5 FAST FACTS ABOUT XKEYSCORE SPYING ON YOU

FROM HEAVY

XKeyscore, Government Surveillance Program: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know Published:12:43 pm EDT, July 31, 2013| Updated:12:43 pm EDT, July 31, 2013| Comment | By Matthew Guariglia SHARE THIS ARTICLE FOLLOW HEAVY 19 Share Heavy.com Sitting at a desk somewhere in the world, an NSA analyst types your Facebook username into a window. Seconds later, he is looking at you Facebook chat your friends in real time. That is what was uncovered today in new documents leaked by Edward Snowden and published by Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian. This leak reveals the most far-reaching government surveillance program yet: XKeyscore. According to Greenwald, the program is designed to give NSA intelligence analysts the ability to survey almost any Internet activity and communications between foreign "targets" and American citizens without a warrant. However, the program would allow analysts easy access to any American's private Internet information by simply plugging in an email address or IP address. 

Snowden told the Guardian: I, sitting at my desk...[could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email. ‘I Could Wiretap Anyone’ —New Snowden Docs Reveal Scariest Surveillance Program Yet | HEAVY The Guardian reveals new NSA documents that reveal a program capable of looking at "nearly everything" you do online. Click here to read more Here is what we know so far about this secret and intrusive program: 

1. It Allows Analysts to Search Your Emails According to the leak, The XKeyscore program allows an analyst to sift through and keyword search any "targets" email account. The analyst would only need to know a persons email address to gain access. Once inside, the analyst can search within the, "bodies of emails, webpages and documents," and even, "To, From, CC, BCC lines." In a similar fashion the wide-ranging surveillance program could peep on virtually all kinds of internet communication. Unlike PRISM, the NSA program revealed by Snowden earlier this year, XKeyscore does not rely on compliance and cooperation from cooperate internet service providers. PRISM relies on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance ACT (FISA) court to legally compel cooperation like Google and Facebook to turn over information about their users. XKeyscore utilizes massive data collections to make your information available to the NSA. NSA and FBI Have Been Montoring Your Internet Usage:

 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know | HEAVY PRISM is a secret government program that tracks 9 major US Internet providers and watches your Internet activity, supported by Obama. Here's what you need to know. Click here to read more 

2. They Can Read Your Facebook Chats Another thing XKeyscore is reportedly able to do is give NSA or contractor analysts the ability to look at Facebook chats and private messages. Greenwald points to an NSA tool called the "DNI Presenter" which allows the government to read unopened emails, but when used in tandem wit XKeyscore, lets the surveyor peep through all Facebook chats and private messages. Again, the leak asserts that all an NSA analyst would need to access this information would be the "target's" Facebook username. TELL YOUR FRIENDS THEY'RE BEING WATCHED! Share on Facebook Twitter Google+ Email 

3. It Collects Massive Amounts of Data The leaks reveal that the NSA is capable of retaining an unbelievable amount of information. Greenwald writes that one NSA report from 2007 estimated that around 150 billion internet records were currently stored, and that each day 1 to 2 billion more were added. XKeyscore stores this information and acts like a search engine, allowing the NSA to sift through the content. Could this be the staggering amount of information prompting the government to build the nearly $2 billion data storage center in Utah? NSA’s Utah Data Center: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know | HEAVY In the wake of the recent surveillance programs scandals, new scrutiny is now being focused on NSA's Utah Data Center in Camp Williams near Bluffdale Click here to read more 

4. Only Limited Justification is Needed Both the leaked slides and Snowden's testimony attest to the fact that the bare minimum of justification is needed to utilize XKeyscore. One slide demonstrates an interface screen for the program which contains a field to enter the target's email address and below it, a small field where analysts need only enter a broad "justification" for the search. Snowden told the Guardian in June that occasionally supervisors would review the searches being made by the analysts using XKeyscore and occasionally tell them to, "bulk up the justification." This means that NSA employees are conducting invasive searches of internet data without proper probable cause. Today before Senate Judiciary Committee, American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said that: These documents also call into question the truth of some of the representations that intelligence officials have made to the public and Congress over the last two months. Intelligence officials have said repeatedly that NSA analysts do not have the ability to sift indiscriminately through Americans' sensitive information, but this new report suggests they do. 

