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America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Totalitarian Society

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March 27, 2024, 12:55:24 pm Mark says: Shocked Shocked Shocked Shocked  When Hamas spokesman Abu Ubaida began a speech marking the 100th day of the war in Gaza, one confounding yet eye-opening proclamation escaped the headlines. Listing the motives for the Palestinian militant group's Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, he accused Jews of "bringing red cows" to the Holy Land.
December 31, 2022, 10:08:58 am NilsFor1611 says: blessings
August 08, 2018, 02:38:10 am suzytr says: Hello, any good churches in the Sacto, CA area, also looking in Reno NV, thanks in advance and God Bless you Smiley
January 29, 2018, 01:21:57 am Christian40 says: It will be interesting to see what happens this year Israel being 70 years as a modern nation may 14 2018
October 17, 2017, 01:25:20 am Christian40 says: It is good to type Mark is here again!  Smiley
October 16, 2017, 03:28:18 am Christian40 says: anyone else thinking that time is accelerating now? it seems im doing days in shorter time now is time being affected in some way?
September 24, 2017, 10:45:16 pm Psalm 51:17 says: The specific rule pertaining to the national anthem is found on pages A62-63 of the league rulebook. It states: “The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem. “During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country. Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.”
September 20, 2017, 04:32:32 am Christian40 says: "The most popular Hepatitis B vaccine is nothing short of a witch’s brew including aluminum, formaldehyde, yeast, amino acids, and soy. Aluminum is a known neurotoxin that destroys cellular metabolism and function. Hundreds of studies link to the ravaging effects of aluminum. The other proteins and formaldehyde serve to activate the immune system and open up the blood-brain barrier. This is NOT a good thing."
http://www.naturalnews.com/2017-08-11-new-fda-approved-hepatitis-b-vaccine-found-to-increase-heart-attack-risk-by-700.html
September 19, 2017, 03:59:21 am Christian40 says: bbc international did a video about there street preaching they are good witnesses
September 14, 2017, 08:06:04 am Psalm 51:17 says: bro Mark Hunter on YT has some good, edifying stuff too.
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Author Topic: America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Totalitarian Society  (Read 22308 times)
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« Reply #150 on: April 07, 2014, 07:18:23 am »

Under attack: Depth of federal arms race should surprise, shock citizenry

 In late February, four federal agents carrying side arms with a drug-sniffing dog descended on the Taos Ski Valley in what was called a “saturation patrol.”

Authorities were working on tips of possible drug selling and impaired driving in the ski resort’s parking lot and surrounding area.

But the agents weren’t from the FBI, ATF or even the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Rather, the agents represented the U.S. Forest Service.

“It’s one of the untold stories about government,” said former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, who lives in Taos, is an avid skier and has been a leading critic of the operation that turned up only a few minor infractions. “People don’t grasp the size and the scope of these entities and their law enforcement arms.”

It may come as a surprise to many U.S. taxpayers, but a slew of federal agencies — some  whose responsibilities seem to have little to do with combating crime — carry active law enforcement operations.

Here’s a partial list:

    The U.S. Department of Education
    The Bureau of Land Management (200 uniformed law enforcement rangers and 70 special agents)
    The U.S. Department of the Interior
    The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (with an armed uniformed division of 1.000)
    The National Park Service (made up of NPS protection park rangers and U.S. Park Police officers that operate independently)
    The Environmental Protection Agency (200 special agents)
    The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (224 special agents)
    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

That’s right, NOAA — the folks who forecast the weather, monitor the atmosphere and keep tabs on the oceans and waterways — has its own law enforcement division. It has a budget of $65 million and consists of 191 employees, including 96 special agents and 28 enforcement officers who carry weapons.

“There’s no question there’s been a proliferation of police units at the federal level,” said Tim Lynch, director of the Project On Criminal Justice for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. “To me, it’s been a never-ending expansion, a natural progression, if you will, of these administrative agencies always asking for bigger budgets and a little bit more power.”

It’s been estimated the U.S. has some 25,000 sworn law enforcement officers in departments not traditionally associated with fighting crime. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and in a tabulation compiled by the Wall Street Journal in 2011, 3,812 criminal investigators are working in areas other than the U.S. departments of Treasury, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security.

Lynch says it’s hard to tell how much money federal agencies spend on their respective law enforcement divisions.

“We need a fuller accounting of exactly how many police units have proliferated in the federal government and how much it’s costing taxpayers,” said Lynch, who said he would like to see members of Congress ask agency officials direct questions about budget and staffing.

The Wall Street Journal reported that, in 2008, agents armed with assault rifles from NOAA, along with officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, raided a businesswoman’s offices in Miami looking into charges that she was violating the Endangered Species Act by trading in coral.

“I felt like I was being busted for drugs, instead of coral,” Morgan Mok said afterward. “It was crazy.”

Mok said she obtained the coral legally and eventually paid a $500 fine and served a year’s probation for failing to complete the proper paperwork.

Why is a law enforcement arm necessary at NOAA?

“NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement protects marine wildlife and habitat by enforcing domestic laws and international treaty requirements designed to ensure these global resources are available for future generations,” NOAA spokesman David Miller said in an email to New Mexico Watchdog, pointing out that the division has existed since 1970. “Our special agents and enforcement officers ensure compliance with the nation’s marine resource laws and take enforcement action when these laws are violated.”

As for the U.S. Forest Service, Special Agent Robin Poague defended the use of the agency’s law enforcement officers — called LEOs — in the Taos operation that resulted in harsh criticism from many residents.

“Rangers were armed when the Forest Service started 100 years ago,” Poague said. “We have a long history of law enforcement.”

Portions of the Taos Ski Valley sit on federal land. If there were suspicions of drug activity leading to the operation in February, why not use the DEA instead?

“U.S. Forest Service land is our primary responsibility, it’s not the DEA’s,” Poague told New Mexico Watchdog by telephone from his office in Albuquerque.

A Forest Service recruitment video says the agency employs about 700 law enforcement personnel. Poague said the service’s law enforcement division was created in 1994.

But many other federal agencies established their own after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the FBI shifted its attention to tackling terrorism, and Congress gave permanent powers to inspectors general in more than two dozen agencies.

By last count, 25 agencies with law enforcement divisions fall under their respective offices of inspectors general.

With their growth has come criticism that officers are becoming overly militarized.

“The whole notion of police operations these days, that they’re dressed to kill, that they’re up against an enemy, is wrong,” Johnson said. “Citizens are not the enemy.”

In 2010, the Department of Education defended its purchase of 27 12-gauge shotguns to replace old firearms used by its Office of Inspector General, the law enforcement arm of the department. DoE said the guns were necessary to help combat “waste, fraud, abuse, and other criminal activity involving Federal education funds, programs and operations.”

A year later, DoE Office of Inspector General special agents raided a California home at 6 a.m. to apprehend a man the department said was involved in criminal activity. DoE officials did not say why the raid was conducted, releasing a statement that said, “the office conducts raids on issues such as bribery, fraud, and embezzlement of federal student aid funds.”

“In these cases, it causes you to think, is this agency really necessary, is this unit really necessary,” Lynch said.

In an email to New Mexico Watchdog, a spokeswoman for the DoE Office of Inspector General — the department’s law enforcement arm — reported it has a staff of 260 members, 90 of which are criminal investigators. Its budget is $57.7 million for fiscal 2014.

Defenders of the agencies say armed law enforcement provides a deterrent and that agents need to be armed to protect themselves against potentially dangerous criminals.

In fact, just last month a Forest Service ranger in North Carolina was shot and killed by a murder suspect, who also killed a police dog. On Jan. 1, 2012, a National Park ranger was shot and killed at Mount Rainier, in Washington state.

http://watchdog.org/136244/federal-law-enforcement/
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« Reply #151 on: April 07, 2014, 11:02:22 am »

The Bill of Rights has been Revoked!

While you were focused on the missing Airliner, there was a little case being heard in front of the Supreme Court called U.S. v. Castleman.  The case was a landmark win for the gun control left wing, but what no one realized, is that our Constitution no longer affords us “rights.”

No longer rights that are inviolate

The case was decided March 28, 2014.  The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Bill of Rights is no longer made up of “Declaratory and Restrictive Clauses.” They are judicially now perceived as “privileges.” A “privilege” can be revoked for the slightest of legislative causes, but a “Right” is “Forever Inviolate” … We the People no longer have that.

U.S. vs Castleman

The case was about domestic violence, a cause we can all get behind. But, in the end, the Supreme Court has taken away not just domestic violence abuser’s right to bear arms, but all of the people, and in turn has made all of the Bill of Rights void, and made it a Bill of Privileges that can be revoked.

The Preamble states:

    “The Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further Declaratory and Restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution.”

While the Constitutional Conventions desired further declaratory and restrictive clauses, the Supreme Court has now taken our rights without anyone noticing and replaced them with privileges. It’s time to wake up America, first this year the NDAA gives Obama the power to arrest anyone without reason and detain them indefinitely. Now we have our Constitution shredded, and still we just move on like nothing has happened.

There is a movement in the country  that is gaining momentum called the Constitutional Emergency. It may be our best hope at restoring the America we all loved. Patriots are needed and  sacrifices will be made — – if you loved the way things used to be and the way the founders intended, check them out and pray that we that make the journey succeed.

- See more at: http://misguidedchildren.com/politics/2014/03/the-bill-of-rights-has-been-revoked/17959#sthash.zlpWiE0S.dpuf

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« Reply #152 on: April 07, 2014, 11:28:32 am »

I remember that case from last month - yeah, what the USSC did was unconstitutional, but had no idea it had THIS much impact.
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« Reply #153 on: April 09, 2014, 02:38:38 am »

 Cheesy Those places you find these articles Mark are something else! You been coming up with some real winners lately. Where do you find these odd websites? "misguidedchildren.com"? Really?

More like misguided website. That article is SO alarmist, it's not even funny. Did they even read the case? I suspect not. Instead that author screams "The sky is falling, oh no!"  Roll Eyes

The Bill of rights HAS NOT been revoked! That's completely absurd. It may not be followed all the time, but it still applies and exists, legally and in full. That's a scare tactic statement that comes across as fearmongering to get people to think they no longer have any rights, which is exactly what the government wants the public to think.

