Archive for the ‘America’s Future’ Category

Former GOP vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin told a Washington audience Saturday that the U.S. should not get involved in the Syrian civil war.

Palin argued that the U.S. should not intervene in any Middle East conflict as long as President Obama remains in office.
“Until we have a commander in chief who knows what he is doing….let Allah sort it out!” she told the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
The statement shows how far Palin has drifted from former running mate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is the chief Senate proponent of U.S. military action to help the Syrian rebels.
This week, the White House announced it had concluded that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against the rebels, thereby crossing a “red line.” Obama has now decided to arm select elements of the Syrian rebellion.
Palin also used her speech to blast the “good ole boys” in Congress and she advised them to follow the lead of freshman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Tea Party darling.
The former governor and Fox News contributor said the U.S. is “becoming a totalitarian surveillance state” and that she is listening more and more to libertarians in the Republican Party.
The scandals surrounding the Justice Department surveillance of reporters, National Security Agency collection of Internet data and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) harassment of conservatives show that Washington is just a “hot mess,” Palin proclaimed.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/305789-palin-slams-intervention-in-syria-let-allah-sort-it-out#ixzz2WPLGBhu8
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Bilderberg in Watford - Impact of The 2013 Agenda

The hard core of the Bilderberg observers and critics met on Sunday after the departure of the Bilderbergs and exchanged information and opinions collected from the meeting.

Also took place at the Kings Lodge a funny evening with a troupe of stand-up comedians, brought us to laugh with their satirical sayings about political themes.
A nice end of the week with like-minded colleagues and we agreed to meet the next year wherever the Bilderbergs will assemble.
Several times I was asked by the locals, if it had a certain meaning why the Bilderbergs met in England.
I said to them, for sure, because, as experience shows, after the meeting something bad happens to the land and they can prepare themselves for it.
2009 was the meeting in the vicinity of Athens, and we have seen what they did with Greece.
The country is completely on the ground.
Then, 2010 Spain was on the turn and I then warned the people.
It has also come to record unemployment !
In 2011, met the Bilderbergs in St. Moritz and behold, since running a war against Switzerland and the financial sector is systematically destroyed, the franc was fixed to the crumbling euro and bank-secrecy is virtually eliminated.
Peter Mandelson, called the Labour spin doctor and 'Prince of Darkness'.
According a survey in the UK in 2005, he belonged to the most influential gay men in Europe.

Right after the shadow chancellor Ed Balls left the Bilderberg meeting in Watford he announced on Sunday morning during an interview with the BBC, Labour wants to cut state pension.
He immediately performed his order the Bilderbergs had given to him.
The British papers were then filled with the headline: "outrage as Ed Balls announces Labour's plan to cut the state pension."
I said to my British colleagues, wow it's been going on with the austerity and it will cut not only the rent, but your NHS (National Health System) will be privatized and it will no longer be for free in the future.
The pharmaceutical industry and the private hospital operators from abroad, especially from America, standing on the mark and ask the politicians to accept hand - over the health care system and health data from you and me.
As everywhere in the Western industrialized countries affordable or even free doctor and hospital visits will become history.
From the perspective of the elite, it only must be profitable, therefore expensive, inefficient and even periling.
The corporations demand this.
Health so has become big business.

(By Mike Adams, Natural News) — “Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…” – NSA spy grid whistleblower Edward Snowden.

And so it begins: the power to tap the private phone calls of a federal judge or even the President. All at the fingertips of young NSA analysts who sift through masses of private data collected through the government’s back doors into the servers of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, AOL and others. (Here’s the proof.)

But if a 29-year-old working for the NSA could wiretap a federal judge, he could also wiretap a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Anything he found that was embarrassing or even incriminating could be used in a simple blackmail threat to force that justice to change his or her decision on a key issue…

… like Obamacare.

What we’ve learned today forces us to re-examine events of 2012

Back in July of 2012, news headlines were ablaze with the revelation that Supreme Court Justice John Roberts suddenly and unexpectedly changed his decision on Obamacare, siding with big government instead of protecting individual liberties. Many facts surrounding this sudden change of decision raise huge red flags when viewed in the context of the NSA being able to wiretap anyone’s emails, phone calls and private files — including a Supreme Court justice.

As CBS news reported in 2012, “Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court’s four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama’s health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations. Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said.”

