Saturday, February 28, 2015
Obama proven wrong again. The Paris shooter himself says so.
Islamist Shooter Asked Victim His Origin. When He Replied, ‘Jewish,’ the Terrorist Killed Him: Report
Islamist Shooter Asked Victim His Origin. When He Replied, ‘Jewish,’ the Terrorist Killed Him: Report
The Islamist gunman who killed four Jews inside a kosher market in France last month apparently videotaped his rampage with a camera attached to his body — and dialogue showed that he asked at least one victim his origin and fatally shot him after he replied “Jewish,” BBC News reported.
This image made from a video posted online by militants on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2015, shows slain hostage-taker Amedy Coulibaly, who shot a policewoman and four hostages at a kosher grocery in Paris, with a gun in front of an Islamic State emblem as he defends the Paris attacks carried out on the satirical newspaper, police and a Jewish store. At one point in the video, he gave his allegiance to the head of the Islamic State. (Image source: AP/Militant Video)
French website Le Nouvel Observateur obtained the transcript of the nearly 8-minute video, which allegedly also captures Amedy Coulibaly fatally shooting three of his four victims and issuing an anti-Semitic diatribe and yelling “stand up or I’ll kill you!” at hostages.
More from the BBC:
It shows him shouting “Nobody move,” before grabbing hold of a customer, asking his name, and then shooting him dead.He asks another man what origin he is. And when the hostage replies “Jewish,” he kills him too.“So you know why I am here then. Allahu Akbar,” he shouts, according to Le Nouvel Observateur’s report. He is also heard making anti-Semitic remarks when one woman tries to tell him that his hostages have done nothing wrong.
President Obama’s initially said the gunman “randomly [shot] a bunch of folks in a deli.”
The day after Obama’s statement was published, the White House defended Obama’s position, saying the attacker didn’t know specifically by name who he was killing, only that it was a Jewish market. It was “not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Feb. 10.
Earnest added during the press conference that “there were people other than just Jews who were in that deli.”
Later on Feb. 10, Earnest tweeted amid harsh criticism that, “Our view has not changed. Terror attack at Paris Kosher market was motivated by anti-Semitism. POTUS didn’t intend to suggest otherwise.”
A photo taken on January 16, 2015 shows a flower tribute to the victims of the attack which killed four people at the Jewish supermarket in Porte de Vincennes by jihadist gunman Amedy Coulibaly during a hostage-taking. (Image source: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images)
A separate video of Coulibaly emerged after police fatally shot him in which he apparently pledged loyalty to the Islamic State. “I’m a soldier of the Caliphate since the beginning,” Coulibaly allegedly said in the video. “Our group [of attackers] was coordinated before the attack. France is a legitimate target because what they are doing to us.”
TheBlaze has not independently verified the report BBC News attributed to Le Nouvel Observateur.
A total of 17 people were killed over the course of three days of terror last month in France.
Islamists killing Christians in the middle east and Obama yawns. While he offers to take in to America thousands of Syrian Muslims he makes no such outreach to the Christians there. Therein lies the story of his world view.
There is no such thing as settled science. Settled science is the refuge of fraudsters.
Scientists Are Wrong All the Time, and That’s Fantastic
Getty Images
On February 28, 1998, the eminent medical journal The Lancet published an observational study of 12 children: Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive development disorder in children. It might not sound sexy, but once the media read beyond the title, into the study’s descriptions of how those nasty-sounding symptoms appeared just after the kids got vaccinated, the impact was clear: The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine can cause autism.
This was the famous study by Andrew Wakefield, the one that many credit with launching the current hyper-virulent form of anti-vaccination sentiment. Wakefield is maybe the most prominent modern scientist who got it wrong—majorly wrong, dangerously wrong, barred-from-medical-practice wrong.
But scientists are wrong all the time, in far more innocuous ways. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s great.
When a researcher gets proved wrong, that means the scientific method is working. Scientists make progress by re-doing each other’s experiments—replicating them to see if they can get the same result. More often than not, they can’t. “Failure to reproduce is a good thing,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. “It happens a lot more than we know about.” That could be because the research was outright fraudulent, like Wakefield’s. But there are plenty of other ways to get a bum result—as the Public Libary of Science’s new collection of negative results, launched this week, will highlight in excruciating detail.
You might have a particularly loosey-goosey postdoc doing your pipetting. You might have picked a weird patient population that shows a one-time spike in drug efficacy. Or you might have just gotten a weird statistical fluke. No matter how an experiment got screwed up, “negative results can be extremely exciting and useful—sometimes even more useful than positive results,” says John Ioannidis, a biologist at Stanford who published a now-famous paper suggesting that most scientific studies are wrong.
The problem with science isn’t that scientists can be wrong: It’s that when they’re proven wrong, it’s way too hard for people to find out.