The guy admitted he physically assaulted his wife. That is not in dispute. All that case did was clarify whether it was a certain type assault, when considering the federal gun laws. Under domestic violence in relation to federal gun laws, a person can have gun possession rights taken away if convicted of certain crimes of violence. Duh, we know that, and that legal fact does not nullify the Bill of Rights like some clowns are trying to claim.

This constant political back and forth is getting REAL old.

Here's some details from the SCOTUS website...

http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/03/opinion-analysis-state-conviction-for-misdemeanor-domestic-assault-counts-as-misdemeanor-crime-of-domestic-violence-for-purposes-of-federal-gun-restrictions/

Quote
Amy Howe Editor/Reporter
Posted Thu, March 27th, 2014 9:54 am

Opinion analysis: State conviction for misdemeanor domestic assault counts as “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” for purposes of federal gun restrictions

One day after oral arguments in a high-stakes battle over whether a corporation must comply with laws and regulations that violate the religious beliefs of the family that owns the company, the Court’s nine Justices were back at work again yesterday morning.  They issued just one decision, in United States v. Castleman.  As I explained in my preview of the case, the question before the Justices was whether James Castleman’s state conviction for “misdemeanor domestic assault,” arising out of an incident involving the mother of his child, qualifies as a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” under federal law, thereby prohibiting him from having a gun.

In an opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, yesterday the Court held that it does.   The Court began its decision by reiterating that domestic violence is pervasive; this pervasiveness, combined with the danger created when guns and domestic violence mix, was what prompted Congress to enact the gun prohibition in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9).  In particular, the Court explained, Congress wanted to “close a dangerous loophole” in prior restrictions on gun possession that often resulted when perpetrators of domestic violence are convicted of misdemeanors, rather than felonies.

The case turned on the meaning of the phrase “use . . . of physical force” in Section 922(g)(9):  is it limited to “violent force,” or does it instead include crimes involving any physical force?  In holding that it is the latter, the Court relied heavily on its 2010 decision in Johnson v. United States, in which the question before the Court was whether a conviction for battery constituted a “violent felony” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.  In disposing of that case, the Court noted that, “at common law, the element of force in the crime of battery was ‘satisfied by even the slightest offensive touching.’”  That definition of force, the Court held today, “fits perfectly” in Castleman’s case:  not only is it consistent with what Congress might have intended in defining a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” but many forms of domestic violence would not, in other contexts, be regarded as especially “violent.”  That conclusion, the Court added, is bolstered by the status of state laws when Congress enacted Section 922(g)(9).  If offensive touching were not regarded as “force,” Section 922(g)(9) would not have applied in ten states, making up thirty percent of the nation’s population, at all.

The Court then turned to whether Castleman’s conviction under Tennessee law was a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” which would depend on whether his conviction “ha[d], as an element, the use or attempted use of physical force” – which, of course, the Court had just defined as including “offensive touching.”  Here, although the Tennessee law under which Castleman was convicted could theoretically apply to assaults that do not involve the use of force, the Court’s task was made easier by the parties’ agreement that the law was divisible – that is, that it could determine whether Castleman’s conviction involved the same elements as a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” simply by looking at Castleman’s indictment.  And “that analysis,” the Court observed, “is straightforward:  Castleman pleaded guilty to having ‘intentionally or knowingly cause[d] bodily injury’ to the mother of his child,” which “necessarily involves the use of physical force.”  As such, his crime does constitute a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” for purposes of Section 922(g)(9).

Although all of the Justices agreed with the result that the Court reached, two Justices wrote separate opinions.  Justice Scalia concurred in part and concurred in the judgment; he would have interpreted the phrase “physical force” more narrowly to “require[] force capable of causing physical pain or bodily injury.”  Justice Alito concurred in the judgment only, in a brief opinion joined by Justice Thomas.
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« Reply #154 on: April 09, 2014, 05:30:58 am »

I can see you missed the whole reason as to why i posted the story. While true the Bill of Rights hasnt been revoked, BUT the way it is interpreted has. The Right, is innate and cannot be taken away. A privilege can be taken away. By making that change it changes the way the court system can look at your rights, or privileges now.You have the privilege of free speech, not a right to it.
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« Reply #155 on: April 09, 2014, 11:54:54 am »

Quote
The guy admitted he physically assaulted his wife. That is not in dispute. All that case did was clarify whether it was a certain type assault, when considering the federal gun laws. Under domestic violence in relation to federal gun laws, a person can have gun possession rights taken away if convicted of certain crimes of violence. Duh, we know that, and that legal fact does not nullify the Bill of Rights like some clowns are trying to claim.

I know what you're saying - but it's these LITTLE things like this that slowly but surely chip away at the 2nd amendment, and ultimately the Consitution.

I read about this particular case a couple of weeks ago - this guy did NOT commit a felony, NOR used a weapon in this domestic violence case. But somehow his guns rights deserve to be taken away?

And like saying - they've been chipping away at the 2nd amendment for years and years(it's not like it's Obama doing all of the damage) - for one, the corrupt court system has all but taken the reigns doing this(like they did here). And two, even Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Richard Nixon, etc passed laws here and there that have existed to this present day. And not to mention too some of these "conservative" and "influential" 'evangelicals' like Franklin Graham are pushing for gun control.
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« Reply #156 on: April 10, 2014, 01:26:49 am »

I can see you missed the whole reason as to why i posted the story. While true the Bill of Rights hasnt been revoked, BUT the way it is interpreted has. The Right, is innate and cannot be taken away. A privilege can be taken away. By making that change it changes the way the court system can look at your rights, or privileges now.You have the privilege of free speech, not a right to it.

That is complete and utter bunk Mark!

You go ahead and continue to THINK your rights have been taken away and changed to a privilege, but it has not. They WANT you to think that way. It's the classic defeatist attitude, and you and others are falling for it.

The Constitution has been violated countless times, and even the President has violated the Constitution, as well as Congress, we know that for a fact. Has that nullified the Constitution? Why of course not. It and the Bill of Rights are STILL in full effect, regardless of what some people want you to think.

What we have is government acting in an un-Constitutional way, by violating the rights afforded citizens via the Bill of Rights. Just because a judge rules contrary, that doesn't mean anything but a judge that made a wrong ruling. It's up to the citizenry, always has been, to manage and correct their representatives.

It can be "interpreted" any way a person can think of, but that doesn't make it right, nor does that mean the legal authority has changed. Nothing has changed, nothing, but the attitudes of people, and people can be replaced, kicked out of office, recalled, whatever.

One of the biggest parts of the scam is that things have changed, when they haven't. "There is nothing new under the sun". This is all old school worldly misdirection.

A person keeps telling the people "You can't fight government...", and eventually people start believing it, bringing us to where we are today, with Americans having become some of the sorriest, worthless, and deluded humans on the planet.

May God have mercy on their souls!
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« Reply #157 on: April 10, 2014, 04:04:26 am »

Your right, thats why this is the exact same country we had 100, 50 and just 25 years ago.
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« Reply #158 on: April 10, 2014, 08:49:07 am »

Well, this country DOES have a non-natural born citizen President(and another one, Ted Cruz, wants to run in 2016). Not that I embrace the earthly riches of this world, but the US Constitution is on its way to be burned, if not burned already.



As for the 2nd amendment - like said, the destruction of it has slowly but surely been in the works for years now - that massive gun control bill that Obama pushed, and ultimately failed, was nothing but an outward dog and pony show(to make everyone think our "rights" were being protected, and we were taking this country back).

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« Reply #159 on: April 11, 2014, 08:21:26 am »

Soros funded scheme to neutralize 36 states’ votes dangerously close to success

The National Popular Vote effort, which could see the 14 states with the largest populations decide the presidency, is more than halfway to its goal of legally bypassing the Electoral College established in the Constitution.

Last week, the Maine state Senate voted in support of the plan one week after both houses of the New York legislature overwhelmingly supported it.

Now the governors of both states will need to decide whether to formally back the National Popular Vote, or NPV.

The plan is more than halfway to its goal of electing future presidents via the popular vote, after Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, signed on last July.

The NPV campaign seeks to obtain the consent of the majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College to award its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

Now 10 jurisdictions possessing 136 electoral votes are part of the plan, just over half of the 270 electoral votes needed to bring the National Popular Vote interstate compact into effect.

The states will not be required to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner until the NPV has signed up enough states to garner 270 electoral votes.

The NVP effort is fully partnered with a George Soros-funded election group, as WND was first to report.

The group, the Center for Voting and Democracy, received original seed money in 1997 from the Joyce Foundation, a non-profit that boasted President Obama served on its board at the time of the grant. Obama was a board member from July 1994 until December 2002.

The NPV is run by individuals with a history of support for the Democratic Party, WND found.

The Founding Fathers firmly rejected a purely popular vote to elect the president, because they wanted to balance the power of the larger and smaller states.

The Electoral College was fashioned as a compromise between an election of the president by direct popular vote and election by Congress.

Now the NPV effort could change the way Americans elect the president without amending the U.S. Constitution. The plan simply requires that enough states join through votes in their legislatures along with gubernatorial approval.

It takes two-thirds of both the House and Senate to pass a constitutional amendment to repeal the Electoral College.

To bypass the constitutional amendment process, NPV minimizes the number of states that would need to agree. Instead, once enough states agree to allot their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, the Electoral College becomes irrelevant.

With the addition of Rhode Island to the NPV effort, the pact now has nine states plus the District of Columbia for a total of 136 of the 270 electoral votes needed. The other states signed up are Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, Vermont and California.

NPV is partnered with FairVote, a project of the Soros-funded Center for Voting and Democracy that advocates for a national popular vote for president.

FairVote’s website says the organization “has nurtured and supported the National Popular Vote plan to ensure that every vote for president is equally valued no matter where it is cast.”

FairVote’s executive director Rob Richie co-authored “Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote,” a book explaining how the National Popular Vote plan would work and why he thinks the U.S. “desperately needs it.”

Fairvote regularly works with advocacy leaders at the National Popular Vote organization to assist in getting legislation passed.

Richie, executive director of FairVote since he co-founded it in 1992, is also a member of the civil society committee of the Soros-led Bretton Woods Committee, which openly seeks to remake the world economy.

Richie’s book was co-authored with NPV’s founder, John R. Koza.

In a Dec. 15, 2008, Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Jonathan Soros, son of George Soros, wrote that it was time to junk the Electoral College.