Regardless of the strength of the supporting evidence brought to Roberts during his time of consideration for the decision, nothing caused him to budge. Roberts was inexplicably immovable, even though he was now siding against nearly everything he had argued and decided in previous court cases.

No one could satisfactorily explain the decision… until the NSA PRISM scandal erupted. Now, we all of a sudden have a viable explanation for what really goes on behind the public headlines.

Consider this: If a group of men had the power to peek into the private conversations of ALL Americans — including the most powerful and influential decision makers in the nation — why would they waste their time looking for so-called “terrorists” in the first place? There’s a far more valuable use for this “omniscient” technology: collecting huge payoffs to blackmail important members of Congress, the Obama administration or the Supreme Court.

How easy would it be to blackmail a Supreme Court Justice?

Blackmailing a U.S. Supreme Court justice is probably easier than you might think. These justices are, of course, human, which means they all have secrets they’d rather not be made public. With its highly intrusive surveillance technology, the NSA could easily gather the usernames, passwords, emails, voice calls, text chats, photos and files of every member of the Supreme Court (and Congress, for that matter), then threaten to leak certain details to the press if they don’t do what they’re told.

We don’t know, of course, whether this actually happened with Roberts. His decision to flip on Obamacarecould have been motivated by some other bizarre influence, but this NSA spy grid blackmail theory is the first realistic theory I’ve run across that would explain the sudden and inexplicable shift in his opinion.

Think about it: The health insurance companies — which are largely owned by globalist banks and investors — stand to make trillions of dollars from the forced buying of insurance via the “individual mandate” that was being decided by the Court. Because the Court was almost evenly divided on the issue, the changing of the opinion of just one justice could tilt the decision in favor of the insurance industry and lock in enormous profits for years to come. So if the NSA approached the insurance globalists and said something like, “Pay us $500 million and we’ll hand you the Obamacare decision,” the answer would obviously be, “to where do we transfer the money?” It’s a cheap investment for a windfall of long-term profits. And health insurance companies — like any large corporations — don’t “play fair.” They play to win.

The NSA is now the most powerful organization in the world

I hope you’re beginning to fully grasp the power that is now concentrated in the hands of the NSA. An organization that has the power to covertly pry into the private lives of everyone also has the power to control everyone. There is no greater currency in Washington, of course, than to have real dirt on the people you’d like to control.

The NSA spy grid “PRISM” program is like a Dirt Devil. It’s the Dyson vortex vacuum of politics… on steroids. If there’s dirt to be found on anyone, the NSA can find it. That dirt can then be used as “insurance” — mob-style — to make sure the people you’re targeting behave in the way you want them to behave. This would include, of course, voting the correct way on key legislation or court decisions.Right this very minute, the NSA almost certainly has a full dossier on every member of Congress, federal judge, State Dept. employee and high-powered corporate CEO in the country. And because the creepiest people tend to rise to the top in politics, there’s no doubt these files contain all sorts of graphic details on prostitutes, under-age sex, secret homosexual relationships, cheating on husbands and wives, substance abuse problems, medical problems and much more. Do you know which members of Congress have smoked pot or snorted coke? The NSA probably does. How about which members of the Obama administration have ever engaged in “experimental” gay sex in college? The NSA knows all that too, no doubt.

This knowledge is far more valuable than any hunt for terrorists. There is no question in my mind that the NSA has already figured this out and has been using this spy grid behemoth for nefarious purposes to pull the strings of key decision makers across our society. This may be the explanation behind all sorts of inexplicable votes and bizarre decisions in Washington. The NSA might even be the puppet pulling Obama’s strings, as they no doubt have all sorts of dirt on Obama’s history which we already know to be largely fabricated. (Real birth certificates don’t have a dozen layers stitched together in Photoshop.)

The power to spy is the power to control

You gotta hand it to whoever built this spy grid from the ground up. It’s a brilliant covert tactic of dominant control. With all the slimebags rising to positions of power in Washington, can you imagine the absolute treasure chest of low-hanging blackmail fruit that would be easily uncovered by sifting through the private emails and phone calls of lawmakers and bureaucrats?

Take DHS as the tip of the iceberg. Last year, several male DHS employees sued the agency, claiming they were forced to perform deviant sex acts on their female bosses. There’s no question that DHS is staffed up with total perverts and sexual predators, which is why we frequently hear stories of the TSA molesting little children (the TSA is part of DHS).

Can you imagine what the private emails and phone calls of Janet Napolitano look like? (Shield my eyes! I don’t even wanna know!)

