North Korea's Madman Kim Jong-un' has.ex-lover 'Executed by Firing Squad'

 

Kim Jong-un's ex-girlfriend was among a dozen well-known North Korean performers who were executed by firing squad nine days ago, according to South Korean reports.

  

Hyon Song-wol, a singer, rumoured to be a former lover of the North Korean leader, is said to have been arrested on Aug 17 with 11 others for violating laws against pornography.

The reports in South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper indicate that Hyon, a singer with the Unhasu Orchestra, was among those arrested on August 17 for violating domestic laws on pornography.

All 12 were machine-gunned three days later, with other members of North Korea's most famous pop groups and their immediate families forced to watch. The onlookers were then sent to prison camps, victims of the regime's assumption of guilt by association, the reports stated.

“They were executed with machine guns while the key members of the Unhasu Orchestra, Wangjaesan Light Band and Moranbong Band as well as the families of the victims looked on,” said a Chinese source reported in the newspaper.

Hyon's band was responsible for a string of patriotic hits in North Korea, including "Footsteps of Soldiers," "I Love Pyongyang," "She is a Discharged Soldier" and "We are Troops of the Party." Her popularity reportedly peaked in 2005 with the song "Excellent Horse-Like Lady."

The 12 who were executed were singers, musicians or dancers with the Hyon's band,, the Unhasu Orchestra or the Wanghaesan Light Music Band and were accused of making videos of themselves performing sex acts and then selling the recordings.

The reports stated that both groups have been disbanded as a result of the scandal.
Some of the musicians were also found to have bibles when they were detained and all were treated as political dissidents.

Kim Jong-un, who became leader of North Korea after the sudden death of his father in December 2011, is believed to have met Hyon about 10 years ago and struck up a relationship.

His father, Kim Jong-il, did not approve of the relationship and ordered him to break it off. Hyon subsequently married an officer in the North Korean military and reportedly had a baby, although there are suggestions that Hyon continued to see Kim after her marriage.

Kim's wife, Ri Sol-ju, was also a member of the Unhasu Orchestra before marriage and one theory is that Ri objected to the continuing high profile of her husband's former girlfriend.

North Korea's Communist dictator reportedly purged his own step-mother, Kim Ok, from her post as a senior official in the Workers' Party Finance and Accounting Department as he sought to tighten his grip on power within the country.

She was luckier than Kim Chol, vice minister of the army, who was executed with a mortar round in October 2012.

Kim Chol was reportedly executed for drinking and carousing during the official mourning period after Kim Jong-il's death.

On the explicit orders of Kim Jong-un to leave "no trace of him behind, down to his hair," according to South Korean media, Kim Chol was forced to stand on a spot that had been zeroed in for a mortar round and "obliterated."

An expert on North Korean affairs believes the singer was executed for "political reasons."

"If these people had only made pornographic videos, then it is simply not believable that their punishment was execution," Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo's Waseda University and an authority on North Korean affairs, told The Daily Telegraph.

"They could have been made to disappear into the prison system there instead.

"There is a political reason behind this," he said, suggesting that the groups may have been leaning towards a rival faction in Pyongyang's shadowy political world.

"Or, as Kim's wife once belonged to the same group, it is possible that these executions are more about Kim's wife," Professor Shigemura added.

 

Muslim Brotherhood Leader Obama Plans War On Syria

 Obama Set for Limited Strike on Syria 

as British Vote NO

 

 

WASHINGTON — President Obama is prepared to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria, administration officials said Thursday, despite a stinging rejection of such action by America’s stalwart ally Britain and mounting questions from Congress.

 

The negative vote in Britain’s Parliament was a heavy blow to Prime Minister David Cameron, who had pledged his support to Mr. Obama and called on lawmakers to endorse Britain’s involvement in a brief operation to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad for apparently launching a deadly chemical weapons attack last week that killed hundreds.

The vote was also a setback for Mr. Obama, who, having given up hope of getting United Nations Security Council authorization for the strike, is struggling to assemble a coalition of allies against Syria.

But administration officials made clear that the eroding support would not deter Mr. Obama in deciding to go ahead with a strike. Pentagon officials said that the Navy had now moved a fifth destroyer into the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Each ship carries dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles that would probably be the centerpiece of any attack on Syria.