Soros’s Open Society Institute funds the Center for Voting and Democracy, where FairVote is based.

The center’s website notes the group was kick-started in 1997 with two grants – one from the Open Society and another from the Joyce Foundation.

With Obama on its board, the Joyce Foundation also funded the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation; the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute; the National Council of La Raza and Physicians for Social Responsibility, among numerous radical groups.

Meanwhile, the NPV leadership is comprised of Democratic Party supporters.

The organization’s chairman and major funder is Koza. He was the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Scientific Games Inc., where he co-invented the rub-off instant ticket used by state lotteries.

Koza, who has reportedly pledged $12 million to NPV, previously gave tens of thousands of dollars to various Democratic Party committees and liberal candidates and was an Al Gore elector in 2000, the Weekly Standard reported.

Another pledged NPV leader is Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex, the nation’s second largest payroll and human resource company. He co-founded the Independence Party of New York in 1994 and ran as the party’s gubernatorial candidate.

Golisano is a registered Republican, even though he supported John Kerry for president and gave $1 million to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.

NPV’s secretary, Chris Pearson, served in the Vermont House of Representatives in 2006. In 2005, he was director of the Presidential Election Reform program at the Soros-funded FairVote.

http://osnetdaily.com/2014/04/soros-funded-scheme-to-neutralize-36-states-votes-dangerously-close-to-success/
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« Reply #160 on: April 11, 2014, 09:20:35 am »

The whole 2000 election fiasco was all by design to do just that - put out "solutions" to make rigging elections easier. First there were the electronic voting machines, and now this.
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« Reply #161 on: April 20, 2014, 06:45:12 am »

Western states hold summit on controlling federal land, say 'It's simply time'

Lawmakers from Western states said Friday that the time has come for them to take control of federal lands within their borders and suggested the standoff this month between a Nevada rancher and the federal government was a problem waiting to happen.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/04/19/western-lawmakers-strategize-on-taking-control-federal-lands/?intcmp=latestnews
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« Reply #162 on: April 20, 2014, 05:36:55 pm »

Lawmakers from Western states said Friday that the time has come for them to take control of federal lands within their borders and suggested the standoff this month between a Nevada rancher and the federal government was a problem waiting to happen.

Then a Reaction. Solution. follows subsequently...all according to the Hegelian Dialectic model.
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« Reply #163 on: April 30, 2014, 05:30:25 am »

Free Speech Farce: Rise of American Fascism

America is facing a new fascism that does not tolerate any views it doesn't like -- where "wrong" speech is being hounded, demonized and shouted down.

The head of Mozilla, maker of Firefox web browser, was forced to step down because he gave money to a campaign several years ago that was against gay marriage.

Brandeis University recently withdrew an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an internationally acclaimed champion of women's rights and a victim of female genital mutilation and forced marriage, because her opposition to Islam was deemed offensive.

Across the Water

If you want a glimpse into how bad it could become in the future, Americans need not look any further than across the Atlantic to Western Europe.

Transplant American conservative values of 'God, country and traditional family' in Western Europe and, more likely than not, you'd be branded "extreme right," "anti-woman," "homophobic," and even "Nazi."

If you're against radical Islam or immigration, you can be labelled a racist. Wave your nation's flag too much and you're a fascist.

And should you be brave enough to demonstrate publicly for a conservative cause or run for office on conservative principles, you could be physically attacked or, in Sweden, your home might be wrecked.

Danish Journalist Lars Hedegaard publishes the Scandinavian online newspaper Dispatch International.

"You could get beaten up. We see that in Sweden. You have these so called 'anti-fascists' coming to known right-wingers' homes and wrecking their apartments," Hedegaard said. "They go destroy the furniture, tear up the books, and then they make a video of it and put it out on the web."

Under the banner of "fighting racism," left-wing radicals terrorize those who dare to speak out against the Left's experiment in multiculturalism.

"They call them 'anti-racists' or they fight for a 'better environment' and a 'more humane society,' but their goal is to smash democracy as we know it. They're revolutionary communists," Kim Møller, a leading expert on the extreme, violent left groups in Denmark, said.

"If you say you want revolution, people say you're crazy, but if you say you want to fight racism, people support that," Møller said.

Free Speech Farce

Throughout Western Europe, those who hold to American-style conservative values are the outsiders.

Freedom of speech -- the right to say things the majority doesn't like -- is gone in most of Europe, including Britain, George Igler, with Discourse Institute in London, says.

"No, Britain is not a country that has free speech. Britain is not a country that has the rule of law," Igler said.

"We have populations who believe they have free speech and then they do something, maybe they tweet something a politician doesn't like, and a knock comes on the door and they realize they don't live in the same kind of democracy they thought they lived in," he added.

Last week, Liberty Party candidate Paul Weston was arrested in Winchester for publicly repeating Winston Churchill's criticism of Islam, in which Churchill wrote about the "curses of Islam."

It's a similar situation in France, where Libertarian publisher Jean Robin described how the government and the media seem to work in tandem to control information and what viewpoints people will see.

"You can't really say it's a democracy with free media. It's an oligarchy. It's not a democracy anymore," Robin said.

Shut Up and Unlearn Liberty

Many conservative Europeans cope by simply not expressing their opinions publicly.

"Americans who look at Europe idealistically just don't have a clue," Christopher Doss, with the Leadership Institute near Washington, D.C., said.

Doss studied at the University of Oslo in Norway and still works in European politics. He said America risks going the way of Europe, especially because most of our universities are training young people to be intolerant.

"We're headed in the same direction as we unlearn liberty, as students go through four years or more of college indoctrination, they become inculcated with the notion that all speech shouldn't be allowed," Doss said.

If this new fascism is not turned back, life for conservatives in America could become very unpleasant, as it already is for conservatives in Europe.

**Editor's note: This article uses the American meaning of "conservative." In Europe, conservatives are called "liberals."

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2014/April/Free-Speech-Farce-Rise-of-American-Fascism/
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« Reply #164 on: April 30, 2014, 06:27:38 am »

White House opens door to tolls on interstate highways, removing long-standing prohibition

With pressure mounting to avert a transportation funding crisis this summer, the Obama administration Tuesday opened the door for states to collect tolls on interstate highways to raise revenue for roadway repairs.

The proposal, contained in a four-year, $302 billion White House transportation bill, would reverse a long-standing federal prohibition on most interstate tolling.

Though some older segments of the network — notably the Pennsylvania and New Jersey turnpikes and Interstate 95 in Maryland and Virginia — are toll roads, most of the 46,876-mile system has been toll-free.

“We believe that this is an area where the states have to make their own decisions,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “We want to open the aperture, if you will, to allow more states to choose to make broader use of tolling, to have that option available.”

The question of how to pay to repair roadways and transit systems built in the heady era of post-World War II expansion is demanding center stage this spring, with projections that traditional funding can no longer meet the need.

That source, the Highway Trust Fund, relies on the 18.4-cent federal gas tax, which has eroded steadily as vehicles have become more energy efficient.

“The proposal comes at the crucial moment for transportation in the last several years,” Foxx said. “As soon as August, the Highway Trust Fund could run dry. States are already canceling or delaying projects because of the uncertainty.”

While providing tolling as an option to states, the White House proposal relies on funding from a series of corporate tax reforms, most of them one-time revenue streams that would provide a four-year bridge to close the trust-fund deficit and permit $150 billion more in spending than the gas tax will bring in.

The corporate tax reform proposal has gotten a lukewarm reception even from Democrats in Congress, and Foxx emphasized that the administration is open to any counterproposal that wins bipartisan support.

With the trust fund about to run into the red and the current federal highway bill set to expire Sept. 30, Congress cannot — as its members often note — keep “kicking the can down the road.”

Even a temporary extension of the current bill would require them to authorize a transfer of money from the general fund.

Details of the president’s proposal, which he first outlined almost two months ago, were welcomed as a sign of growing momentum toward a resolution, even by those who couldn’t fully embrace his plan.

“While we may not agree with all aspects of the administration’s proposal, we look forward to the continuing dialogue with Congress and the administration on charting America’s transportation future,” said Bud Wright, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, said the bill helped “advance the discussion” but said a federal gas tax increase should be used to fund it.

“The gas tax remains the most tested and logical way of meeting our critical investment needs,” O’Sullivan said.

“For too long, Congress’s duct-tape approach has made our roads and bridges unsafe, destabilized the construction industry and slowed our economy.”

The federal tax last was raised in 1993 and has not been adjusted for inflation.

Another advocacy group, the nonprofit Transportation for America, spelled out its concerns Tuesday in a report, “The looming financial disaster for transportation.”

The report provided a state-by-state accounting of the percentage of transportation funding that came from Washington. In most cases, it amounted to about half, though some states were far more dependent on federal dollars. (Federal funds accounted for 52 percent of the District’s funding, 49 percent of Maryland’s and almost 59 percent of Virginia’s.)

It also broke down the funding that would be lost by each major metropolitan area without federal revenue, pegging the Washington region’s loss at $424 million.

“Congress has an opportunity to not only save the transportation program, but to recommit to investing in the repairs and improvements our communities and businesses need,” said James Corless, the group’s director.

Corless predicted that most Americans would accept tax increases to fund transportation.

“When people understand where the dollars are being spent, the direct impact to their lives, they support paying their fair share,” he said.

Foxx said the highway trust fund would face a $63 billion shortfall over the next four years.

“What our proposal would do is [use] pro-growth business tax reform to backfill in the highway trust fund,” Foxx said. “We would put that $63 billion back in place to stabilize the highway trust fund, and then the additional $90 billion would be spent on new programs.”

He said the $302 billion bottom line for the proposal would be reached “through a combination of existing taxes that go to the highway trust fund that would equate to $152 billion on their own, and then $150 billion in transitional revenues from pro-growth tax reform.”

The proposal emphasizes a fix-it-first approach that would give funding priority to existing roads, bridges and transit systems rather than expanding their network.

It would expand reforms intended to streamline environmental reviews and project delivery that were begun in the current federal highway bill.

It also would expand popular loan-guarantee programs that have been used by state and local governments to fund projects. The White House plan would almost double funding — from $12.3 billion to $22.3 billion — for transit systems and intercity passenger rail.

In addition, the plan would increase the fine an automaker could face for a safety violation from the current $35 million to $300 million.

