Politics & Government

Truth Dig | There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners.

Spingola | In 1989 President George H. W. Bush began the multi-billion dollar Project Hammer program using an investment strategy to bring about the economic destruction of the Soviet Union including the theft of the Soviet treasury, the destabilization of the rubl...

Southern Avenger | When the Charleston City Police Department warned recently that alcohol was forbidden from any tailgating activities prior to the Dave Matthews Band concert on the Fourth of July at The Joe, many fans were not happy and justifiably so.

Wikipedia | The ruling upheld a Texas recidivism law requiring a minimum punishment for a third felony offense committed within a fifteen year time span to be life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. On his third offense Rummel refused to return money received as payment for unsatisfact...

ABC | Officer Polanco says One Police Plaza's obsession with keeping crime stats down has gotten out of control. He claims Precinct Commanders relentlessly pressure cops on the street to make more arrests, and give out more summonses, all to show headquarters they have a tight grip on their ...

KOIN | The Martins said they buy their stock from Taiwan because the merchandise is less expensive. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seized a shipment of 30 in October. That shipment is worth around $12,000 and the ATF is promising to destroy the entire shipment. 

House.gov | ongressman Ron Paul has continued to run his Congressional office in a frugal manner, and was able to return more than $100,000 from his allotted office budget to the Treasury this year, an increase over the $90,000 returned last year. 

Alternet | It's been only a month that a union for the unemployed has come into existence through an ingenious grassroots organizing campaign. In case you haven't heard about it, the union's name is "UR Union of the Unemployed" or its nickname, "UCubed," because of its unique method of organizin...

United States House of Representatives | Madame Speaker, I would like to enter into the record the following letter from Professor Robert D. Auerbach, a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.  This letter provides additional information regarding remarks I ...

MSNBC | Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to the primary U.S counterterrorism law, stymied by Senate Republicans who argued the changes would weaken terror investigations.

CNN | In the name of improved security a hacker showed how a biometric passport issued in the name of long-dead rock 'n' roll king Elvis Presley could be cleared through an automated passport scanning system being tested at an international airport.

LA Times | Reporting from Washington - A crime suspect who invokes his "right to remain silent" under the famous Miranda decision can be questioned again after 14 days, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. And if he freely agrees to talk then, his incriminator...

Times Online | The proposals were met with relief from both the present embassy’s Mayfair neighbours and the residents and developers of the Battersea wasteland where the vast crystalline cube, surrounded by a moat, will be built.

Larry Flynt | They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

Counterpunch | In the past 4 years 22 universities across the U.S. have quietly taken the CIA’s dollars and agreed to become spy-factories for student spooks. David Price breaks the story, identifies the campuses, details secret faculty protests and charts the strategy for resistance.

Slate | It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear:

Alternet | We can start with the crimes found in the three articles of impeachment contained in H Res 333 in the 110th Congress:  Cheney has purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of m...

Center for a Stateless Society | At The Washington Times (!), Cato’s Daniel Griswold comments:  “Despite complaints from critics on the left, such as Ralph Nader, and even a few libertarians, such as Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, membership in the World Trade Organization serves Americas national ...

Lew Rockwell | A little after 6:00 p.m. on January 28, Rourke, a 59-year-old man widely respected among residents of Doylesburg for his generosity and service to others, learned of a car crash involving his 19-year-old son Freddy.

Anti War | Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil ...

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.

Infowars | Self-described “conservative” Jonathan Kay invokes Obama regulation czar Cass Sunstein in railing against ideas he describes as “dangerously detached from reality” by labeling vehemently proven facts as “conspiracy theories” and thereby exposing himself as the only person dange...

Bloomberg | Also, 75 percent disapproved of the job Congress is doing, the highest level since 74 percent said they disapproved in October 2008. Congress’s job approval rating was 15 percent in the current survey; it was 12 percent in October 2008.

Bloomberg | President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.  Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all opti...

Washington Post | After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Blackwater rose to become the largest of the State Department's private security contractors and has since been paid billions of dollars to protect diplomatic employees in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other agencies' security missio...

