I wouldn't consider Rand a frontrunner. Paul will probably struggle for donors in CA, TX, OH. Current trends shouldn't be taken as a reasonable projection by any means.

The challenge for Paul at this stage, however, is not to persuade the American public of his policy correctness or his electability. Paul’s immediate target audience is an invisible primary electorate made up of influential party donors and power brokers, many of whom are relatively unfamiliar with Paul or wary of his political brand.

The process has involved relentlessly courting allies outside the traditional Libertarian core of support built up by his father, Ron Paul -- such as Rupert Murdoch, who accompanied Paul to this year's running of the Kentucky Derby.

But to land such meetings, Paul's political reputation alone does not always suffice, often requiring an assist from allies more connected to the mainstream Republican Party, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“You think Rupert Murdoch would have come to the Kentucky Derby with Rand if McConnell hadn't told him what a good guy he is?” said one Republican source with knowledge of the meeting. Indeed, since Paul has actively supported McConnell in his challenging re-election bid, McConnell has in return acted as an emissary of sorts for Paul with mainstream donors and party influencers. Then, once Paul gets in the room, his allies say, he’s gifted at closing the deal.

“When McConnell puts his arm on Rand's shoulder, he goes from a curiosity to a serious player,” the party source explained. “McConnell helps open the door, and Rand charges in.”

Also opening doors for Paul is Nate Morris, 33, a Kentucky-based businessman and former bundler for George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign, who boasts deep connections in the business community and a close friendship with Bush's former finance guru, Jack Oliver. Morris each month has been helping to set up several introductions between Paul and deep-pocketed GOP influencers.

Just as the Republican establishment has been slow to warm to Paul, support from the religious right — an important constituency in a Republican presidential primary — has also been somewhat elusive.

Paul began working to shore up support among religious conservatives with a trip to Israel early last year. The trip was the brainchild of David Lane, an evangelical activist with deep ties in Iowa, who has been at the center of Paul's efforts to appeal to the religious right. Also along for the ride were A.J. Spiker, the former Iowa Republican Party chairman who in March stepped down to steer Paul's PAC; now-former South Carolina GOP Chairman Chad Connelly; Mallory Factor, who holds influential meetings among conservative power brokers in New York and South Carolina; and Morris, among others.

But Paul has attracted the most notice for reaching far beyond the traditional Republican base of support — with a speech at Howard University in Washington, a historically black college, and by reaching out to black pastors.

“I haven't seen this kind of inclusive thinking since George W. Bush,” said one Republican familiar with Paul’s strategy. “He’s going places where Republicans typically won't go.”

Rand Paul to headline “conservatarian” tech gathering in San Francisco

By Joe Garofoli

A likely 2016 GOP presidential candidate is coming to San Francisco this summer and — stop the presses — not to raise money. Well, no fundraiser are scheduled yet for Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY when he rolls into town in July.

The main reason he’s coming to town is to headline “Lincoln Labs Conference 2014: Reboot,” the conservatarian tech conference July 18-20 in San Francisco. The goal of the confab is to link the tech savvy of Silicon Valley with the political needs of conservative and libertarian – or “conservatarian” – America.

Also scheduled to be there is Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.org and Reason TV, the libertarian media hubs, and Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, R-WA, who will be “trying to see how Congress can adapt some of these (tech) tools to what they’re doing,” co-organizers Aaron Ginn told me. Also on the lineup is Joe Green, former Harvard roommate of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and co-founder of the issue advocacy group fwd.us. He’ll be there to talk about tech and immigration reform

By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

Drug task force that burned a toddler this week also killed an innocent pastor in 2009

But this same task force has a history. In February, I posted about a settlement in the death of Jonathan Ayers, an innocent pastor that this same drug task force killed in a drug operation in 2009.

In September 2009, the young pastor Ayers was ministering to a young woman whom a Georgia drug task force was investigating on drug charges. (She had allegedly sold an undercover officer $50 worth of cocaine.) When task force members saw Ayers alone in the car with the woman, they switched their focus to him. According to Ayers’s lawsuit, the woman was about to be evicted from the motel at which she was staying. Ayers gave her the $23 in his pocket to help cover her rent.

The task force followed Ayers to a convenience store, where he went in to get money from an ATM. When he returned and got into his car they pounced. They pulled up behind him in an unmarked black SUV. Armed agents dressed in street clothes then rushed Ayers’s car. He put his car in reverse and attempted to escape. In the process, he nicked one agent. Another then opened fire, killing him. Ayers told hospital staff was that he thought he was being robbed. His reported last words were, “Who shot me?”