Though that proposal is not new, it takes on greater significance amid the debate over General Motors’s delayed recall of 2 million cars with faulty ignition switches that are alleged to have led to at least 13 deaths.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/white-house-opens-door-to-tolls-on-interstate-highways-removing-long-standing-prohibition/2014/04/29/5d2b9f30-cfac-11e3-b812-0c92213941f4_story.html
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« Reply #165 on: April 30, 2014, 07:20:16 am »

Supreme Court green lights detention of Americans

A decision from the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” critics of the high court’s ruling said.

The high court by its own order this week refused to review an appellate-level decision that says the president and U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals.

Officials with William J. Olson, P.C., a firm that filed an amicus brief asking the court to step in, noted that not a single justice dissented from the denial of certiorari.

“The court ducked, having no appetite to confront both political parties in order to protect the citizens from military detention,” the legal team told WND. “The government has won, creating a tragic moment for the people – and what will someday be viewed as an embarrassment for the court.”

WND reported earlier when the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act were adopted, then later challenged in court.

The controversial provision authorizes the military, under presidential authority, to arrest, kidnap, detain without trial and hold indefinitely American citizens thought to “represent an enduring security threat to the United States.”

Journalist Chris Hedges was among the plaintiffs charging the law could be used to target journalists who report on terror-related issues.

A friend-of-the-court brief submitted in the case stated: “The central question now before this court is whether the federal judiciary will stand idly by while Congress and the president establish the legal framework for the establishment of a police state and the subjugation of the American citizenry through the threat of indefinite military arrest and detention, without the right to counsel, the right to confront one’s accusers, or the right to trial.”

The brief was submitted to the Supreme Court by attorneys with the U.S. Justice Foundation of Ramona, California; Friedman Harfenist Kraut & Perlstein of Lake Success, New York; and William J. Olson, P.C. of Vienna, Virginia.

The attorneys are Michael Connelly, Steven J. Harfenist, William J. Olson, Herbert W. Titus, John S. Miles, Jeremiah L. Morgan and Robert J. Olson.

They were adding their voices to the chorus asking the Supreme Court to overturn the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to challenge the law adopted by Congress.

The brief was on behalf of U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman, Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall, Virginia Sen. Dick Black, the U.S. Justice Foundation, Gun Owners Foundation, Gun Owners of America, Center for Media & Democracy, Downsize DC Foundation, Downsize DC.org, Free Speech Defense & Education Fund, Free Speech Coalition, Western Journalism Center, The Lincoln Institute, Institute on the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln Foundation and Conservative Legal Defense & Education Fund.

Journalist Chris Hedges, who is suing the government over a controversial provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, is seen here addressing a crowd in New York's Zuccotti Park.

The 2014 NDAA was fast-tracked through the U.S. Senate, with no time for discussion or amendments, while most Americans were distracted by the scandal surrounding A&E’s troubles with “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson.

Eighty-five of 100 senators voted in favor of the new version of the NDAA, which had already been quietly passed by the House of Representatives.

Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and others filed a lawsuit in 2012 against the Obama administration to challenge the legality of an earlier version of the NDAA.

It is Section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, and its successors, that drew a lawsuit by Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Jennifer Bolen, Noam Chomsky, Alex O’Brien, Kai Warg All, Brigitta Jonsottir and the group U.S. Day of Rage. Many of the plaintiffs are authors or reporters who stated that the threat of indefinite detention by the U.S. military already had altered their activities.

Video mania: The instruction manual on how to restore America to what it once was: “Taking America Back” on DVD. This package also includes the “Tea Party at Sea” DVD.

“It’s clearly unconstitutional,” Hedges said of the bill. “It is a huge and egregious assault against our democracy. It overturns over 200 years of law, which has kept the military out of domestic policing.”

Hedges is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and was part of a team of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.

The friend-of-the-court brief warned the precedent “leaves American citizens vulnerable to arrest and detention, without the protection of the Bill of Rights, under either the plaintiff’s or the government’s theory of the case.

“The judiciary must not await subsequent litigation to resolve this issue, as the nature of military detention is that American citizens then would have no adequate legal remedy,” the brief explained.

“Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court has shown itself to be an advocate for the government, no matter how illegal its action, rather than a champion of the Constitution and, by extension, the American people,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.

“No matter what the Obama administration may say to the contrary, actions speak louder than words, and history shows that the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes. What the NDAA does is open the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker.

“According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists – a word used interchangeably with terrorists, that technically applies to anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government,” he said.

It’s not like rounding up innocent U.S. citizens and stuffing them into prison camps hasn’t already happened.

In 1944, the government rounded up thousands of Japanese Americans and locked them up, under the approval of the high court in its Korematsu v. United States decision.

The newest authorizes the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” to jail those “suspected” of helping terrorists.

The Obama administration had claimed in court that the NDAA does not apply to American citizens, but Rutherford attorneys said the language of the law “is so unconstitutionally broad and vague as to open the door to arrest and indefinite detentions for speech and political activity that might be critical of the government.”

The law specifically allows for the arrests of those who “associate” or “substantially support” terror groups.

“These terms, however, are not defined in the statute, and the government itself is unable to say who exactly is subject to indefinite detention based upon these terms, leaving them open to wide ranging interpretations which threaten those engaging in legitimate First Amendment activities,” Rutherford officials reported.

At the trial court level, on Sept. 12, 2012, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District Court of New York ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and placed a permanent injunction on the indefinite detention provision.

Obama then appealed, and his judges on the 2nd Circuit authorized the government detention program.

Since the fight started, multiple states have passed laws banning its enforcement inside those states. Herb Titus, a constitutional expert, previously told WND Forrest’s ruling underscored “the arrogance of the current regime, in that they will not answer questions that they ought to answer to a judge because they don’t think they have to.”

The judge explained that the plaintiffs alleged paragraph 1021 is “constitutionally infirm, violating both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the 1st Amendment as well due process rights guaranteed by the 5th Amendment.”

She noted the government “did not call any witnesses, submit any documentary evidence or file any declarations.”

“It must be said that it would have been a rather simple matter for the government to have stated that as to these plaintiffs and the conduct as to which they would testify, that [paragraph] 1021 did not and would not apply, if indeed it did or would not,” she wrote.

Instead, the administration only responded with, “I’m not authorized to make specific representations regarding specific people.”

“The court’s attempt to avoid having to deal with the constitutional aspects of the challenge was by providing the government with prompt notice in the form of declarations and depositions of the … conduct in which plaintiffs are involved and which they claim places them in fear of military detention,” she wrote. “To put it bluntly, to eliminate these plaintiffs’ standing simply by representing that their conduct does not fall within the scope of 1021 would have been simple. The government chose not to do so – thereby ensuring standing and requiring this court to reach the merits of the instant motion.

“Plaintiffs have stated a more than plausible claim that the statute inappropriately encroaches on their rights under the 1st Amendment,” she wrote.

http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/supreme-court-green-lights-detention-of-americans/print/
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« Reply #166 on: May 01, 2014, 08:22:52 am »

This is BIG, this should start a revolt, but the sheeple of Amerika wont get it. Too dumbed down

Supreme Court: Pennsylvania cops no longer need a warrant to search citizens’ vehicles



Pennsylvania police officers no longer need a warrant to search a citizen’s vehicle, according to a recent state Supreme Court opinion.

The high court’s opinion, released Tuesday, is being called a drastic change in citizens’ rights and police powers.

Previously, citizens could refuse an officer’s request to search a vehicle. In most cases, the officer would then need a warrant — signed by a judge — to conduct the search.

That’s no longer the case, according to the opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery.

The ruling, passed on a 4-2 vote, was made in regard to an appeal from a 2010 vehicle stop in Philadelphia.

Local police and legal professionals are calling the opinion “big news.”

“This is a significant change in long-standing Pennsylvania criminal law, and it is a good one,” Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman said Wednesday afternoon.

Under prior law, an officer who smells marijuana inside a car, for example, could only search the car with the driver’s consent — or if illegal substances were in plain view.

(Federal officers, like FBI or ATF agents, can search, regardless.)

Now, based on the opinion, it only takes reasonable probable cause for an officer to go ahead with a search without a warrant.

“The prerequisite for a warrantless search of a motor vehicle is probable cause to search,” McCaffery writes in the opinion. “We adopt the federal automobile exception... which allows police officers to search a motor vehicle when there is probable cause to do so...”

Previously, a warrantless search was only allowed if “exigent circumstances” existed, the opinion states.

“This case gives the police simpler guidelines to follow and (it) finally and clearly renders our law consistent with established federal law,” Stedman said.

“It is a ruling that helps law enforcement as they continue to find people in possession of illegal drugs,” New Holland police Lt. Jonathan Heisse said Wednesday.

While police rejoice over what’s been a lasting issue, citizens might not be as thrilled.

“It’s an expanding encroachment of government power,” defense attorney Jeffrey Conrad said Wednesday morning, while reviewing the 62-page opinion. “It’s a protection we had two days ago, that we don’t have today. It’s disappointing from a citizens’ rights perspective.”

Christopher Patterson, another veteran defense lawyer, said: “I am concerned that we are on a slippery slope that will eliminate personal privacy and freedom in the name of expediency for law enforcement.”

Shiem Gary filed the Philadelphia appeal, arguing that police didn’t have probable cause to search his vehicle on Jan. 15, 2010. Officers found two pounds of marijuana stashed under the vehicle’s hood.

Lancaster defense attorney Michael Winters noted that police still need good reasons to pull over a vehicle and conduct a search.

“This does not mean that they may search every vehicle they stop,” Winters said. “They must still develop probable cause before they are permitted to search your vehicle without a warrant.”

In the Gary case, probable cause for the vehicle stop was window tint the officers believed to be illegal. Officers smelled marijuana and asked about it; Shiem then told an officer there was “weed” in the vehicle. A search ensued.

“This case does not eliminate the need for the police to have probable cause to search,” Stedman said.

The district attorney said the ruling puts Pennsylvania in line with federal law and many other states.

Locals stressed that probable cause to stop a vehicle does not equate with probable cause to search it.

A driver can still refuse if an officer asks for consent to search a car. The officer can then only search if he/she has probable cause to do so, or a warrant. A driver refusing consent, alone, does not give a police officer probable cause to search.

