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My Slashdot friend PopeRatzo directed my attention to the following article, which provides a good overview for those unfamiliar with the Obama administration's "Insider Threat Program;" if any doubts remained regarding "the most transparent administration in US history," prepare to be even more disgusted:

Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S. [2013-06-20]

That said, the better question is -- are we willing to allow the government to change its relationship with us, the citizens, and if so, what will be the new boundaries for such a change?

I think that question is in the process of being answered.

Linchpin for Obama’s plan to predict future leakers unproven

PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’

I would direct you (or more precisely, anyone reading this who does not have a financial interest in maintaining the surveillance state) to read about something called "Operation Insider Threat". There is a very good article in McClatchy about this new anti-whistleblower program of the U.S. government. Read about this and then decide whether or not the government has declared whistleblowers enemies of the state (even those in the Department of Education, Agriculture, and other agencies not directly related to national security). I think you'll be surprised at what our government's up to.

Thanks for the article tip*, and for your other posts above; you expressed my sentiments regarding Curunir_wolf, WindBourne, and their respective arguments very well.

* Link for other readers: "Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S."

We can no longer claim any high ground, when you've created an apparatus that the East German secret police could have only dreamed about.

Heh, you got that right!

BERLIN — Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs

Wars (and threats) only exist as long as there's enough people who believe in enemies. Sometimes it only takes a few to install the images in the minds of millions.

When the facades come down it's obvious that everybody does everything, and the useful illusions are no longer valid as a control mechanism. It's therefore paramount to control the information, and the ultimate construction to achieve that is basically a totalitarian state.

To enable the p2p control and loyality to the leader and the state measures have already been taken - Insider Threat Program for example.

The changes are slowly creeping in. The problem is that an individual is impossible to control in the end, so the measures are also tightened to infinity.

It may have worked for you for a long time but the world is slowly awakening to just how evil the behaviour of Israel is.

Given your views, you should probably hope that the world isn't awakening to evil behavior, otherwise the there some unexpected drubbings that are going to be handed out.

Palestinians Celebrate after Brutal Murder of Fogel Family
The Jews Were Brought to Palestine for the Great Massacre
Palestinian Myth Machine
Fighting the Lies Harder Than Fighting the War
Goldstone: You Cannon Undo a Slander
The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews
Why the al-Dura Blood Libel Still Matters

Yes, much of the world joins to condemn Israel, often based on lies, but either passes in silence over true horrors of the genuine mass murdering regimes in the Middle East, or actually defends the real butchers.

Hama 1982 – The Syrian massacre you never heard about
Commentary: Remembering Iraq's mass graves

What happened to Iraq's 'human shields'?

If Israel was only as evil as Iraq or Syria, the Paelstinians would have disappeared into mass graves long ago. That clearly hasn't happened.

Not to defend him, but the last guy ordered capture and detainment. The current guy by far prefers drone strikes, most of which include civilian casualties, and many of which are ONLY civilian casualties (i.e. no terrorist was hit in the strike.)

http://www.policymic.com/articles/16949/predator-drone-strikes-50-civilians-are-killed-for-every-1-terrorist-and-the-cia-only-wants-to-up-drone-warfare
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/world/asia/pakistan-us-drone-strikes

Also, the last guy didn't lie about WMD's. Yes, there were none, that much is true. However the belief that they were there is not just what the last guy beheld, but numerous other nations did as well. Basically everybody believed there were WMD's, not just the US. It isn't a lie unless you were unaware that you weren't speaking the truth.

