Politics & Government

Daily Mail | Major cities across the U.S. are today bracing themselves for more protests against corporate America as the Occupy Wall Street campaign enters its third week and gathers pace.  The demonstrations, which began in New York City two weeks ago, have already spread to Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Denver and Seattle. The arrests of 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge over the weekend seem to have only strengthened the resolve of protesters.

Think Progress | A Tallahassee, Florida circuit court judge sided with a union today in ruling that a prison privatization scheme lawmakers included in the state budget violates Florida’s constitution. The Florida Police Benevolent Association, which represents correctional workers in the state, filed a lawsuit saying the method in the which lawmakers planned to privatize 29 prisons in southern Florida violated state law, arguing that it should have been done via a separate law, not through the budget. Tallahassee Judge Jackie Fulford agreed, adding that lawmakers rushed the process:

Salon.com | Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

World Net Daily | Just imagine. You want to build a home, so you buy a $23,000 piece of land in a residential subdivision in your hometown and get started. The government then tells you to stop, threatens you with $40 million in fines and is not kidding.

CBS News | A former judge who orchestrated a massive kickback scheme involving for-profit youth detention centers was sentenced Friday to 17 1/2 years in federal prison, closing a major chapter on a scandal that prosecutors said shook Pennsylvania's judicial system "to its very foundation."

LA Times | Quietly, and very much under the radar, Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who no pundit believes has a serious chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination, is staging a bit of comeback, returning to his position as a solid No. 3 candidate in the GOP race.

The Hill | Sponsored by Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Donna Edwards (D-Md.), the proposal would amend the Constitution to empower Congress and the states to limit corporate spending on political activities.

Wall Street Journal | Imagine that President Obama could order the arrest of anyone who broke a promise on the Internet. So you could be jailed for lying about your age or weight on an Internet dating site. Or you could be sent to federal prison if your boss told you to work but you used the company's computer to check sports scores online. Imagine that Eric Holder's Justice Department urged Congress to raise penalties for violations, making them felonies allowing three years in jail for each broken promise. Fanciful, right?

Think Progress | Oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to probe News Corporation over allegations that the company broke the Foreign Corrupt Practices Law and may have even hacked the phones of victims of the 9/11 tragedy.

The Street | It's been 10 years since Sept. 11 and many Americans still haven't had a serious conversation about why we might have been attacked and why we're fighting a war on multiple fronts. In fact, the single line of reasoning that "the enemy hates our freedom" is still trumpeted throughout the nation.

San Francisco Chronicle | Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday smacked down what he called overbearing and expensive proposals for state regulations by vetoing bills that would require that kids wear helmets when on ski slopes and increase fines for people who talk on cell phones or text while driving.

MSNBC | A federal judge in Richmond ruled Tuesday that a lawsuit could move forward against two airport security screeners who had a college student arrested after he stripped to a pair of running shorts to protest what he felt were unconstitutionally intrusive search procedures.

Bloomberg | The parties, carrying $1,000 admission charges and aimed at replenishing congressional campaign coffers, were held as the largest U.S. phone company sought regulators’ blessing for the $39 billion deal. On Aug. 31, the Justice Department sued to block the transaction, saying it would harm competition.

Daily Iowan | A good rule of thumb I’ve discovered is that critics who claim Rep. Ron Paul doesn’t understand the Constitution are themselves the ones whose knowledge is deficient.  For example, Scott McKeag, a teacher in the Iowa City School District, came down hard on the congressman in these pages for denying that the federal government has a role in education according to the Constitution. The congressman further believes that education is better managed by states, localities, and parents.

Palm Beach Post | Given Solantic's role in that marketplace, critics are again asking whether Scott's policy initiatives - this time, requiring drug testing of state employees and welfare recipients - are designed to benefit Scott's bottom line.

San Jose Mercury News | Earlier this month, Brodman received a bill for $1,398 from the State Board of Equalization for back taxes and penalties he owes for 100 cartons of cigarettes he bought online from an out-of-state retailer in 2007 and 2008. Initially, Brodman thought it was a mistake.

