Ask yourself this, what would happen to you if you were incompetent at your job? What would happen to you if you were in management and people you supervised were constantly making poor decisions? What would your boss do to you? Would you still have your job? How many times would you be able to use the excuse that you just didn’t know what some underling was doing? I bet it wouldn’t take long before some disciplinary action was brought against you. It’s likely that sooner or later you would be held accountable. If only it was that way in politics. READ MORE »
Houston Police Department targeting man’s best friend?
According to a recent report, the Houston Police Department has shot and killed 187 dogs since 2010. The department authorizes officers to use any force necessary if they feel threatened by an animal and the officials have defended their officers actions. We take a closer look at why HPD is targeting man’s best friend.
U.S. denies archives’ claim that Agent Orange was stored in Okinawa
NAHA—Defoliants used by the U.S. armed forces during the Vietnam War was stored in Okinawa, according to U.S. archives and testimony of a resident in Okinawa Prefecture. However, the U.S. government said in March that descriptions in the archive are wrong.
Some people have said that barrels of the defoliant, which contain highly toxic dioxins, had been stored in Okinawa before being transported elsewhere for disposal. However, the U.S. government has denied the possibility.
In 2003, the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency compiled an environment assessment report of Johnston Island, a U.S. territory in the northern Pacific where U.S. forces stored and disposed of chemical weapons.
The report includes a description that 25,000 drum cans containing 5.2 million liters of Agent Orange were transported to Johnston Island from Okinawa in 1972. Those drum cans had been brought to Okinawa from Vietnam, the report added.
The descriptions of the report match the testimony of Yukio Toyama, 68, of Urasoe, Okinawa Prefecture, who was interviewed by The Asahi Shimbun.
John McCain Refuses To Back Impeaching Obama Over Benghazi
WASHINGTON — As Republicans are increasingly calling the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attacks a cover-up worse than Watergate and even floating impeachment, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) urged a note of caution on Sunday, saying he wasn’t yet willing to go that far.
“With all due respect, I think this is a serious issue,” said McCain on ABC’s “This Week.” “I will even give the president the benefit of the doubt on some of these things. We need a select committee.”
On Thursday, Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) accused President Barack Obama of overseeing “the most egregious cover-up in American history.” He added that “people may be starting to use the ‘I word’” before long.
Former Arksansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) also said on his radio show this week, “I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term. As bad as Watergate was because it broke the trust between the president and the people, no one died. This is more serious because four Americans did in fact die. And President Obama has yet to explain why did they die.”
McCain also defended Obama against impeachment during a late February town hall, saying, “I do not believe that the president has committed impeachable offenses — that’s high crimes.”
The Fed and the War on You and Private Property
The word “war” has changed over the decades. It used to mean the militaries of different nation states battling each other for dominance over certain territorial claims and the peoples living in those territories. Nowadays, because of the complete bastardization of the English language, it has come to mean a battle against anything the state wants to control but can’t. It’s come to mean the attempt of an elite ruling class to gain control of all the wealth, property and power in the world versus rising middle and lower classes who wish only a small portion so that they can live their lives and raise their children in relative comfort. It is a war of those who would be lords of all versus those they wish to make into serfs. READ MORE »
D.C. police: We’ll arrest armed protesters
The District of Columbia’s police chief said Tuesday officers would arrest marchers who plan to openly carry rifles into the city in violation of District law.
“Passing into the District of Columbia with loaded firearms is a violation of the law and we’ll have to treat it as such,” Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier said on NewsChannel 8.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/armed-protesters-face-arrest-91022.html#ixzz2Skb7hNCV
The New Truth About the Cop Shot in Watertown: Friendly-Fire in a Getaway
The way the nation met 33-year-old MBTA Transit Police officer Richard Donohue was — like much of the conflicting information from that night of mayhem in Watertown, Massachusetts — violent, fast, and scary: He was exchanging fire with the Tsarnaev brothers, the story went, and he took a gun shot to his right thigh from the Boston bombing suspects — an injury that would see Donohue lose all of his own blood, sever three blood vessels, send him into cardiac arrest, and almost die. Now comes a more complete picture, with more eyewitnesses telling a new story, that Donohue was probably shot by a fellow police officer.
The Boston Globe has a long story in today’s paper with new accounts from Watertown residents who witnessed “the climactic moment in the confrontation, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev drove between two groups of police officers amid police gunfire” in the early morning of April 19. Jane Dyson lives less than 200 feet from where Donohue went down:
“A black SUV appeared, and rapid gun fire was focused on the vehicle,” Dyson wrote in a statement provided to the Globe, referring to the vehicle Tsarnaev allegedly drove in his escape. “It appeared to me that an individual at the corner [of the street] fell to the ground and had probably been hit in the gunfire.”
Dyson’s account of the guns-blazing getaway seems to indicate that Donohue was shot while Dzhokhar was fleeing (and running over his brother) and that the gunfire was one-way, not an exchange between the suspects and the cops. Indeed, the Globe reports that the Tsarnaev brothers were no longer armed as Dzhokhar drove away, which would seem to align with updated reports about the next day that the younger Tsarnaev brother was not, in fact, armed when authorities captured him in a Watertown boat.