Now the current guy? He actively and knowingly lies about who he targets:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-drone-war-kills-others.html

If you want to talk about innocents being killed, the current guy is much worse. That, and he himself made the argument that he has the right to hit Americans with drone strikes without due process. Personally I'm happy with the one time that this has been done because that asshole had it coming, but it still sets a bad precedent.

the average American is only outraged when they are told to be by the mainstream media

I have more than a few qualms about the MSM and what they do and don't cover. However this one isn't getting a pass. That story is from the Associated Press, which is not exactly samizdat. It's also in McClatchy papers, which if anything are known for leaning left.

http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/2013/05/republicans-call-for-an-inquiry-into-irs-targeting-of-conservative-groups.html

What's today? You will notice that damaging stories are always released on Friday when they want something forgotten. The press gets a pass because they can claim to cover it, but it will be forgotten by Monday and we'll be back to the American Idol judges getting fired.

the average American is only outraged when they are told to be by the mainstream media

I have more than a few qualms about the MSM and what they do and don't cover. However this one isn't getting a pass. That story is from the Associated Press, which is not exactly samizdat. It's also in McClatchy papers, which if anything are known for leaning left. http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/2013/05/republicans-call-for-an-inquiry-into-irs-targeting-of-conservative-groups.html

Re GITMO: Obama had control of the Senate and House for 2 years, plus he can submit an Executive Order. Don't blame anybody but Obama and the Dems if you think GITMO should be closed.

Only partially correct. The opposition to moving GITMO detainees to the United States for trial was widespread and came from both parties. The Senate voted 90-6 to block all funding associated with moving any GITMO prisoners to the US. Blame the Democrats, sure, but also blame the Republicans. Almost nobody in the Senate was willing to see GITMO closed. (See the Associated Press story.)

And please, let's put that canard about "control of the Senate and House" to bed. Remember that it takes 60 votes to do anything in the Senate, not 50, if there is even one member of the opposition willing at assert a fillibuster. And Republicans used the filibuster a record number of times in 2009 and 2010. According to the American Enterprise Institute:

"Republicans have ratcheted use of the filibuster up to completely unheard of levels. Look at the things that the House (of Representatives) has passed that can't make it through the Senate. The list just keeps growing," said Norman Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right policy organization.
(source)

The chart accompanying that article shows 112 cloture votes (used to try to end a filibuster) in 2009. The previous record was 61. Blaming Obama and the Democrats for anything on the excuse that they could have passed Program X when they controlled the House and Senate is flatly untrue. At no time during the Obama administration did the Democrats ever have functional control of the House and Senate.

You are uninformed.

Non-citizens are protected by the constitution: http://www.asil.org/insights080620.cfm

Obama's definition of imminent: page 7, par 2, first sentence:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf
Analysis: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/obama-kill-list-doj-memo

Obama's definition of militant:
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/
which should be put in context with the recent CIA document leak which confirms that the Obama administration kills random people and calls them militants:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-drone-war-kills-others.html

Bitcoin is a political move by Mega probably as a hedge out of fear the US government might try to cut off it's revenues somehow.

Indeed, he might have looked at what happened to Wikileaks, and decided to take preventive measures.

Wikileaks has nothing to do with Mega. When you even put them in the same category you endanger Mega. Wikileaks was basically functioning to piss the US government off almost exclusively for the past few years and wasn't prepared for the reaction. Wikileaks was threatening not just a faction within the US government but the entire State Dept itself. That being said the actions to try to block the flow of money were unconstitutional as Julian Assange is not an American Citizen they had no business trying to treat him as if he were. Even if he were he was not under oath so they had no business trying to give him a responsibility to protect classified information which that responsibility belonged to Bradley Manning. The only person who should have been arrested and prosecuted is Bradley Manning.

Bitcoin is a political move by Mega probably as a hedge out of fear the US government might try to cut off it's revenues somehow.

Indeed, he might have looked at what happened to Wikileaks, and decided to take preventive measures.

Not only that, but A123 was actually a damn fine lithium ion battery producer that had decent products. The electric car thing killed it, but China subsidizing its competitors more than we were subsidizing A123 didn't help one bit.

So out of 63 companies, 4 dead ones were vaporware. That's 6.3%.

Meanwhile Up to $3 of every $10 as much as $3 of every $10 that U.S. taxpayers spent on wartime contracting over the last decade went up in smoke. That's 30%.

tl;dr: There's always fraud when it comes to the government. The Republicans are just whining that the Democrats aren't very good at it.

