Monster Beverage Corporation Message Board

I sold out. I got spooked by some global trends - possible end of easy Fed money, China slowing, a lot of smart people say the stock market is getting back into a bubble etc. etc.

So why should you care? It means FIO will be bought at north of $20 per share now! Longs can thank me later.

CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson disclosed that her personal and work computers have been “compromised.”:

“I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I’m not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I’ve been patient and methodical about this matter,” Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. “I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public.”

In an earlier interview with WPHT Philadelphia, Attkisson said that though she did not know the full details of the intrustion, “there could be some relationship between these things and what’s happened to James [Rosen],” the Fox News reporter…

Attkisson told WPHT that irregular activity on her computer was first identified in Feb. 2011, when she was reporting on the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal and on the Obama administration’s green energy spending, which she said “the administration was very sensitive about.” Attkisson has also been a persistent investigator of the events surrounding last year’s attack in Benghazi, and its aftermath.

Was the administration angry at Attkisson for failing to keep Fast and Furious secret?

Laura Ingraham: So they were literally screaming at you?

Attkisson: Yes. Well the DOJ woman was just yelling at me. The guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me. Oh, the person screaming was [DOJ spokeswoman] Tracy Schmaler, she was yelling not screaming. And the person who screamed at me was Eric Schultz at the White House. …

The White House and Justice Department] will tell you that I’m the only reporter–as they told me–that is not reasonable. They say the Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.

The dam protecting the IRS scandal began to crack today when Lois Lerner, the IRS official who announced, and apologized for, the improper singling out of conservative-leaning organizations by IRS employees under her command, announced through her criminal defense lawyer that she will not testify as scheduled tomorrow before the House Oversight Committee. Rather, she will assert her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. It can now be taken as more or less established that crimes were committed by Obama administration employees.

Prior to joining the IRS, Lerner’s tenure as head of the Enforcement Office at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was marked by what appears to be politically motivated harassment of conservative groups.

This excerpt is from a deposition taken by an FEC lawyer, acting under the direction of Lois Lerner, of Oliver North and apparently Lerner and her minions were burning to find out whether Pat Robertson had prayed for Oliver North:

Q: (reading from a letter from Oliver North to Pat Robertson) ‘Betsy and I thank you for your kind regards and prayers.’ The next paragraph is, ‘Please give our love to Dede and I hope to see you in the near future.’ Who is Dede?

A: That is Mrs. Robertson.

Q: What did you mean in paragraph 2, about thanking -you and your wife thanking Pat Robertson for kind regards?

A: Last time I checked in America, prayers were still legal. I am sure that Pat had said he was praying for my family and me in some correspondence or phone call.

Q: Would that be something that Pat Robertson was doing for you?

A: I hope a lot of people were praying for me, Holly.

Q: But you knew that Pat Robertson was?

A: Well, apparently at that time I was reflecting something that Pat had either, as I said, had told me or conveyed to me in some fashion, and it is my habit to thank people for things like that.

Q: During the time that you knew Pat Robertson, was it your impression that he had – he was praying for you?

Tuesday afternoon a bombshell was dropped into the already explosive IRS scandal when it was reported that Lois Lerner, a top IRS official in the non-profit division that paralyzed Tea Party groups with ongoing harassment, would invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions during Congressional testimony schedule before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

The LA Times reports that Lerner will refuse to answer any questions about what she knows about the targeting of conservative groups. She will also refuse to explain why she is refusing to answer questions.

Lerner has retained defense attorney William W. Taylor 3rd, who sent a letter to Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee. In the letter Taylor said, "She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course.”

Taylor is hoping Issa will excuse his client from having to testify in order to save her the embarrassment of having to invoke the Fifth in public. Per The L.A. Times, the committee hasn't yet answered her request one way or the other.

Since the IRS scandal broke wide open ten days ago, Lerner has been at the center of the controversy. She is not only the head of the division that oversaw the Kafka-esque harassment of President Obama's political foes; she has also been caught on numerous occasions making misleading statements.

Lerner was also part of the fumbled attempt to control how the scandal was made public with a planted question at an American Bar Association meeting. Lerner followed that debacle with a phone call with journalists in which she attempted to downplay the scandal and laughed off the fact she didn't understand math.

Lerner's testimony had been widely anticipated. What she knows is considered key to finding out the answer to the one question we still don’t know the answer to: Who okayed this partisan harassment and who participated in it?

From the WSJ:

The 36-year war between communist guerrillas and the Guatemalan state that ended with peace agreements in 1996 was bloody and torturous.

Yet the claim that the Guatemalan state, led by the general, engaged in genocide—that is, an attempt to destroy totally or partially the Ixil people or displace them—is not supported by the facts. On the contrary, a serious reading of the history suggests that the general bested the guerrillas by empowering those Indians who did not want anything to do with the upper-middle-class ideas of revolution that were being foisted on them. The trial of Mr. Ríos Montt, 30 years after the fact, is more a score-settling exercise by the international left than a search for truth and justice.

In his meticulously researched two volume book "Guatemala, The Silenced History 1944-1989", Francisco Marroquin University historian Carlos Sabino cites a key Ríos Montt counterinsurgency document known as Victoria 82. He writes that "the military strategy set as principle objectives 'to deny the subversives access to the civilian population,' to reclaim those [who had joined the] guerrilla 'where possible' and 'to eliminate subversives who did not want to disarm.' "

Some army units, often made up of ethnic Indians, did indeed engage in massacres, village burning and the destruction of crops. But it was "in no way a policy of the state nor a war strategy," he explains, because it would have been directly contrary to solving the problem as it was diagnosed.

In the trial, the prosecution presented the testimony of numerous Indians who had been victims of the violence. But their stories could not prove genocide.

Neither did the prosecution's "experts," mostly foreigners of the leftist persuasion who were not actually witnesses to any alleged acts of genocide.

Gustavo Porras, a former guerrilla intellectual...signed a letter, with others, calling the charge "a legal fabrication" and asserting that it could threaten the peace.

The IRS scandal was brought to light by the revelation that the IRS, in evaluating nonprofits’ applications for 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) status, discriminated against Tea Party and other conservative groups. The IRS would routinely hold up such applications, sometimes for years, while often making irrelevant inquiries of the applicant, e.g., asking for the names of donors. At the same time, the IRS quickly and easily approved similar applications from liberal groups.

A second aspect of the IRS scandal relates to targeting conservatives in the audit process. Conservatives, especially high-profile donors to conservative causes, have long believed that they are likely to be singled out for harassment by the IRS. Anecdotally, it seems that there is considerable evidence to support this belief. What other explanation can there be for a case like that of Professor Anne Hendershott, who was targeted for an audit in 2010 after she wrote a series of articles, mostly in Catholic publications, that were critical of Obamacare. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to a meeting to discuss the “business expenses” associated with her writing. Hendershott reports that the IRS agent wanted to know “who was paying her” and barred her husband from attending the inquiry, even though the Hendershotts file joint returns. Hendershott says that she was so traumatized by the experience that she stopped writing about political topics, which presumably was the intended effect.

A third aspect of the IRS scandal is illegal or improper leaking of confidential tax data. NOM, a pro-traditional marriage organization, claims the IRS leaked their 2008 confidential financial documents to the rival Human Rights Campaign. Those NOM documents were published on the Huffington Post on March 30, 2012. At that time, Joe Solmonese, a left-wing activist and Huffington Post contributor, was the president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Solmonese was also a 2012 Obama campaign co-chairman.

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.