5. The Government Has Called This Leak a Lie According to the Guardian story about the program, the chairman of the House intelligence committee Republican Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) has denied that that government is capable of these feats saying of Snowden, "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do." Neither the government nor Facebook has issued a statement since the release of the Guardian's story early Wednesday morning. The release of the XKeyscore documents today took the wind out of the Obama administration's sails after they released formerly classified documents detailing the NSA collection of cell phone metadata. The revelation that the FISA court was compelling major cellular phone providers like Verizon to hand over metadata to the U.S. Government kicked off the summer of leaks almost two months ago. The documents released by the Obama administration today try to soften the blow by claiming that metadata could only be accessed when a member of the executive branch finds, "facts giving rise to a reasonable, articulable suspicion." These documents went relatively unnoticed in light of the XKeyscore revelations. Constitution Under Fire: A List of Endangered Amendments | HEAVY The last few years have seen the U.S. Constitution constantly under fire from all branches of government. Here is a list of all the Amendments under attack. Click here to read more SHARE THIS ARTICLE FOLLOW HEAVY

Read more at: http://www.heavy.com/news/2013/07/xkeyscore-government-snowden-internet-email-spying/

J..P. MORGAN PAYS MILLIONS IN FINES FOR ENERGY SCHEME

FROM RANDI RHODES.COM

JPMorgan Pays $410 Million Fine for Energy Price Scheme

  

   

The financial giant JPMorgan is paying a $410 million fine for driving up energy prices in California and the Midwest. JPMorgan agreed to the penalty without admitting to government allegations it manipulated utilities to raise the price of electricity. It is the largest settlement in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s history. The British firm Barclays has been hit with a similar fine but is refusing to pay. JPMorgan is facing a more expensive government penalty for its role in pushing toxic mortgage-backed securities. According to The New York Times, the firm is currently under investigation from eight different federal regulators

OBAMA TO RE-WRITE NUMBERS TO SHOW GDP GROWTH

FROM Z NET, Z SPACE

Economic Recovery by Statistical Manipulation

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By Jack Rasmus

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

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Facing the prospect of a 2^nd quarter GDP report showing economic growth less than 1% (some professional forecasting services predict as low as 0.5%), and a year to year growth of the US economy likely to come in at barely 1%--compared to a 2011-12 already tepid 1.7%--the Obama administration on Wednesday, July 31, will announce a major revision of how it calculates GDP which will bump up GDP numbers by as much as 3% according to some estimates. That’s one way to make it appear the US economy is finally recovering again, when all other fiscal-monetary policies since 2009 have actually failed to produce a sustained recovery.

Wednesday’s GDP definition revisions is not the first time that politicians, failing in their policies, have simply rewritten the numbers to make the failure ‘go away’. But this time, the GDP revisions will be made going all the way back to 1929. So watch for the slowing US economy GDP numbers from last October 2012 onward to be significantly revised upward.

Instead of an actual, paltry 0.4% GDP growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2012, a weak 1.6% in the first quarter 2013, and the projected 0.5%-1% for the 2^nd quarter 2013—all the numbers will be revised higher in the coming GDP estimate for the 2^nd quarter 2013. The true GDP growth rate of the most recent April-June 2013 period, projected as low as 0.5% by some professional macroeconmic forecasters, might not thus get reported.

President Bill Clinton played fast and loose with economic statistics as well at the end of his term, redefining who was uninsured in terms of health care coverage. The total of 50 million uninsured at the end of the 1990s, was reduced to 40 million—after having risen by ten million during his eight years in office. Today, they still claim there are only 50 million without health insurance coverage, despite the ten million more becoming unemployed since the Great Recession began in 2007, tens of millions of population increase in the US, and millions more having left the labor force.

Similarly, under President Reagan in the 1980s a raft of government statistics were ‘revised’. Unemployment in particular was revised downward by various means to make it appear fewer were jobless in the wake of the 1981-82 recession. Changes were made to inflation data as well to make it appear lower than it was, and to how manufacturing was defined to make it appear that the mass exodus of manufacturing ‘offshoring’ of jobs was not as great as it was in fact.