Or Anthony Weiner, the congressman who sexted a bunch of half-nude pictures of himself to young women?

Usually the more power hungry these people are, the more deviant and perverse they behave when they think no one is looking. That makes them all incredibly easy to be compromised by the NSA — the techno-mob with the ultimate power to control through intimidation.

And if the NSA can really control all these people — or at least some of them — it begs the question: What are the NSA’s aims? Who are the people calling the shots and where do their loyalties lie?

Ever further down the rabbit hole is this question: Are these also the same people running global terrorist networks in order to justify their own existence? Or if that’s too nefarious to believe, would you believe these people might willfully look the other way with certain terror groups in order to make sure they keep operating?

Perhaps the NSA is actually in the business of NOT catching terrorists in order to make sure its own power and financial budgets keep growing. And perhaps the NSA’s real business is shaking down corporate interests that pay huge dollars to have key decisions in Washington hijacked via blackmail.

This is far more believable that the utter nonsense explanation we’re told by the media which says the NSA is “catching terrorists.” Really? Show me one! In reality, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the NSA has stopped even a single act of genuine terrorism that targeted Americans.

Remember: Enormous power coupled with a complete abandonment of ethics can only lead in the direction of corruption and evil. Without checks and balances, the NSA will become a rogue criminal mafia that terrorizes everyone… and can be stopped by no one.

by Ed Morrissey

We’ve heard plenty of outrage over Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA activities as treason, and passionate defenses of him as a hero for crippling the surveillance state. How about Edward Snowden … nothingburger? Senator Jon Tester appeared on MSNBC to rebut Peter King’s contention that reporters should be prosecuted for cases like these, in which leaks damage national security. Rather than oppose King on First Amendment grounds, Tester says that Snowden’s leaks didn’t actually do that much damage:

“The information that they wrote about was just the fact that NSA was doing broad sweeps of foreign and domestic phone records, metadata. First of all, Snowden probably shouldn’t have done what he did. But the fact of the matter is is I don’t see how that compromises the security of this country whatsoever,” Tester said. ”And quite frankly, it helps people like me become aware of a situation that I wasn’t aware of before because I don’t sit on that Intelligence Committee.”
No, but Tester does sit on the Homeland Security Committee, which exercises oversight on the kind of domestic intelligence collection that presumably would be a customer of the NSA under certain circumstances. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, and TSA all exist within DHS. NSA capabilities never came up once as part of DHS oversight? If so, that probably works in NSA’s defense, but what about all of the intel-law enforcement dot-connecting for which the DHS consolidation was intended?

If exposing a top-secret program doesn’t do damage to national security, then why was it classified so tightly to begin with? As Politico notes, there is a general rule about classification levels, which are calculated on the basis of how much damage exposure will do:

There are three basic levels of security clearance in the U.S. intelligence community: confidential, secret and top secret. In a touch of irony, given Snowden’s leak, those classification levels are based on how much damage would be done to national security if the information they cover were improperly revealed.

Confidential material, if leaked, could be “reasonably expected to cause some measurable damage to the national security.” Secret material could cause “serious damage” to national security, and top secret information is classified as having the potential to cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if revealed.

As of October 2012, 4.91 million people held U.S. security clearances. About 71 percent of them hold the lower confidential or secret clearances, and the rest have top secret clearances, according to an annual report to Congress by the director of national intelligence.
There are other clearances that are task- or organization-centric too; this is a bit simplified, but communicates the general principle used in classifying material. If revealing the existence of PRISM and some of its operations didn’t damage national security — say, by allowing enemies to work around it — then it shouldn’t have been classified in the first place. It should have been made transparent to Congress and the American people so that we can have the “debate” Obama claimed to want this week, and which he provided in 2007-8 — if Tester is correct.

The number of cleared personnel have increased by more than 200,000 since October 2010. The number cleared at TS has dropped, though, from 1.436 million in October 2010 to 1.409 million last October. That suggests that we’re lowering classifications on some efforts while expanding them overall. Either way, Congress should spend some time looking at the scope of classifications and think about forcing a little more transparency.

