The Next Snowden Leaks "Drip"...

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

[...]

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

[...]

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

[...]

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

[...]

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities. The “202” collection was deemed irrelevant to any of them. “The issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” according to the author of the secret memo from March 2013.

[...]

The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress.

[...]

The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other ­facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speak­ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

  WaPo

This report even has Diane Feinstein, who is heavily invested both politically and financially in the government’s intelligence mechanisms, backpedaling.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

[...]

Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.

I think we can take a “declined to disclose” to be a yes answer there.

[An] operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.

Maybe that’s what they told the court, but that’s not what they told us, now is it?

In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional.

Hmmm. They didn’t get the court’s permission first?

The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy.

[...]

President Obama and other government leaders have emphasized the court’s oversight role in the wake of revelations this year that the government is vacuuming up “metadata” on Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.

“We also have federal judges that we’ve put in place who are not subject to political pressure,” Obama said at a news conference in June. “They’ve got lifetime tenure as federal judges, and they’re empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren’t being abused.”

[...]

The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy.

  WaPo

How handy. And so, you’re saying Obama is a liar. We’re shocked.

I also think more troubling is that last year, the NSA retained more than 3,000 files of telephone call records in defiance of an FISC order (!). How many calls involving how many people were on each file is unknown, by the way.

[...]

[M]ainly this is on the NSA, which is to say, on the administration. President Obama pledged last Friday to make these surveillance programs “more transparent.” He argued, “It’s not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them, as well.”

Yet the administration did not disclose, say, the lapses Gellman reported. In fact, the NSA retroactively placed an on-the-record interview with its director of compliance off the record, according to Gellman. It did this after Obama’s speech extolling the importance of and promising transparency. In a sense, we got his wished-for transparency. We can see right through him now. .

  New Republic

UPDATE: Two leading Democrats respond.

Big Mouth, Big Head

Republican shock jock Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday that he accepts responsibility for Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 presidential election. “Just as I predicted, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “This election was lost because of your host, Rush Limbaugh. I am the primary reason.”

  Raw Story

But, Paul Ryan has a little different take. 

Former Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan says that his party lost the White House in 2012 because so many “urban” voters went to the polls, not because Americans rejected his Medicare and other budget policies.

  Raw Story

They lost because people voted, but not because people didn't like them. I guess people go out and vote for what they don't want these days.

Oh. He may have a point.

And on second reading, maybe he doesn't consider urban voters to be Americans.

Although exit polls showed that six in ten voters wanted tax rates to be raised, Ryan said he didn’t believe that was what Americans really voted for.

Whew. The denial. It's as big as Limbaugh's head.

“I don’t think we lost it on those budget issues, especially on Medicare,” the former nominee explained. “We clearly didn’t lose it on those issues. I think what people want us to do is tackle the country’s problems, and what I got out of this is they don’t want only Republican ideas or only Democratic ideas, they want us to come together for common ground and to work this out.”

What Paul Ryan got out of the election:  losing doesn't mean people don't want GOP policies. It means they want Democrats to compromise with them. 

Perceptive guy.  No nuance too slight to get past him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

To All Celebrants of the Latest Election...

...Chris Floyd has a question for you:

Is this child dead enough for you?

Go read the article.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They're Not Happy Over at Black Agenda Report

The rulers had, at long last, found our Achilles Heel, the weakest spot in African Americans’ political armor. Our reflexive racial solidarity (actually, an aspect of Black nationalism), which had served us so well, for so long, short-circuited our progressive political instincts. We became fodder for Obama, the slicker-than-Slick-Willie corporate guy with the brown face.

[...]

Dutifully, Black folks set aside the last vestiges of their vaunted distrust of Power. Henceforth, African Americans would consider themselves as a Palace Guard – the antithesis of independent political actors. Thus was Obama empowered to become the “More Effective Evil.”

With little resistance on the Left, and virtually none from organized Black America, Obama has worked miracles for the resuscitation of the Lords of Capital and their imperial apparatus – feats that only a Black corporate Democrat could accomplish.