Christopher Lyden, another local defense lawyer, believes if an officer wants to search a vehicle without consent, they should have to get approval from a judge — as they do in searches of homes.

“Judicial oversight of vehicle searches, just like residential searches,” he said, “helps maintain a free society.”

Chief Supreme Court Justice Ronald D. Castille and Justices J. Michael Eakin and Thomas G. Saylor joined McCaffery in the majority.

Justices Debra McCloskey Todd and Max Baer opposed it.


http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/supreme-court-pennsylvania-cops-no-longer-need-a-warrant-to/article_6a407fc6-d077-11e3-8025-0017a43b2370.html
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« Reply #167 on: May 02, 2014, 03:51:58 am »

Second-Grader Says School Put Him In Handcuffs For Misbehaving

 A second-grader said a school security guard put him in handcuffs because he was misbehaving.

“Some of the kids were messing with me,” Kalyb Primm Wiley told KSHB-TV.

Kalyb told the station that kids were teasing and taunting him but nothing got physical. A teacher was unable to calm him down and he was taken to the principal’s office by a school security guard.

“We were halfway down the hall, he put handcuffs on and twisted my wrists a little,” Kalyb added.

“I don’t think any 7-year-old should be put in handcuffs unless he was armed with a weapon, or violent,” Kalyb’s mother, Tomesha Primm, told KSHB.

Kalyb’s parents were called when he was misbehaving. Kalyb’s father said his son was in handcuffs when he showed up.

A school’s spokesperson said the security officer followed the proper protocol to ensure everyone’s safety.

Kalyb said handcuffs are for bad guys. “Criminals, robbers, bank robbers, stealers, because kids are not that bad,” the second-grader said.

His parents want the district to re-evaluate their policy. They plan on taking him out of the school and moving him into another district.

http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2014/05/01/second-grader-says-school-put-him-in-handcuffs-for-misbehaving/
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« Reply #168 on: May 05, 2014, 01:13:59 pm »

Here’s Proof That Wealthy Elites Control Washington

Dow down 45 points on Friday. Gold up over $1,300 an ounce. Nothing much happening.

Meanwhile, we had no proof. Just an observation. But it looks to us as though government always begins and ends as a tool for those who control it.

It is not the product of a “social contract.” It is not an expression of the “general will.” It is not the “price we pay for civilization.” It is not “captured by wealthy special interests.”

On the contrary, it is as blunt and stupid as a crowbar. It is used by the elite to pry wealth, status and power away from everyone else.

Few victims of the public school system believed us, but now cometh a study from Princeton and Northwestern universities proving we were right. From a report by United Press International:

    Oligarchy is a form of government in which power is vested in a dominant class and a small group exercises control over the general population.

     

    A new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities concluded that the US government represents not the interests of the majority of citizens but those of the rich and powerful.

     

    “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” analyzed extensive data, comparing nearly 1,800 US policies enacted between 1981 and 2002 with the expressed preferences of average and affluent Americans as well as special interest groups.

     

    The resulting data empirically verifies that US policies are determined by the economic elite.

     

    The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence,” says the peer-reviewed study.

Win… Win… Win…

Yes, dear reader, the elite run things.

That’s why we have QE (quantitative easing), for example. The banking cartel is perhaps the most powerful group in America. Its oligarchs want to make a profit. How better to do so than to lend themselves money for practically zero interest… then use that money to lend to Washington at a higher rate?

Everybody wins, right?

Washington gets the cheap funding it needs to continue handing out billion-dollar contracts for things we don’t need… and banks earn a fat margin on the newly created money. Hey, and maybe the “wealth effect” will drip a few shekels onto the poor schmucks who still think their votes decide things.

Win…win…win…

One of the most special of special interests in America is what President Eisenhower (previously a five-star general in the US Army) called the military-industrial complex.

When the feds ran low on money they decided to cut the Pentagon back a bit. (Why not? We have no enemies worth mentioning… at least none that we didn’t create ourselves). That was the famous “sequester” worked out by the bunch of hacks and slacks who call themselves Congress. Rather than agree to cut spending, Congress decided to let the budget cut itself – automatically – in future.

The Old DC Trick

Well, the future is here. And here comes Representative Paul Ryan with a budget designed to put the military-industrial industry back in high cotton. Ron Paul describes it:

    The Republicans are using the old DC trick of spending less than originally planned and calling that reduced spending increase a $5.1 trillion cut in spending. Only in DC could a budget that increases spending by 3.5% per year instead of by 5.2% per year be attacked as a “slash-and-burn” plan.

      Last week’s budget debate showed how little difference there lies between the parties when it comes to preserving the warfare-welfare state. One side may prefer more warfare while the other prefers more welfare, but neither side actually wants to significantly reduce the size and scope of government.

Adds Jon Utley of the American Conservative magazine:

    The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said “the greatest threat to our national security is our debt.” In the final analysis Ryan is not a leader, he’s just another puppet of the military-industrial complex. If he really cared about American defense he would take up some of the many ways to stop wasting money and make America truly stronger and more competent.

Now we know: There is nothing “wrong” in Washington. There is nothing we can fix. No one is making a mistake. This is just the way government operates: It rewards the people who control it… and punishes everyone else.

http://www.bonnerandpartners.com/heres-proof-that-wealthy-elites-control-washington/#.U2fUMVehFyI
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« Reply #169 on: May 06, 2014, 07:03:46 am »

10 Examples Of How “Big Brother” Is Steadily Creeping Into Our Daily Lives

Virtually everything that you do is being watched.  Do you drive a car?  Do you watch television?  Do you use a cell phone?  As you do any of those things, information about you is being recorded and tracked.  We live at a time when personal privacy is dying.  And it is not just governments that are doing this.  In fact, sometimes private companies are the biggest offenders.  It turns out that gathering information about all of us is very, very profitable.  And both government entities and private companies are going to continue to push the envelope when it comes to high tech surveillance until people start objecting to what they are trying to do.  If we continue down the path that we are currently on, it is inevitable that we will end up living in an extremely restrictive “Big Brother” police state where basically everything that we do is very closely watched, monitored, tracked and controlled.  And such a day may be much closer than you think.  The following are 10 examples of how “Big Brother” is steadily creeping into our daily lives…

#1 Our cars are rapidly being transformed into high tech “Big Brother” surveillance devices.  In fact, a push is being made to require all new vehicles to include very sophisticated black box recorders…

    As if the government wasn’t already able to track our movements on the nation’s highways and byways by way of satellites, GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, government officials are now pushing to require that all new vehicles come installed with black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, ostensibly to help prevent crashes.

    Yet strip away the glib Orwellian doublespeak, and what you will find is that these black boxes and V2V transmitters, which will not only track a variety of data, including speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and seatbelt use, but will also transmit this data to other drivers, including the police, are little more than Trojan Horses, stealth attacks on our last shreds of privacy, sold to us as safety measures for the sake of the greater good, all the while poised to wreak havoc on our lives.

    Black boxes and V2V transmitters are just the tip of the iceberg, though. The 2015 Corvette Stingray will be outfitted with a performance data recorder which “uses a camera mounted on the windshield and a global positioning receiver to record speed, gear selection and brake force,” but also provides a recording of the driver’s point of view as well as recording noises made inside the car. As journalist Jaclyn Trop reports for the New York Times, “Drivers can barely make a left turn, put on their seatbelts or push 80 miles an hour without their actions somehow, somewhere being tracked or recorded.” Indeed, as Jim Farley, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Ford Motor Company all but admitted, corporations and government officials already have a pretty good sense of where you are at all times: “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.”

#2 A new Michigan law will ban thousands of preppers and small farmers from owning farm animals.  What are they going to do next?  Ban us from growing our own food?

#3 Have you ever collected anything?  If so, the FBI might swoop in and grab your collection someday even if you have not committed a crime.  If you think that this sounds crazy, you should consider what happened to a man named Don Miller recently…

    FBI agents Wednesday seized “thousands” of cultural artifacts, including American Indian items, from the private collection of a 91-year-old man who had acquired them over the past eight decades.

    An FBI command vehicle and several tents were spotted at the property in rural Waldron, about 35 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

The FBI did not have any evidence that a crime had been committed prior to seizing the collection, and Mr. Miller has not been arrested or charged with any crime.  The FBI says that it is going to catalog the collection “to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately”…

    The aim of the investigation is to determine what each artifact is, where it came from and how Miller obtained it, Jones said, to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately.

#4 A father of a 4-year-old girl has been told that he will no longer be allowed to send healthy homemade lunches with his daughter when she attends her pre-kindergarten program because they conflict with federal guidelines.

#5 Do you watch television?  Well, if you have a newer television there is a very good chance that your television is watching you as well…

    In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway.

#6 A plan that is being proposed in Fairfax County, Virginia would ban “frequent and large gatherings at neighborhood homes“.  This would include parties, scout gatherings and home Bible studies.

#7 At a public school in Florida, a 12-year-old boy has been banned from reading the Bible during “free reading time”…

    A Florida schoolteacher humiliated a 12-year-old boy in front of an entire class after she caught him reading the Bible during free reading time.

    The teacher at Park Lakes Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale ordered Giovanni Rubeo to pick up the telephone on her desk and call his parents.

    As the other students watched, the teacher left a terse message on the family’s answering machine.

    “I noticed that he has a book—a religious book—in the classroom,” she said on the recording. “He’s not permitted to read those books in my classroom.”

#8 In the USSA, a young child cannot even build a tree fort with his friends without the threat of being confronted by the police state.  Just consider what happened to one little fifth-grade boy down in Georgia a few weeks ago…

    A fifth-grader says he was terrified when a police officer pointed a gun at him and his friends while they built a tree fort.

    Omari Grant, 11, said he and his friends often play in a wooded area behind his home and were building a fort when a neighbor in the next subdivision called police to complain about what the boys were doing.

    But no one anticipated what Omari and his mother say happened next.

    “I guess the release of tension was like, ‘Mom, he had a gun in my face, Mommy. Mommy, he had a gun in my face,’” said Janice Baptiste, Omari’s mother.

The officer reportedly used very filthy language as he pointed his gun at the boys, and he forced them to get out of the tree and lay down on the ground…

    “I was thinking that I don’t want to be shot today, so I just listened to what they said,” Omari said.