This writer has been forewarning of this radical shift in GDP definition since earlier this year, in a series of analyses on US GDP numbers over the past year, July 2012-June 2013, in which the warning was raised the US economy was slowing significantly—from its already weak historical 2011-2012 annual growth rates of less than 2% to around half at 1% (see my blog entries at jackrasmus.com). The point was raised that the Obama administration may use the 5 year scheduled GDP revisions to boost the appearance of the slowing US economy.

The government agency, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, responsible for the GDP numbers will explain the GDP methodology changes this week, and this writer will provide a follow up analysis of the revisions. Some initial indications have appeared in the business press as to how and why the changes are being made in GDP.

One explanation is that Gross Domestic Income (GDI) has been running well ahead of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). GDP is supposed to measure the value of goods and services produced in the US, while GDI is a measure of the income generated in the US. They are supposed to be about equal, with some adjustments for capital consumption and foreign net income flows. The idea is whatever is produced in terms of goods and services generates a roughly equivalent income. However, it appears income (GDI) is rising faster than GDP output. The BEA revisions therefore appear aimed at raising GDP to the higher GDI levels.

But income is rising faster because investors, wealthy households (2%), and their corporations are increasing their income at an accelerating pace from financial securities investments—that don’t show up in GDP calculations which consider only production of real goods and services and exclude financial securities income like stocks, bonds, and derivatives. So instead of adjusting GDI downward, the BEA will raise GDP. It appears from early press indications it will do this by reducing deductions from GDP due to research and development and by now counting some kinds of financial investments as GDP.

When GDP was developed back in the 1930s, economists purposely left out financial assets’ price appreciation in the determination of GDP. Such assets did not reflect real production of goods and services, it was determined. But today in the 21^st century, massive gains in capital incomes increasingly come from financial asset appreciation. Even many non-financial corporations now accumulate up to 25% of their total profits from what are called ‘portfolio investments’—i.e. financial asset speculation. Like profits from real production, that gets distributed to shareholders in the form of capital gains, dividends, stock buybacks, etc. That corporate profits and other forms of non-corporate business income also ends up in reported ‘Gross Domestic Income’, or GDI. As GDI rises in relation to GDP, the government’s answer is to conveniently revise GDP upward to better track GDI. But that doesn’t represent real economic growth and does represent a false recovery when measured in terms of new GDP revisions.

If GDP is revised upward, a host of other government data will have to revise up as well. That will likely include employment numbers as well. How reliable will be future jobs numbers, not just GDP numbers, is therefore a reasonable question.

Apart from making it appear the US economy is doing better than it in fact is, what are the motivations for the forthcoming redefinition of GDP, one should ask?

For one thing, it will make it appear that US federal spending as a share of GDP is less than it is and that US federal debt as a share of GDP is less than it is. That adds ammunition to the Obama administration as it heads into a major confrontation with the US House of Representatives, controlled by radical Republicans, over the coming 2014 budget and debt ceiling negotiations again in a couple of months. It also will assist the joint Obama-US House effort to cut corporate taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars more, as legislation for the same now moves rapidly through Congress in time for the budget-debt ceiling negotiations.

Revising GDP also enables the Federal Reserve to justify its plans to slow its $85 billion a month liquidity injections (quantitative easing, QE) into the banks and private investors. This ‘tapering’ was raised as a possibility last June, and set off a firestorm of financial asset price declines in a matter of days, forcing the Fed to quickly retreat. But the Fed and global bankers know QE is starting to destabilize the global economy in serious ways and both, along with the Obama administration, are looking for ways to slow and ‘taper’ its magnitude—i.e. slow the $85 billion. Redefining GDP upward, along with upward revisions to jobs in coming months, will allow the Fed to revisit ‘tapering’ after September, when the budget-debt ceiling-corporate tax cut deals are concluded between Obama and the US House Republicans. (see my lengthy article, ‘Austerity American Style’ , on this).