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.
Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.
The Forgotten Reasons for Advocating Freedom
As I watched the beginning of the Boston Red Sox game, the first baseball game played in Boston since the tragic events of 4/15/2013, I was flabbergasted by the propaganda that was taking place before my eyes. Thousands of people applauding the police who had shut down their city in an attempt to find one unarmed, wounded 19 year old. Thousands of people applauding the martial law that had come to their city. Thousands of people applauding the disintegration of The Bill of Rights and welcoming the armed men who could remove entire families from their homes at gun point without warrant and without, in my humble opinion, just cause. All for one lonely, isolated teen accused, not proven, of doing something evil and already judged guilty by the masses. READ MORE »
Man Dies in Police Raid on Wrong House
A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house.
Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night. They intended to raid the home next door.
The two officers, 25-year-old Kyle Shedran and 24-year-old Greg Day, were placed on administrative leave with pay.
“They need to get rid of those men, boys with toys,” said Adams’ 70-year-old widow, Loraine.
John Adams was watching television when his wife heard pounding on the door. Police claim they identified themselves and wore police jackets. Loraine Adams said she had no indication the men were police.
“I thought it was a home invasion. I said ‘Baby, get your gun!,” she said, sitting amid friends and relatives gathered at her home to cook and prepare for Sunday’s funeral.
Lawmakers want FBI to explain early Russian tip on Boston bombing suspect
WASHINGTON —
Amid disclosures that Russia tipped the FBI in 2011 that one of the Boston Marathon bombers had become a Muslim radical, Republican leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee plan to hold hearings to examine what the bureau and U.S. intelligence agencies might have done to thwart last week’s attack.
The committee’s chairman, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, and New York Rep. Peter King, a key subcommittee chairman, asserted that the elder of the two Chechen brothers implicated in the Boston attacks appeared to be the fifth person since Sept. 11, 2001, “to participate in terror attacks” after being interviewed by the FBI.
In a letter over the weekend, they called for “all information possessed by the U.S. government” in advance of the bombings relating to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother who died in a police shootout early Friday.
An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the letter, sent to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.
How Progressives Love and Support Corporations
I don’t like to label people. I don’t like to speak in generalities. Unfortunately we live in a society where labels and generalities have become quite acceptable, particularly when talking in terms of politics and political beliefs. It is, in my opinion, because of this, at least partially, that we often forget we live in an individualist society. It is among the most unique societies in human history. As part of Westernized culture we have romanticized the idea of freedom, but as Americans we have squandered the ideals of the founding fathers and allowed a tyrannical centralized government and their corporate backers to gain too much power and influence over our personal lives. I believe this is because we as human beings seem to have this tendency toward wanting to collectivize. This likely has something to do with the human desire to be loved and accepted by others. We worry that if we don’t share the same customs and beliefs as others that they will not accept us for loving, caring human beings. READ MORE »
One Boston Marathon Suspect Dead, Other at Large
The Boston Marathon bombing suspects—armed with guns and explosives—battled law enforcement officers in a Boston suburb early Friday morning, unleashing chaos until cops took one of the men into custody, law enforcement sources said. The other suspect is at large and considered armed and dangeroous. Police have called him a “terrorist” who “came here to kill people.” Residents of the Boston suburb of Watertown have been advised to keep their doors locked and not let anyone in. The Middlesex district attorney says the two men are suspected of killing an MIT police officer at the college late Thursday, then stealing a car at gunpoint and later releasing its driver unharmed. Hours earlier, police had released photos of the bombing suspects and asked for the public’s help finding them. Authorities say the suspects threw explosives from the car as police followed it into Watertown. The suspects and police exchanged gunfire and one of the suspects was critically injured and later died. Read »
Mass Casualty Drill On Same Day As Waco Explosion
North Hills Hospital is proud to be hosting one of the largest emergency preparedness drills ever held in the state of Texas this week. We will be partnering with the North Central Texas Trauma Regional Advisory Council (NCTTRAC) and first responders from throughout North Texas to test our equipment and processes so that when a real disaster happens, we’re all ready to respond.
This drill is even timelier in the wake of the bombings at Monday’s Boston Marathon. Our prayers go out to the victims involved, and we are proud of the first responders – EMS, fire, police, race workers, and hospital staff - who so bravely cared for the injured.
If you live near North Hills Hospital, you will see a lot of activity in our parking lots over the next three days as the NCTTRAC sets up a mobile 140-bed hospital, along with dozens of ambulances, several AMBUS (multi-patient ambulances), and helicopters. This is only a drill and will simulate a hospital evacuation, something that might be necessary in the event of a tornado, hurricane, earthquake, or prolonged power failure.
Innocents Suffer, the Powerful Profit
I have said this before and I will continue to say it, I do not condone violence. I particularly abhor random acts of violence such as the one that occurred in Boston on April 15th, 2013 during the Boston marathon. I say it was a random act of violence because as of this moment, as I write this, no one has taken responsibility for it and no suspects have been arrested nor any reason given for this act. This is only speculation, but I would bet that there’s some political agenda or another behind it. For some reason those who seek power over others seem to think that the way to go about gaining such power is through force and coercion. READ MORE »