[...]

Despite his background, Obama knew enough about African Americans to pay us no attention and less respect. There would be no penalty. Black folks had convinced themselves that Obama needed our protection; it never occurred to most of us that we needed protection from him – not during the primaries, when he praised Ronald Reagan’s reaction to the “excesses” of the Sixties, or when he refused to endorse even a voluntary halt to home foreclosures (while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards endorsed “voluntary” and mandatory moratoriums, respectively); not in the last weeks before his inauguration, when Obama announced that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all “entitlements” would be “on the table” for chopping under his administration.

[...]

President Obama has attempted to render international law a dead letter. No nation has any rights that he feels bound to respect. Obama, with his drone armadas and multiplying Special Forces troops, represents a far greater threat to global civilization – which must be rooted in law! – than the failed conquerer George Bush (who actually negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq).

[...]

Statutory authority to imprison Americans without charge or trial was beyond Bush’s reach, and he knew it. But Obama guided a bill through the Congress with very little Democratic opposition. He is the more effective secret police warden.

Now Obama has won another “mandate,” which he will use to finish the projects he started: wider wars, a more profound government subservience to finance capital, and that “new legal architecture” on national security that he warned about on the Daily Show, a few weeks ago.

[...]

African Americans have made themselves irrelevant – not just for the second Obama presidency, but possibly deep into the future. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” and Black folks have failed to demand even elementary respect from this president, much less concrete programs, or peace.

  Black Agenda Report

 

 

It's Sunday

Many Republican icons follow the P.T. Barnum motto of business: There's a sucker born every minute. But maybe the most shameless is Glenn Beck.

[In] the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election, Beck had repeatedly said that God was orchestrating Republican nominee’s path to the presidency. Speaking to his radio listeners in September, he insisted that Romney’s poll numbers had fallen as a part of a plan from God to make it obvious to the American people that divine intervention was responsible when Republicans took the White House in November.

The conservative radio host later speculated that Romney had lost the final debate because he was “being guided” by God to be “less contentious” and agree with President Barack Obama.

[...]

During his radio show t[the morning after the election], Beck told listeners that he had realized Romney was going to lose while praying before the polls opened on Tuesday.

“Man, sometimes God really sucks,” the radio host lamented.

  

Ooops. Must have gotten carried away with himself.

Not that he's wrong.

A man whose leg was amputated after an accident involving a 600-pound crucifix is suing the Hudson Valley, NY church that owns the cross. According to the Associated Press, church volunteer David Jiminez was cleaning the edifice when it fell on him and injured his leg in May of 2010.

White Plains attorney Kevin Kitson, who is representing Jimenez, said that his client volunteered to clean the crucifix at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church after praying to it for his wife’s recovery from ovarian cancer. When it appeared that his prayers were answered, the grateful husband offered to perform the duty as a show of thanks to god and to the church.

Now Jimenez, whose injuries were too extensive for his leg to be saved, is suing St. Patrick’s for $3 million. The church claims it is not liable for the mishap.

  Raw Story

Election Message to the GOP

Democratic commentator James Carville noted that some in the South say, “‘You know, in order to get that boys attention, you got to hit him upside the head with a two by four.’ Well the sound you heard on election night was pine on skull."

  Raw Story

The Real Mitt Romney

From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself.

Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked.

  NBC

He not only fired “the help” he stranded them.  Think they'll wake up now?

Me neither.

Get Ready, Granny

If there were an actual liberal - or even an actual Democrat - in the White House, the election would have been more than just symbolic.

[With Tuesday] night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.

[...]

Consider the very first controversial issue Obama is likely to manage, even before the glow of his victory dims, literally within the next couple of weeks. It is widely expected - including by liberals - that Obama intends (again) to pursue a so-called "Grand Bargain" with the GOP: a deficit- and debt-cutting agreement whereby the GOP agrees to some very modest tax increases on the rich in exchange for substantial cuts to entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare, the crown legislative jewels of American liberalism.