The Fed has stated it will begin to reduce its QE when the economy shows more growth and unemployment numbers come down to 6.5%, from the current roughly 7.5% low-ball estimate. (Other government data show unemployment at more than 14%, but politicians and the press ignore that number). Revising GDP upward will thus provide the Fed with an argument to start ‘tapering’. Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, is quite aware of the usefulness of the projected revisions, moreover. In his recent testimony to Congress he specifically noted that the economy was growing better than (old) GDP numbers indicate if the higher Gross Domestic Income (GDI) is considered.

It is ironic somewhat that what we are about to witness with the GDP revisions is a recognition that the economic recovery since 2009 has been a recovery for corporate profits and capital incomes, stock and bond markets, derivatives and other forms of income from financial speculation—all now at record levels—while weekly earnings for the rest continue to decline for the past four years. What the GDP revisions reflect is an attempt to adjust upward GDP to reflect in various ways the gains on financial side of the economy, the gains in income for the few and their corporations.

When you can’t get the economy going otherwise, just change the definitions and how you calculate it all. Manipulate the statistics—just as Clinton did before and Reagan even before that.

Dr. Jack Rasmus is Professor of Political Economy at St. Marys College and the author of the 2012 book, ‘Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few’, Pluto books, and host of the weekly radio show, ‘Alternative Visions’, on the Progressive Radio Network. His blog is jackrasmus.com, website: www.kyklosproductions.com, and twitter handle, #drjackrasmus. 

MICHAEL MOORE: MANNING'S SENTENCE WILL BE ABSURD

FROM READER SUPPORTED NEWS

What Bradley Manning's Sentence Will Tell Us

By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog

31 July 13

oday Bradley Manning was convicted on 20 of 22 counts, including violating the Espionage Act, releasing classified information and disobeying orders. That's the bad news. The good news is he was found not guilty on the charge of "aiding the enemy." That's 'cause who he was aiding was us, the American people. And we're not the enemy. Right?

Manning now faces a potential maximum sentence of 136 years in jail. When his sentence is announced tomorrow, we'll all get a good idea of how seriously the U.S. military takes different crimes. When you hear about how long Manning - now 25 years old - will be in prison, compare it to sentences received by other soldiers:

Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib and the senior officer present the night of the murder of Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi, received no jail time. But he was reprimanded and fined $8,000. (Pappas was heard to say about al-Jamadi, "I'm not going down for this alone.")

Sgt. Sabrina Harman, the woman famously seen giving a thumbs-up next to al-Jamadi's bodyand in another photo smiling next to naked, hooded Iraqis stacked on each other in Abu Ghraib, wassentenced to six months for maltreating detainees.

Spec. Armin Cruz was sentenced to eight months for abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and covering up the abuse.

Spc. Steven Ribordy was sentenced to eight months for being accessory to the murder of four Iraqi prisoners who were "bound, blindfolded, shot and dumped in a canal" in Baghdad in 2007.

Spc. Belmor Ramos was sentenced to seven months for conspiracy to commit murder in the same case.

Sgt. Michael Leahy Jr. was sentenced to life in prison for committing the four Baghdad murders. The military then granted him clemency and reduced his sentence to 20 years, with parole possible after seven.

Marine Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich received no jail time for negligent dereliction in the massacre of 24 unarmed men, women and children in 2005 in the Iraqi town of Haditha. Seven other members of his battalion were charged but none were punished in any way.

Marine Lance Cpl. Jerry Shumate and Lance Cpl. Tyler Jackson were both sentenced to 21 months for the aggravated assault of Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, a father of 11 and grandfather of four, in Al Hamdania in 2006. Awad died after being shot during the assault. Their sentences were later reduced.

Marine Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington was sentenced to eight years for the same incident, butserved only a few months before being granted clemency and released from prison.

Marine Sgt. Lawrence G. Hutchins III was sentenced to 15 years for murder in the Awad case but his conviction was soon overturned and he was released.

No soldiers received any punishment for the killing of five Iraqi children, four women and two men in one Ishaqi home in 2006. Among the U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by Bradley Manning wasemail from a UN official stating that U.S. soldiers had "executed all of them." When Wikileaks published the cable, the uproar in Iraq was so big that the Nouri al-Maliki government couldn't grant any remaining U.S. troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, thus forcing the Obama administration to abandon its plans to keep several thousand U.S. soldiers in Iraq permanently. All U.S. troops were removed at the end of 2011.