    Omari said the officer holding his gun also used foul language and made him and his friends lay down on the ground.

    “I learned that they’re supposed to help you not make you feel scared to even come outside,” Omari said.

#9 People like to joke about “the eye in the sky”, but it is no joke.  Technology that was originally developed for “blanket surveillance” during the Iraq war is now returning home…

    Persistent Surveillance Systems has developed a surveillance camera on steroids. When attached to small aircraft, the 192-megapixel cameras record the patterns of the planetary life they fly over for hours at a time. According to the Washington Post, this will give the police and other customers a “time machine” they can simply rewind when they need it. Placed strategically at the highest points of any town or city, these cameras could provide the sort of blanket surveillance that’s hard to avoid. The inventor of the camera, a retired Air Force officer, helped create a similar system for the city of Fallujah, the site of two of the most violent battles of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It’s just one example of how wartime surveillance technologies are returning home for “civilian use.”

#10 Have you ever purchased storable food?  If so, you should know that it is now considered to be “suspicious activity” in some areas of the country.  Just check out what is happening in New York state…

    1-866 SAFE NYS is part of Safeguard New York, an NY State counterterrorism program that uses promotional material to encourage citizens to report people for engaging in “suspicious activity….which makes them stand out from others”.

    An accompanying letter provided by the state trooper listed such “suspicious activity” as the purchase of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), flashlights, weather proof ammunition, night vision equipment, match containers, or gas masks.

For even more examples like this, please see my previous article entitled “19 Signs That America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Giant Surveillance Grid“.

Sadly, most Americans are totally oblivious to all of this.

Most Americans are so addicted to entertainment and to their electronic devices that they have no idea what is going on in the real world.

I came across the following video entitled “Look Up” on YouTube earlier today.  I think that it does a great job of showing what our obsession with our electronic devices is doing to us.  Watch it for yourself and see what you think…



http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/10-examples-of-how-big-brother-is-steadily-creeping-into-our-daily-lives
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« Reply #170 on: May 26, 2014, 01:00:35 pm »

This country was started for way less. We used to storm cargo boats and dump ship loads of tea, and this lady is arrested for clapping? Really? there should have been a riot in that town and the whole council taken out and given jobs picking fruit or something. But this is what the country has become. 

Riverside Woman Sues Over Her Arrest For Clapping

A woman who was arrested after she repeatedly clapped at a Riverside City Council meeting has filed a federal lawsuit.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise reports that Letitia Pepper argues her constitutional rights were violated.

Pepper, a longtime critic of Riverside government, was taken away in handcuffs last June. Authorities say she disrupted the meeting by repeatedly applauding speakers even after being warned by the mayor.

However, she was never criminally charged.

Her suit names the city, Mayor William Bailey, the city attorney and police chief.

In a statement, Bailey says the city tries to respect free speech rights at council meeting. He also says meeting rules aim to ensure that city business can be carried out without unnecessary disruptions.

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/05/23/riverside-woman-sues-over-her-arrest-for-clapping/
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« Reply #171 on: May 27, 2014, 07:38:38 am »

Is America Starting To Target Thought Crime?

Last week, Michelle Obama made headlines when she exhorted graduating high schoolers in a commencement address to monitor their families for politically incorrect thoughts and behaviors.

To one journalist, this was more than an off-hand comment made by the first lady. In the opinion of Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times and the author of “Police State USA,” Michelle Obama’s remark reflects a growing trend in America to target and attack individuals for committing “thought crime.”

“Michelle Obama’s push for kids around the nation to monitor their family members for perceived racist comments is just another way the government seeks to inject itself into an area it doesn’t really belong — the American home,” Chumley told The Daily Caller Monday.

“Having the first lady wag her finger at us and send America’s youth on some sort of quest to scour the homes and backyards of our nation’s families for any mention of a racist joke, slur or slight is nanny-governance run amok — something that belongs in a George Orwell novel, not the White House, Chumley said.”

Chumley sees a troubling growth of America’s most powerful political figures now singling out private individuals for their beliefs, and using government agencies and public denunciations to intimidate opponents into silence.

“Harry Reid attacking the Koch brothers for the crime of giving money to conservative causes is just as bad. President Obama, Joe Biden and the entire cast of the White House, for slamming lawful gun owners for exercising their Second Amendment rights, and for trying to drum up emotional-fueled support to ram through gun control,” Chumley listed off. “The IRS targeting of tea party and patriotic non-profits and our nation’s highest law enforcement official, Eric Holder stonewalling on a special prosecutor appointment — does it get any more police state than that?”

The Washington Times reporter sees the creation of hate crime laws as one of the first steps in our country’s history in the direction of attacking unpopular and politically incorrect thoughts in America.

“What comes to mind when I think of the genesis for this growing trend of government to control Americans’ speech, and by extension, thoughts, is when the notion of hate crime was brought into our criminal prosecution system — as if acts of violence that are committed because of racial divides deserve a different category of ‘extra-special bad,’” Chumley stated.

“Political correctness and pandering politicians have fueled this narrative in recent years. Anybody who throws the race card on a regular basis — think Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Harry Reid — is guilty to a certain degree of clamping down on free speech, and in turn, making Americans even wary of what they think.”

And it’s not just the government enforcing this new speech code, in Chumley’s opinion — private companies are just as complicit in regulating speech that’s deemed offensive by the government and media.

“Private companies, like A&E with the “Duck Dynasty” debacle, are getting just as bad as government when it comes to clamping down on free speech, especially when religious views are involved — or, of late, the gay rights movement,” Chumley stated. “I’m all for businesses reacting to free market pressures from their customer base — but really, they need to show a little more spine.”

In Chumley’s opinion, Americans growing a backbone and holding firm to their beliefs would be enough to resist this apparent infringement on individual rights.

“When Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, stood strong in the face of gay rights activists, you didn’t see his business crumble and fold. Rather, you saw those who believe in freedom of speech rise up and stand in Chick-fil-A lines across the nation to support him,” the “Police State USA” author stated. “The only answer is to refuse to be cowed. We’re a nation that’s founded on the belief that rights come from God, not government.”

http://news.yahoo.com/america-starting-target-thought-crime-015023317.html
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« Reply #172 on: June 29, 2014, 09:09:48 am »

Oregon Celebrates Independence Day… With ‘No Refusal’ Blood Checkpoints
Police rename Fourth of July weekend "No Refusal Weekend"


During Independence Day weekend, a time to celebrate US freedom and unalienable rights, Americans in Oregon will be subjected to a “blitz” of ‘no-refusal’ blood-draw checkpoints, as part of a disturbing trend that now extends nationwide.

Local news station KVAL reports that State police are re-naming Fourth of July weekend “No Refusal Weekend”, as part of a crack down on drunk driving.

Any driver who is stopped by police and refuses to take an alcohol breath test will be subjected to a mandatory blood test either at the scene, at a medical facility, or at the nearest jail.

Anyone who merely questions the breath test could also automatically lose their license for a year.

The police say they will liaise closely with prosecutors and judges to immediately obtain “blood draw warrants” in an effort to paint the process up as legal and Constitutional.

“No Refusal enforcement efforts aim to prevent people from avoiding full accountability,” said Officer Ryan Stone. The process is designed to force drivers into relenting to breath tests in order to avoid a potentially harsher penalty if they refuse to cooperate.

The ACLU, previously critical of the practice, lauded the initiative, saying that obtaining warrants for blood test was “the right way to go about it in our view,” and “a good thing.”

However, breathalyzer tests have previously been proven to be inaccurate in a high percentage of cases, with many factors rendering the results “little more than scientific guesswork”. Further research has shown that police officers often influence the results of breathalyzer tests, resulting in inaccurately high readings. Blood tests can also produce false high readings of alcohol levels if they are not conducted quickly and properly.

This information is important, many argue, because it means that mandatory tests could provide police with self-incriminating evidence.

In previous examples of police conducting the practice, horror stories have emerged of Americans being forcibly restrained and having their blood extracted.

The following footage filmed last year in Georgia shows cops strapping down citizens to gurneys, before using a needle to forcibly draw blood as the victim screams, “WHAT COUNTRY IS THIS?”

rest: http://www.infowars.com/oregon-celebrates-independence-day-with-no-refusal-blood-checkpoints/
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« Reply #173 on: August 06, 2014, 08:43:45 am »

http://news.msn.com/us/us-terrorism-database-doubles-in-recent-years
US terrorism database doubles in recent years
8/6/14

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. government database of known or suspected terrorists doubled in size in recent years, according to newly released government figures. The growth is the result of intelligence agencies submitting names more often after a near-miss attack in 2009.

There were 1.1 million people in the database at the end of 2013, according to the National Counterterrorism Center, which maintains the information. About 550,000 people were listed in the database in March 2010.

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a huge, classified database of people who are known terrorists, are suspected of having ties to terrorism or in some cases are related to or are associates of known or suspected terrorists. It feeds to smaller lists that restrict people's abilities to travel on commercial airliners to or within the U.S.

The government does not need evidence linking someone to terrorism in order for the person to be included in the database. This is among the reasons the database and subsequent terror watch lists have been criticized by privacy advocates.

An online publication, The Intercept, on Tuesday reported that 40 percent of people on the terrorism watch list — which is a subset of names in the TIDE database — were not affiliated with any recognized terrorist organization.

The publication cited what it said were classified government documents from one year ago it obtained from a source in the intelligence community, raising the possibility that someone other than former NSA analyst Edward Snowden was improperly disclosing classified information. Snowden fled to Russia in June 2013, roughly two months before the date stamp on the newly disclosed documents. The Intercept was founded by journalists with whom Snowden shared classified materials last year.

The growth of the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment is a result of the government's response to a failed attempt to blow up a commercial airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009. The terror operative's name was included in the database before the attack but not on a list that would have prevented him from boarding a U.S.-bound flight. Since then, the government lowered the standards for placing someone on the no-fly list, and intelligence agencies have become more diligent about submitting names to the TIDE database.

Of the 1.1 million people in the TIDE database, 25,000 are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, the National Counterterrorism Center said.

The database was created after the September 2001 terror attacks after it became clear that the government's terror watch list was ineffective. The watch list was once maintained in a Rolodex and in paper notebooks, according to edited photographs provided by the National Counterterrorism Center.

