News Items

Two Women Cavity Searched After Throwing a Cigarette from Car Window

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Absolutely insane.  Seems this cop was on a power trip and made up “I smell marijuana” to exercise his petty little authority.  Don’t mess with Texas!  Meanwhile, where is Jon Corzine? In Liberty, Mike   Like this post? Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G Follow me on Twitter.

Most Transparent President? Obama Cabinet Refuses to Release Info on Cost of Travel

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Just another lie amongst an impressive and ever growing list.  The worst part is he completely understands that his supporters have no idea what day of the week it is, let alone that he is funneling the remaining wealth of the nation upward to the oligarch class.

From Bloomberg:

More than half of President Barack Obama’s cabinet agencies continue to defy open-government rules by not disclosing the cost of travel by top officials.

Above. The. Law.

Nine of 15 cabinet offices have yet to release details of their out-of-town travel records six months after Bloomberg News filed requests for those documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Kathleen Sebelius of the Department of Health and Human Services are among those who haven’t complied.

The law requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 working days. Watchdogs say the delays show that the president hasn’t fulfilled his promise of greater transparency, and one group found that more than half of 99 federal offices ignored a directive to overhaul the way they respond to filings.

The lowest rate of response — 40 percent — has come from Obama’s cabinet. Among executive departments, only Treasury, Homeland Security, Labor, Commerce, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs released travel details.

Now here’s the money line…

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It’s Time to Ban Suicide

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The results are in and it’s high time we did something about it.  According to the American Journal of Public Health, suicide surpassed car crashes as the number one cause of death by injury for Americans as of 2009.  This is unacceptable.  I demand the President hold an immediate press conference, touch the corner of his eye three or four times and insist he will do “whatever it takes” to solve this problem.  Enough is enough people.  I suggest increasingly harsh punishment for those that participate in suicide, even up to the death penalty.

The point of the above was obviously to be absurd.  To offer a ridiculous solution to a tragic and increasingly serious epidemic in this country.  The point is to hammer into people that what I wrote above is not that distinct from some of the anti-gun arguments going around in the wake of the Newtown tragedy.  Suicide is the perfect example to use, because there is no punishment that can serve as a deterrent, there is simply no easy “feel good” solution that Congress can sign into law, smile for the cameras and move on.  If we want to deal with the suicide epidemic, we must deal with the root causes.  While I am no expert on the matter, I would suggest that three of the most probable causes are: 1) Mental illness 2) The economic depression 3) A population over-medicated on prescription drugs, particularly SSRIs.  What I find interesting, is that the above three issues are probably also likely significant root causes of these mass shootings.

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Freedom of the Press Foundation Launches in the War on Censorship

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A really interesting organization launched last night called the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with a slew of prominent individuals involved.  For one, there is Glenn Greenwald, one of my favorite journalists active today who used to work for Salon and now writes for the UK’s Guardian.  Also on the board is Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame; John Perry Barlow a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Xeni Jardin of the Web site Boing Boing; and actor John Cusack.  The idea behind the organization is to support and fund unbiased journalism, particularly the kind that governments and intelligence organizations around the world may not like.  What really bothered all of the founders involved and served as a call to action was the way WikiLeaks was systematically cut off from the financial system.  The Huffington Post writes:

NEW YORK — Not long after WikiLeaks began publishing leaked diplomatic cables in November 2010, the anti-secrecy organization ran into trouble raising money.

Increased government scrutiny and criticism from lawmakers prompted several companies, including MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, to stop processing donations to the non-profit organization. WikiLeaks eventually suspended publication due to the “bank blockade.”

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Meet Brandon Bryant: The Drone Operator Who Quit After Killing a Child

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Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.

“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

– From The Woes of an American Drone Operator published in Der Spiegel

The above article is a must read for every American citizen, particularly those that get up in arms about domestic gun control, but never think twice about the horror caused by our foreign policy, which regularly murders innocent children overseas.  This story was also covered by the UK’s Daily Mail and they write:

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Ever Heard of the National Counterterrorism Center? Didn’t Think So

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It’s very interesting that in recent weeks the mainstream press seems to be unveiling the surveillance state to the American sheeple.  I was shocked when I read the Wired article about how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was funding the placement of microphones and cameras on public buses to monitor innocent citizens’ behavior.  Now we have this information published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

Thanks for the justice Holder.

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited.

The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.

The National Counterterrorism Center’s ideas faced no similar public resistance. For one thing, the debate happened behind closed doors.

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This Really Happened: Harry Belafonte Says Obama Should “Act Like a Third World Dictator” and Jail His Critics

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Laughter fills the background.  I don’t think Belafonte was kidding either…   Like this post? Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G Follow me on Twitter.

Blue Shield of California to Hike Insurance Rates up to 20%

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Good thing there is no inflation, you know, except in every single thing every single American needs to buy to survive that is!  The hits just keep coming for California, America’s very own Greece.  Remember the article I posted a couple of days ago titled: Payday Loans in California: School Districts Owe $1 Billion on $100 Million Borrowed.

Now we find out from the LA Times:

Health insurer Blue Shield of California wants to raise rates as much as 20% for some individual policyholders, prompting calls for the nonprofit to use some of its record-high reserve of $3.9 billion to hold down premiums.

In filings with state regulators, Blue Shield is seeking an average rate increase of 12% for more than 300,000 customers, effective in March, with a maximum increase of 20%.

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The Kid Who Tweets Every Drone Strike

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I have been reading about this kid Josh Begley for the past several days, but hadn’t looked more into it until now.  This article is really interesting in that it reveals that the U.S. Military (or CIA, who really knows anymore) is employing terrorist tactics in its drone strikes overseas.  From Business Insider:

NYU student Josh Begley is tweeting every reported U.S. drone strike since 2002, and the feed highlights a disturbing tactic employed by the U.S. that is widely considered a war crime.

Known as the “double tap,” the tactic involves bombing a target multiple times in relatively quick succession, meaning that the second strike often hits first responders.

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