Even before the parliamentary vote, White House officials said, Mr. Obama decided there was no way he could overcome objections by Russia, Syria’s longtime backer, to any resolution in the Security Council.

Although administration officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not made a final decision, all indications suggest that a strike could occur soon after United Nations investigators charged with scrutinizing the Aug. 21 attack leave the country. They are scheduled to depart Damascus on Saturday.

The White House presented its case for military action to Congressional leaders on Thursday evening, trying to head off growing pressure from Democrats and Republicans to provide more information about the administration’s military planning and seek Congressional approval for any action.

In a conference call with Republicans and Democrats, top officials from the State Department, the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence agencies asserted that the evidence was clear that Mr. Assad’s forces had carried out the attack, according to officials who were briefed.

While the intelligence does not tie Mr. Assad directly to the attack, these officials said, the administration said the United States had both the evidence and legal justification to carry out a strike aimed at deterring the Syrian leader from using such weapons again.

A critical piece of the intelligence, officials said, is an intercepted telephone call between Syrian military officials, one of whom seems to suggest that the chemical weapons attack was more devastating than was intended. “It sounds like he thinks this was a small operation that got out of control,” one intelligence official said.

But Republican lawmakers said White House officials dismissed suggestions that the scale of the attack was a miscalculation, indicating that the officials believe Syria intended to inflict the widespread damage.

“I’m comfortable that the things the president told Assad not to do he did,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who took part with seven other Republican senators in a separate briefing by the White House chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough.

Among the officials on the conference call were Secretary of State John Kerry; Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel; the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.; and the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice. It was unclassified, which means the administration gave lawmakers only limited details about the intelligence they assert bolsters the case for a military strike.

Before the call, however, some prominent lawmakers expressed anger that the White House was planning a strike without significant consultations with Congress. “When we take what is a very difficult decision, you have to have buy-in by members and buy-in by the public,” Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday on MSNBC. “I think both of those are critically important and, right now, none of that has happened.”

Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said after the telephone briefing that administration officials “had no doubt that chemical weapons were used by Assad and his people.”

Mr. Engel said that among the evidence described to members of Congress was an intercepted communication “from a high-level Syrian official” discussing the attack. “There is more than enough evidence if the president chooses to act,” Mr. Engel said.

After the 90-minute conference call, some senior lawmakers were not persuaded that the Obama administration had made its case for military action in Syria. Representative Howard (Buck) McKeon, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Obama needed to make a forceful case to persuade both Congress and a “war weary” country.

“If he doesn’t, I think he could have a real problem with the Congress and the American public,” he said. “He’s got a big sell.”

Several officials said that the intelligence dossier about the attack also includes evidence of Syrian military units moving chemical munitions into place before the attack was carried out.

Mr. Obama, officials said, is basing his case for action both on safeguarding international standards against the use of chemical weapons and on the threat to America’s national interest.

That threat, they said, is both to allies in the region, like Turkey, Jordan and Israel, and to the United States itself, if Syria’s weapons were to fall into the wrong hands or if other leaders were to take American inaction as an invitation to use unconventional weapons.

Mr. Obama’s rationale for a strike creates a parallel dilemma to the one that President George W. Bush confronted 10 years ago, when he decided to enter into a far broader war with nearly 150,000 American troops in Iraq without seeking an authorizing resolution in the United Nations. The Obama administration says that case differs sharply from its objectives in Syria.

In Iraq Mr. Bush was explicitly seeking regime change. In this case, White House officials argue, Mr. Obama is trying to enforce an international ban on chemical weapons and seeking to prevent their use in Syria, or against American allies.

“We have been trying to get the U.N. Security Council to be more assertive on Syria even before this incident,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “The problem is that the Russians won’t vote for any accountability.”

The decision to proceed without Britain is remarkable, however. Even in the Iraq war, Mr. Bush relied on what he called a “coalition of the willing,” led by Britain. Mr. Obama has made clear that this initiative would come from the United States, and that while he welcomed international participation, he was not depending on foreign forces for what would essentially be an operation conducted largely by the United States, from naval vessels off the Syrian coast.

Mr. Rhodes and other aides rejected comparisons between this case and that of Mr. Bush in 2003, and noted that Mr. Obama was still actively seeking allied participation. “There is no direct parallel with 2003, given that the United States at that time had to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction in a country where we were going to do a military intervention aimed at regime change,” Mr. Rhodes said.