Negative results, like the one that definitively refuted Wakefield’s paper, don’t make the news. Fun game: Bet you can’t name the lead author of that paper. (It’s okay, neither could we. But keep reading to find out!) It’s way easier for journalists to write a splashy headline about a provocative new discovery (guilty) than a glum dismissal of yet another hypothesis, and scientific journals play into that bias all the time as they pick studies to publish.
“All of the incentives in science are aligned against publishing negative results or failures to replicate,” says Oransky. Scientists feel pressure to produce exciting results because that’s what big-name journals want—it doesn’t look great for the covers of Science and Nature to scream “Whoops, we were wrong!”—and scientists desperately need those high-profile publications to secure funding and tenure. “People are forced to claim significance, or something new, extravagant, unusual, and positive,” says Ioannidis.
Plus, scientists don’t like to step on each other’s toes. “They feel a lot of pressure not to contradict each other,” says Elizabeth Iorns, the CEO of Science Exchange. “There’s a lot of evidence that if you do that, it’ll be negative for your career.”
When the politics of scientific publishing prevent negative results from getting out there, science can’t advance, and potentially dangerous errors—whether due to fraud or an honest mistake—go unchecked. Which is why lots of scientific publications, including PLOS, have recently begun to emphasize reproducibility and negative results.
Big-name journals have said they want to make data more transparent and accessible, so scientists can easily repeat analyses. Others, like the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, are devoted to publishing only negative results. PLOS One’s collection of negative, null, and inconclusive papers, called The Missing Pieces, is now putting the spotlight on papers that contradict previous findings. PLOS thought—and we agree—it’s time to give them the attention they deserve. Negative results, step up:
Vaccines and Autism. Wakefield’s 1998 study reported a possible link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and the onset of autism in children with gastrointestinal problems. More than 20 studies have since ruled out any connection, but they didn’t focus on children with gastrointestinal problems. So in 2008, researchers led by Mady Hornig conducted a case study that did. Again, they found no evidence linking the vaccine with autism.
Psychic Ability. In 2011, Daryl Bem, a psychologist at Cornell, conducted nine experiments that seemed to suggest people could be psychic. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so researchers replicated one of the experiments three times in 2012. As the newer paper states, “all three replication attempts failed to produce significant effects and thus do not support the existence of psychic ability.” Bummer.
Priming and Performance. In a highly cited study from 2001, John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale, found that people who were exposed to words like “strive” or “attain,” did better on a cognitive task. Researchers did two experiments in 2013 to reproduce the original findings. They could not.
Running Out of Self Control. Some research has suggested that when trying to exercise self-control, you really are exercising—like flexing a muscle. After a while, you get too tired and can no longer control yourself. But a 2014 study wasn’t able to reproduce this effect at all.
Buddies and Memory. In 2007, Sid Horton, a psychologist at Northwestern University, found that people who associated an object with a specific person were able to name a picture of that object faster when the person was present. But in a valiant display of self-abnegation, Horton tried to reproduce his results in 2014—and failed.
Sharon Stone liberal, hypocrite. She took the money and ran.
Sharon Stone sued over events in Chevron Shakedown
POSTED AT 5:01 PM ON FEBRUARY 27, 2015 BY JAZZ SHAw
While there’s been a fair bit of Chevron Shakedown coverage already this year, this story has an ironic and interesting twist to it. While Chevron continues to chase down all of the people involved in attempting to pick their pockets, it seems like some of the actors involved with Ecuador and the environmentalists are falling to feeding on each other. And in this case, actors has a literal as well as a figurative meaning. Hollywood star Sharon Stone was scheduled to make a (paid) appearance in Ecuador last year to talk about the environment and generally say how bad Chevron was, etc. She was paid a significant sum of money for this “activism” but two small problems cropped up. First, she didn’t show up to do the appearance. And second, according the hosts of the event, she kept the money anyway.
A public relations firm representing the government of Ecuador sued Sharon Stone in federal court on Tuesday alleging that the actress absconded with a large speaking fee for work promoting that government’s long-running legal and political battle against oil giant Chevron.The complaint, filed by New York-based MCSquared PR, alleges that Stone and the American Talent Bureau, a speaking agency that represented her, accepted $275,000 to attend an anti-Chevron event in Ecuador last year but failed to appear as promised.MCSquared alleges that APB canceled Stone’s appearance at an event in Ecuador, scheduled for April 2014, but never returned the $275,000 it was paid for the event.The firm’s agreement with Stone and APB was never put in writing, admitted MCSquared president Maria Garay in an affidavit accompanying the complaint. However, the firm “entered into an oral agreement with APB and Stone (through her agent APB) for Stone to make a three-day appearance in Ecuador from April 7-9, 2014.”
In terms of their little spat, there are obviously complicating factors. The reps for the actress say she fell ill in Brazil right before the event. They also claim that the contract for the event was never put in writing. Both of these items are certainly relevant, but they lose some heft in the argument when you fail to give back the cash.