Indeed, Obama already sought in his first term to implement sizable cuts to those programs, but liberals were saved only by GOP recalcitrance to compromise on taxes. In light of their drubbing last night, they are likely to be marginally if not substantially more flexible, which means that such a deal is more possible than ever.

In other words, the political leader in whose triumph liberals are today ecstatically basking is likely to target their most cherished government policies within a matter of weeks, even days. With their newly minted power, will they have any ability, or even will, to stop him?

[...]

If history is any indication, [what they will do is follow the] standard pattern of self-disempowerment used by American liberals to render themselves impotent and powerless in Washington, not just on economic issues but the full panoply of political disputes, from ongoing militarism, military spending and war policies to civil liberties assaults, new cabinet appointments, immigration policy, and virtually everything else likely to arise in the second term.

  Glenn Greenwald

JEREMY SCAHILL:  "And when you [Dennis Kucinich] put forward legislation in the Congress, that [...] said that the president does not have the right to unilaterally authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen without due process, only six of your colleagues signed on to that legislation. I mean, to me, that’s one of the sort of enduring symbols of your legacy in Congress, the fact that you were one of only half-a-dozen members of Congress—not a single senator—to simply state on the record that American citizens have the right not to be assassinated by their own government without due process."

[...]

Outgoing Congressmember DENNIS KUCINICH: "I expect that the Obama administration will continue their policies of drone strikes, which have killed hundreds of innocent people and have put to death, through drone strikes, thousands of individuals who were just determined to be combatants, often because they happened to be the wrong age. This is repugnant to morality. It’s morally depraved, this drone strikes. And whether you’re a Democrat or Republican doesn’t matter. This is about what kind of human beings we are

[...]

"The drone situation is abominable. By the way, I’m going to have a briefing in Washington on November 16th on the drone policies. We’re going to be bringing some of the top people in the world who have something to say about this and could be considered experts, on civil liberties and other matters."

  Democracy Now!

Good luck with that.

Avalanche on Bullshit Mountain

About four and a half minutes into this clip, there's footage of Karl Rove on Fox News that's hillarious. Brian Williams made the comment on election night about Donald Trump that he "has driven well past the last exit to relevance." And I'm thinking Karl Rove was in the passenger seat.

Really?

If it was, it took  more than 20 minutes to get to the good part.  That's when I gave up on it as more blah, blah, blah, we're great, blah, blah, blah, we're really, truly great.

What We Really Wanted to See Last Night

And just because they make me laugh, here's an earlier one that still works..

The Morning After

I thought I could listen to the president's victory speech, but I couldn't get through more than 15 minutes.  What a bunch of vapor.

There were some positive outcomes from the people's votes yesterday:

Maine and Maryland on Tuesday became the first states to approve same-sex marriage by popular vote, while Washington and Colorado legalised the recreational use of marijuana.

[...]

In Massachusetts, voters approved a measure to allow marijuana use for medical reasons, joining 17 other states.

Minnesota also rejected an initiative to ban gay marriage, and a law approving it seemed on track to pass referendum in Washington.

  alJazeera

Plus, Elizabeth Warren won her contest, and Houston voted to raise taxes to build 29 new schools and improve extant ones.

And this morning the Republican analysts and politicos are all asking themselves what they need to do to get back in the running.

I've a suggestion. Why don't you stop being dicks? See how that works for you.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Well, That Was Boring

I think this is the most boring election night I have experienced in all my many years. The only thing that surprises me is that Obama won Colorado. Maybe I just have never paid attention, but I always think of Colorado as the most conservative state in the union.