My guess is Bradley Manning will spend more time in jail than all of the other soldiers in all of these cases put together. And thus, instead of redeeming ourselves and asking forgiveness for the crimes that Spc. Manning exposed, we will reaffirm to the world who we really are.

OBAMA WON'T RELEASE INQUIRY INTO AFGHAN MASSACRE

FROM THE ATLANTIC WIRE

The White House Won't Release Its Inquiry into a Deadly Afghan Massacre

Afghan General Abdul Rashid Dostum greets supporters from the Sar-e-Pol region during a gathering to which they came to pay their respects, at his palace in Shiberghan in northern Afghanistan August 19, 2009. REUTERS/Caren Firouz (AFGHANISTAN POLITICS SOC

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Soon after taking office, President Obama pledged to open a new inquiry into the deaths of perhaps thousands of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan fighters in late 2001.

Last month, the White House told ProPublica it was still "looking into" the apparent massacre.

Now it says it has concluded its investigation—but won't make it public.

The investigation found that no U.S. personnel were involved, said White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden. Other than that, she said, there is "no plan to release anything."

The silence leaves many unanswered questions about what may have been one of the worst war crimes since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, including why previous American investigations were shut down, and how evidence was destroyed in the case.   

"This is not a sufficient answer given the magnitude of what happened here," said Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy for Physicians for Human Rights, the organization that originally uncovered mass graves where the prisoners were buried.

The long saga began in November 2001, when Taliban prisoners who had surrendered to Northern Alliance commander Abdul Rashid Dostum were transported in shipping containers without food or water. According to eyewitness accounts and forensic work by human rights investigators, hundreds of men died of suffocation while others were shot, and their bodies buried at the desert site of Dasht-i-Leili.

Dostum was working closely with U.S. troops at the time. Surviving prisoners alleged that Americans were present at the loading of the containers—but the Pentagon has said repeatedly that it had no evidence that U.S. forces participated or were even aware of the deaths. (Dostum has denied any personal involvement, and claims that roughly 200 men died in transit, from battlefield wounds.)

In the fall of 2002, the U.S., U.N., and even Dostum himself expressed support for an investigation. But none got underway. In the summer of 2009, prompted by a New York Times report that Bush administration officials had actively discouraged U.S. investigations, President Obama ordered a new review of the case.

Hayden, the White House spokeswoman, said the new investigation "was led by the intelligence community," and found that no Americans—including CIA officers, who were also in the region – were involved.

She declined to answer the following lingering questions:

• What was the scope of the investigation? Former Bush administration officials who had been involved in the initial U.S. response to Dasht-i-Leili told ProPublica that they had not been contacted for a new inquiry. Physicians for Human Rights said it received only tepid responses to its queries from the administration over the past several years.
• Did the investigation cover the allegations, reported in the New York Times, that Bush administration officials had discouraged inquiries by the FBI and State Department?
• Did the U.S. help with related inquires by the U.N. or the Afghan government? Even absent direct involvement of U.S. personnel, government documents make clear that the U.S. knew about the allegations early on. The U.S. was in an alliance with Dostum, and was the de facto power in the country after the invasion. An Afghan human rights official told ProPublica last month, "I haven't seen any political or even rhetorical support of investigations into Dasht-i-Leili or any other investigation into past atrocities, from either Bush or Obama."
• Did the new investigation cover revelations that graves were disturbed and evidence removed as late as 2008? What, if anything, did the U.S. do to help protect the site over the years?

A parallel investigation began by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2010 also never made headway. The committee staffer leading that investigation was former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who is currently serving time in federal prison for revealing the name of an undercover officer to a reporter.

In letters from prison to ProPublica and an interview published recently in Salon, Kiriakou said that Secretary of State John Kerry, who was then chairman of the committee, personally called off the investigation. The State Department declined to comment, but a former Senate aide to Kerry called Kiriakou's account "completely fabricated."

FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

OP-ED

Ted Cruz, wacko like a fox

Does Texas' tea partying senator have his eye on the White House?

