The Permanent Campaign: Failed President Held More Fundraisers Than Previous 5 Presidents Combined

The Obama administration‘s decision to seize phone records from the Associated Press was “unconstitutional” and sends a message that “if you talk to the press, we are going to go after you”, the news agency’s boss Gary Pruitt said Sunday. AP revealed last week that the Justice Department had obtained two months’ worth of phone records of calls made by reporters and editors without informing the organisation in advance. The move was an apparent effort by US officials to identify the source of a story about the CIA foiling an alleged terrorist plot by an al Qaida terrorist affiliate in Yemen. News of the seizure has caused a political firestorm and comes amid a widening scandal into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups over their tax exemptions and the White House’s handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack last year. Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Pruitt, AP’s president and chief executive officer, said the government’s seizure of the phone records was “unconstitutional” and was already clearly harming the press’s ability to do its job. “We don’t question their right to conduct these sort of investigations. We just think they went about it the wrong way. So sweeping, so secretly, so abusively and harassingly and over-broad that it constitutes, that it is, an unconstitutional act,” he said. “We are already seeing some impact. Already officials that would normally talk to us and people we talk to in the normal course of newsgathering are already saying to us that they are a little reluctant to talk to us. They fear that they will be monitored by the government. We are already seeing that. It’s not hypothetical,” said Pruitt. The government investigation was seemingly triggered by an AP exclusive about a joint US-Saudi spy operation that had foiled a plot involving an improved version of the “underwear” bomb that failed to detonate properly on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009. AP agreed to delay publication after officials cited national security concerns. Pruitt said he would normally expect dialogue with government officials ahead of any decision to ask for or demand records relating to the news organisation’s activities. Those requests would usually be subject to negotiation and if an agreement could not be reached, they would be put before a judge, he said. In this case, the Justice Department has claimed it made every reasonable effort to obtain the information through alternative means, as is required by law. “Because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws,” it said in a statement. Pruitt said he had not received any explanation as to why AP had not been consulted ahead of the seizure. “I really do not know what their motive is. I know what the message being sent is, it’s that if you talk to the press, we are going to go after you,” he said. Pruitt said the Justice Department had acted “as judge jury and executioner, in secret”. If the government restricts the “news gathering apparatus” then “the people of the United States will only know what the government wants them to know. And that’s not what the framers of constitution had in mind when they wrote the first amendment,” Pruitt said. The White House has denied knowledge of the Justice Department’s move. It comes as officials face mounting criticism over an IRS investigation into Tea Party groups. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that the IRS controversy demonstrated a “culture of intimidation” by the administration. —— Photo: AFP

Marissa Mayer, the former Googler who is now chief executive of Yahoo, is poised to create yet another nothing-to-riches tale in the web industry with a rumoured $1.1bn (£720m) acquisition of the blogging site Tumblr. Mayer called Yahoo’s board together on Sunday afternoon to discuss the company’s latest attempt to regain the glamour it once held, and the word from Sunnyvale, California is that the board has given its approval. Tumblr was only founded in 2007, by David Karp, then 21, in his bedroom in his mother’s apartment in New York. Within a fortnight it had 75,000 users; by January 2012, there were 42m blogs on the site; today, there are around 110m, and the investors who have poured $125m into the company include Sir Richard Branson. With a high-profile press conference scheduled for Monday afternoon at a location in a lounge in New York’s Times Square, just a couple of miles from Tumblr’s headquarters, nobody expects Mayer will turn up empty-handed. According to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday evening, the Yahoo board have agreed to pay $1.1bn for Tumblr and will let it continue to operate as an independent business. Yahoo declined to comment ahead of the announcement, but pointed out that it will be streamed live. That’s something the company previously only did (in audio) for its quarterly financial results. Which points to Mayer being aware of its significance, and wanting the world’s media to realise it too. For Yahoo, capturing the white-hot blogging site which is so easy to use that it repeatedly and effortlessly captures the zeitgeist (such as “White Men Wearing Google Glass“) could catapult it back into the top flight of contenders, in a web world that has become hugely more complicated since it was set up in March 1995 – before Google and nearly a decade before Facebook. Tumblr’s attraction is how easily people can create their own web presence; they can go from zero to blogging in less than a minute, collecting pictures, and posting stuff effortlessly. Unlike Facebook, it’s anonymous; yet it has powerful search for finding “similar” content, which is often reshared. As the network grows, that internal sharing grows and grows. Web measurement company Quantcast says Tumblr had 217m global users in the past month, and was the US’s 24th most popular site with about 75m US users. For Yahoo, it says the figure is about the same: 75m US monthly users. But for Tumblr, Yahoo could bring the skills at pulling in advertising sales it has been sorely missing. It also looks like something of a shotgun marriage. Tumblr only has a few months’ worth of cash left, according to industry gossip, and has been shopping itself around the industry for a little while. It pulled in $13m of advertising in 2012, but is spending far more than that. It hoped to hit a $100m revenue target for 2013 but that seems unlikely now, making its purchase a potential lifesaver for both companies, and for investors. Unlike Facebook, Tumblr has been slow to pull in advertisers. Speaking to the Guardian in January 2012, Karp expressed disdain for how other sites use ads. Of Google-owned YouTube, he said: “They take your creative works – your film that you poured hours and hours of energy into – and they put ads on top of it. They make it as gross an experience to watch your film as possible. I’m sure it will contribute to Google’s bottom line; I’m not sure it will inspire any creators.” At Yahoo, Mayer was only appointed 10 months ago, in a move that looked both audaciously clever, and a last throw of the dice. She was at the time one of the longest-serving staff at Google, having been there 13 years, but had apparently been bypassed for the high-profile jobs. Yahoo, meanwhile, had seen revenues slump, and a revolving-door procession of CEOs. “Yahoo will be able to offer advertisers a full set of channels that serve most demographics,” commented Ben Thompson, who works in the technology industry on his Stratechery blog. “That’s where the synergy is; I don’t think anyone expects Tumblr users to suddenly develop an affinity for Yahoo.” One tricky question that Mayer will have to face up to: if it completes the acquisition, what should it do about all the porn? It’s an open secret that a significant proportion of Tumblr blogs are “not safe for work” viewing. But cleaning out the porn might not be popular with users. The big fear though is that Tumblr will turn out to be an updated version of Geocities. When Yahoo bought that in January 1999, it was the third most-visited site on the internet, because of its collection of “communities” where people could create their own sites. Though it became famous for users’ garish choice of page colours and blinking “Under Construction” logos, Geocities was also a resource many loved. But the company arguably never got back the $3.57bn it paid – entirely in stock, at $36 per share; today the share price is around $27. In 2009, Geocities was shut down, and the entire site simply wiped from the internet. For Mayer and Karp, and millions of Tumblr users, the hope must be that history won’t repeat itself. —— Photo: Shutterstock.com.

