Politics & Government
KPHO | Chuck Coughlin is one of two people in the Brewer administration with ties to Corrections Corporation of America. The other administration member is communications director Paul Senseman, a former CCA lobbyist.
Alternet | In July, the Washington Post published the Top Secret America project -- a sweeping portrait of America’s heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment. Lead reporter Dana Priest calls it the “vast and hidden apparatus of the war on terror.”
Raw Story | A federal cybersecurity bill that critics say creates a presidential "kill switch" for the Internet could be added on to a defense spending bill and passed without much debate, technology news sources report.
Boston.com | Most of the 33,000 donations were made over the Internet in what the supporters called a "money bomb" timed to coincide with the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The last fund-raising blitz, which took in 40,000 donations, was timed to coincide with Guy Fawkes Day, which c...
Digital Meeting Center | At least this is what many libertarians like Ron Paul believe when they see someone like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin trying to lead the Tea Party at the “restoring honor” rally this weekend. In fact, Ron Paul believes, if you’re looking for real freedom, you should really ...
Video | A new report suggests that Barack Obama is an entirely manufactured entity manufactured by the CIA, from the time of his parents and grandparents. Wayne Madson presented his investigative report on the internet some months back and Press TV has the story today.
RAW Story | An advocacy group working on behalf of Vietnam veterans has asked a federal judge in California to sanction the CIA, saying the spy agency has been blocking efforts to uncover its role in alleged experiments on US soldiers from the 1950s to 1970s.
Raw Story | Kucinich's statement doesn't mention President Obama's name once, but the president also didn't don a military jumpsuit and fly a plane onto a carrier with a gigantic "Mission Accomplished" banner.
Washington Examiner | Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To [Marilyn] Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.
ABC | Greg Taylor was wrongfully convicted of killing a prostitute in 1991 in North Carolina. Taylor proclaimed his innocence, but the evidence against him seemed insurmountable: blood from the victim found on his SUV.
Indian EVM | Today, at wee hours Maharashtra police landed up at the residence of Hari Prasad in Hyderabad, a technologist and Technical coordinator of VeTA to arrest him. The arrest was made on the flimsy charge of ‘theft of EVM’ used for vulnerability demonstration by Hari Prasad and a team of...
Reuters | New Jersey, the first state ever hit with securities fraud charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission, agreed to settle the case without admitting or denying the findings, the SEC said. The state was not required to pay any civil fines or penalties, but ordered to cease and desi...
Talk to Action | For the past several years, two U.S. Army posts in Virginia, Fort Eustis and Fort Lee, have been putting on a series of what are called Commanding General's Spiritual Fitness Concerts. As I've written in a number of other posts, "spiritual fitness" is just the military's new ...
Comcast | The senator took a question near the end of the Monday morning meeting in Big Rapids from a man who said he was a student, Levin's office said in a news release. The man read a long statement, then a woman came up and hit Levin with a pie.
Alternet | After being voted into office on promises that included undoing abuses carried out under the Bush administration - promises to protect privacy, to end government-sanctioned torture and rendition programs and to end the use of military commissions for non-enemy combatants - Preside...
The Daily Beast | The Obama administration is pressing Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to severely limit his nomadic travels across international borders, American officials say.
Esquire | The symptoms crashed down like an avalanche, and John Moore didn't know what to think. Bruises all over his body, bleeding gums, and the roll of flesh around his waist that he'd always figured for fat had gotten lumpy and red and sore.
Maxim | Moments later two red lights broke through the low clouds, heading almost directly toward the ground. It was a light aircraft, and for a second, as it descended below the tree line, the man thought it would climb back up. Instead, there was a terrible thud, and the sky turned orange. Whe...
Washington Post | For six years, Nicholas Merrill has lived in a surreal world of half-truths, where he could not tell even his fiancee, his closest friends or his mother that he is "John Doe" -- the man who filed the first-ever court challenge to the FBI's ability to obtain personal data on Amer...
Patriot Forums | U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan answers questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the second day of her confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill June 29, 2010 in Washington, DC. Kagan is U.S. President Barack Obama's second Supreme Court nominee sin...
Mondoweiss | This is interesting. Mike McMahon, a first-term Democratic congressman from New York, fired a staffer after she said that McMahon's Republican challenger was getting a lot of out-of-state donors and "Jewish money." NY Observer:
Outside the Beltway | IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked ...
Washington Post | The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.
GovTrack.us | This bill is in the first step in the legislative process. Introduced bills and resolutions first go to committees that deliberate, investigate, and revise them before they go to general debate. The majority of bills and resolutions never make it out of committee.