First: wrong. These things are trivial to research, this link took me 10 seconds to find.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/u-s-religious-donations-at-8-8-billion-for-developing-world-32354/

$8.8B for foreign aid is a lot, that's great - but as the *Christian newspaper* says, it's only 37% compared to what the US government provides. "Great majority" and "simple fact"? Yeah, try again...

And second: I didn't say anything about "Christians", I was pointing out hypocricy of the wealthy religious right. Do you know where a disproportionate amount of religious donations come from? Those who can barely afford to donate... http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/05/19/68456/americas-poor-are-its-most-generous.html

In general, all stats I have looked up say that religious (NOT just Christian, all religions) make up about 1/3 of charitable donations in the US. As I said above, that's admirable, but had nothing to do with my point.

But you could have looked ALL of this up just as easily if you really cared about truth vs truthiness.

I can see a 13 year old boy called into the principal's office and

Selective outrage. You won't even blink while the statists inflict protein deficiency on your kid.

You confuse 'the American public' with 'internet nerds'. The American public is overwhelmingly anti-Wikileaks.

subsidies are there to maintain a stable food market...and it works.

No, subsidies exist to feed money into corporate farms that in turn give their lobbying groups the edge to make sure that they come out turning taxpayer dollars into profit (often with negative or little disposition towards the family farms and little guys).

Soda are marginally cheaper because of it. Less then a penny a liter.

That's not true at all. To come to that conclusion, you're taking the billions of dollars that the federal government is paying out to farmers and dividing it across the number of servings in that time frame. But that's not the true net effect of what those subsidy dollars have on the industry. The market is literally flooded with corn now that ethanol subsidies have been put in place and removed. The price is going to plummet and you'll be able to make as much HFCS as you want for nothing. The amount the government put in to bait these farmers into this system is paltry compared to the effect it's going to have on the price of corn. You didn't even read the article I linked to, did you? A ton of people are producing corn right now thinking they're going to get a ton of money just like last year as that corn is turned into "green" ethanol and when that doesn't happen, HFCS will basically be free for soda manufacturers. Hell, the government (read: taxpayer) will probably end up paying (er, "incentivizing") again to prevent that corn from rotting in the fields.

"Don't even get me started on how US corn subsidies and NAFTA have destroyed Mexico's farming and forced millions to turn to other crops like drugs." Since it isn't true, there is nothing to start.

Citation granted. You don't realize it, but the poorest parts of Mexico are suffering from the above subsidies paid for on my and your dime.

As to the fed, no... Fannie and Freddie were on the hook for them.

And again, the vast majority of subprime loans had nothing to do with Fannie or Freddie.

As to my friends lying to me. Yes, I take your word over theirs. Not only do you know less then them but you also have no credibility beyond the common courtesy I extend to anyone. I'm afraid no one trusts a random person on the street over a trusted friend who is also a professional expert in the field. No one does that. That you would expect me to do that is frankly odd.

Government regulations prevented redlining or the practice of giving higher interest rates to borrows based not on their debt or income, but on who they were or where they lived.

Meaning: if a white assistant manager of a Burger King made $40k a year and qualified for a 4% rate with xyz outstanding debt, banks wouldn't be able to charge a 7% rate to a black assistant manager making the same wage with the same credit rating.

Conservatives and banking apologists have tried to twist that into a "government forced banks to hand out loans" storyline. They are lying.

Evidence? here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_policies_and_the_subprime_mortgage_crisis#Community_Reinvestment_Act

See above. Feel free to stop spreading this Big Lie at any time.

My friends were not wrong or lying to me. They simply knew what they were talking about unlike you. I don't take kindly to people calling my friends liars especially when they're full of crap. So if you feel insulted, understand that you earned it. The anger or offense you might feel is something you should turn upon yourself and not upon me.

Too damned bad. Your "friends" are lying to you, as I've just proven. Feel free to deal with that fact at any time as well.