Los Angeles politicians have struggled for more than five years to regulate medical marijuana, trying to balance the needs of the sick against neighborhood concerns that pot shops attract crime. In this Tuesday, May 14, 2013, photo, Brennan Thickem who helps run the Venice Beach Care Center medical marijuana dispensary in Venice, Calif., poses next to "Yes to Prop D" signs in Venice. Los Angeles politicians have tried and failed for so long to regulate medical marijuana that it was only a matter of time before voters got a chance to control shops that have proliferated. Complicating matters, there are three measures on Tuesday's ballot that would allow sick people to get the drug, but either limit the number of shops, raise taxes or do both. In this photo taken Tuesday, May 14, 2013, Medical marijuana prescriptions vials are filled at the Venice Beach Care Center medical marijuana dispensary in Venice, Calif. Los Angeles politicians have tried and failed for so long to regulate medical marijuana that it was only a matter of time before voters got a chance to control shops that have proliferated. Complicating matters, there are three measures on Tuesday's ballot that would allow sick people to get the drug, but either limit the number of shops, raise taxes or do both. In this photo taken Tuesday, May 14, 2013, Brennan Thicke, who helps run the Venice Beach Care Center medical marijuana dispensary, poses next to posters explaining different medical marijuana measures, at the business in Venice, Calif. Los Angeles politicians have tried and failed for so long to regulate medical marijuana that it was only a matter of time before voters got a chance to control shops that have proliferated. In this photo taken Tuesday, May 14, 2013, Rosy Solis, left, and Nicole Denis help fill medical marijuana prescriptions at the Venice Beach Care Center medical marijuana dispensary in Venice, Calif. Los Angeles politicians have tried and failed for so long to regulate medical marijuana that it was only a matter of time before voters got a chance to control shops that have proliferated. Complicating matters, there are three measures on Tuesday's ballot that would allow sick people to get the drug, but either limit the number of shops, raise taxes or do both.

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Fox News Sunday selected Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, attorneys who represented witnesses at a Republican-led hearing on the attacks at a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, for its "power players of the week," an unfortunate choice given that both individuals misled Fox News and its viewers about allegations of threats and intimidation against their clients and about efforts by the administration to prevent their clients from testifying. Though Fox News Sunday aired certain aspects of Toensing and diGenova's biographies, the segment neglected to mention that the two have a history of poor professional conduct, including criticism from a Democratic congressman for inappropriate behavior and actions while they worked as congressional investigators due to their constant media appearances attacking President Clinton. They were also accused of having a conflict of interest for representing a Republican committee chairman under Justice Department investigation while simultaneously serving as special counsel to the committee in a separate investigation. More recently, Toensing pushed the false claim that outed CIA agent Valerie Plame had not been covert, in addition to other falsehoods. On April 29, Fox's Special Report aired video of Toensing claiming that people who wanted to testify on Benghazi "have been threatened," which Fox & Friends aired the following morning. Toensing was also cited by Special Report on April 29 in reporting the allegations that "the Obama administration is trying to intimidate potential whistleblowers into silence" and that possible witnesses were having their careers threatened. And a May 6 FoxNews.com article by Fox Washington correspondents James Rosen and Chad Pergram sourced a claim that a witness named Mark Thompson "has been subjected to threats and intimidation by as-yet-unnamed superiors at State, in advance of his cooperation with Congress" to diGenova, who was representing Thompson. But testimony by the witnesses at a GOP-led hearing on May 8 and subsequent interviews of their attorneys on Fox News revealed that Toensing and diGenova misled the network by claiming that their clients had suffered threats, intimidation, and orders to keep quiet. When asked on Fox's Your World on May 9 about claims that Thompson had been threatened, diGenova replied that Thompson "actually hasn't said that," and explained that his client "didn't feel intimidated." Gregory Hicks, another witness at the hearing -- represented by Toensing -- explained under questioning that he had not been told not to speak to congressional investigators, only that he was required to have a State Department attorney present while doing so. Hicks also explained that, in contrast to claims that the administration tried to silence him, he was interviewed twice by the State Department's independent Accountability Review Board that was created to investigate the Benghazi attacks. Hicks' testimony further contradicted Toensing's April 29 claim to Special Report that careers were being threatened when he explained that "the overriding factor" in his determination to not return to his post in Libya was to remain with his family in the United States.