Vote Your Conscience

"Most Likely" I Voted

We have some bizarre voting machines here in Galveston. They look like touch screens, but they're not - You spin a wheel that rotates the selector through the choices, and then click an "enter" button when you get to your choice. When you get to the write-in, you have to spin it through an alphabet letter board. Since all the other candidates are listed as "presidential candidate/vice presidential candidate," I was concerned that the write-in would have to be in that same form. There was no "/" on the letter board, so I asked one of the election officials whether the proper way to enter my choice was to just put Rocky's name in or add Rodriguez along with it, without the "/". She said "most likely" just putting Rocky's name would be the proper way. So "most likely" I voted for Anderson/Rodriguez. I can only be CERTAIN that I didn't vote for any of the other pairs on the ballot. Yes, we need some serious overhaul to our election process, and not just with the machinery.

Avoiding the Slow Death

David Swanson will be debating Daniel Ellsberg on whether to vote third party. Here are a few snippets of his argument against voting  Democrat this election.

Under Obama, as you may know, wealth is concentrating faster, the environment is deteriorating faster, the military has spread further and cost more, the warrantless spying has spread and been firmly established as without criminal penalty, rendition and torture have become policy choices rather than crimes, imprisonment without charge or trial has been "legalized" (although Obama is still fighting for that power in court), an assassination program has been created and openly advertised, wars have been launched without the courtesy of lying to Congress, the CIA has been given major war powers, "special" forces are in 70 nations on any given day and raiding a dozen homes to kill on any given night, drones have raised to new heights the percentage of war victims who are civilians and the percentage of the people in certain nations who hate our government, secrecy has mushroomed, and retribution against whistleblowers has exploded. You are aware of all of this.

Yes, Romney could advance them even further even faster than Obama would in the next four years -- even in the face of the public opposition that would likely materialize for a President Romney. But we need a reversal of course, not a slightly slower death, not even a significantly slower death. The environment is collapsing. Weaponry and hostility are spreading. We're dealing with a need for survival, not a desire for utopia. What we need for survival is a credible independent movement.

I would [vote] for Captain Peace Prize if I believed it would save the most lives. I do not. I believe that building an activist movement that depends on rejecting support for a party of mass murderers will save the most lives, and will do so in the relative near term -- or we will all perish.

  David Swanson

..but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Feels Like a Monday

"I would learn power's currency," Obama wrote of his move from community organiser in Chicago to Harvard Law School, and then bring that knowledge "back to where it was needed... like Promethean fire". 

  alJazeera

Talk about your swelled head.

Unlike Prometheus, Obama has set the house ablaze with his fire, proving once again that power in the hands of the wrong person is a deadly proposition. (And he may have forgotten the price Prometheus paid.)

He ran on a platform of "hope" and "change". But the only long-term change for which Barack Obama might well be remembered come November 7 will be to have breathed new life into an imperial machine that was fraying at the seams when he first took office. 

Last throes?

Whatever Obama believed, it's clear that gaining power within a thoroughly corrupt and violent system does not empower people to change it. The strategies for achieving and then bringing home power that Obama learned as a young community activist have little currency in a political-economic system in which the power of workers and organised labour has been severely diminished and the government is in good measure literally owned by corporate interests.

[...]

It's well known now that Obama bailed out banks and major corporations which were most directly responsible for the financial crisis that exploded in 2007, while offering far slimmer relief to the ordinary Americans for whom he once dreamed of stealing the fire of political and economic power. Militarily, the President has succeeded in fulfilling the unrealised strategic goals of the Bush administration to transform the US military and security complex into a leaner and far more efficient killing machine that maintains "full spectrum dominance" over all existing or potential adversaries and all technologies or methods that could be deployed to challenge US power.

And perhaps most important, Obama has outshone his predecessor in curtailing the most basic rights and freedoms Americans and anyone else might have to challenge, resist or even hope to transform the system. In a June column, I tried to lay the many ways that the current administration has "fused" together intelligence gathering, untrammeled prosecutorial powers, and extrajudicial murder and imprisonment as core means of ensuring its policies face no robust challenge from citizens or their representatives.

The situation has become even more dangerous, as the Federal courts have supported the administration's attempts to suppress any challenges to laws that could lead to indefinite detention of American citizens without trial for engaging in constitutionally protected activities while the Supreme Court has refused to hear appeals to convictions based on secret testimony of anonymous witnesses whom defendants were prohibited to cross examine.

[...]

The "disposition matrix" that has been developed is a "next-generation targeting list" that supposedly pairs the name of every suspected terrorist with all the possible ways in which that person can be disposed of, whether through drones, special operations, local government actions or capture. The development of this matrix signals recognition that the US will be disposing of perceived enemies for years to come, with no end in sight. 

[...]

How did a community organiser-turned-Constitutional law professor-turned-public servant become the chief custodian, enabler and enforcer of a matrix of policies that so clearly violates the most basic principles of the Constitution he's sworn to uphold?

[...]

Let's face it; hope and change probably never had a chance.

But we can imagine what might have happened if instead of spending four years designing a new playbook with 50 ways to dispose of potential enemies Obama had spent his efforts developing a new playbook with 50 new ways to fight poverty, global warming, environmental degradation and authoritarianism.

Easy enough. He wouldn't even be in the running for the 2012 prize.

But he also would have marked out a new space for resistance and protest that could have inspired activists both inside the United States and abroad to work together to begin building elements of a new global order.

Perhaps.

A new global order requires acts of resistance anyway. We would have to start by stepping out of the two-party voting structure. Futile, did somebody say? So environmental activists and the ACLU should just go home and find real jobs? Occupy protests should never have taken place?  For all they've changed things.

To be sure, his Presidency might have gone down in flames, but if people had actually seen a president who cared little for his political future and was willing to sacrifice it for the chance to bring out fundamental change in the system, Obama might have inspired the kind of uprising among the middle and working classes that would have truly threatened the US and global elite, forcing them to make the compromises necessary to recalibrate the global system to reflect a balance of power that not only serves the interests of a far greater percentage of the earth's population, but of earth itself as well.

Because Jimmy Carter's presidency left just such a lasting legacy, eh?

In a world with givers and takers, the takers always get it all. There's no other way for that to come out. Resist if you want. Don't if you'd rather not. Suit yourself. Until a new age of spiritual evolution – or your next life on another planet – this is what we've got. I'm with Sartre: No Exit. Sadly, we usually only realize that after we've expanded the population. Hormones trump wisdom every time. That was a clever factor in Hell's creator's planning. Welcome to Hell. The Gods of Prometheus still sit on Olympus.

...and hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Oh My Stars and Bars

If you're needing a little comic relief in your election week, check this out.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Clowns

Look, America, you've had your fun. It was great to pretend that we all are just a nation of bootstrappy pioneer entrepreneurs who Built It All Ourselves. It made us feel all warm and tingly in our Chris Matthews parts when our favorite millionnaire radio hosts and TV stars told us what strong and independent people we are, what stalwart heirs to the best traditions of the Founders we are, and how absolutely spiffy we looked in our tricorns and knee breeches out there on the mall. It made us feel powerful when we elected a Congress full of loons and vandals. It was a tremendous, rolling good time to follow this year's Republican primary, in which, while the rest of the world likely looked on in horror, one of our two political parties allowed a veritable Wrestlemania of political dementia to produce the most singularly soulless and mendacious nominee since it allowed Richard Nixon to rise from moldy earth again. It was great good jolly fun to come right up to the edge of n-bombing the president and then, giggling like schoolboys caught wanking out a window, run away.

But, honestly, it's time to get real about things. Honestly, it's time for someone to politicize this storm for what it is.

[...]

[F]inally at the end of its tether, Irony washes down forty-five Xanax with a bottle of Kentucky Gentleman, and hurls itself off a cliff:

  Charlie Pierce

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown offered criticism of President Obama’s early responses to Hurricane Sandy yesterday .

[...]

“One thing he’s gonna be asked is, why did he jump on [the hurricane] so quickly and go back to D.C. so quickly when in…Benghazi, he went to Las Vegas?”

[...]

Brown is not the only one making the insinuation that Obama and his administration are responding too quickly to Sandy only for political reasons. He’s joined in his accusations by such prominent right-wing commentators as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and columnist Charles Krauthammer.

However, Brown’s comments carry a special irony due to the role he played during the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005. As director of FEMA during the legendarily botched response, Brown, famously dubbed “Brownie” by President Bush, was in the center of criticism from both sides of the aisle that the Bush administration was too slow to respond. An internal review by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector-General following the disaster concluded, “Much of the criticism is warranted.” Brown resigned from his position as director less than two weeks after Katrina hit.

  Think Progress

You'd think, of all people, Brownie Brown, the literal horse trader with no experience appointed to run FEMA by George W. Bush in return for campaign contributions would keep quiet about the response to a national natural disaster, particularly a hurricane. Apparently, he hasn't gotten any smarter since Katrina.

[E]ven though the Republican half of it was an embarrassing clown show, this election has come down to a battle between two visions of the functions of the national government and, through that, a battle over whether the political commonwealth exists at all. It is not politicizing anything to point out the obvious fact that one side of these arguments is lying as a soggy pulpish object on the beaches of New Jersey, and the other one is out there trying to get the lights back on.

[...]

Willard Romney and Paul Ryan [...] are on record — and on audiotape, and on video, and all over the Intertoobz, and, for all I know, bellowing from the fillings in your teeth — as recommending that the federal government's responsibility for things like disaster relief be either handed back to the states, or privatized entirely. They have made this argument in public. They have made this argument as part of the reason why you should vote for them.

[...]

What they are saying now in an attempt to walk back their earlier arguments is almost assuredly nothing but a barrel full of lies. They'd be out there saying the very same things today if they hadn't gotten blindsided by this storm.

  Charlie Pierce

Yes, I wonder how the states of New York and New Jersey would be handling disaster relief right now if they were cut off from any Federal assistance.  (And, BTW, I think we all know who the Republicans will be running for the office in 2016 - we're looking at you, Governor Christie, as you know full well.  Nicely done.  No snark.)

Doesn't matter though. Abortion! Gay marriage!

I don't need to state explicitly that I am not endorsing Barack Obama, do I? There are other, better - far better - choices.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

A Key Response Approval

“I spoke to the president three times yesterday,” [New Jersey's Republican Governor Chris Christie] explained. “He called me for the last time at midnight last night asking what he could do. I said, if you can expedite designating New Jersey as a major disaster area that that would help us to get federal money and resources in here as quickly as possible to help clean up the damage here.”

“The president was great last night,” Christie continued. “He said he would get it done. At 2 a.m., I got a call from FEMA to answer a couple of final questions and then he signed the declaration this morning. So I have to give the president great credit. He’s been on the phone with me three times in the last 24 hours. He’s been very attentive, and anything that I’ve asked for, he’s gotten to me. So, I thank the president publicly for that. He’s done — as far as I’m concerned — a great job for New Jersey.”

  Raw Story

And, furthermore...

“Over the last couple of months, you have appeared throughout the country, Governor, on behalf of Mitt Romney,” [Fox News co-host Steve] Doocy remarked to Christie. “[W]e hear that perhaps Mr. Romney may do some storm-related events. Is there any possibility that Gov. Romney may go to New Jersey to tour some of the damage with you?”

“I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested,” Christie replied.

[...]

“I have a job to do,” he added. “I’ve got 2.4 million people out of power, I’ve got devastation on the shore, I’ve got floods in the northern part of my state. If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics then you don’t know me.”

"Storm-related events." 

Let's hope that Rmoney's team isn't as clueless as Fox News host Steve Doocybag.  The smartest thing for Rmoney to do at this point is ask people to pitch in to help hurricane victims and also praise Obama's handling of the situation (as long as it's going well). 

1-800-JERSEY7  to volunteer to help out in New Jersey.