From the Old | Not only were they called in to help because of the snow disaster but they will start patrolling the streets. The humvees rolled in yesterday after the mayor also told people on a live broadcast that “be advised that you will begin to see National Guard Humvees in some of your ...

Conspiracy Archive | Prompted by a new book release, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research has received a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency, Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), concerning a r...

Libertarian Viewpoint | Governor Nixon is directly responsible for operating the fusion center and has been confirmed to be one of the nominees for this new panel, likely to head the p[panel. It does not bode well for Americans when police are instructed to look for citizens who are concerned ab]...

Birmingham News | Sold by Shelby County to U.S. Steel subsidiary Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co., Cottenham served his sentence in shackles, alongside more than 1,000 convicts at TCI's Pratt mines, digging coal with a pick in the dark and damp

Salon | The Washington Post's Dana Priest today reports that "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people."

Wired | The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

Empty Wheel | Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vo...

Daily Caller | The State Department has refused to answer basic questions about an accident that took place in Washington on Wednesday night, in which a U.S. Diplomatic Security Service vehicle struck Daily Caller employee Sean Medlock as he was crossing the street.

CNN | While grateful to have the information -- Isabel received further testing and she doesn't have the disease -- the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel's genes in the first place. After all, they'd never consented to genetic testing.

Washington Examiner | Yet in Obama's State of the Union address, Obama claimed, "We've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs."  Did Obama speak falsely?  Well, it depends on what the definition of "excluded lobbyists" is.

New York Times | Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be “democracy’s next step”: It is running for Congress.

Wired | Last year, that budget grew to more than $50 billion – ”the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer. A few more billion were added for wartime operations, for a total of $54 billion. This year’total would be $2 bil...

New York TImes | Mr. Letten said that after consulting with Justice Department officials, and “in consideration of various relevant factors,” he was allowing his first assistant attorney to handle the case. Ms. Landrieu, a Democrat, has requested that Mr. Letten, who was appointed by President ...

Toke of the Town | Initial reports that the President had ignored the marijuana questions were inaccurate; YouTube took pot, the top vote getter, out of the running.  President Obama never even got an opportunity to answer the most popular question of all.

Reason.com | Around 3 in the morning on January 7, 2009, a 22-year-old college student named Anthony Smelley was pulled over on Interstate 70 in Putnam County, Indiana. He and two friends were en route from Detroit to visit Smelley’s aunt in St. Louis. Smelley, who had recently received a $50,000 se...

Washington Post | The money includes $200 million to pay state and local costs of securing terrorism-related trials; a 10 percent increase, to $950 million, for Federal Air Marshals; and $734 million to deploy up to 1,000 whole-body-imaging scanners at airports that use radio or X-rays to detect...

Alternet | Brand Obama makes us hopeful. We like our president and we believe he's like us. But we're being duped into doing a lot of things that are not in our interest.

Salon | As has been voluminously documented here, one of the most notable aspects of the first year of the Obama presidency has been how many previously controversial Bush/Cheney policies in the terrorism and civil liberties realms have been embraced

Reuters | The White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal, a congressional source told Reuters on Sunday.

Telegraph | It was bad enough that President Barack Obama lost his US Senate super majority to a Republican. Now it turns out that Scott Brown, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, is Mr Obama's cousin.

CNN | The board, resembling the TV game show "Jeopardy," includes categories such as "pickle smokers," "our gang" and "creatures," which sources said were names used by managers for gay men, African-Americans and lesbians.

All Gov | Frontier Foundation, established seven years ago by Congressman Steve Buyer (R-Indiana) to award scholarships, has yet to help any students, but it has financed Buyer’s golf game.   Buyer’s foundation has collected more than $800,000, while not giving out a single scholarship, an...

Red State | “To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve."

Newsbusters | "In my opinion, I feel like he should be focusing a lot more on jobs and the economy," Amber Lee Ettinger told the New York Post.   "He did create some jobs, but most of them were government jobs and that doesn't really help the middle class," she added.

Arizona Central | An Avondale woman who spent 11 days sleeping in her car said the city treated her unfairly when her home was condemned in December for lack of electricity.  But city officials said Christine Stevens violated building codes, a health and safety concern because Avondale homes ar...