The Week | What does Rep. Ron Paul have to do to be taken seriously? The libertarian Texan placed a solid third in Gallup's new poll of Republican presidential hopefuls, trailing Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, but handily beating media magnets Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman. Paul also ranked a close second in Iowa's much-covered Ames Straw Poll earlier this month, and followed that up by raising a hefty $1.8 million in a 24-hour "money bomb" last weekend. Is it time to start treating Paul like a top-tier presidential candidate?

San Francisco Chronicle | Ignored by the media and dismissed by the Republican Party in general, liberty-minded Congressman Ron Paul leaped into third place today in the Gallup Presidential Nomination preference poll. Paul jumped over Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party darling/lunatic, relegating her to fourth-place in the current poll. Here's how the numbers shake out today.

Rolling Stone Magazine | On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

Wall Street Journal | “If you’re a tractor driver, if you drive your tractor across a public road, you’re gonna have to have a commercial driver’s license. Now how idiotic is that?” he thundered to the fair crowd in Des Moines, with the rejoinder, “What were they thinkin’?”

Haaretz | Senator Patrick Leahy claims Shayetet 13 unit, undercover Duvdevan unit, and the Israel Air Force Shaldag unit are involved in human rights violations in occupied territories.  Leahy, a Democrat and senior member of the U.S. Senate, wants assistance withheld from the Israel Navy's Shayetet 13 unit, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the Israel Air Force's Shaldag unit.

New World Order Report | The mainstream media did this in 2008 when Ron Paul ran then.  Republican debates stopped inviting him even when he had majority support at times and it was so bad that the corporate controlled media even announced that Ron Paul had officially withdrawn from the U.S. Presidential race when he was still in it and succeeding with tremendous millions of followers and support. 

Electronic Frontier Foundation | H.R. 1981 would impose sweeping requirements on a broad swath of online service providers to keep new records on all of their customers, just in case the police ever want to investigate any of them. In particular, the bill would require any commercial providers of Internet access to keep for at least 12 months a record of which users were assigned to particular network addresses at particular times.

Russia Today | With alleged whistleblower Thomas Drake on trial for leaking classified info to the media, why is the Obama administration cracking down on disclosing the truth when the commander in chief has long lauded running a transparent presidency?

Russia Today | Thomas Drake, former NSA senior official who the government tried to convict of ten felony charges, some by using the Espionage Act, joins the show with his attorney Jesselyn Radack, National Security and Human Rights Director for the Government Accountability Project. Just a few months ago all of the charges were suddenly dropped, and Drake pled guilty to one misdemeanor charge of unauthorized computer access. This was a case carried over from the Bush administration, and pursued actively by the Obama administration.

The Iowa Independent | In a Friday letter to Iowa GOP chair Matt Strawn and media officials from Fox News, Karger said he has met the last criteria to be considered a debate contender, which is to earn a one percent average in “in five national polls based on most recent polling leading up to the registration day.”

Anti-war.com | You might think that 20 percent of the American Congress going on all-expenses-paid, weeklong junkets to a foreign country — paid for by a lobby for that country — would be newsworthy, especially when the top congressional leaders of both parties are leading the trips.

MSNBC | Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced Thursday to 28 years in federal prison for taking $1 million in bribes from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as "kids-for-cash."

Politico | The ABA recommends that Congress amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act to enact a two-year ban on lobbyists engaging in fundraising efforts for members of Congress they lobby and to narrow the lobbying reporting threshold from 20 percent of one’s professional work to a “reasonable,” but unspecified percentage.

Conservative Action Alerts | A company called W Spann LLC, formed on March 15th, has dissolved shortly after making a $1 million contribution on April 28th to Restore Our Future, a committee organized in support of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

The Consumerist | While breast cancer in males is not common, it's no yellow lobster. But a South Carolina state program that provides Medicaid to breast cancer patients in need had to deny a patient because of his Y chromosome.

Firedoglake.com | Just days ago, the Obama Administration and Congress effectively made legitimate all the operations of the FBI since FBI Director Robert Mueller took over the agency one week before the September 11th terror attacks.