None of this, however, is as interesting as the enlightenment gained about MCSquared, who admits to arranging for multiple celebrities to go and speak on behalf of the rain forests and against Chevron… all for a pretty hefty price tag. Mia Farrow received $188,000 and Danny Glover was paid $330,000. It’s rather odd that when you hear about these Hollywood types taking a bold stance against The Man and fighting for the health of the planet, they never seem to mention all the money they are getting, no?
This is just a Friday feel good story for you, but I’m sure the folks at Chevron are finding it all quite amusing.
Why Don't Liberals Care About Black-on-Black Killing?
Why Don't Liberals Care About Black-on-Black Killing?
By Christopher Chantrill
The good thing about a book like Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is that it's real reportage about murder in the African American ghetto; it's not just narrative from the usual social justice warriors.
And when author Jill Leovy gets to talk about her book on NPR's Fresh Air in “'Ghettoside' Explores Why Murder is Invisible in Los Angeles” we get to see what is really going on, despite the author's knee-jerk liberalism.
Author Leovy's angle is that routine murder in African American ghettos is invisible, in the sense that individual murders don't get a write-up in the paper. So she decided to do something about it, The Homicide Report, a blog that documents each and every murder in LA.
Each murder, routine as it is, devastates a family, but the cops only arrest a suspect in about 40 percent of the murders. To add insult to injury, the cops compensate by harassing young men on the street with arrests for minor infractions.
Of course, everybody knows “who dunnit” because the perpetrators typically come around to the victim's home and taunt the grieving family.
Why would they do that? Because the gang-bangers need to intimidate potential witnesses. Thus, everybody knows who did it, but nobody is willing to testify. Here's the scoop, buried in the middle of the Fresh Air interview:
[Leovy:] I spoke to a mother, once, in South Bureau - black woman - her son had just been murdered. I think this was maybe a couple of days after the murder. I had gone to her door. And it was one of these cases where the police just had no witnesses. The case wasn't going anywhere. The mother told me that since the murder, the killers, who she knew, who were, I think, the gang members who lived on her street, had been knocking on her door and taunting her and laughing at her - her grief.
What is the African American response to this? It is “Snitches get stitches.” And what is the liberal response to this? It is to blame the police for police brutality. You couldn't invent a better way to keep the killing going.
End of song, beginning of story.
This ruling-class tolerance for lower-class violence is not new. We've had urban gangs in America at least since the Irish gangs of the mid 19th century. We've had Jewish gangs and Bugsy Siegel running Las Vegas. We've had the Italians and the Mafia. We've had the black Crips and Bloods for a while and now we've got Hispanic gangs.
And then there are unions. The point of a labor union is intimidation, and not just intimidation of employers. The whole point of the strike and the picket is to intimidate workers eager for a job from hiring on at picketed employers. And liberals are fine with that.
How come people are afraid to report crimes to police and afraid to testify in court? How come the ruling class accepts the existence of virtual proto-states in the inner cities, where the gang, not the police, holds sway?
We all accept urban violence as endemic, not epidemic. But let's do a thought experiment. Imagine what would happen if, say, the NRA and the Tea Party started killing each other in a suburban turf war.
I will tell you what would happen. Number one, white suburbanites would insist that their mayors and city councils stopped the violence yesterday, or say good-bye to elective office. Number two, the liberal media would run wall-to-wall coverage about violence in the very DNA of America.
But with black-on-black violence, the media say nothing (except for Jill Leovy), the liberals do nothing, and inner-city residents
By Christopher Chantrill
The good thing about a book like Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is that it's real reportage about murder in the African American ghetto; it's not just narrative from the usual social justice warriors.
And when author Jill Leovy gets to talk about her book on NPR's Fresh Air in “'Ghettoside' Explores Why Murder is Invisible in Los Angeles” we get to see what is really going on, despite the author's knee-jerk liberalism.
Author Leovy's angle is that routine murder in African American ghettos is invisible, in the sense that individual murders don't get a write-up in the paper. So she decided to do something about it, The Homicide Report, a blog that documents each and every murder in LA.
Each murder, routine as it is, devastates a family, but the cops only arrest a suspect in about 40 percent of the murders. To add insult to injury, the cops compensate by harassing young men on the street with arrests for minor infractions.
Of course, everybody knows “who dunnit” because the perpetrators typically come around to the victim's home and taunt the grieving family.
Why would they do that? Because the gang-bangers need to intimidate potential witnesses. Thus, everybody knows who did it, but nobody is willing to testify. Here's the scoop, buried in the middle of the Fresh Air interview:
[Leovy:] I spoke to a mother, once, in South Bureau - black woman - her son had just been murdered. I think this was maybe a couple of days after the murder. I had gone to her door. And it was one of these cases where the police just had no witnesses. The case wasn't going anywhere. The mother told me that since the murder, the killers, who she knew, who were, I think, the gang members who lived on her street, had been knocking on her door and taunting her and laughing at her - her grief.