Ayers had no drugs in his car or in his system, and there was no evidence he was using or distributing anything illegal. Still, local law enforcement officials tried to smear him. They first said he was part of their drug investigation all along, then retracted. The woman the police were following initially said in an interview that Ayers was counseling her and helping her kick her drug habit. Later, while facing criminal charges for a separate incident, she changed her story and claimed that Ayers had been paying her for sex.

In the end, Ayers was innocent, and a federal jury awarded his widow a $2 million settlement.

In the burned toddler raid, Terrell told the paper that District Attorney Brian Rickman had already cleared the task force of any wrongdoing. That’s a remarkably fast investigation given that the raid happened less than two days ago. Rickman also cleared the cops in the Ayers case. So did the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Rickman would tell a local paper that the investigations went “to extraordinary lengths,” and, “I do not see how anybody could say the process was unfair based on the lengths that they went to.”

Here’s what happened next:

Ayers left behind a wife, Abigail, who at the time of his death was pregnant with her first child. She filed a lawsuit and hired her own investigator to look into the shooting. What he found is astonishing. As it turns out, Officer Billy Shane Harrison, the cop who shot Ayers, hadn’t taken the series of firearms training classes required for his certification as a police officer. It gets worse. It turns out that Harrison also had received zero training in the use of lethal force.

He wasn’t authorized to make arrests or to carry a gun. Yet somehow he had been given a position on a narcotics task force, a position that not only gave him a gun but put him in volatile, high-stakes situations where he might be tempted to use it. Abigail Ayers’s lawsuit also alleged that Harrison and Officer Chance Oxner, who initially bought the drugs from the woman Ayers was counseling, had a history of disciplinary problems, including use of illicit drugs.

So those “fair” investigations that went to “extraordinary lengths” failed to discover that the cop who shot Ayers not only had prior disciplinary problems, but also he wasn’t even legally authorized to be a cop, much less carry a gun. It was later revealed that Rickman had appointed the head of the task force at the time of the Ayers shooting, and was a close personal friend with the officer (who is now deceased).

So maybe we should take Rickman’s quick assessment of this week’s raid with a grain of salt.

In my post on Ayers, I noted how little professional accountability there had been for the death of Jonathan Ayers. The cop who killed him was fired, but only after it was revealed that he lacked the training. One other law enforcement official was fired for lying about the training. No one was disciplined for the actual killing of Ayers. Rickman, Terrell, and the other sheriff who oversees the task force were all reelected.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised that a sheriff who sees drug suspects as “terrorists” also oversees a drug task force that has now killed an innocent pastor and burned a two-year-old child.

Daniel Ellsberg (30 May 2014)

Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice

John Kerry was in my mind Wednesday morning, and not because he had called me a patriot on NBC News. I was reading the lead story in the New York Times – "US Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of 2016" – with a photo of American soldiers looking for caves. I recalled not the Secretary of State but a 27-year-old Kerry, asking, as he testified to the Senate about the US troops who were still in Vietnam and were to remain for another two years: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

I wondered how a 70-year-old Kerry would relate to that question as he looked at that picture and that headline. And then there he was on MSNBC an hour later, thinking about me, too, during a round of interviews about Afghanistan that inevitably turned to Edward Snowden ahead of my fellow whistleblower’s own primetime interview that night:

There are many a patriot – you can go back to the Pentagon Papers with Dan Ellsberg and others who stood and went to the court system of America and made their case. Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.

On the Today show and CBS, Kerry complimented me again – and said Snowden "should man up and come back to the United States" to face charges. But John Kerry is wrong, because that's not the measure of patriotism when it comes to whistleblowing, for me or Snowden, who is facing the same criminal charges I did for exposing the Pentagon Papers.

John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I wonder how he deviated so much from his father.

"We do have some differences and our approaches will be different, but that makes him his own person. I mean why should he [Rand] be a clone and do everything and think just exactly as I have. I think it's an opportunity to be independent minded. We are about 99% the same on issues." "People Try To Drive Wedges Between Rand And Me." --Ron Paul

That is the problem. What is the use in voting for a party, which is not even represented in most of the ballot papers? A better option might be to support the Libertarian section within the GOP.

Blaming christians is sorta fallacious when we could be blaming the people who manipulate and brainwash the people below them, the government and powers that be.

No surprises there.

BFL finally found a marketplace to sell their expensive room-heaters to people dumb enough to buy them.

A match made in scammer heaven!

Dear Chef,

Yes I do!

Kr,

Malcolm O

Whose fault is it they were played?