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U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks to local residents during a fundraising picnic for the Iowa Republican Party in Des Moines, Iowa. (Charlie Neibergall / Associated Press / July 19, 2013)

By Doyle McManus

July 31, 2013

Ted Cruz is on a roll.

The tea party firebrand from Texas has been in the Senate all of seven months, but he's already looking like a strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Last week, Cruz won a straw poll at a major gathering of the party's conservative wing in Denver with an impressive 45% of the votes, far ahead of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

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Before that, he wowed social conservatives in a campaign-style visit to Iowa, whose caucuses are the first stop on the long trail that leads to the nomination.

"I saw a lot in Ted Cruz, and I liked what I saw," said Bob Vander Plaats, an Iowa evangelical leader whose endorsement has carried weight in earlier caucuses. "If he proves to be the real deal, he will be a phenomenon."

Naturally, Cruz responds to talk of a presidential candidacy with the obligatory aw-shucks: "My focus is entirely on the Senate." But he doesn't say no. So watch what he does, not what he says. He's on his way back to Iowa next week and New Hampshire after that, unusual destinations for a freshman senator whose day job is looking out for Texas.

Isn't a presidential campaign a stretch for a 42-year-old first-time officeholder whose initial media coverage painted him as a nutty combination of Joseph McCarthy and Sarah Palin?

After all, Cruz's first moments in the national spotlight came during Chuck Hagel's nomination hearing to become Defense secretary, when Cruz asked whether the nominee might be hiding secret income from North Korea. Later, he attacked his Republican colleagues as unprincipled "squishes" on gun control. Fellow Senate Republican John McCain dismissed him as a "wacko bird."

But Cruz is wacko like a fox. He is driven by his belief that government spending is the problem, and he says he has a strategy for changing the country's direction. He believes that the tea party movement, if sustained and better organized, could force the Republican establishment to the right — where, in his view, it belongs.

Will he succeed? If not, it won't be for lack of brains. At Harvard Law School, he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review (like Barack Obama), and constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who taught Cruz, told me this week that the senator was "among the smartest students I've ever had."

So far, Cruz's career in Washington has focused on a series of high-profile "no" votes. He voted against raising the federal government's debt ceiling, against aid to states ravaged by Superstorm Sandy and against the nomination of John F. Kerry as secretary of State. Along with most other Republicans, he voted against the immigration reform bill that would grant a path to citizenship to immigrants who entered the country illegally. And now Cruz is leading a campaign to press Republican senators to threaten a government shutdown in October unless President Obama's healthcare program is entirely defunded — a proposal several conservatives have denounced as suicidal.

But Cruz cheerfully shrugs off the criticism of his GOP colleagues as the complaints of an entrenched establishment made up of, in his words, "a lot of people that don't like to be held accountable."

Cruz says his main goal is recasting the Republican Party's economic message to embrace both low-income voters and the Mitt Romney set.

"Republicans should be the party of the 47%, of those climbing the economic ladder," he said at a recent conference sponsored by the Hoover Institution, adding that policies should be evaluated in terms of how they affect "those who are least well off among us."

Cruz calls his approach to these issues "opportunity conservatism," although most of his specific policies still sound like traditional GOP doctrine. He opposes hiking the minimum wage, for example, but on grounds that it would be harmful to "young people, African Americans, Hispanics, single women."

So far, the message seems to be resonating, and Cruz has pulled off a feat that has eluded most other tea party candidates: He is drawing fervent support from social conservatives, economic conservatives and libertarians at the same time.

"He is already trusted on the values issues that mean a lot to social conservatives," Vander Plaats told me. "So we don't mind when he says he wants to focus on economic issues; for most people, we would agree that the focus has to be on growth and opportunity."

Cruz's rawboned attacks on his fellow Republicans haven't won him many friends in the Senate or put his name atop any successful legislation, but they aren't designed to. His goal, he says, is to mobilize the GOP's most conservative voters and push the party in their direction.

It may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election — not according to conventional wisdom, at least. But it's made this once unknown Senate freshman a man to watch in the race for the GOP nomination.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Follow Doyle McManus on Twitter @DoyleMcManus