What is the African American response to this? It is “Snitches get stitches.” And what is the liberal response to this? It is to blame the police for police brutality. You couldn't invent a better way to keep the killing going.
End of song, beginning of story.
This ruling-class tolerance for lower-class violence is not new. We've had urban gangs in America at least since the Irish gangs of the mid 19th century. We've had Jewish gangs and Bugsy Siegel running Las Vegas. We've had the Italians and the Mafia. We've had the black Crips and Bloods for a while and now we've got Hispanic gangs.
And then there are unions. The point of a labor union is intimidation, and not just intimidation of employers. The whole point of the strike and the picket is to intimidate workers eager for a job from hiring on at picketed employers. And liberals are fine with that.
How come people are afraid to report crimes to police and afraid to testify in court? How come the ruling class accepts the existence of virtual proto-states in the inner cities, where the gang, not the police, holds sway?
We all accept urban violence as endemic, not epidemic. But let's do a thought experiment. Imagine what would happen if, say, the NRA and the Tea Party started killing each other in a suburban turf war.
I will tell you what would happen. Number one, white suburbanites would insist that their mayors and city councils stopped the violence yesterday, or say good-bye to elective office. Number two, the liberal media would run wall-to-wall coverage about violence in the very DNA of America.
But with black-on-black violence, the media say nothing (except for Jill Leovy), the liberals do nothing, and inner-city residents
reelect their race-baiting minority politicians.
So here is my question: Liberals say they are opposed to violence. They get their knickers in a twist at the very thought of right-
wing extremists, as in the latest DHS report on “sovereign citizen extremists.”
But hey, when it comes to blacks killing each other in the inner city, they worry about racism. When union thugs are intimidating workers willing to work, they write about unions giving us the weekend. When Muslims are creating no-go zones, they worry about Islamophobia.
You'd think that the liberal ruling class would put a stop to gangs setting up proto-states in our cities, and Islamists setting up no- go zones in Texas.
But liberals don't care about blacks killing each other, or workers intimidating each other. What they care about are threats to their ruling class power. The NRA is a threat to their power. The Tea Party is a threat to their power. College dropout Scott Walker is a threat to their power. So they must be destroyed, as in racism, sexism, hate speech.
But comes black-on-black violence in the inner cities? Nothing Can Be Done.
And nobody calls out the liberals on their hypocrisy.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.
So here is my question: Liberals say they are opposed to violence. They get their knickers in a twist at the very thought of right-
wing extremists, as in the latest DHS report on “sovereign citizen extremists.”
But hey, when it comes to blacks killing each other in the inner city, they worry about racism. When union thugs are intimidating workers willing to work, they write about unions giving us the weekend. When Muslims are creating no-go zones, they worry about Islamophobia.
You'd think that the liberal ruling class would put a stop to gangs setting up proto-states in our cities, and Islamists setting up no- go zones in Texas.
But liberals don't care about blacks killing each other, or workers intimidating each other. What they care about are threats to their ruling class power. The NRA is a threat to their power. The Tea Party is a threat to their power. College dropout Scott Walker is a threat to their power. So they must be destroyed, as in racism, sexism, hate speech.
But comes black-on-black violence in the inner cities? Nothing Can Be Done.
And nobody calls out the liberals on their hypocrisy.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.
IRS targeting of conservative and pro-Israel groups still going on. IRS, FEC, FCC, recently development, do you see a pattern of leftist bureaucratic tyranny?
New Revelations Show IRS Is Judge, Jury, Executioner–And Grave Robber
The most important piece of information about the IRS’s targeting of conservative and pro-Israel groups is this: it is still going on. Politico reported yesterday that there are two categories of groups still being delayed and silenced by the IRS’s tax-exempt apparatchiks. The first category is Karl Rove (and his Crossroads organization). The second category is financially strapped mom-and-pop shops who have been driven into debt by the IRS’s corrupt practices in which critics of the Obama administration are deprived of some of their constitutional rights.
The story notes that this contradicts new IRS director John Koskinen’s claim that the agency “completed” its set of recommendations to get the corruption under control. As of this week, it’s still taking place. What this means in practice is that these groups, some of which applied several years ago, are still in limbo, unable to proceed. The point is to destroy the groups by bankrupting and suffocating them. Politico quotes a former IRS official using the agency’s term for this: “death by bureaucratic delay.”
Here’s how it plays out for the groups the government’s weaponized tax collectors set out to crush:
The years-long delay has gutted these groups’ membership, choked their ability to raise funds, forced them to reserve pots of money for possible back taxes and driven them into debt to pay legal bills.“If you say the targeting issues have been resolved … how come we still haven’t received a determination one way or the other?” asked Rick Harbaugh, leader of the Albuquerque Tea Party, which has been waiting five years for its tax exemption. “We are still being targeted.”