Mr. Obama has referred, somewhat vaguely, to reinforcing “international norms,” or standards, against the use of chemical weapons, which are categorized as “weapons of mass destruction” even though they are far less powerful than nuclear or biological weapons.

In addition to the importance of upholding standards of international behavior, Mr. Obama this week has also highlighted America’s inherent right to self-defense. But some scholars warn that may be a difficult case for the United States to make.

“Under this principle, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Iraq or Lebanon could respond directly to Syrian belligerent acts, as could their allies, such as NATO and the U.S.,” said Phillip Carter, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security in Washington. He cautioned that despite the spillover from the violence, there still was no just cause for war with Syria by its neighbors.

The United States has conducted unilateral bombing campaigns without seeking international endorsement before. But it made a direct case for self-defense.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan ordered an airstrike on Tripoli after concluding that Libya was behind the bombing of a Berlin disco that killed two American military personnel. In 1998, after deadly bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton authorized cruise missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan.

Mark Mazzetti and Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting from Washington, and Ana Facio-Krajcer from Santa Clarita, Calif.

Choice America Network

Your Mortgage Documents Are Fake!

Prepare to be outraged. Newly obtained filings from this Florida woman's lawsuit uncover horrifying scheme (Update)

By David Dayen

 

If you know about foreclosure fraud, the mass fabrication of mortgage documents in state courts by banks attempting to foreclose on homeowners, you may have one nagging question: Why did banks have to resort to this illegal scheme? Was it just cheaper to mock up the documents than to provide the real ones? Did banks figure they simply had enough power over regulators, politicians and the courts to get away with it? (They were probably right about that one.)

A newly unsealed lawsuit, which banks settled in 2012 for $95 million, actually offers a different reason, providing a key answer to one of the persistent riddles of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The lawsuit states that banks resorted to fake documents because they could not legally establish true ownership of the loans when trying to foreclose.

This reality, which banks did not contest but instead settled out of court, means that tens of millions of mortgages in America still lack a legitimate chain of ownership, with implications far into the future. And if Congress, supported by the Obama administration, goes back to the same housing finance system, with the same corrupt private entities who broke the nation’s private property system back in business packaging mortgages, then shame on all of us.

The 2011 lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in both North and South Carolina, by a white-collar fraud specialist named Lynn Szymoniak, on behalf of the federal government, 17 states and three cities. Twenty-eight banks, mortgage servicers and document processing companies are named in the lawsuit, including mega-banks like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank of America.

Szymoniak, who fell into foreclosure herself in 2009, researched her own mortgage documents and found massive fraud (for example, one document claimed that Deutsche Bank, listed as the owner of her mortgage, acquired ownership in October 2008, four months after they first filed for foreclosure). She eventually examined tens of thousands of documents, enough to piece together the entire scheme.

A mortgage has two parts: the promissory note (the IOU from the borrower to the lender) and the mortgage, which creates the lien on the home in case of default. During the housing bubble, banks bought loans from originators, and then (in a process known as securitization) enacted a series of transactions that would eventually pool thousands of mortgages into bonds, sold all over the world to public pension funds, state and municipal governments and other investors. A trustee would pool the loans and sell the securities to investors, and the investors would get an annual percentage yield on their money.

In order for the securitization to work, banks purchasing the mortgages had to physically convey the promissory note and the mortgage into the trust. The note had to be endorsed (the way an individual would endorse a check), and handed over to a document custodian for the trust, with a “mortgage assignment” confirming the transfer of ownership. And this had to be done before a 90-day cutoff date, with no grace period beyond that.

Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin spelled this out in testimony before Congress in 2010: “If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever.”

The lawsuit alleges that these notes, as well as the mortgage assignments, were “never delivered to the mortgage-backed securities trusts,” and that the trustees lied to the SEC and investors about this. As a result, the trusts could not establish ownership of the loan when they went to foreclose, forcing the production of a stream of false documents, signed by “robo-signers,” employees using a bevy of corporate titles for companies that never employed them, to sign documents about which they had little or no knowledge.

Many documents were forged (the suit provides evidence of the signature of one robo-signer, Linda Green, written eight different ways), some were signed by “officers” of companies that went bankrupt years earlier, and dozens of assignments listed as the owner of the loan “Bogus Assignee for Intervening Assignments,” clearly a template that was never changed. One defendant in the case, Lender Processing Services, created masses of false documents on behalf of the banks, often using fake corporate officer titles and forged signatures. This was all done to establish standing to foreclose in courts, which the banks otherwise could not.

