to make this claim about a Fox News reporter in court to get to records that could bolster their case against Kim, there should be no doubt that they have used the same claims about WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and its staffers to strengthen their case against Pfc. Bradley Manning but to also construct innovative cases against WikiLeaks that could be employed in defense of secrecy and the national security state.

Furthermore, there should be no confusion. The perverse decision by the Obama administration to back a re-introduced version of a media shield law has a broad national security exception. And, James Goodale, the former counsel to the Times, says:

I think if that shield law were passed it would reverse the victory James Risen won which permitted him not to disclose national security information leaked to him by Jeffrey Sterling. Without taking up more time than I have, the bottom line on Obama’s suggestion to reintroduce the shield law is that it is a snare and delusion.

The Obama administration considers shielding the national security state to be a higher priority than protecting freedom of the press. No one should be dissuaded otherwise because the administration’s record shows this is the case.

But a close reading of the rules makes it clear that those mandates affect only plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm. That affects only about 30 million of the more than 160 million people with private insurance, including 19 million people covered by employers, according to a Citigroup Inc. report. Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty. [...]

Administration officials confirmed in interviews that the skinny plans, in concept, would be sufficient to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty. Several expressed surprise that employers would consider the approach.

The Rube Goldberg nature of how people are supposed to get insurance under the Affordable Care Act creates a huge amount of bureaucratic waste and the potential for many to fall through the cracks. The maddening lack of consistent standards could end up causing much more damage.

Since the exchanges will be very small markets it is unlikely most large businesses will use this strategy. If even a modest number of companies use this to cheaply shift their least health insured employees onto the exchanges,  these companies could push up premiums to discourage use.

More importantly, President Obama’s most used justification for the law was to stop people from going “bankrupt if they get sick.” Most Americans who experience medical bankruptcy are actually underinsured not uninsured. By allowing large companies to underinsure employees the ACA will not stop medical bankruptcy.

Not even a week after Buzzfeed’s relationship with the Koch Brothers is exposed do we learn that a near civil war erupted in public television over documentaries that focused on Charles and David Koch. In an expose written by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker it is revealed that two public television affiliated documentaries prominently featuring the Koch family came under pressure to be censored and edited due to fear that Charles and David Koch, major donors to public media, would withdraw support.

One film by Academy Award winning director Alex Gibney, Park Aveneue: Money, Power & The American Dream, received unprecedented scrutiny and was almost pulled while another, Citizen Koch, was subject to such extensive editing by public television representatives that the film ultimately collapsed.

The drama over the documentaries was caused by efforts by WNET a major public television station and program provider in the New York Area.

Neal Shapiro, the president of WNET, said that he grew concerned about the [Park Avenue] film, which he had not yet watched, after Ira Stoll, a conservative writer, lambasted it in the Post...

Shapiro initially said, he called Koch at his office and told him that the Gibney film “was going to be controversial,” noting, “You’re going to be a big part of this thing.” Shapiro offered to show him the trailer, and added that he hoped to arrange “some sort of on-air roundtable discussion of it, to provide other points of view.” It could air immediately after the documentary.

Why the special treatment of a subject by the documentary film, especially after Koch had refused to cooperate with the film? There’s this thing, maybe you have heard of it, called money.

David Koch is a major philanthropist, contributing to cultural and medical institutions that include Lincoln Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years. In 1997, he began serving as a trustee of Boston’s public-broadcasting operation, WGBH, and in 2006 he joined the board of New York’s public-television outlet, WNET.

Despite the uneasiness the film aired but was followed by a roundtable discussion of the film that included a representative of Koch funded Manhattan Institute but did not include the filmmaker to offer a defense of the film.

Nonetheless, Park Avenue received much better treatment than the other Koch film which attempted to come after.

ITVS, which is based in San Francisco and was founded some twenty years ago by independent filmmakers, prides itself on its resistance to outside pressure…

Shapiro acknowledged that, in his conversations with ITVS officials about “Park Avenue,” he was so livid that he threatened not to carry its films in the future. The New York metropolitan area is the largest audience for public television, so the threat posed a potentially mortal blow to ITVS.

Did ITVS get the message? Tia Lessin and Carl Deal told ITVS they were making a documentary about the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and how it was influencing the Wisconsin protests against Governor Scott Walker taking away union rights. The filmmakers told ITVS they were going to call their film “Citizen Koch.”

Before the Park Avenue drama ITVS loved the Citizen Koch documentary.

In April, 2012, ITVS recommended that the film receive a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in funding. “Please accept this as confirmation and congratulations,” the ITVS notification said. It went on, “Everyone here at ITVS looks forward to working with you on your very exciting and promising program.” A few weeks later, ITVS sent a multipage contract to the filmmakers, and negotiations seemed close to a resolution just before “Park Avenue” aired.

After the Park Avenue drama ITVS changed its tune.