Rove’s Crossroads group can afford being the target of a government campaign against those who would or should appear on the president’s enemies list (though obviously the IRS’s behavior is still morally repulsive). But what about all the others? Here’s one example:
At one point, for example, Unite in Action, a group that’s been on hold for more than 1,700 days, looked poised for growth. With members in various states and a mission to “prepare current and future generations to be guardians of our Constitutional Republic,” it quickly built a nationwide following, fundraising $600,000 to throw a multiday rally on conservative priorities in Washington, D.C., in 2010. Thousands attended.IRS agents flagged its tax-exempt application, citing a blog post that said “fire Timothy Geithner,” then the Treasury secretary, and “demand Joe Biden apologize,” according to leaked IRS documents from 2011.When the IRS asked Unite in Action for its list of donors, their occupations and addresses, the group’s finances took a nosedive.“We told everybody that we will in no circumstances surrender that … [donor] information, but it still has dried up about 95 percent of the fundraising that we were able to do prior,” said current president Jay Devereaux, who joined the group in 2009. The IRS would later apologize for asking for groups’ donors, which it said was inappropriate.Now Unite in Action is $16,000 in debt and operates on an annual budget of $8,000 to $10,000.
That case is an important one, because the IRS admitted afterwards that its own actions were inappropriate. There is no debate, in other words, about the injustice of the government’s actions here. But that didn’t stop the government from destroying a growing group and plunging it into debt because it dared criticize the administration of Dear Leader.
They lose donors and members “out of fear and frustration.” Some groups, Politico notes, “went belly-up while waiting.” That’s the point of the death-by-delay targeting. In other cases, the IRS demanded back taxes to try to pick the pockets of the activists one more time before the groups faded away. The IRS is both executioner and grave robber.
It’s also been engaged in a cover-up, and new revelations suggest that cover-up may be exactly as illegal as it looks: which is to say, very.
Politico reports on the congressional testimony of the IRS’s inspector general J. Russell George and his deputy, Timothy Camus. They revealed that the IRS actually withheld communication and evidence related to Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the abuse-of-power scheme:
In addition, TIGTA learned two weeks ago there were more than 400 additional back-up tapes that IRS did not disclose to the agency for examination when it opened its probe last summer and asked for all the relevant back-ups, said Deputy IG for Investigations Timothy Camus. They believe those could include more Lerner emails from 2011.“There is potential criminal activity,” Camus said when pressed by Republicans.
And unsurprisingly, the Democrats in Congress are aiding in the cover-up by attacking the inspector general. These Democrats, including Virginia’s Gerry Connolly, want an investigation into the investigator. For whatever reason, the Democrats continue to act as though any serious investigation will be damaging to them.
And the Justice Department, led by outgoing attorney general Eric Holder, is lending its own support to the abuse of power. One of the reasons the IRS has given for the continued delay on some applications is that those applications are the subject of litigation and therefore the Justice Department has a say. But of course the Justice Department is not seriously investigating the administration or its political allies, so it’s a cover and an excuse to deny justice. It’s a scam.
The IRS, by the way, has basically proved that it shouldn’t be the free-speech gatekeeper not only because it’s unconstitutional but also because it’s simply incapable of respecting the rights of ordinary Americans. For example, the IRS, according to Politico, made the groups an offer: “immediate approval if they pledged to spend less than 40 percent of their time and resources on political campaigns. But several of the groups dismissed that option on principle, calling it unfair because it was a stricter standard than other 501(c)(4)s had to abide by.”
Precisely. The IRS told groups they could surrender a portion of their rights to which they are legally entitled and the IRS would allow them to retain the remaining portion of their free-speech rights. This is the behavior of an organized crime syndicate, not a governmental institution of a free country. It is extortionate, deeply immoral, and a permanent stain on the agency and the politicians who enabled it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he will do everything possible to bring to justice those who committed the "vile and cynical" murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. Putin to call O.J. Simpson for advice.
Boris Nemtsov murder prompts Putin 'justice' pledge
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he will do everything possible to bring to justice those who committed the "vile and cynical" murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.
In a telegram to Mr Nemtsov's mother, published on the Kremlin website, Mr Putin offered condolences and praised Mr Nemtsov's openness and honesty.
Mr Nemtsov was shot four times in the back on a bridge near the Kremlin.
Western leaders demanded a transparent investigation into the killing.
In the telegram to Mr Nemtsov's 86-year-old mother, Dina Eydman, Mr Putin said: "We will do everything to ensure that the perpetrators of this vile and cynical crime and those who stand behind them are properly punished."
He said: "Please accept my deepest condolences in connection with this irreparable loss. I sincerely share your sorrow.