Reuters | President Barack Obama on Monday urged the Senate to approve legislation that would reveal who is behind election campaign advertising, and chided Republicans for opposing a measure he said would protect American democracy.
Examiner | Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues. Critics have complained that much if not all of Obama's major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government.
America Blog | How long before the Republicans apologize to AT&T for the FCC promoting net neutrality which will help consumers? There's a great comment inside the link about the idea of politicians wearing "sponsorship patches" to highlight who gave them money.
Salon | Virtually all of the $4.7 million raised by Karl Rove's new conservative outfit was contributed by just four billionaires, three of whom are based in Dallas, Texas, and two of whom made their fortune in the oil and gas industry.
Economist | IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans from breaking foreign rules when hunting o...
Gallup | Gallup's 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the p...
Boiling Frogs | Kyrgyzstan’s Wanted Fugitive: Maksim Bakiyev. The story is more or less the same – the one that has been repeating itself for many decades. The one based on a script written by the very same conductors who wrote the ones before, and who will probably be writing the ones to ...
Infowars | Another site was taken down following the shuttering of Blogetery. Ipbfree.com, a platform for message boards, was removed within days of Blogetery. So far there is no explanation why Ipbfree.com was denied service.
Wired | U.S. spy agencies, the State Department and the White House had a collective panic attack Friday over a new Washington Post exposé on the intelligence-industrial complex. Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin let it drop Monday morning.
Economic Policy Journal | They have passed the health bill, they have passed the financial regulations bill and they have snuck stuff into the stimulus package bills. They are going to track your money and your body. Here's the first few things they are doing. This is step one. It will only...
Telegraph | James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventur...
Torrent Freak | After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provi...
Tech President | One set of numbers jumps out from Sarah Palin's campaign finance reports, filed with the FEC last night, and that's some $22,000 paid by Sarah PAC over the last three months to the firm Aries Petra Consulting.
Prison Planet | The Royal Society, an organisation made up of renowned eco-fascists and depopulation fanatics, is to launch a major study on human population growth and its implications for social and economic development, a study it has ludicrously branded “objective”.
Mental Floss | Being a Secret Service agent isn’t as action-packed as they make it seem in the movies. It’s a lot of observation and surveillance, sure, but the President and his family have the power to ask their protection staff to do just about anything – including serving as a urinal. Yup… ...
Tenth Amendment Center | Professor Barnett’s argument is twofold. First, he believes insufficient evidence exists pointing to a power of state nullification within the original understanding of the Constitution.
All Voices | ""The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy (1855-1931), a Baptist minister, a Christian socialist, and the cousin of socialist utopian novelist Edward Bellamy (1850-1898). From the start there were critics who wanted to make things clearer so the preposi...
Special Forces | The 42-year-old former special-forces medic had served in Kosovo and Desert Storm before stepping on a land mine in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2001. He lost parts of both legs, broke his back in 13 places, shattered a shoulder and ribs and suffered injuries to several internal or...
This will put into perspective how the republican platform used to be what modern day democrats support. Today, neoconservatism is a disease plaguing the republican party. People like Ron Paul have slowly reformed to party causing in some states up to 50% support for the older platfo...
Natural News | As CNN is now reporting, the U.S. government has issued a new rule that would make it a felony crime for any journalist, reporter, blogger or photographer to approach any oil cleanup operation, equipment or vessel in the Gulf of Mexico.
Cnet | Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a bill on Thursday that would rewrite the ground rules for Internet and mail order sales by eliminating the option for many Americans to shop over the Internet without paying state sales taxes.
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - School of Law | A 2004 study of the results of stock trading by United States Senators during the 1990s found that that Senators on average beat the market by 12% a year. In sharp contrast, U.S. households on average underperformed the market by 1....
Bloomberg | Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner told senators on April 3, 2008, that the tens of billions of dollars in “assets” the government agreed to purchase in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos. were “investment-grade.”
CBS | Here's Mr. Obama on September 18, 2008, not long after the economic collapse: "Senator McCain's first answer to this economic crisis was - get ready for it - a commission. That's Washington-speak for 'we'll get back to you later.'"
New York Times | The sales have cut the Treasury's stake in the bank from nearly 27 percent to about 17.6 percent. Citi shares rose briefly in morning trading, before falling about 2.39 percent to $3.67 by mid-morning. Most of the banking sector was trading down.
American Everyman | The only disguise she ever wore was the same one worn by Hilary Clinton and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama… i.e. the neoliberal Corporatist in Democrat Clothing disguise. It’s a shame because not only is Elena Kagan perhaps the most unqualifi...