During a conference call on January 14th, Jim Sommers, the senior vice-president of content for ITVS, acknowledged to Lessin and Deal that, after Gibney’s film aired, there was “one station that gave us a lot of push-back about it.” Was the station in New York? He said, “Ha, ha, ha, that might be it.” According to the television producer, “They kept using words like ‘balance,’ but what they really meant was ‘Get rid of the Koch story line.’ ”

Not surprisingly the film project died, never to air on WNET. In Hollywood and the commercial film business there is something called development hell. There can be many contributing factors for a project to be sent to hell, chief among them is money problems but often content rewrites and edits lead to the stagnation. So apparently the non-commercial world is going to get a nice taste of Hollywood dysfunction thanks to edits and rewrites by public television executives obsessing over donor sensitivities. But is that public television or just a different commercial venture where the advertisers are rich individuals and their foundations instead of mass market consumer companies? How many edits does it take?

What may be worse is the larger media’s cowering in the face of Koch power. The writer of the expose, Jane Mayer, already got a nice taste of blowback after writing a previous story on the Koch Brothers. And with the duo in the running to buy the Tribune Company they may be getting much more of a pass. So maybe these conflicts over stories and films on the Koch Brothers will be a thing of the past, because they will never have a chance of being published in the first place.

SEN. MCCONNELL: You know, I don’t know what the issues will be next year. If I were predicting what’s likely to be the biggest issue in the 2014 election, I think it would be Obamacare. I think it’s coming back big time. And by the way, the IRS has a role to play in the implementation of Obamacare, which is another reason why if we had the opportunity to do it, we ought to pull it out root and branch, the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed in modern times in this country. And the American people are beginning to learn as their premiums go up, as jobs are lost, the full effect of this on our slow growth economy has been enormous. I– I think that’s likely, frankly, David, to be the biggest issue next– in 2014 and maybe others.

This answer comes right after the House Republicans decided to dedicate a day staging another repeal vote just to get every new member on record. Republicans are convinced that campaigning against the ACA will help them replicate their success in 2010. Republicans have gone all in on this political bet.

For this strategy to work the implementation of the law needs to go very badly, which gives Republicans at all levels a strong incentive to derail it.  In some states where the Republican governors have endorsed the idea the rank and file Republican state legislatures have worked to kill it, which partially explains why Medicaid expansion has gone so poorly.

The CEO of the Associated Press said the government’s unprecedented actions to seize phone records of reporters from the news organization was both unconstitutional and has had a chilling effect on sources.

The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government’s secret seizure of two months of reporters’ phone records “unconstitutional” and said the news cooperative had not ruled out legal action against the Justice Department.

Gary Pruitt, in his first television interviews since it was revealed the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records of AP reporters and editors, said the move already has had a chilling effect on journalism. Pruitt said the seizure has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists and, in the long term, could limit Americans’ information from all news outlets.

Was the point to terrify journalists and sources? Yes.  Mr. Pruitt identifies the ultimate goal of using state power to intimidate the press.

Pruitt told CBS’ ”Face the Nation” that the government has no business monitoring the AP’s newsgathering activities.

“And if they restrict that apparatus … the people of the United States will only know what the government wants them to know and that’s not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment,” he said.

The seizure was part of the Obama Administration’s Orwellian War On Leakers where government secrecy and opacity is paramount and citizen privacy is held in contempt. Of course, the war is really on unapproved leakers, the government leaks things all the time to help spin the press. No prosecutions forthcoming.

Anyone remember the leak to Michael Isikoff of the OLC Memos justifying the killing of Americans without due process? That was a major security breach that jeopardized national security policy. When is the Justice Department going to get to the bottom of that case? NBC get ready for the secret subpoena. Oh, wait, that served state power? That helped the Obama Administration work the press before a Senate hearing? Never mind let’s all move on.

The press has constitutional rights when it does what the government wants and none when it does not.

Good morning.

International Developments

❖ Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:  “‘We can’t negotiate with fragmented rebels’.   The Syrian government says that the opposition could not uphold any peace deal, and blames the west for supporting them.”

❖ According to “opposition activists”, Syrian troops have been joined by “Hezbollah militants” in “an offensive to retake a major town near Lebanon from rebels”.  Update:  Rebels report 50 people killed ”while state media says 70 ‘terrorists’ are dead” in Qusair.

❖ Drone strike on “suspected al-Qaida members in southern Yemen” Saturday, presumably by the US, killing 4.  There were two other drone strikes in Yemen last month, killing “at least six suspected militants”.

❖ “EU decision to lift Syrian oil sanctions boosts jihadist groups:  Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida affiliate, consolidates position as scramble for control of wells accelerates”.  Very complex situation with the Syrian government paying al-Nusra to keep the oil flowing,  the Kurds fighting to protect their oil interests, and Iraqi tanks protecting other oil wells.  Chaos ensured.

❖ “Tunisia police clash with Salafists over meeting ban”.

❖ A female Pakistani politician, Zahra Shahid Hussain, member of Imran Khan’s Movement for Justice party, was been shot dead in Karachi.