Establishment politicians from both major political parties are rushing to defend the NSA and condemn whistleblower Edward Snowden. They are attempting to portray Edward Snowden as a “traitor” and the spooks over at the NSA that are snooping on all of us as “heroes”. In fact, many of the exact same politicians that once railed against government spying during the Bush years are now staunchly defending it now that Obama is in the White House. But it isn’t just Democrats that are acting shamefully. Large numbers of Republican politicians that love to give speeches about “freedom” and “liberty” are attempting to eviscerate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The government is not supposed to invade our privacy and investigate us unless there is probable cause to do so. Apparently many of our politicians misunderstood when they read the novel 1984 by George Orwell. It wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual. We should be thanking Edward Snowden for exposing the deep corruption that is eating away at our own government like cancer. Now the American people need to pick up the ball and start demanding answers, because without a doubt we are going to see establishment politicians from both major political parties try to shut this scandal down. Establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans both love the Big Brother surveillance grid that the U.S. government has constructed, and they are both making it abundantly clear that they will defend the NSA to the very end. The following are 22 nauseating quotes from hypocritical establishment politicians that show exactly how they feel about the NSA spying scandal…

#1 Barack Obama: “I think it’s important to understand that you can’t have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

#2 Barack Obama in 2007: “This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand… That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists… We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.”

#3 Speaker Of The House John Boehner on what he thinks about NSA leaker Edward Snowden: “He’s a traitor.”

#4 U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham: “I hope we follow Mr. Snowden to the ends of the Earth to bring him to justice.”

#5 U.S. Senator Al Franken: “I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.”

#6 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: “For senators to complain that they didn’t know this was happening, we had many, many meetings that have been both classified and unclassified that members have been invited to”

#7 U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell: “Given the scope of these programs, it’s understandable that many would be concerned about issues related to privacy. But what’s difficult to understand is the motivation of somebody who intentionally would seek to warn the nation’s enemies of lawful programs created to protect the American people. And I hope that he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

#8 U.S. Representative Peter King on why he believes that reporters should be prosecuted for revealing NSA secrets: “There is an obligation both moral, but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security.”

#9 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper making a joke during an awards ceremony last Friday night: “Some of you expressed surprise that I showed up—so many emails to read!”

#10 Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper about why he lied about NSA spying in front of Congress: “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner”

#11 National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden: “The president has full faith in director Clapper and his leadership of the intelligence community”

#12 White House press secretary Jay Carney: “…Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers that he’s given, and has actively engaged in an effort to provide more information about the programs that have been revealed through the leak of classified information”

#13 Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee: “There is no more direct or honest person than Jim Clapper.”

#14 Gus Hunt, the chief technology officer at the CIA: “We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever.”

#15 Barack Obama: “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

#16 Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency: “We do not see a tradeoff between security and liberty.”

#17 An exchange between NSA director Keith Alexander and U.S. Representative Hank Johnson in March 2012…

JOHNSON: Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens’ emails?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Google searches?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Text messages?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Amazon.com orders?

ALEXANDER: No.

JOHNSON: Bank records?

ALEXANDER: No.

#18 Deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino: “The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks”

#19 U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss: “This is nothing new. It has proved meritorious because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

#20 Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton on NSA leaker Edward Snowden: “Let me ask, who died and made him king? Who gave him the authority to endanger 300 million Americans? That’s not the way it works, and if he thinks he can get away with that, he’s got another think coming.”

#21 Senior spokesman for the NSA Don Weber: “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide”

#22 The White House website: “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.”

Right now, the NSA is building a data collection center out in Utah that is so massive that it is hard to describe with words. It is going to cost 40 million dollars a year just to provide the energy needed to run it. According to a 2012 Wired article entitled “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)”, this data center will contain “the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches” in addition to “parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases” and anything else that the NSA decides to collect…

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

The goal is to know as much about everyone on the planet as possible.

And the NSA does not keep this information to itself. As an article in USA Today recently reported, the NSA shares the data that it collects with other government agencies “as a matter of practice”…

As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as “product” in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups.

So when the NSA collects information about you, there is a very good chance that the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS will have access to it as well.

But the U.S. government is not the only one collecting data on American citizens.

Guess who else has been collecting massive amounts of data on the American people?

Barack Obama.

According to those that have seen it, the “Obama database” is unlike anything that any politician has ever put together before. According to CNSNews.com, U.S. Representative Maxine Waters says that this database “will have information about everything on every individual”…

“The president has put in place an organization that contains a kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” she added. “That’s going to be very, very powerful.”

Martin asked if Waters if she was referring to “Organizing for America.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Waters said. “And that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it’s never been done before.”

Waters said the database would also serve future Democratic candidates seeking the presidency.