"Boris Nemtsov has left his mark in the history of Russia, in its political and public life. He occupied significant posts in a difficult time of transition in this country. He always openly and honestly voiced and upheld his views."
Expressing shock at the "cruel and cynical murder", Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Mr Nemtsov was a "principled person" who "acted openly, consistently and never betrayed his views".
On Saturday there was a steady stream of people leaving flowers at the site of the killing.
Mr Nemtsov, 55, served as first deputy PM under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s but fell out of favour with Mr Putin and became an outspoken opponent, particularly on the Ukraine conflict.
In a recent interview, Mr Nemtsov had said he feared Mr Putin would have him killed because of his opposition to the war.
Mr Nemtsov died hours after appealing for support for a march on Sunday in Moscow against the conflict.
The march, due to be held in a Moscow suburb, has now been cancelled, and the organisers have been given permission to hold a mourning procession in the centre of the city.
Russian state media say it will begin on Kitaigorodsky Proezd at 15:00 local time (12:00 GMT) and pass the site of the killing. Analysts say it is rare for state media to announce the time and place of opposition rallies.
'Courage'
Amid widespread global outrage, US President Barack Obama condemned the killing as a "brutal murder".
Analysis: Artyom Liss, BBC Russian
Russia woke up in shock on Saturday. The press, the social media, the politicians - all describe the killing of Boris Nemtsov, one of the leaders of the country's opposition, as something that was - until Friday night - completely unthinkable.
He was gunned down a stone's throw away from the Kremlin, in an area which is always tightly policed, and where security cameras are everywhere you look. He was, it appears, tracked for hours as he travelled around central Moscow.
The investigation will probably take a very long time. From experience, few in Moscow believe that it will name those who ordered the killing. The Russian police have a long history of catching people who pull triggers - but they are much less successful when it comes to identifying their masterminds.
The Russian government must conduct a "prompt, impartial and transparent investigation", the US president urged.
"I admired Nemtsov's courageous dedication to the struggle against corruption in Russia and appreciated his willingness to share his candid views with me when we met in Moscow in 2009," Mr Obama said in a statement.
A statement from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of Mr Nemtsov's "courage" for his frequent criticism of Russian government policy.
Mrs Merkel "calls on President Putin to ensure that the murder is cleared up and the perpetrators brought to justice", her spokesman Steffen Seibert said.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron echoed the calls for an inquiry, saying he was "shocked and sickened" by the news.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described Mr Nemtsov as a friend of Ukraine.
He said: "Boris had declared he would provide clear evidence of Russian armed forces' participation in [the war] in Ukraine. Somebody was afraid of this."
Amnesty International demanded a "prompt, impartial and effective" investigation into what it said was "a cold-blooded murder of one of those free voices whom the authorities have so actively sought to silence".
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Mr Putin, told the BBC that any suggestion the Kremlin was involved in the killing was nonsense.
'Meticulously planned'
Mr Nemtsov was shot at around 23:40 (20:40 GMT) on Friday while crossing Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge accompanied by a woman, Russia's interior ministry said.
He was shot with a pistol from a white car which fled the scene, police said.
Russian investigative committee head Vladimir Markin said in a statement that several motives for the killing were being considered including "Islamic extremism" and the victim's alleged links with Ukraine.
"Mr Nemtsov may have been sacrificed by those who do not shun anything to reach their political gains," the statement said.
It added that the attack was meticulously planned and the killers had been tracking Mr Nemtsov's movements around the city.
Violent deaths of Putin opponents
April 2003 - Liberal politician Sergey Yushenkov assassinated near his Moscow home
July 2003 - Investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin died after 16-day mysterious illness
July 2004 - Forbes magazine Russian editor Paul Klebnikov shot from moving car on Moscow street, died later in hospital
October 2006 - Investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya shot dead outside her Moscow apartment
November 2006 - Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died nearly three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium in London hotel
March 2013 -Boris Berezovsky, former Kremlin power broker turned Putin critic, found dead in his UK home
DOJ doing everything to squelch opposition. No mention of Hillary, George Soros funded groups, just people who are not Democrats.
Justice Department ramps upscrutiny of candidates andindependent groups
By Matea Gold and Colby Itkowitz February 27
The Justice Department is stepping up scrutiny of the increasingly cozy ties between candidates and their outside allies, a move that could jolt the freewheeling campaign- finance atmosphere ahead of the 2016 elections.
A rare conviction of a Virginia campaign operative this month is part of a broader focus on cases in which candidates may be violating a federal ban on sharing strategic information with well-funded independent allies, Justice officials said.
“The opportunity to commit the crime has increased dramatically,” said Justice spokesman Peter Carr. “Illegal coordination is difficult to detect, which is why we strongly encourage party or campaign insiders to come forward.”