❖ Nigerian army troops are in Maiduguri, Borno where they have “imposed a 24-hour curfew in parts” of the city.

International Finance

❖ The “US State Department has been essentially acting as a de facto global-marketing arm of the ag-biotech industry” through “a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods that they do not want” and to plan biotech crops.  “900 diplomatic cables [Wikileaks] . . . showed a carefully crafted campaign to break down resistance to GM products”.  But wait: could UK Prime Minister David Cameron come to the rescue?

❖ “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry asked his EU counterpart Catherine Ashton to [delay the decision to label products from Israeli settlements] as he tries to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.”

❖ This has been on-again, off-again for awhile, but it now seems JP Morgan shareholders are determined “to strip Jamie Dimon of chairmanship:  US banking giant facing revolt by dissidents in wake of $6bn London Whale trading loss last year”.

❖ Led by FIOM, the metalworkers’ union, yesterday “Thousands of protesters . . . rallied in the Italian capital Rome against the policies of the new coalition government.”

Money Matters USA

❖ 14 North American retailers refused to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

❖ “In a study that surprises almost no one, the Bloomberg administration has found that half of New York City residents are ‘poor’ or ‘near-poor’ meaning that they were ‘making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold.’” [cont'd.]

Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security.

Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.

U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say
doing so would be very difficult.

Nevermind, can you use fear to make a profit?

Oh yes:

Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los
Angeles Times investigation found.

Meanwhile, let’s cut more food stamps and Medicare.

Oh, and based on the above, you might think Danzig was a “loyal Bushie”.

He’s not, he has substantial connections to both Clinton and Obama too.

A bipartisan approach to making a profit on panic.

So ignore this scandal and go back to Benghazi.

AC/DC & The Rolling Stones – Rock Me Baby

They all had some fun that nite…! Hippo Birdies to Phil Rudd…!

What’s on your mind tonite…?

The FBI has contacted two former staffers of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign, adding to the swirl of federal and state investigations looking into alleged financial improprieties by top officials in the campaign.

Is that a banshee’s wail I hear?

See, until fairly recently, Andy Parrish was as loyal to Michele Bachmann as a Republican can be loyal to anything outside of the Almighty Dollar. For him to cooperate in this way with the authorities makes me think that there’s got to be something big and juicy here — and I’m guessing that once they get that particular big-and-juicy thing nailed down, they want to build a bridge from that thing to some other big-and-juicy things: Frank Vennes and Tom Petters.

Now that Parrish is talking to the FBI (and did you notice his lawyer is Classy John Gilmore, who’s suing the City of Minneapolis for $10 million for arresting him for being a drunken bigoted asshole to two Muslim women and their pedicabbie friend?), I think I know one reason why Bachmann’s decided to start running campaign ads nearly eighteen months before the next election.

That RT clip is an object lesson in how obtuse our MSM FP press and/or Think Tank advisers are…!
Consider Judith Kipper‘s bio… Judith Kipper is the adviser for Middle East Programs and director of the Energy Security Group at the Council on Foreign Relations(CFR) and a longtime consultant on international affairs for ABC News… Then, on the other hand you have Flynt Leverett(and Hillary!)…
From their most recent post…

“Iran and American Foreign Policy: Where Did the US Go Wrong?”— Noam Chomsky and The Leveretts at MIT…

…It was in this critical spirit that we came to MIT. We left deeply inspired by Prof. Chomsky, an incarnation of that spirit, whose comments were simultaneously powerful, profound, and delightful. One example:

“It’s now sixty years since the U.S. overthrew the parliamentary government in Iran. And since that time, not a single day has passed in which the U.S. hasn’t been torturing Iran, constantly. Jimmy Carter was asked about this, and he said, ‘Well, it didn’t really matter, it’s ancient history.’ Obama’s standard line is, ‘Let’s not look to the past; let’s look to the future.’

That’s a very convenient position for criminals. ‘Let’s forget everything that happened.’ Somehow, victims don’t feel that way. They have memories. You see this all over the world. The victims have memories which the perpetrators don’t know about, or like to forget: ‘It’s all in the past; let’s forget it.’ I think it’s useful to remember a quip of William Faulkner’s, who said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ And that’s true in this case. For victims, the past isn’t past.”

But, while deeply appreciating the past, Prof. Chomsky is also very much forward looking, telling his audience that Americans have the power to demand different policies from their government. In that regard, we will always treasure Chomsky’s verdict on our book, Going to Tehran, offered at the beginning of his remarks:

“The most important thing I can say tonight is actually very brief. Three words: Read this book. That’s good advice. You’ll find a lot of information that’s not generally available, some that’s not available at all, also very valuable insights and understanding which is sharply different from views in the United States, attitudes in the United States that are so conventional and unchallenged they can fairly be called a ‘party line.’ [You’ll also find] perspectives that may help, if they’re widely enough understood, to halt a very clear drift towards what could be a terrible war.”

To rebut some of Kipper’s obtuseness…Lavrov Discussed Iranian Role in Syria Peace Talks: