~ “I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.” Ronald Reagan.
When Anthony McCann opened a thick manila envelope from the Department of Veterans Affairs last year, he expected to find his own medical records inside.
“It had everything about him, and I could have done anything with it,” McCann said in an interview.
It wasn’t the first time McCann had received another veteran’s medical records. In the past, he informed the VA, then threw away the misdirected documents. This time, after failing to make contact with the other veteran on his own, McCann took the documents to a town hall meeting held by the director of the VA’s Tennessee Valley Healthcare System.
When the floor opened for questions, McCann was the first to raise his hand.
“I got 256 pages of another person’s extremely confidential, extremely explicit mental health records,” he said, waving the documents in his hands, an exchange captured by local media. When an official asked for the documents back, McCann refused, doubting the VA’s ability to safeguard the material or make sure it ended up in the right hands. “I don’t trust them,” McCann told ProPublica. “They don’t do what they say they’re going to do.”
Employees and contractors at VA medical centers, clinics, pharmacies and benefit centers commit thousands of privacy violations each year and have racked up more than 10,000 such incidents since 2011, a ProPublica analysis of VA data shows.
The breaches range from inadvertent mistakes, such as sending documents or prescriptions to the wrong people, to employees’ intentional snooping and theft of data. Not all concern medical treatment; some involve data on benefits and compensation.
Many VA facilities and regional networks are chronic offenders, logging dozens of violations year after year[…]
Here’s a list of at least 75 times President Obama violated the Constitution and/or broke federal law during his presidency, which also doubles as a list of at least 75 reasons why Congress must impeach the president now:
1) Illegally armed Mexican drug cartels and ISIS militants
“The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel,” the New York Postreported. “Let that sink in: After months of pretending that ‘Fast and Furious’ was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.”
Even more shocking, President Obama authorized a shipment of guns to the Syrian opposition, a.k.a. ISIS-linked militants, on the exact same day he demanded more gun control in response to the Oregon shooting.
“…The President also emphasized to his team that the U.S. would continue to support the Syrian opposition as Russia enters the war-torn country,” CNN reported in October.
But virtually all of the rebels in Syria have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State since at least 2013.
“The Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Council, the vaunted bulwarks of the moderate opposition, only really exist in hotel lobbies and the minds of Western diplomats,” journalist Ben Reynolds wrote in November. “There is simply no real separation between ‘moderate’ rebel groups and hardline Salafists allied with al-Qaeda.”
2) Attempting to shut down gun stores outside of law
In a classic case of criminal racketeering, the U.S. Department of Justice was pressuring banks to refuse service to gun stores in a program entitled Operation Choke Point[…]
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton’s unorthodox use of a private email account and personal server for government business exploited a loophole in the State Department’s FOIA, or Freedom of Information Act, process, according to the findings of the first Inspector General report to stem from her email scandal.
Congress asked the Office of Inspector General, the State Department’s independent watchdog, to investigate the issue following the revelation that Mrs. Clinton did not use a government email account while secretary of state.
Fox News reviewed the 25-page report and its findings before they were made publicly available.
The report reads in part:
‘FOIA neither authorizes nor requires agencies to search for Federal records in personal email accounts maintained on private servers or through commercial providers (for example Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.) Furthermore, the FOIA Analyst has no way to independently locate Federal records from such accounts unless employees take steps to preserve official emails in Department record keeping systems.’
The report strongly suggests that it relies on employees at all levels to follow the regulations, and when personal email is used, to forward copies to a State Department account so that it can be captured….
Rules to which Hillary Clinton along with her minions in the State Department felt she was the exception, which explains failure or refusal to respond in a timely fashion, to FOIA requests.
They knew. They ALL knew and were party to the lack of transparency/cover up.
The top leadership of the State Department regularly botched open-records requests such as those for former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s emails, the department’s inspector general said in a report released Thursday that portrayed a staff who gave short shrift to its legal obligation to be transparent.
Department leaders ignored one request for Mrs. Clinton’s schedules “for several years,” and in another instance insisted it couldn’t find any records relating to Mrs. Clinton’s other emails — even though at the time, “dozens of senior officials” were aware of her unique email arrangement….
The bottom of page 9 – 10 (below) reports the lack of effort on the State Department part under various Secretaries of State to meet FOIA deadlines with Clinton’s State Department proving to be the most derelict in their duties.
Almost two-thirds of 1.6 million civilian full-time federal employees receive merit bonuses. Agency officials claim it’s to attract talent but it’s really just another union giveaway. They are being rewarded for merely showing up to work. They haven’t brought in new clients, sold more products, or improved productivity. They’ve appeared.
There is no way 60% of the government employees excel to the point of earning bonuses. It’s just not possible.
The VA paid out $143 million in performance bonuses to employees in 2014 — even though several of them were under investigation or accused of mismanagement, according to Jeff Miller, Chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee where the information was collected[…]
We have these blasted dog and pony shows and STILL NOTHING CHANGES with the VA except that even more veterans are being neglected and dying. Talk about a dereliction of duty – when is enough TOO MUCH?
How about Congress, Veterans Administration employees and federal workers as a whole receiving the same benefits, medical treatment and lack thereof as is being doled out to our vets. Moreover, eliminate all incentives and bonuses. Would things change then?
A six hour standoff began just before 6 a.m., Friday morning when four NYPD officers and four U. S. Marshals with the Regional Fugitive Task Force arrived at 15 Destiny Court in Staten Island, the home of Garland Tyree, leader of the Bloods subset Nine Trey gang to take the gang banger in for a probation violation.
According to law enforcement, Tyree violated his probation by traveling to the Bahamas, which was also drug related.
Shortly after the standoff began, Tyree posted the following to his Facebook page:
In spite postings from acquaintances to the gang leader’s Facebook page urging Tyree to live another day, the standoff and Tyree’s life ended sometime around noon after Tyree exited his home wearing a wearing a bullet-proof vest, carrying an AK-47 and began firing on law enforcement hitting police vehicles and surrounding houses.
The East Coast leader of the Bloods ordered police to fly his mother from Delaware to New York City before deliberately running into the line of fire at the end of a six-hour stand-off.
Garland ‘S.I.’ Tyree, 38, said ‘coming out now, I love you’ on the phone to his mother at around midday on Friday and told police he agreed to surrender.
But when he emerged from his Staten Island home wearing a bullet proof vest and armed with an AK-47, he opened fire. A police officer returned fire, killing Tyree.
Tyree, who served time for a homicide at 16 years old, set his house on fire and shot a firefighter at 5.45am on Friday when US Marshals came to arrest him for violating parole.
Two of his bullets hit Lt James Hayes, 53, one in the leg and one in the buttocks. Hayes, a 30-year veteran who recovered victims during the 9/11 attacks, is in a stable condition in hospital.
By 8.30am the fire was under control and a hostage squad had made contact with Tyree, who remained barricaded inside.
He requested four loved ones including his Delaware-based mother, his girlfriend, his assistant, and another friend. He told detectives he would surrender if his mother came to the scene….
NYC’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, is under attack for dereliction of duty; when de Blasio rather than visit the veteran firefighter wounded during the standoff instead went MIA for two hours to the gym.
According to de Blasio staff, the Commie dirt bag took phone calls. Oh yes and Bloomberg left his office early on Fridays to fly to weekend home in Bermuda.
De Blasio was dismissive of questions regarding his trip to the gym from reporters.
‘We’re briefing you all on a very serious situation, and that’s just not a serious question,’ Mr. de Blasio curtly replied during a press conference at a Staten Island police station when asked about his gym schedule….
END OF SIDEBAR
During the standoff, Tyree spoke to a reporter from DNA by phone stating the following:
‘I don’t know what they want. They just kicked in my door,’ Tyree calmly told DNAinfo New York earlier Friday morning.
Police were briefly in his home, but he beat them back by detonating a smoke grenade, which filled the place with heavy fumes, officials said.
‘I’m a person that takes life as it comes. It is what it is,’ said Tyree, who sources said heads the East Coast branch of the notorious Bloods gang.
Cops recovered three handguns in addition to the AK-47 from the dead man’s apartment, along with a pair of magazines loaded with more than 100 rounds of ammunition.
Tyree spent virtually his entire adult life behind bars, and was a high-ranking “O.G.” in the Bloods, said Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce.
His first bust was on a homicide rap at age 16, followed by 17 more arrests — including three federal convictions, two on gun charges. He was also found guilty of assaulting another inmate while in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, inflicting a gash that required 60 stitches to close….
From the looks of his FB page, at times Tyree who spent the majority of his life incarcerated saw himself as a victim. “He was jailed at the age of 16 for a homicide just feet away from the scene where he was shot dead on Friday.”
Tyree, referred to as an O.G. by law enforcement, may have suspected that law enforcement was on to him, having vowed never to return to prison, spent the past couple of weeks reflecting unapologetically on his past (Facebook and Instagram screenshots below).
The world today has one less gangbanging thug. The problem is that in less than a New York minute, Garland Tyree will be replaced.
I have been following the appearances of Lt. Col. Ralph Peters on Fox News programs for years.
Peters has been calling Barack Obama out for refusing to call Islamic terrorism by its name, his numerous “cowardly” responses to acts by jihadists against the West, Christians, Muslims and Jews, the latest of which is the ditherer’s response to last week’s Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris.
Then we have the piece de resistance where Peters on Monday took Obama to the woodshed.
“The president is a coward. The president is a physical coward, he is a moral coward, he is an intellectual coward…”
Strong words indeed but the hat fits.
As for Obama’s problem with optics, that is just an excuse the despot keeps in his back pocket.
Fully aware of the repercussions Obama who blames everything on “his failed perception of optics” (oh cry me a river) does not give a damn. Thus, any claims by the media and pundits that the Paris snub is a wakeup call for Obama is delusional.
Of course, in Obama’s world, once he blames it on optics, the discussion is officially over.
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