Perhaps this helps to explain why so many big donors got slapped with IRS audits immediately after they wrote big checks to the Romney campaign.

We are being told to “trust” Barack Obama and the massive government surveillance grid that is being constructed all around us, but there has been example after example of government power being grossly abused in recent years.

A lot of Americans say that they do not care if the government is watching them because they do not have anything to hide, but is there anyone out there that would really not mind the government watching them and listening to them 24 hours a day?

For example, it has been documented that NSA workers eavesdropped on conversations between U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and their loved ones back home. Some of these conversations involved very intimate talk between husbands and wives. The following is from a 2008 ABC News story…

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.

“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during break in Back Hall’s “smoke pit,” but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

Is this really what we want the future of America to look like?

Do we really want the government to watch us and listen to us during our most intimate moments?

So, when your Deputy CIA Director steps down in the middle of a massive scandal, who do you suppose would be a good person to appoint. How about a lawyer with no intelligence experience who used to read aloud at “erotica nights” at her local bookstore. Yeah, that about sums up what Obama just did.

from Newsweek:

The former host of “Erotica Night” at a Baltimore bookstore will be the first-ever female No. 2 official at the CIA.

On Wednesday, Barack Obama nominated Avril Danica Haines to be the deputy director of the CIA, replacing Michael Morell, who twice served as acting director of the agency but took much of the blame for editing the highly controversial talking points around the 2012 attack on the consulate in Benghazi. As a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office, Haines oversaw the approval process for the CIA’s covert actions, acting as a vital link between the CIA and the president.

But 20 years ago, Haines opened and co-owned Adrian’s Book Café in the Baltimore waterfront neighborhood of Fells Point. She opened Adrian’s after dropping out of a graduate program in physics at Johns Hopkins University. The store featured regular “Erotica Nights.” including dinner and a series of readings by guests of published work or their own prose, according to a 1995 report in the Baltimore Sun; couples could attend for $30, while singles paid $17.

“Erotica has become more prevalent because people are trying to have sex without having sex. Others are trying to find new fantasies to make their monogamous relationships more satisfying,” Haines, then in her 20s, told the Sun. “What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and turns. And it affects everyone.” (She also told Baltimore Sun reporter Mary Corey that friends heckled “you just want a mass orgy in your bookstore, while she and her co-owner were initially worried only “dirty old men” would show up.)The event Corey attended at the bookstore featured a room lit with red candles where guests held chicken tostadas, waiting to eat as Haines read aloud the opening pages of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice writing under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaire, which features passages such as:

“He mounted her, parting her legs, giving the white inner flesh of her thighs a soft deep pinch, and, clasping her right breast in his hand, he thrust his sex into her.

He was holding her up as he did this, to gather her mouth to him, and as he broke through her innocence, he opened her mouth with his tongue and pinched her breast sharply.”

“What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and turns. And it affects everyone.”
But her bookstore was hardly defined by erotica (which was shelved between self-help and parenting), stocking titles from a variety of smaller publishing houses and local authors, and offering a café. Haines was also well respected in the close-knit waterfront neighborhood of Fells Point, according to former neighbors.

One of them, long-time neighborhood fixture Steve Bunker, who has since retired to Maine, raved about Haines to The Daily Beast, saying “She’s brilliant, has a genius IQ, is easy to work with, and reliable.” He recalled going to New Year’s Eve parties with her at the $22 million dollar townhouses then owned by her father, Dr. Thomas Haines, a liberal activist and noted chemist, on the Upper West Side of New York.

Another property owner in the neighborhood, Howard Barstop, raved about Haines’ work ethic, reminiscing about when she would rehab her apartment in “jeans or a pair of shorts.”

At an agency recently rocked by revelations about then-Director David Petraeus’s secret erotic emails while having an affair with his biographer, Haines’s bookstore past seems considerably more appealing, and about as racy as what a reader might find in a Lewis Libby or Jim Webb novel.
Although Bunker was somewhat surprised to learn that his old neighbor had gone from Baltimore bookstore owner to one of America’s top spies, “stranger things have happened,” he said, predicting that she’d do a great job at the agency. His wife, Sharon Bondroff, agreed, calling Haines “a sweetheart.”

Good Lord! Again, let me stress this one point: she is not an intelligence officer. She is a lawyer, and she’s now #2 at the most powerful intelligence agency in the world. Perhaps she’s host the CIA’s new book club…