Do you not know that Democrats blocked a Republican bill to lower student loan interest rates just last month? The fact that you hammer Republicans for this either shows blatant bias or extreme ignorance on your part as well as whoever submitted this article. HERE is an article explaining it.

Democrats blocked that bill because Republicans attached an amendment at the last minute that defines legal sexual relations as being only between couples who are heterosexual, married, and Christian. In other words, rape charges could be filed against anyone having otherwise consensual sex. Try reading the damn legislation in full before you start spouting nonsense about how evil Democrats are.

What's even more funny is that Republicans are running ads against Obama for how much total student loan debt there is out there. There actions here would either (a) increase debts, assuming the higher interest rates don't keep people from going to college, or (b) keep people from going to college.

Yep. they are showing themselves to be *sooo* much better.

Do you not know that Democrats blocked a Republican bill to lower student loan interest rates just last month? The fact that you hammer Republicans for this either shows blatant bias or extreme ignorance on your part as well as whoever submitted this article.

HERE is an article explaining it.

The Iranians are Shia Muslims, the Saudis are Sunnis, the two hate each other with the passion you often find in long running sectarian conflicts.

By some accounts, the strife in Syria is a proxy for a general sectarian war.

Perhaps my irony detector is busted but I seriously doubt any banker INTENDED to lose a shedload of money

I think the OP was referring to stuff like this.

Because real life has to compromise. In that though you should be a big supporter of those Tea Party Republicans who will vote down any tax raises. They are standing by their guns and sticking to their promises even though they are obviously bad for the United States.

You mean those same tea-partiers who defied GOP leadership [1] and decided the middle class didn't deserve a continued tax break? Yea, that's a class act right there... tax cuts are good...only for the 1%. Shows you the teaparty's true colors (ie, green as the funding from Koch brothers).

[1] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/20/133652/house-passes-year-long-payroll.html

Sure Hitchens made a name for himself for his efforts against religion. But those pale in comparison to his greater achievement: helping to bring the world the Iraq war.

I will always remember the steadfastly careerist way Hitchens reached across the political divide to join hands with the neocons in the Bush administration to boldly hype up false intelligence to make the war in Iraq a reality. Thanks to Hitchens the Iraqi people no longer live in fear of Saddam Hussein's regime. Now they live in fear of torture and death at the hands of Iraqi government and/or various politico-religious militias. Always better when a government monopoly is replaced by a competitive market, eh?

The war also removed the burden of a functioning electrical grid or sanitation systems – facilities that would be superfluous for the 6% of the population, or 2 million Iraqis, who have been internally displaced by the war.

None of this would have been possible without the efforts of pro-war propagandists like Christopher Hitchens. I hope for his sake, that he's right and there is no god.

For instance, Iran has been training and supplying people to fight in Iraq against US troops.

Not really. Most of the people fighting US troops in Iraq were Sunni (Saddam, his Ba'ath Party and his military were mostly Sunni). The present governments of Iraq and Iran are both Shia and are closely allied (no doubt to the annoyance of the US)... removing the Ba'ath Party from power and installing a Shia government was a great move for Iran. There are even allegations that it was Iranian intelligence that tricked the U.S. into invading Iraq through the use of double agents and false intel: US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war:

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq... "It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi." .... "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."

Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

"The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces."

What's challenging for certain other people to understand is that, as your income goes up, the fraction of your income donated to charity goes way, way down. Here in Utah, most of our state legislators are real estate barons or other successful businessmen who constantly write laws for each other. Their stinginess towards the poor probably shows up in their private life as well as their victim-blaming legislation. Hell, one of the bastards runs a payday loan business that preys on those who are in desperate financial straits.

If you're arguing against government-run charity, you can't just wave your hands about how private charity will pick up the slack. You need to show how private charity will do at least as much to combat poverty as government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, housing assistance, food stamps, etc. Otherwise you're essentially arguing that it's better to increase human suffering than to edge away from an absolutely pure capitalist ideology.

And as you point out yourself, private charities aren't immune to corruption.

Bush's budget issued in 2001 warned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were overleveraged, and said that they needed tighter controls, oversight, and a host of reforms because "their failure could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting federally insured entities and economic activity".

So the republican president with a republican house and senate could do nothing to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because of the threat of a democratic filibuster? Do you really think the democrats had that much power back then? Unlike the republicans, they were (and are) not organized enough to maintain a unified front against anything that is absolutely core to their platform.
Additionally, Fannie and Freddie were significantly less exposed to the subprime housing market than private banks. See here. They were merely dragged down with the collapse of the housing market. Your republican talking points are entertaining, but do not honestly represent the facts.

It's said that people are ultimately responsible for their actions, and I agree. Wholeheartedly... Because in the end, when someone if boned, it's their reality. Thankfully, we've got the division of labor thing going so people don't have to be lenders or real estate agents to get a home. Whose burden of responsibility is it to say "No, you can't have that home"? I keep hearing that it's government regulation with the Community Reinvestment Act that caused it, but the act was only compulsory to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which handled roughly 33% of the secondary loans to low income families. That left 66% loosening up their underwriting standards and giving loans to people that were guaranteed to not be able to afford them. The 66% were companies not covered under the CRA, which did not have to give out the loans. The only reason the loans were a good investment was because they could be repackaged into CDOs and sold off, leaving the risk with the last sucker holding the bag, which was not the underwriting firm. They didn't have a pound of flesh in the game after the securities were sold. The individuals who could not pay the mortgage lacked the sophistication to tell they couldn't afford it was only part of the problem. I know if Tyrone Biggums walked up to me asking me for a loan, while I knew he had no job and a $300/week crack habit, would make me the asshole for giving it to him. Sure, he shouldn't have asked for it, but that doesn't put that money back in my pocket. Maybe there should be a fiduciary duty in the housing and lending markets to ensure the loan meets the expectations.

tl;dr making bad loans was not compulsory to private lending instututions. They did it because they saw dollar signs instead of what it really was: a plan designed to fail for private institutions due to the inherent risk. Subprime means less than optimal. If you're putting your own money up, you're not going for subprime.

Including the point-blank firing of weapons into the heads of toddlers.

I'm guessing you meant this:

WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says

Bradley Manning did the right thing.

Considering the news from just the last week:

• WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says
• Wall Street Journal: Why Does Jeanne Whalen Have a Hardon for Julian Assange?
• The Guardian Leaks unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables
• Former Wikileaks Spokesman Destroyed Documents
• New Your Times: The Nixonian henchmen of today:

I am not surprised at all that powerful organizations continue to attack them, cheered on by the usual propaganda fan club.

Not in South Carolina, thanks to our stupid legislature.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/05/19/114429/sc-house-approves-amazon-tax-break.html

"They hate us because we blindly support Israel" "US foreign policy has caused this hatred"

Another Israel hater, how charming.

So, if we withdraw our "blind" support for Israel and let the chips fall where they may, the Islamists will stop hating us?

Hardly.

Let me contribute some facts here. The Wall Street Journal was across the street from the World Trade Towers. After 9/11, they were barely able to evacuate their offices before the WSJ offices were destroyed.

After 9/11 (and before it was bought up by Murdoch), the WSJ made a major effort to find out *why* terrorists would hate us. They used the resources of their worldwide bureaus and international editions. They *already* had access to leaders of the Arab world, and had been interviewing everybody from top rulers and billionaires to college students in MacDonald's. People subscribed to the WSJ and trusted them. This was the effort in which Daniel Perl was killed.

They got several important answers. One response kept coming up repeatedly. One interview summed it up. The guy said, "I love America. I got my MBA in America. But you must do something about Israel." People around the Arab world are really upset about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Some of them are using it cynically, but others are sincere.

I'm Jewish and I'm upset about it. For 20 years B'Tselem has been documenting atrocities that sound like what the Nazis did to the Jews. Now we have the Goldstone report.

