Politics

Drones for Christ by David Swanson | July 2013 How Jerry Falwell's Liberty U.—the world's largest Christian university—became an evangelist for drone warfare. LIBERTY UNIVERSITY in Lynchburg, Va., was founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell. Its publications carry the slogan “Training Champions for Christ since 1971.” Some of those champions are now being trained to pilot armed drones, and others to pilot more traditional aircraft, in U.S. wars. For Christ. Liberty bills itself as “one of America’s top military-friendly schools.” It trains chaplains for the various branches of the military. And it trains pilots in its School of Aeronautics (SOA)—pilots who go up…

http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/snowden-surveillance-subverting-constitution

A true American -- Sheriff Andy teaches Opie about the Fourth Amendment and due process of law after Opie eavesdrops on a private conversation.

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelationsThe 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows • Q&A with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I do not expect to see home again' Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 June 2013 15.18 EDT The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Sn…

Mama Earth is beginning to feel the strain with 7 billion folks weighing her down. Before we really make her angry should we make some real attempts to limit the population? When Mama Earth gets angry it can be ugly. She can unleash famine, disease, pestilence and much, much more. All have some effect on the general population. That is reducing it. Therefore should we prohibit "straight marriage" except in unusual circumstances? Of course, marriage is not the point. having children is. So what I really mean is to prohibit straight relationships. China, a country I ordinarily would not try to emulate, has passed prohibitions on anything other than one child per mar…

Putin allegedly wants to welcome Edward in Russia... Well at least he isn't gay... I'm not sure whether Putin would offer the same invitation if he were gay. I hope Edward doesn't end up there. Hope he can reunite with his girl friend. His girl friend is a hottie. http://news.yahoo.com/russia-consider-asylum-american-cyber-furor-134130875.html

ACLU published a brief piece noting among other things what a crock is the claim that NSA's shenanigans have been subject to "judicial review." Checks, Balances, and the National Security AgencyBy Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU & Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 10:14am This column was originally published on MSNBC.com. Over the course of three days, the usually invisible National Security Agency has become ostentatiously visible and many Americans do not like what they see. In an effort to address the widely shared feeling that our vaunted system of checks and balances has utterly failed us, President Obama reassu…

Reflections on Hofstadter's thesis in current context: http://m.guardiannews.com/world/blog/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-patriotism-versus-paranoia

Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance dataRevealed: The NSA's powerful tool for cataloguing global surveillance data – including figures on US collection • Boundless Informant: mission outlined in four slides • Read the NSA's frequently asked questions document Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 June 2013 10.08 EDT The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). Note the '2007' date in the image relates to the document from which the interactive map derives its top secret classification, not to the map itself. The National Securi…

In a similar case in 2011, a leaker named Thomas Drake got away without serving time. Maybe Edward can do the same. Not sure why he chose Hong Kong out of many places. Anyways, there must be something done in the agency but it's hard to do that when it is so secretive and operates behind the door. Let's hope for the best. //www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/10/thomas-drake-plea-deal-nsa-leaks-obama-administration_n_874780.html

Boggles belief. NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama Glenn Greenwald The Guardian, Wednesday 5 June 2013 • Read the Verizon court order in full here Under the terms of the order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data and the time and duration of all calls. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order…

Following on the Verizon and PRISM news, Anonymous has published additional documents that it says show government surveillance overreach: http://thedocs.hostzi.com/ ...prefaced by this memo: _ / \ _ __ ___ _ __ _ _ _ __ ___ ___ _ _ ___ / _ \ | '_ \ / _ \| '_ \| | | | '_ ` _ \ / _ \| | | / __| / ___ \| | | | (_) | | | | |_| | | | | | | (_) | |_| \__ \ /_/ \_\_| |_|\___/|_| |_|\__, |_| |_| |_|\___/ \__,_|___/ |___/ Greetings Netizens, and Citizens of the world. Anonymous has obtained some documents that "they" do not want you…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/gallery/2013/jun/09/nsa-kids-books-twitter-pictures?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-4%20Pixies:Pixies:Position1:anchor%20image#/?picture=410411607&index=7