The department’s move comes as complaints have stalled before the Federal Election Commission, which has not moved ahead with any coordination investigations since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 triggered a proliferation of big-money groups.
By Matea Gold and Colby Itkowitz February 27
The Justice Department is stepping up scrutiny of the increasingly cozy ties between candidates and their outside allies, a move that could jolt the freewheeling campaign- finance atmosphere ahead of the 2016 elections.
A rare conviction of a Virginia campaign operative this month is part of a broader focus on cases in which candidates may be violating a federal ban on sharing strategic information with well-funded independent allies, Justice officials said.
“The opportunity to commit the crime has increased dramatically,” said Justice spokesman Peter Carr. “Illegal coordination is difficult to detect, which is why we strongly encourage party or campaign insiders to come forward.”
The department’s move comes as complaints have stalled before the Federal Election Commission, which has not moved ahead with any coordination investigations since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 triggered a proliferation of big-money groups.
The newly aggressive stance by the Justice Department is certain to have wide
reverberations at a time when candidates are taking more leeway than ever in their
relationships with independent allies. Many potential 2016 candidates are working
hand-in-glove with super PACs set up to support them.
“It will have a huge impact on the landscape,” said Lawrence Norton, a former FEC general counsel who co-chairs the political law practice at Venable. With independent groups “only growing in influence, that announcement is a signal to everyone involved in the 2016 campaign that government is watching.
“We’re talking about potential criminal enforcement action, not a FEC investigation or a fine,” he said. “The implications are serious.”
The recent case involved Tyler Harber, a 34-year-old Republican campaign operative from Alexandria, who pleaded guilty Feb. 12 to illegally coordinating $325,000 spent by a super PAC with a congressional campaign he was running. Prosecutors noted that it was the first criminal conviction for campaign-finance coordination.
In a statement announcing his plea, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said the department “will aggressively pursue coordination offenses at every appropriate opportunity.”
Anthony Herman, another former FEC general counsel, said it appears that federal prosecutors “view themselves as filling a role — to the extent that they think the FEC is not on the job, they think part of their job is to fill that gap.”
Even so, pursuing coordination cases and securing convictions is not easy without inside information. The few known cases in which federal prosecutors have investigated
“It will have a huge impact on the landscape,” said Lawrence Norton, a former FEC general counsel who co-chairs the political law practice at Venable. With independent groups “only growing in influence, that announcement is a signal to everyone involved in the 2016 campaign that government is watching.
“We’re talking about potential criminal enforcement action, not a FEC investigation or a fine,” he said. “The implications are serious.”
The recent case involved Tyler Harber, a 34-year-old Republican campaign operative from Alexandria, who pleaded guilty Feb. 12 to illegally coordinating $325,000 spent by a super PAC with a congressional campaign he was running. Prosecutors noted that it was the first criminal conviction for campaign-finance coordination.
In a statement announcing his plea, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said the department “will aggressively pursue coordination offenses at every appropriate opportunity.”
Anthony Herman, another former FEC general counsel, said it appears that federal prosecutors “view themselves as filling a role — to the extent that they think the FEC is not on the job, they think part of their job is to fill that gap.”
Even so, pursuing coordination cases and securing convictions is not easy without inside information. The few known cases in which federal prosecutors have investigated
illegal coordination were driven by tips they received while pursuing other alleged
crimes.
“It is going to be very difficult to bring these kinds of cases and to ferret out instances of unlawful coordination,” said Herman, a senior counsel at Covington & Burling.
The Harber case began when Terry Wear, a local Republican party official, alerted federal prosecutors in Virginia about a suspicious super PAC called the National Republican Victory Fund that he believed was trying to scam donors.
Law enforcement officials later discovered the super PAC was being run by Harber at the same time he was serving as campaign manager for GOP congressional candidate Chris Perkins. Harber had directed a donor who had given the maximum to Perkins’ campaign to contribute additional funds to the super PAC, much of which he directed back to himself and his family.
“This is really a guy who was really off the reservation,” Wear said.
Such a clear-cut case of someone straddling the line is unusual. More often, candidates
and their aides walk right up to the line — and often shout across it.
Nonetheless, experts said the threat of federal criminal investigations could give pause to campaign operatives who have become accustomed to a lack of action by the sharply divided FEC.
Overall FEC enforcement has plummeted in the past decade. The agency found election- law violations in just 16 cases last year and issued $206,235 in civil penalties — one of the smallest amounts in 30 years, according to data obtained by The Washington Post through a public-record request. An additional 116 cases were closed without finding fault.
“It is going to be very difficult to bring these kinds of cases and to ferret out instances of unlawful coordination,” said Herman, a senior counsel at Covington & Burling.
The Harber case began when Terry Wear, a local Republican party official, alerted federal prosecutors in Virginia about a suspicious super PAC called the National Republican Victory Fund that he believed was trying to scam donors.