The most outrageous and well-documented ones, I think, are the "white flag" cases. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/01/27/60853/israeli-troops-killed-gaza-children.html An Israeli soldier got out of a tank and machine-gunned down a 2-year-old and 7-year-old child, while their grandmother was standing outside their house waving a white flag. This really is the kind of thing the Nazis did to the Jews. There were many cases like this. It's been going on for 20 years. Israel didn't investigate them or prosecute the soldiers involved.

Our government has been supporting Netanyahu and the settlers on this. When reporters go to the site of a massacre like this, they often find equipment stamped "Made in USA". Whenever anybody protests, the Hasbara squad calls him an "Israel hater."

This understandably makes many Arabs hostile towards the U.S. If we hadn't let it get to this point starting 20 years ago, we wouldn't have so many Arabs that hate us. If we made Israel stop, we wouldn't have so many more Arabs hating us.

The solution is simple -- the settlements are illegal, and Israel should obey the law and get them out. Netanyahu won't do that because he's the party of the settlers. Our government won't force them, because the AIPAC lobby has a lock on our government.

I think the most likely solution is that the Palestinians will get their state. That will make the legal status of the settlements even worse. The Israelis will probably wind up with a worse solution than they could have gotten from Arafat. The settlers will have to choose between living as law-abiding citizens under a Palestinian government -- including Hamas -- or getting out. And unlike Gaza, they might not get $200,000 to $300,000 compensation for their homes this time. I just hope theydon't come back to Brooklyn.

There has not been a single documented case of you making poopie, anywhere, any time. Therefore I can conclude that you MUST be full of shit. Isn't logic wonderful?

I am not surprised that you are one to pop up with the logical fallacy that an absence of evidence is actually conclusive proof. You want to accuse people of being endangered by wikileaks? Then you need to back that shit up with more than self-serving speculation.

Also: http://www.anorak.co.uk/267106/politicians/wikileaks-killed-1300-people-and-counting.html

Yes, when people die in the aftermath of the removal of corruption it's not at all the fault of the people abusing their power in the first place. Good thing you aren't an American because you have far more in common with the ideals of the DPRK than with ours.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/taliban+hunt+wikileaks+outed+afghan+informers/3727667.html

Seems like you are plenty willing to take terrorists at their word, until it no longer serves your purposes. It was an empty threat then and it still is today.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/28/104404/officials-may-be-overstating-the.html

"But despite similar warnings ahead of the previous two massive releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death."

Japan's ocean radiation hits 7.5 million times legal limit

TOKYO â" The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.

The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal limit. The Monday samples also were found to contain radioactive cesium at 1.1 million times the legal limit.

The exact source of the radiation was not immediately clear, though Tepco has said that highly contaminated water has been leaking from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. The utility initially believed that the leak was coming from a crack, but several attempts to seal the crack failed.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/04/05/111571/japans-ocean-radiation-hits-75.html

"We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents," Morrell told the Washington Post on Aug 11. Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/28/104404/officials-may-be-overstating-the.html#ixzz1FXksZKgb

By Glenn Garvin | The Miami Herald (A McClatchy Paper)

Virtually at the same moment Obama was demanding that Egypt stop monkeying with Facebook and Twitter, Maine's imitation-Republican Sen. Susan Collins announced that she plans to reintroduce a bill that died in Congress last year. Collins gave the bill a smiley-face name, the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. Internet geeks, about the only people who've noticed what the government is up to, prefer to call it the Kill-Switch Bill, because that's what it would do: Give the president the authority to turn off the Internet whenever he pleases.

The bill (assuming Collins follows through on her announced plan to keep it substantially the same as the one she sponsored previously) would give the president the right to declare "a national cyber emergency" and seize authority over any part of the Internet he decides is "vital" to the "economic security, public health or safety of the United States, any state, or any local government." And just in case that's not broad enough, the bill also allows him to snatch anything the White House deems "appropriate."