The GOP’s Huge, Growing Modernity Gap by mansplained to Fox News’ incredulous Megyn Kelly this week that “when you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society, and other animals, the male typically is the dominant role.” Exhibit No. 3: Phil Bryant, Mississippi’s first-term governor, blamed working mothers for American illiteracy. Exhibit No. 4, Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss attributed rape in the armed forces to hormones.” The real problem, though, is not stray and scatterred comments. Rather it is that such comments speak to the party's discomfort with modernity. (1998 is the last time Silicon Valley sent a Re…

Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate By NOAM COHEN and LESLIE KAUFMAN Published: June 6, 2013 After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors. Enlarge This Image David dos Santos Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The…

We often hear the famous snippet of Jefferson's great pronouncement on why a free press is critical to the functioning of a democracy. Finally occurred to me to look it up in context. Illuminating; sharply relevant today: Document 8 Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington 16 Jan. 1787Papers 11:48--49 The tumults in America I expected would have produced in Europe an unfavorable opinion of our political state. But it has not. On the contrary, the small effect of those tumults seems to have given more confidence in the firmness of our governments. The interposition of the people themselves on the side of government has had a great effect on the opinion here. I am persuad…

NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple • Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007 Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 18.05 EDT A slide depicting the top-secret PRISM program The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to colle…

On whistleblowers and government threats of investigationNo healthy democracy can endure when the most consequential acts of those in power remain secret and unaccountable Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 June 2013 08.04 EDT James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, who called the Guardian's revelations 'reprehensible'. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's ph…

The shooting of Ibragim Todashev: is the lawlessness of Obama's drone policy coming home?Once a state gets used to abusing the rights of foreigners in distant lands, it's almost inevitable it will import the habit George Monbiot The Guardian, Monday 3 June 2013 15.50 EDT Did the FBI execute Ibragim Todashev? He appears to have been shot seven times while being interviewed at home in Orlando, Florida, about his connection to one of the Boston bombing suspects. Among the shots was the assassin's hallmark: a bullet to the back of the head. What kind of an interview was it? An irregular one. There was no lawyer present. It was not recorded. By the time Todashev was shot…

Don't recall this being much if at all discussed here when it was released Sept. 2011. Still seems only too relevant. Report - A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11 September 7, 2011 Download the Report » An ACLU report release to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 warns that a decade after the attacks, the United States is at risk of enshrining a permanent state of emergency in which core values must be subordinated to ever-expanding claims of national security. (More on Civil Liberties After 9/11 ») The report, entitled, "A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years after 9/11," explores how sacrificing America's valu…

CBO: Tax Breaks Cost $12 Trillion Over Decade, Benefit Most Wealthy * Top 20 pct of earners get half the benefit of top breaks * Tax breaks on capital gains favor the wealthy * Study favors Obama's approach to tax reform -Democrats By David Lawder WASHINGTON, May 29 (Reuters) - The top ten U.S. tax deductions, credits and exclusions will keep $12 trillion out of federal government coffers over the next decade, and several of them mainly benefit the wealthiest Americans, a new study from the Congressional Budget Office shows. The top 20 percent of income earners will reap more than half of the $900 billion in benefits from these tax breaks that will accrue i…

Getting the whole 4th Estate this riled up at you would seem to be a strategy not pursued with such success since Nixon... Obama Administration's Media Surveillance Unleashes Wave Of Condemnation The Huffington Post | By Rebecca Shapiro and Jack Mirkinson Posted: 05/22/2013 9:05 am EDT | Updated: 05/23/2013 10:20 am EDT The Justice Department's investigation and surveillance of the Associated Press and Fox News have led to perhaps the most sustained wave of criticism for the Obama administration's media policies since the president took office. On Wednesday, the New York Times became one of the more influential voices to say what many others have been saying: th…

WTF??? Who is this goon? Alex Jones Claims Tornado Weather Weapon Could Have Been Used In Oklahoma On Tuesday, Alex Jones suggested on his show the possibility that the Government possibly used weather weapons to create the tornado that ripped through Oklahoma. Claiming that ski resorts use weather planes to create clouds that create snow, Jones posits that the weaponized version of a weather manipulation system could be the one responsible for the Oklahoma weather disaster. “Of course there’s weather weapons stuff going on.” Said Jones. “But, who knows if they did?” Added Jones. “You know, that’s the thing. We don’t know.” http://voice4america.com/masadluff…

I didn't know this.