Law enforcement officials later discovered the super PAC was being run by Harber at the same time he was serving as campaign manager for GOP congressional candidate Chris Perkins. Harber had directed a donor who had given the maximum to Perkins’ campaign to contribute additional funds to the super PAC, much of which he directed back to himself and his family.
“This is really a guy who was really off the reservation,” Wear said.
Such a clear-cut case of someone straddling the line is unusual. More often, candidates
and their aides walk right up to the line — and often shout across it.
Nonetheless, experts said the threat of federal criminal investigations could give pause to campaign operatives who have become accustomed to a lack of action by the sharply divided FEC.
Overall FEC enforcement has plummeted in the past decade. The agency found election- law violations in just 16 cases last year and issued $206,235 in civil penalties — one of the smallest amounts in 30 years, according to data obtained by The Washington Post through a public-record request. An additional 116 cases were closed without finding fault.
“I’m glad somebody is doing these cases,” said Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic member
of the commission. “Maybe that will put a little bit of a fear of God in people.”
Her GOP colleagues on the panel say the lack of FEC investigations is a sign that people are doing a good job of following the rules.
“Republicans on the FEC have long held we are here to enforce the law as it is, not as we or others wish it to be,” said Caroline Hunter, a Republican member. “This philosophy, coupled with a concerted effort by the FEC to encourage voluntary compliance, has reduced civil penalties.”
The FEC has closed 29 complaints of alleged illegal coordination between candidates and super PACs in the past five years, without opening an investigation into any of them. In 28 of those cases, the agency’s general counsel did not recommend an investigation, said Lee Goodman, one of the three GOP commissioners.
That’s in part because the FEC’s narrowly drawn coordination regulation — which was the subject of years of litigation — contains so many exceptions that there is still ample room for candidates to work in concert with their big-money allies. For example, communicating strategic information in public, as several congressional campaigns did in the 2014 elections, is legal.
Among the coordination cases the FEC closed recently without investigating was a complaint against Terri Lynn Land, a 2014 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, who had said in a speech that her campaign had talked to strategists for independent super PACs who “really want to support us here in Michigan.”
The agency also dismissed a complaint alleging that the 2012 campaign of then-Senate candidate Angus King, an independent from Maine, coordinated with a super PAC. The complaint noted that a King campaign chairman had served as a director of a super PAC
Her GOP colleagues on the panel say the lack of FEC investigations is a sign that people are doing a good job of following the rules.
“Republicans on the FEC have long held we are here to enforce the law as it is, not as we or others wish it to be,” said Caroline Hunter, a Republican member. “This philosophy, coupled with a concerted effort by the FEC to encourage voluntary compliance, has reduced civil penalties.”
The FEC has closed 29 complaints of alleged illegal coordination between candidates and super PACs in the past five years, without opening an investigation into any of them. In 28 of those cases, the agency’s general counsel did not recommend an investigation, said Lee Goodman, one of the three GOP commissioners.
That’s in part because the FEC’s narrowly drawn coordination regulation — which was the subject of years of litigation — contains so many exceptions that there is still ample room for candidates to work in concert with their big-money allies. For example, communicating strategic information in public, as several congressional campaigns did in the 2014 elections, is legal.
Among the coordination cases the FEC closed recently without investigating was a complaint against Terri Lynn Land, a 2014 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, who had said in a speech that her campaign had talked to strategists for independent super PACs who “really want to support us here in Michigan.”
The agency also dismissed a complaint alleging that the 2012 campaign of then-Senate candidate Angus King, an independent from Maine, coordinated with a super PAC. The complaint noted that a King campaign chairman had served as a director of a super PAC
backing the candidate.
The limitations of the current rules are part of the problem, advocates for stricter
enforcement say.
“There is a huge gap between what the general public would think of as coordination and what the FEC would define as coordination,” said Paul Ryan, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.
Ann Ravel, the Democratic chairman of the FEC, noted that coordination rules were last updated the year before the Citizens United decision.
“They really didn’t anticipate the kinds of super PACs that now exist,” she said. “But the likelihood of us being able to have four votes to strengthen the rules on coordination is not great.”
Matea Gold is a national political reporter for The Washington Post, covering money and influence.
Colby Itkowitz is a national reporter for In The Loop.
The limitations of the current rules are part of the problem, advocates for stricter
enforcement say.
“There is a huge gap between what the general public would think of as coordination and what the FEC would define as coordination,” said Paul Ryan, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.
Ann Ravel, the Democratic chairman of the FEC, noted that coordination rules were last updated the year before the Citizens United decision.
“They really didn’t anticipate the kinds of super PACs that now exist,” she said. “But the likelihood of us being able to have four votes to strengthen the rules on coordination is not great.”
Matea Gold is a national political reporter for The Washington Post, covering money and influence.
Colby Itkowitz is a national reporter for In The Loop.
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