Other terror watch lists derived from the TIDE database have also grown. As of November 2013, the Terrorist Screening Database consisted of 700,000 people, according to a government official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive numbers.

Questions about the watch list surfaced in a recent civil lawsuit out of Virginia challenging the constitutionality of the no-fly list. The government disclosed that there were 1.5 million nominations to the watch list over the last five years. Weeks later, a government official explained that a "nomination" meant new names as well as changes or updates to existing names on the list, and the figure in the court document should not have been interpreted to mean that 1.5 million people had been added to the watch list in the last five years, as The Associated Press reported July 18.

In August 2013, there were more than 73,000 people affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq on the terror watch list, according to a document marked "secret," obtained by The Intercept. That al-Qaida affiliate represented the largest group of people associated with a known terrorist group on the watch list at the time.
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« Reply #174 on: August 14, 2014, 09:29:50 am »

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=882265
Twitter to improve policies after Robin Williams' daughter quits over cyberbullying
Aug. 14, 2014, 8:01 AM EST

Twitter has vowed to improve its policies in the wake of the very public decision by Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, to abandon Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram after vicious cyberbullying attacks.

The 25-year-old actress signed off of Twitter on Wednesday for "a good long time, maybe forever," after enduring an onslaught of what she called "cruel and unnecessary" messages from a few Twitter users.

In particular two Twitter handles, @PimpStory and @MrGoosebuster, were particularly offensive and heinous, leading to Williams' decision to abandon the social media platform altogether. She asked her followers to report the two handles, which were ultimately disabled by Twitter.

"I'm shaking," Williams wrote while asking for help from her followers after receiving messages blaming her for her father's death, and altered images purporting to be his corpse. The site currently has a one-click button to report abuse linked to each post in a user's feed.

"We will not tolerate abuse of this nature on Twitter," Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president of trust and safety, said in a statement. "We have suspended a number of accounts related to this issue for violating our rules and we are in the process of evaluating how we can further improve our policies to better handle tragic situations like this one. This includes expanding our policies regarding self-harm and private information, and improving support for family members of deceased users."

Facebook, which owns Instagram, said the photo violates its policy, according to the AP, and that it was "being actively flagged and removed across both platforms as it pops up."
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« Reply #175 on: August 14, 2014, 06:41:59 pm »

http://news.yahoo.com/neil-stammer--juggling-star-and-suspected-child-molester--nabbed-by-fbi-201609142.html
How the FBI nabbed a 14-year fugitive and juggling star almost by accident
8/14/14

Even the best show-biz acts eventually come to an end.

Neil Stammer, a star in the juggling world and a suspected child molester, has been captured by the FBI in Nepal after 14 years on the run.

Authorities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, say Stammer, who owned Rob’s Magic and Juggling Shop, skipped town in 2000 after police charged him with the kidnap and **** of a 12-year-old boy.

The FBI tried to find Stammer, now 47, but feared that the fugitive — who had traveled extensively and spoke dozens of languages — had fled the country.

In his teens and 20s, Stammer, who was born Andrew J. Allen but later changed his name, performed at nightclubs and on cruises ships, juggling for money in more than 30 countries.

“Given his overseas travel experience and his language skills, the juggler could have been hiding anywhere in the world,” the FBI acknowledged this week in a press release.


Without many leads, the case went cold.

Fast-forward to 2014, and the FBI got their guy — pretty much by accident.

In January, Special Agent Russ Wilson, recently assigned to the Albuquerque FBI division, decided to crack open Stammer's case again, because he was intrigued by the unique suspect. A new "wanted" poster was issued and distributed.

Then, in June, a special agent with the State Department was testing new facial recognition software for passport fraud investigations. The agent needed samples and used photos from FBI "wanted" posters.

Voilà — Stammer’s face matched a person whose passport photo carried a different name.

The agent contacted the bureau, and the tip soon led investigators to Nepal, where Stammer was living under the name Kevin Hodges "and regularly visiting the U.S. Embassy there to renew his tourist visa," the FBI said.

“He was very comfortable in Nepal,” FBI special agent Russ Wilson said in the release. “My impression was that he never thought he would be discovered.” Stammer had been living in Nepal for years, teaching English and other languages to students hoping to gain entrance into U.S. universities."

The fugitive juggler — who once performed at the esteemed Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. — was extradited from Nepal to New Mexico.

In July, Stammer pleaded not guilty to charges of ****, kidnapping, witness intimidation, and criminal sexual contact of a minor stemming from an incident in which Stammer allegedly took the 12-year-old boy to his apartment and raped him. Bernalillo County District Attorney Kari Brandenburg told the Albuquerque Journal that at least "three alleged victims have come forward" with allegations against Stammer. He's being held without bail in Bernalillo County Jail.

“The Albuquerque Police Department is grateful for the hard work and perseverance of our federal law enforcement partners and the government of Nepal in locating this extremely dangerous fugitive,” Police Chief Gorden Eden Jr. said in announcing Stammer's capture last month. “We can only hope that during his time as a fugitive that he did not commit similar terrible crimes on others.”
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« Reply #176 on: September 02, 2014, 08:32:27 am »

FBI Radio: Public Service or Self-Serving?

PLEASE READ!!!
http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf

Listen to the radio and you might run across a segment that sounds something like a news report. A newsy music introduction plays as woman’s officious-sounding voice begins narrating a story. In a stilted delivery that appears to mimic that of a news anchor, the woman states, “In a move demonstrating the FBI’s valuable role of protecting national security, Director James Comey creates a separate Intelligence Branch…”

It turns out this isn’t a news report at all. And the “news anchor” is actually a public affairs specialist.

You might call the radio spot a faux news report brought to you by the FBI. It’s called “FBI This Week,” produced and distributed regularly on the radio, via podcasts and on the Internet along with three other FBI productions.

Is this a much-needed public service? Or self-serving propaganda? Are the segments masquerading as independent news reports? And just how many tax dollars are being spent on the FBI’s promotional efforts?

“[T]he programs that we produce are ultimately designed to aid and assist the public in protecting itself against crime,” says Susan McKee, the FBI’s chief of investigative publicity and public affairs.

In some cases, that may be true. But it’s unclear how the Aug. 15 edition of “FBI This Week” helps us protect ourselves against crime.

Instead, it promotes FBI Director James Comey’s creation of “a separate Intelligence Branch.” Again, mimicking a news story format, it includes “interview” excerpts with the executive assistant director of the new branch, Eric Velez-Villar. He tells listeners in a comment pre-approved by the FBI for air: “As the director says, we are a national security law enforcement organization that uses, collects, and shares intelligence in everything we do.”

Long History of Government Information Activities

The FBI is just one of many federal agencies using tax dollars to engage in this sort of information activity: a longstanding yet growing practice.

The FBI public affairs specialist who first returned my queries on this topic is Mollie Halpern: the voice on the radio spots. When I tell her that I’m looking into federal agencies using public resources to create their own facilities and staff to self-produce information segments, she remarks, “The FBI’s been doing it longer than anybody … decades and decades and decades!”

FBI radio began in 1965, according to the FBI. The first series was called “FBI Washington” and aired on ABC. In 1990, it was reformatted and renamed “FBI This Week.” Since then, more than 1,200 one-minute spots have aired.

Any hint of the government’s engaging in what some might consider domestic propaganda efforts can be a sensitive issue.

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 authorized the U.S. government to generate and disseminate programming in foreign nations to combat widespread misinformation about U.S. policies, but it specifically forbade creation of programming for U.S. audiences. Furthermore, it directed the U.S. government to “reduce” its “information activities” where there was adequate dissemination by non-governmental means, such as an independent news media.

The law didn’t contemplate today’s dynamic in which domestic government information efforts attempt to compete with, or sometimes replace, news coverage by independent organizations.

Increasingly, federal officials are end-running reporters and taking their unfiltered messages straight to the public using public resources.

Selective Information

The irony is that at the same time government public affairs departments flood the public with information they want to disseminate, they often withhold public information requested by the public or the news media.

I asked the FBI’s McKee about the cost of producing the FBI’s various radio segments. She told me the cost is “negligible” and “handled by a public affairs specialist in addition to her other public affairs related duties.”

What is the budget for the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs? That’s where I hit a roadblock.

I am not in a position to comment on the Office of Public Affairs’ personnel numbers or budget,” McKee told me via email.

“I don’t really need a comment on the budget,” I replied. “I just need the numbers. (Are you saying this is classified information? If not, how can I find them?)”

Three days passed with no answer, so I probed again.

McKee finally answered, “No, the number is not classified. You can find the budget numbers on-line.”

In other words, the FBI will tell you everything you didn’t want to know about Comey’s new Intelligence Branch, but it won’t cough up a basic, public budget number. I had already searched online and it wasn’t easy to find. I set off looking once again.

On my way, I found out a lot of other things about the FBI public affairs office:

    I found several postings for FBI public affairs jobs that pay salaries ranging from $56,000 to $136,000.
    I found the FBI was criticized for “wasting” tax dollars on a public affairs program that provides FBI consultants to Hollywood.
    But the best resource I found was a 2008 report from the inspector general. It says that, in 2007, the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, employed 325 public affairs specialists at a cost of $33.1 million. (That doesn’t count expenses and personnel devoted to community outreach, responses to public solicitations of information or component museum and historian staff.) The biggest chunk of the total is attributed to the FBI which, at the time, racked up $11.9 million in public affairs expenses and employed 124 public affairs officials. That’s enough employees in the FBI’s public affairs department alone to staff the equivalent of what the government considers two “large businesses.”

Disclosure?

The Federal Trade Commission requires commercials that mimic news formats to carry conspicuous disclosures that they are, indeed, paid commercial advertising.

With public agencies in the quasi-news business, should their products also carry a disclosure to avoid the same confusion? Should they clearly tell listeners that the message is generated using their tax dollars?

“The only thing we’re promoting is public awareness so, no, I don’t think there is a need for a label,” the FBI’s McKee told me. “Within each program the narrator clearly identifies herself as an FBI employee and the programs are found on official FBI sites/pages.”

In fact, in the Aug. 15 story on “FBI This Week,” the narrator doesn’t clearly identify herself as an FBI employee. The segment follows a typical news format where the reporter signs off with the location of the assignment and the title of the feature. But to those who are listening closely, the positive message is the clue that there’s a government sponsor.