But this is America, dammit, so the bill includes safeguards for our liberties. The president can only grab stuff for four months at a time. And while the bill says his designations on which parts of the Internet are "vital" are not subject to judicial review, he will have the advice of an enormous new cyberspace bureaucracy presided over by one of our most civil-liberties-sensitive agencies ... the airport-gropers of Homeland Security.

[...]

Even more ominous was an interview given last year by Collins' supporter, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. "We need the capacity for the president to say, Internet Service Provider, we've got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country," Lieberman told CNN. "Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too."

What makes me laugh is the author's pretending - downright posturing - that America's right doesn't want an internet kill switch...lollll...the right will do the "reluctantly signed of on" gig in public, and celebrate in private. You only have to watch Fox for a half hour to see that our right ain't real thrilled with the idea of the American people having untimely access to the inconvenient truth.

Probably it means some form of rural broadband or Wimax or something for shcools. But maybe not for every farmer along the route.

It was Obama's promise to push the internet into every classroom and village library and small town hospital.

Benigni asked if the Mafia were now using pretty young girls instead of guns and bombs, and imagined the premier returning home one night to find three girls in his bed, and shrieking: “The Mafia are after me!”.

Now it appears that Begnini's joke is the truth if you substitute the CIA for the Mafia. It's starting to look like at least one of the girls in Julian Assange's bed had CIA ties, a history of politically motivated lies, and is very likely part of a CIA plot to discredit him. Well, I suppose it's more pleasant than a bullet from a sniper rifle.

There's certainly something interesting going on.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/08/104911/one-of-wikileaks-founder-assanges.html

They are already selling cocaine. It has been said that pot is their cash cow funding all their other operations. Most people in the US look at pot as no different than alcohol, and such it doesn't have the same stigma as cocaine or it's derivatives. I wouldn't be surprised if more people in the US use pot than all of the other illegal drugs combined.

Legalizing pot will not destroy the cartels, but it will deal a huge blow to their revenue stream.

The fact is, that within the continental USA, because we are electrified, the ONLY places that Solar pays for itself is on extreme rural areas

The fact is is solar may be more competitive if it received as much in subsidies as conventional energy gets. Coal receive billions of dollars in subsidies. Add in external costs, such as co2 and mercury emissions, and coal will cost more. Require nuclear power to buy it's own insurance, get rid of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, and make companies pay their own disposal costs and nuclear power will cost more too.

Between 2002 and 2008 coal received around $17 billion in subsidies. Obama's 2011 budget proposal even cuts coal subsidies $2.3 billion over the next decade. But it's hard to see exactly how much subsidies are, as State coal subsidies and US subsidies of oil and coal more than double the subsidies of renewable energy says, it's hard to add up all the subsidies because while some are purely handouts on taxpayer dollars others are deductions on taxes owed. And nuclear power would not exist without subsidies, it is Hooked on Subsidies:

"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

Falcon

The problem is that there is so much (free) money going around that the people who are in a position to lend have run out of ideas for investments.

O Rly?

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/aug2010/sb20100830_829624.htm

Generally speaking, we found more demand for loans among business owners. And among the banks that responded to our survey, 72 percent indicated that the number of loan applications they received had increased during the last six months. So there's demand for capital. Something's not quite sitting right when we hear from the banks that there's no demand.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/12/90309/too-small-to-succeed-firms-still.html

Yet when Collins approached the bank about borrowing at least $500,000 to expand his 12-employee firm -- which retrofits buildings with energy efficient technologies -- he was rebuffed, told that his company lacks resources and collateral. US Bancorp declined comment.

So yes, they are attempting to have us believe that 'some one else' at least will be responsible for the deaths of these informants.

Yes, you're definitely confused about what a false flag operation means, and why it doesn't apply to the scenario you're describing. False flag requires secrecy on the part of the entity who engages in the operation, allowing them to create the belief in the public that another entity (government, government agency, the illuminati, whoever) actually performed the operation in question.