Daily Kos | The Democratic Party of Wisconsin today filed complaints in multiple jurisdictions alleging that state Sen. Alberta Darling has committed multiple felonies as part of a collusion and obstruction conspiracy.  The complaints also name the corporate front group Americans For Prosperity, Wisconsin Family Action, Wisconsin Right to Life and the lobbying arm of for-profit education corporations, the so-called American Federation for Children.

New York Times | After dealing with the debt crisis, Senate negotiators tried and failed on Tuesday to end a stalemate over temporary financing for the Federal Aviation Administration, leaving 4,000 agency employees out of work and relying on airport safety inspectors to continue working without pay.

Alternet | Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.  

Think Progress | GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann (R) has been in hot water in recent weeks for personally taking advantage of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government aid while denouncing the very programs she benefited from. Most recently, the Washington Post discovered that Bachmann and her husband signed for a $417,000 home loan backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac just weeks before she called for the two mortgage giants to be entirely dismantled.

UPI | The Christian and Jewish leaders urged the administration and Congress not to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor" as they propose trillions of dollars in cutbacks, they said in a statement reported by The Hill.

ARS Technica | FBI agents served 40 search warrants in January on people suspected of hosing down PayPal during ”Operation Payback”—Anonymous’ retaliatory attack against companies who blacklisted WikiLeaks. On July 19, the feds charged the first 14 defendants under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and raided an additional 35 suspects for evidence.

Disinfo.com | In the state of Wisconsin, you may be denied the ability to vote for lack of sufficient recent “bank activity”. A woman surreptitiously filmed the interactions as her 18-year-old son leaps through hurdle after hurdle in an attempt to get a constitutionally-guaranteed state ID so that he could vote.

Truth-Out | A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

MSN | Travelers may soon be able to avoid some of the hassles of airport security -- the long lines, taking off your shoes and hauling your computer out of its case. That is, if you're willing to pay and hand over a lot of personal information.

Salon.com | When Eric Cantor shut down debt ceiling negotiations last week, it did more than just rekindle fears that the U.S. government might soon default on its debt obligations -- it also brought him closer to reaping a small financial windfall from his investment in a mutual fund whose performance is directly affected by debt ceiling brinkmanship.

Reason | On Friday the Drug Enforcement Administration officially rejected a nine-year-old petition asking it to remove marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, the law's most restrictive category. Schedule I is supposedly reserved for drugs that have "a high potential for abuse," "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States," and no "accepted safety for use under medical supervision."

The Daily Beast | Which is why Rep. Michele Bachmann created quite a stir when she suggested slashing $4.5 billion from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Her proposal—which was part of a $400 billion spending-cut strategy to avoid raising the debt ceiling—was to freeze funding for health care and cut disability payments for vets who also collect from Social Security.

TheHill | Speaking on his weekly "Texas Straight Talk" audio address, Paul said that recent reports alleging a 95-year-old woman was forced to remove her adult diaper and an eight-month-old baby's diaper was inspected showed the TSA was overzealous.

The Inquirer | Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director of ICE said told the Guardian that the agency will actively target web sites that are breaking US copyright laws even if their servers are not based in the US. According to Barnett, all web sites that use the .com and .net TLDs are fair game and that, since the Domain Name Service (DNS) indexes for those web sites are routed through the US-based registry Versign, ICE believes it has enough to "seek a US prosecution".

Archive.org | A scan from the Internet Archives of the original document

Stop the Drug War | Barney Frank and Ron Paul's historic bill to end federal marijuana prohibition is generating a lot of excitement around the country, but in Washington D.C., it's already becoming another reminder of the arrogant drug war politics that have long obstructed the path to reform.

Reason | You might think that putting an innocent person in prison for a major crime like rape or murder would end or at least impede a prosecutor’s career. But prosecutors are rarely sanctioned for mistakes, even when their misconduct is egregious.

NOLA | The president of the Christian conservative Family Policy Network sent Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a letter Monday calling on him to follow the lead of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and resign rather than leave Republicans and conservatives open to charges of hypocrisy.