Szymoniak stated in her lawsuit that, “Defendants used fraudulent mortgage assignments to conceal that over 1400 MBS trusts, each with mortgages valued at over $1 billion, are missing critical documents,” meaning that at least $1.4 trillion in mortgage-backed securities are, in fact, non-mortgage-backed securities. Because of the strict laws governing of these kinds of securitizations, there’s no way to make the assignments after the fact. Activists have a name for this: “securitization FAIL.”

One smoking gun piece of evidence in the lawsuit concerns a mortgage assignment dated Feb. 9, 2009, after the foreclosure of the mortgage in question was completed. According to the suit, “A typewritten note on the right hand side of the document states:  ‘This Assignment of Mortgage was inadvertently not recorded prior to the Final Judgment of Foreclosure… but is now being recorded to clear title.’”

This admission confirms that the mortgage assignment was not made before the closing date of the trust, invalidating ownership. The suit further argued that “the act of fabricating the assignments is evidence that the MBS Trust did not own the notes and/or the mortgage liens for some assets claimed to be in the pool.”

The federal government, states and cities joined the lawsuit under 25 counts of the federal False Claims Act and state-based versions of the law. All of them bought mortgage-backed securities from banks that never conveyed the mortgages or notes to the trusts. The plaintiffs argued that, considering that trustees and servicers had to spend lots of money forging and fabricating documents to establish ownership, they were materially harmed by the subsequent impaired value of the securities. Also, these investors (which includes the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve) paid for the transfer of mortgages to the trusts, yet they were never actually transferred.

Finally, the lawsuit argues that the federal government was harmed by “payments made on mortgage guarantees to Defendants lacking valid notes and assignments of mortgages who were not entitled to demand or receive said payments.”

Despite Szymoniak seeking a trial by jury, the government intervened in the case, and settled part of it at the beginning of 2012, extracting $95 million from the five biggest banks in the suit (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citi and GMAC/Ally Bank). Szymoniak herself was awarded $18 million. But the underlying evidence was never revealed until the case was unsealed last Thursday.

Now that it’s unsealed, Szymoniak, as the named plaintiff, can go forward and prove the case. Along with her legal team (which includes the law firm of Grant & Eisenhoffer, which has recovered more money under the False Claims Act than any firm in the country), Szymoniak can pursue discovery and go to trial against the rest of the named defendants, including HSBC, the Bank of New York Mellon, Deutsche Bank and US Bank.

The expenses of the case, previously borne by the government, now are borne by Szymoniak and her team, but the percentages of recovery funds are also higher. “I’m really glad I was part of collecting this money for the government, and I’m looking forward to going through discovery and collecting the rest of it,” Szymoniak told Salon.

It’s good that the case remains active, because the $95 million settlement was a pittance compared to the enormity of the crime. By the end of 2009, private mortgage-backed securities trusts held one-third of all residential mortgages in the U.S. That means that tens of millions of home mortgages worth trillions of dollars have no legitimate underlying owner that can establish the right to foreclose. This hasn’t stopped banks from foreclosing anyway with false documents, and they are often successful, a testament to the breakdown of law in the judicial system. But to this day, the resulting chaos in disentangling ownership harms homeowners trying to sell these properties, as well as those trying to purchase them. And it renders some properties impossible to sell.

To this day, banks foreclose on borrowers using fraudulent mortgage assignments, a legacy of failing to prosecute this conduct and instead letting banks pay a fine to settle it. This disappoints Szymoniak, who told Salon the owner of these loans is now essentially “whoever lies the most convincingly and whoever gets the benefit of doubt from the judge.” Szymoniak used her share of the settlement to start the Housing Justice Foundation, a non-profit that attempts to raise awareness of the continuing corruption of the nation’s courts and land title system.

Most of official Washington, including President Obama, wants to wind down mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and return to a system where private lenders create securitization trusts, packaging pools of loans and selling them to investors. Government would provide a limited guarantee to investors against catastrophic losses, but the private banks would make the securities, to generate more capital for home loans and expand homeownership.

That’s despite the evidence we now have that, the last time banks tried this, they ignored the law, failed to convey the mortgages and notes to the trusts, and ripped off investors trying to cover their tracks, to say nothing of how they violated the due process rights of homeowners and stole their homes with fake documents.

The very same banks that created this criminal enterprise and legal quagmire would be in control again. Why should we view this in any way as a sound public policy, instead of a ticking time bomb that could once again throw the private property system, a bulwark of capitalism and indeed civilization itself, into utter disarray? As Lynn Szymoniak puts it, “The President’s calling for private equity to return. Why would we return to this?”

Update: This story previously suggested that banks settled this lawsuit with the federal government for $1 billion. That number is actually the total for a number of whistle-blower lawsuits that were folded into a larger National Mortgage Settlement. This specific lawsuit settled for $95 million. The post above has been changed to reflect this fact.

David Dayen is a contributing writer for Salon. Follow him on Twitter at @ddayen.  

 

The Greatest Phony America's Ever Known

by Ted Nugent

It is very difficult to ignore accusations of phoniness from the master of all things phony who has dedicated his entire life to one phony scam after another. But when this unprecedented level of criminal abuse of power is so flagrantly dictated from the most powerful man in the world, good Americans should be quivering in our boots.

No, Mr. President, those are not phony tears from Brian Terry’s mother. Those are real tears, unlike your constant phony blather about caring about the middle class as you continue your well-orchestrated kamikaze economic swan dive for the average American family.

And, be assured, you old Chicago ACORN scammaster you, that those were not phony body bags that arrived home from Benghazi. As the greatest phony America has ever known, like your phoniest phony “job” as community organizer, your phony claims to get to the bottom of that horrific dereliction of duty by your phony secretary of state was just another scam of phony smoke and mirrors to placate your phony sheep-like constituency.

Phony is as phony does, Mr. President, but none of the tea party or conservative Republicans’ claims of illegal targeting by your phony IRS jackboots is phony by any stretch of the imagination.

We believe your earlier claims that such accusations were serious was just more of your phony baloney.

You want phony, Mr. President? I give you your top cop of the United States, your own phony attorney general who refuses to charge your Black Panther buddies with any crimes even though you both saw the same footage of your phony buddies committing numerous federal and state felonies when they threatened and intimidated voters in Philadelphia.

Nothing phony about those criminal gangsters.

And with all due respect, your holy phoniness, who can’t see the terminal phoniness of wasting more tax dollars with more phony charges against George Zimmerman in defiance of your own FBI investigation and the same exhaustive evidence that proved his obvious innocence to the jury of his peers and everyone paying attention who was not blinded by your phony racism?

And we mustn’t forget your phony Nobel Peace Prize, or your phony real estate scammaster ripoff artist Tony Rezko, or your phony claims that your phony “Affordable Healthcare” scam will make our healthcare system cheaper and better when just the opposite is guaranteed.

And let’s all be honest here; more of us believe in the American hero Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s thorough investigation into your phony birth certificate and phony history than the phony media’s smoke and mirrors.

We all know that Van Jones is a phony and all your green scams are as phony as phony can be.

We know that your Mao-loving communications czar Anita Dunn is as phony as they come.

Everyone knows your phony claims to “all of the above” for America’s energy independence is dangerously phony.
We know your so-called Department of Justice is as phony as the insane phony claim that your Allah Ahkbar buddy Maj. Hasan is about as guilty of “workplace” violence as I am the tooth fairy.

I could go on and on and on, but in order to avoid the inevitable violent vomiting impetus from more of your nasty phony baloney than America can possibly handle, I would just like to say: “How dare you, Mr. President, claim the nonstop ugly scandals during your Saul Alinsky inspired attack on America are phony, when everyone with a brain, a heart and a soul knows damn well what you are up to and how you are intentionally implementing the ‘Rules for Radicals’ agenda so appropriately dedicated to Satan.”

We know your hope-and-change lie is as phony as it comes. We know the rotten America-hating preacher that married you and baptized your children is a phony man of the cloth, a soiled cloth as it were.

It brings me no pleasure at all to have to admit all this ugliness. But as a participating “We the People” American in this sacred experiment in self-government, it is clearly my duty, a moral obligation that I owe to the hero warriors of the U.S. military and their families for sacrificing so dearly for our God-given individual rights, as guaranteed by the sacred U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

They, and I as a law enforcement officer, took a sacred oath of honor, to defend, protect and enforce the U.S. Constitution. But unlike the president of the United States, we weren’t being phony when we raised our hand and placed our hands on the Holy Bible, and gave our solemn pledge as Americans.

We meant it.

No, these are not phony scandals, but we are heartbroken that we have a phony president.

HIROSHIMA - THEN AND NOW

Did Obama break law to win re-election?

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 

Former Homeland Security attorney exposes shrewd maneuver

Did Barack Obama win re-election by violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

This is the question posed by former Homeland Security attorney Stewart Baker, a blogger for The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog organized by Eugene Volokh, a professor of American law at the UCLA School of Law.

Baker’s credentials make the question a serious one.

A partner in the Washington office of Steptoe & Johnson LLP, he returned to private law practice after serving for three and a half years as the assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, where he created and managed the 250-person DHS Policy Directorate responsible, among other duties, for relationships with law enforcement and public advisory committees.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, enacted by Congress in 1986, is a broadly written law that in practice regulates virtually all computers and cellphones, largely because communications over the Internet tends to have implications for interstate commerce.
Baker argued that the Obama presidential campaign in 2012 possibly violated the act by an arrangement with Obama supporters posting on Facebook. It allowed the Obama campaign to search the person’s Facebook network for likely voters the campaign could identify as unmotivated or unregistered.

The likely voters would then get tailored messages from their Facebook friends urging them to register and turn out.

 Baker’s appreciation for the creativity of the tactic was moderated by his conclusion the tactic might have been a criminal violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

“It’s clever. It’s the future,” Baker conceded. “And it’s a violation of the CFAA. Facebook doesn’t let users share access to their accounts, and anything Facebook doesn’t authorize is very likely a federal crime.”

Baker explained that Facebook’s customer service agreement was written to limit access to information, not just use of the information.

“Maybe the campaign never thought about the possibility that it was violating federal law,” Baker wrote. “That’s not a scandal, though it strikes me as unlikely that not one of these tech-savvy geeks failed to notice that they were breaching Facebook’s terms of service.”
Given the importance of turnout to the outcome of the 2012 presidential campaign, Baker argued President Obama arguably won re-election by violating federal law or by getting special treatment from Facebook, and maybe from federal prosecutors as well.

“I think this issue will go mainstream,” Baker insisted. “Half the country will want to know exactly how that happened. And I don’t see how the extraordinary discussion conferred by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act can survive the storm that follows.”

Trolling for voters
WND senior staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi, author of the WND book “What Went Wrong: The Inside Story of the GOP Debacle of 2012 … And How It Can Be Avoided Next Time,” agrees.

“There is no doubt the Obama computer strategies and capabilities gave Obama an advantage in 2012,” Corsi said. “A major goal of the Obama voter intelligence campaign was to network from strong Obama supporters to find likely Obama voters that could be converted into Election Day votes.”

Corsi pointed out that despite Obama winning six of the seven swing states in play in 2012, many of the key states were very close, within reach for Romney had Republican turnout been higher.

In 2012, when all the precincts were counted, Obama won Ohio by only 103,481 votes, approximately 2 percent of all votes cast in the state, and he won Florida by 73,189 votes, approximately 1 percent of all the votes cast.

“Turnout was the key to victory in 2012,” Corsi pointed out. “Approximately 6.7 million fewer white voters voted in 2012 than voted in 2008. Romney got 59 percent of the white vote. The white voters who stayed home were the conservatives. Had Romney gotten the same numbers of white voters to the polls as McCain got in 2008, Romney could well have been president.”

Maximizing turnout in the Democratic Party base was a necessary strategy for Obama to be re-elected, Corsi pointed out, stressing that Obama got 4.5 million fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008.

“The Obama team had the social science studies that showed how you can increase turnout by telling a prospective voter how his or her neighbors plan to vote,” Corsi noted.
He said the Facebook strategy analyzed by Baker is “very powerful, when the Obama campaign accesses your friends to ask if they know you plan to vote for Obama.”

If Baker is correct, Corsi stressed, the Facebook strategy rapidly moves into the liability column if the Obama campaign did not adequately research the information-access restrictions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

“The geeks in the ‘cave’ in Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters were trolling for votes over the Internet wherever and however they could find them,” Corsi said. “It would not surprise me if Obama’s computer geniuses cut legal corners on the Internet, much like hackers couldn’t care less if they violate a few federal laws breaking through firewalls.”