The Pentagon saying that "The Taliban" killed these people because "Julian Assange" leaked their names lacks the element of subterfuge and misdirection required for it to be a false flag - a false flag operation would require the Pentagon to put people in Taliban uniforms and send those people to go kill the informants themselves, and then if they really wanted to be good, arrange for video from a Predator showing those "Taliban" guys getting shredded by a bomb, but miraculously, notes from the Wikileaks entry survived incineration - thus "proving" to the public that, a) the Taliban did it; b) Assange helped them by identifying ; and c) they're the good guys because they killed the people who killed informants.

That's false flag. Simply accusing someone of an act without evidence isn't. Accusing someone of something when "BobMcD don't believe it for a second!" isn't, either. There's a difference.

You're doing it again.

Doing what again, Bob? Asking you to stop being a hypocrite? Guilty as charged. I'd love for you to simply say on the record that if Assange is going to make accusations of crimes being committed, he should be held to the exact same standard as anybody else - namely, that he should provide some supporting evidence for his accusations, or be criticized as a sensationalist media manipulator for making baseless accusations.

Did you likewise miss how our own money was used to attack NATO forces? Isn't abetting terrorism on the list of 'bad things' to do?

First, this wasn't "revealed" by the wikileaks documentation, this was reported on at least as early as 2007: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2007/08/27/19232/iraqi-insurgents-taking-cut-of.html

Second, "bad things to do" =/= "war crimes".

Involving civilian deaths: Again, already known, already reported, at least 6 months ago: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18001

And the particular civilian deaths would have to be *shown* to be a war crime, not just "unreported," because there is nothing in the Geneva conventions that says the death has to be reported. If there is evidence that any of these deaths was in fact criminal, i.e., they violated the laws of war, not just your sense of propriety about what "acceptable" levels of collateral damage are, then you need to cite that data, not just say "underreporting is a crime." Because it's not.

This is yet another tangent that I'm sorry I brought up, but if you feel there were genuinely no revelations in the data, then I have to begin to be suspicious of your motives. You've ruled out 'discussion' a while back.

Bob, I've been trying to discuss with you this entire time. You have been - figuratively - putting your fingers in your ears and humming in response. If it makes you feel better to believe that I'm immune to reason, that's your deal, not mine. You have not presented anything but speculation and opinion, and maintained that your speculation and opinion should be given the weight of facts. Again, that's your deal.

Cheers.

1. Coal plants emitted 44.7 tons of mercury in 2008.
2. Coal causes 30,000 deaths every year
3. Coal shortens another 24,000 lives a year.
4. Coal pollution has increased 16% since 1992.
5. Coal emits 25% of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Google, it is your friend. Logic, you can learn it. Math, it has power, doesn't follow politics and can free your mind. Quit being a tool and open your damn mind already.

But corporates are all about short term profits. Fuck the future!

Nothing else could explain their rapacious, irreversible, indefensible despoliation of our air, sea, freshwater (and in USA), forests,, environment, health, food, and economies.

It really goes into conspiracy-theory territory here:

BP Subcontractor warned of incomplete design documents

BP cut corners while constructing well

Liberals claim Haliburton at fault

BP, Transocean, Halliburton will blame one another for the spill

It's going to be a real wham-dinger seeing them fight this one out ...

> If your school did that, then they probably violated the constitution of your state.

You write that as if you come from a state where that matters. I, however, live in a state where it does not.

Or you're in Arizona and you don't have your passport on you to prove your citizenship and the judge won't accept the birth certificate your sister managed to convince the county to release to her (since it's not like they're going to let some illegal out on bail and leave the state to pick up their birth certificate) and you nearly get deported to Russia before a Senator steps in and convinces the judge to accept the certificate and release you.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/01/24/25392/immigration-officials-detaining.html

All it takes to fuck you over is a cop willing to claim he "suspected" you were Russian. Or Canadian. Or British, or whatever other country white people come from. Obviously you picked up the southern accent while you were here trying to blend in.

Liar.