“The first class of intelligence analysts to graduate from the FBI Academy since sequestration reports to duty this month,” says Halpern in the report. “From FBI Headquarters, I’m Mollie Halpern with ‘FBI This Week.’”

“FBI This Week” airs on ABC Radio as a public service on a space-available basis. This program, along with “Wanted by the FBI,” “Gotcha,” and “Inside the FBI,” is posted to FBI.gov, the FBI’s Facebook page, Twitter account and uploaded to iTunes at no cost.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/09/02/fbi-radio-public-service-self-serving/
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« Reply #177 on: September 10, 2014, 05:01:00 pm »

http://news.yahoo.com/terror-isis-911-poll-134635258.html

Almost half of Americans feel less safe now than before 9/11 attacks, poll says
NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey finds Islamic State killings have left a mark

9/10/14

On the eve of the 13th anniversary of 9/11, almost half of Americans feel less safe than they did before the attacks, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds.

According to the poll conducted Sept. 3-7, 47 percent of 1,000 registered voters surveyed said the country is less safe than before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. That's more than twice the level of fear among Americans a year after the attacks, when 20 percent said the country was less safe, and an increase of 19 percentage points from last year.

And 26 percent of Americans now believe the nation is safer than before 9/11. (Twenty-six percent said they feel about as safe.)

The poll comes after the beheadings of a pair of American journalists at the hands of Islamic State militants, and ahead of President Barack Obama's prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday night, when he is expected to lay out the U.S. plan to combat extremists in Syria and Iraq.

According to the poll, 61 percent of American voters support the United States taking military action against IS, the terrorist group also known as ISIS and ISIL, which wants to establish an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. Thirteen percent believe such action is not in the United States’ interest, while 24 percent said they don’t know enough to have an opinion. However, 40 percent of Americans said U.S. military action against IS should be limited to airstrikes, while 34 percent said they would support airstrikes and the use of combat troops.

A CNN poll released this week found 61 percent of Americans oppose placing U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Syria to combat IS, while 38 percent do not oppose that strategy.

That's a significant shift over a year ago, when a similar NBC/WSJ poll, conducted after widespread reporting that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on its own people, found little support for U.S. military action in Syria. In that poll, 21 percent of Americans supported military action against Syria, while 33 percent did not.

Homeland Security officials testified on Wednesday that IS doesn't pose an immediate threat of an attack inside the United States, but it does "have the ability to attack American targets overseas with little or no warning."

But video of the beheadings, disseminated around the world through social media, appears to have had an effect. According to the recent NBC/WSJ poll, 94 percent of Americans said they had heard about the news of the beheaded journalists — a figure "higher than any other news event" the poll has measured over the past five years.
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« Reply #178 on: September 12, 2014, 11:20:56 pm »

http://news.yahoo.com/americans-back-air-strikes-islamic-state-wary-long-005333178.html
Americans back air strikes on Islamic State, wary of long haul: poll
9/12/14

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans support President Barack Obama's campaign of air strikes against Islamic State militants but have a low appetite for a long campaign against the group, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Friday.

Sixty-four percent of people in the online survey said they backed the campaign, which Obama said in a televised address this week is being escalated and spread beyond Iraq to Syria. Twenty-one percent were opposed and 16 percent said they did not know.

The poll result is good news for Obama as he tries to build support at home for attacking IS, as well as putting together a coalition of allies against the militant group which has taken a swath of territory in Iraq and Syria.

Weary after years of ground war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans look favorably on air strikes because they are less risky, said Ipsos pollster Julia Clark.

"People see air strikes as surgical. They think we are able to go in and do something that affects in a negative way this horrible group of people and we are able to extract ourselves with only a very low risk to American lives," she said.

But when asked if they supported the air campaign even if it lasts two or three years, the proportion of those in favor dropped to 53 percent. Twenty-eight percent were against a long air campaign and 19 percent said they did not know.

"There's absolutely no appetite for re-engagement in that region in any prolonged way so we see that support drop off," Clark said.

The poll was conducted almost entirely after Obama's speech about Islamic State on Wednesday night.

Obama's plan to fight Islamic State simultaneously in Iraq and Syria thrusts the United States directly into the midst of two different wars, in which nearly every country in the region has a stake, alliances have shifted and strategy is entangled with Islam's 1,300-year-old rift between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

Islamic State is made up of Sunni militants, who are fighting against a Shi'ite-led government in Iraq and a government in Syria led by members of a Shi'ite offshoot sect.

It also battles against rival Sunni Islamists and more moderate Sunni groups in Syria, and Kurds on both sides of the border.

In the last month, Islamic State outraged many Americans by beheading two U.S. journalists whom it had held captive.

When asked what is the best response to the threat posed by the Islamic State, 44 percent of people in the Reuters/Ipsos poll said air strikes while only 9 percent favored sending American troops to fight the militants.

Poll respondent Aggie Kuhn, a retired nurse from Ellis in western Kansas, said she strongly favored strikes in part because the United States was partially responsible for Iraq after invading the country in 2003.

"I think we do have a responsibility," she said. "We started things over there."

But she was more lukewarm to the idea of a drawn-out air campaign, especially if countries neighboring Iraq and Syria are not supportive of U.S. military action.

"We have to re-evaluate our position and re-evaluate where the people nearby are. Are we getting support from them? Where is the rest of the international community? It's not one of these things where you want to get into it for 10 years," Kuhn said.

A quarter of respondents said the United States should fund and support a multinational intervention against the group.

A total of 988 people answered the questions about whether Americans support or oppose air strikes from Sept. 10 to 12.

For the question on the best response to Islamic State, 522 people responded on Sept. 11 and 12.

The precision of the Reuters/Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In the questions about support from air strikes the credibility interval was 3.6 percentage points. It was 4.9 percentage points for the question about the best response.
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« Reply #179 on: September 19, 2014, 09:06:44 am »

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/09/17/law-enforcement-bulletin-warned-isis-urging-jihad-attacks-on-us-soil/
9/18/14
Law enforcement bulletin warned of ISIS urging jihad attacks on US soil

A law enforcement bulletin obtained by FoxNews.com warned that Islamic State fighters have increased calls for "lone wolves" to attack U.S. soldiers in America in recent months, citing one tweet that called for jihadists to find service members' addresses online and then "show up and slaughter them."

There will be “a continued call - by Western fighters in Syria and terrorist organizations - for lone offender attacks against U.S. military facilities and personnel,” warned a July law enforcement intelligence bulletin from the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, a state-run agency that gathers, assesses and shares threat information and works with the Department of Homeland Security. “These threats will most likely increase should the U.S. or its allies attack the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) in Syria or Iraq.”

In one example cited in the bulletin, a British jihadist encouraged radicals still living in the West to use Facebook and LinkedIn to find and target soldiers.

"You could literally search for soldiers, find their town, photos of them, look for address in Yellowbook or something," the tweet read. "Then show up and slaughter them.”


On Thursday, Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told FoxNews.com that "there is no credible intelligence at this time to suggest that there is an active plot by (ISIS) to carry out an attack in the United States."

"Public postings by people claiming to be (ISIS) supporters on social media threatening to carry out attacks against the United States and our allies have been made, and we are aware of them," Boogaard said in a statement. "The product referenced is based on such open source social media reports from earlier this summer and is not considered to reference specific, credible evidence of a plot against the homeland.”

The bulletin came out long before Tuesday's indictment of an upstate New York man on a raft of terror-related charges, including attempting to kill "officers and employees of the United States. Mufid Elfgeeh, 30, of Rochester, was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on three counts of attempting to provide material support and resources to Islamic State. Elfgeeh was arrested in late May in a Walmart parking lot after a sting in which an FBI informant offered to sell him guns and silencers, which Elfgeeh allegedly wanted to use to kill returning American troops as well as Shiite Muslims living in the region.

Killing U.S. troops on American soil is an increasing focus of jihadists, according to the bulletin, titled “Continued Threat to Military Personnel from Al Qaeda Inspired Homegrown Violent Extremists.” It was sent out on July 8, 2014, “in response to recent social media messaging from Western fighters in Syria calling for attacks against “soldiers in the West.” Instead of luring radicalized Americans to the Middle East, Islamic State will likely encourage them to stay home and kill U.S. soldiers here, the bulletin warned.

“U.S.-based [Home-Grown Violent Extremists] could be inspired by this rhetoric to turn their attention towards carrying out attacks at home,” the bulletin states.

The radical rhetoric is delivered via social media, where Islamic State operatives have long exhorted westerners to get on a plane and come join the battle. But terrorists now believe they can have a powerful effect from afar just by inspiring attacks inside the U.S.

“In recent Twitter posts, foreign fighters in Syria have encouraged Muslims in the West to target soldiers with spontaneous attacks using small arms (i.e. knives and guns),” the bulletin said.

It listed several examples of tweets posted in late June that specifically mention interest in attacking Western military personnel. In one series of tweets a British fighter formerly with Jabhat al Nusra lamented the terrorist infighting between Islamic State and groups affiliated with Al Qaeda.

"I’m realizing bickering about internal politics is taking up our time too much, the enemies are working what’s stopping you from something like learning how to make explosives or learning shooting, or killing vulnerable soldiers right now? (To the bros in the West).”

The bulletin also cited an uptick in chatter on Internet forums calling for attacks on Western military targets, with many referring to Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 service members at the Texas Army base in 2009 in a case the Obama administration still labels as an example of "workplace violence," and not terrorism. Hasan recently announced from prison, where he is awaiting execution, he wanted to join Islamic State.

A commenter on the Ansar Al-Mujahideen English Forum reposted a 2009 statement from radicalized American Adam Gadahn, now a senior Al Qaeda leader, praising  Hasan.

"The Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan, lightly armed but with a big heart, a strong will and a confident step, again brought into focus the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of America ... and most significantly, the Mujahid brother Nidal Hasan is a pioneer, a trailblazer and a role model who has opened the door, lit a path and shown the way forward for every Muslim among the unbelievers and yearns to discharge his duty to Allah and play a part in the defense of Islam and Muslims against the savage, heartless and bloody Zionist Crusader assault on our religion, sacred places and homelands,” read the statement.

The intelligence center assessed in July “ “that military personnel will likely be targeted individually in spontaneous ‘ambush’ style attacks similar to the May, 2013, machete attack against British soldier Drummer Lee Rigby in the U.K.
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