Food unSafety Enhancement Act (HR 2749) Passes House

by Aaron Turpen

In the United States House of Representatives, the appropriately mis-named Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (H.R. 2749) passed and is now on its way to the Senate. The recorded vote can be seen at this link.

The bill is supposedly to regulate the agricultural industry to keep our food supplies safe. That’s what it claims to do. What is really does is ad a lot of rules and regulations that all farmers must comply with, large or small, and thus creates a hugely burdensome set of bookkeeping on already over-worked farmers. Large, corporate “Big Agriculture” farms will have no issues with this, of course, and will just hire another bookkeeper to do it for them. Smaller, family farms, however, don’t have this luxury.

An excellent writeup on this legislation and how it will effect the small farmer and family, organic farmers can be read at the Oklahoma Food Cooperative at this link.

The gist of the bill is this: there is a potential and already-seen disease spread problem in our nation’s food supply chain. Mad cow disease, avian flu, and other issues have recently shown this. What the bill completely ignores is that all of these and nearly all expected problems of this nature are due to poor farming methods of big agriculture and factory farms.

sprayer1This, of course, proves that the people behind the bill aren’t interested in really keeping the food supply safe. They’re interested in benefiting Big Ag at the expense of small, family farms. In other words, business as usual in Washington. This bill will likely become the end of the small, organic, and family farm as we know it today.

Soon, all of our food will be imported or produced at huge factory farm conglomerates using genetically modified (GMO) seeds and toxic practices.

Thanks a lot, Congress! You suck!

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THE DEATH OF LIBERTY: THE FINAL SCENE UNFOLDS

by Greg Evensen

When police investigators begin amassing evidence at a crime scene, the bits and pieces of the puzzle begin to take shape. Usually, with several trained men and women working together to come up with an answer, the intent and actions of the perpetrator are almost always revealed.

Since my core training and experience over many years was as a state level enforcement officer, I have worked crime scenes that were large, complex and conflicting. With enough time, effort and resolve, we too, were able to bring the bad guys to account.

You certainly do not have to be a trained state trooper—or any other level police agent—to use common sense, logic and knowledge, to assess the crime scene that has become the socialist states of amerika.

I continue to be at a loss to explain how it is that so many tens of millions of amerikans simply do not see the utter destruction of their former republic by socialists, one worlders, deviates, liars and thieves. The men in black have been roving the country flashing their memory erasers around the clock. Let’s take a check on how things are really going.

Our nation’s police forces prior to the criminal thug Richard Nixon were centered on community policing. MOST of their time was spent on looking for, identifying, and monitoring criminals, and responding to unusual or dangerous events that were beyond the control of ordinary folks. We appreciated those officers and were proud to say, “he is OUR Cop!” We knew that we could talk to him, kid him, see him play adult softball, and sit across from him in church. We watched him shed tears when one of our kids didn’t make it home after a night of drinking and driving. We remembered him at Christmas, because he didn’t make much you know.

I said “him” because back then, there were no women in the ranks.

As government began its sickening expansion, policing became a meaner and nastier job. It was made that way by badge wearing thugs who didn’t hesitate to do whatever they were told by the S.A.C. (Special Agent in Charge) of the FBI, BATF(E), US Marshal’s Office right down to armed poultry inspectors—yes they have them and they are really tough on criminal chickens. The “us against them” mentality, and the “mission essential” attitude justified SWAT teams, “dynamic entries,” and later use of MACE, TASERS, FLASHBANG GRENADES and “routine” use of SUBMACHINE guns. All in the name of “taking down” the accused—no matter the charge. I abhor such police tactics and was an officer that served my own warrants, rarely with one other officer at the back door.

Now we have become eaves-dropping, roadblock setting, door crashing, face grinding, arm breaking, pursuit driven bastards that have sold their asses to the government masters hell bent on establishing the TRUE reincarnation of the dreaded SS. That is NO overstatement. Note: There are significant numbers of officers at all levels that simply detest the forced training at FEMA centers, the requirements to stop Patriots and others simply because they “look” dangerous, and are exercising free speech statements on their vehicles. By whose ultimate authority does this take place? By whose ultimate judgment is it that it is necessary to harass INNOCENT drivers and families? The public sees this Gestapo mentality as far more of a danger than any stickers they put on their vehicles? Where are all these “faithful” enforcers of the law when it comes to confronting the unlawful, unconstitutional, unjustifiable, and unmerciful rotten bunch of usurpers, communists, atheists, deviated, immoral scungebuckets that are walking the halls of Congress, the White House, and the Federal Courts? How is it that the “get ‘em at any cost” morons at Homeland Security have created an environment in amerika that is an unwarranted intrusion of power in 186 other nations?
And all of this is done in the name of safety and security. I guess that a majority of ignorant buffoons really do believe that Barack Sotero is the Messiah and he does hold the keys to socialist paradise in his hands.

So, once again, I implore those officers of the law who are in grave doubt about the legitimate authenticity of their superiors in any agency, to simply read the constitution, re-read their oath of office, seek out retired officers for guidance, and remember this very carefully—to brutalize citizens in the pursuit of order, is a guaranteed recipe for resistance. PLEASE do not pit yourselves (all 650,000 officers at all levels in the US) against a seething and angry populace who outnumber you 5000 to 1. Believe me; you want all of us working with you, not against you.

Read the rest at this link.

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Bin Laden worked for US until 9/11

InfoWars.com

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”

These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.

As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

Control of Central Asia

The goals of the American ’statesmen’ directing these activities included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.

The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia ( Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.

Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.

In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)

According to Sibel:

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

Uighurs

Sibel was recently asked to write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that “our fingerprint is all over it.”

Of course, Sibel isn’t the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:

“were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China.”

And also that:

“Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia.”

In a separate interview, Margolis said:

“That illustrates Henry Kissinger’s bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.

The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden’s collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this.”

Rogues Gallery

Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she published eighteen photos, titled “Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,” of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called ‘President-in-exile’ of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called ‘government-in-exile’ was ‘established‘ on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.

Also featured in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery was ‘former’ spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani’s ‘government-in-exile’ of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his “ Xinjiang Project” for Rand Corp is apparently the blueprint for Turani’s government-in-exile. Sibel has openly stated her contempt for Mr. Fuller.

Susurluk

The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.

Sibel states that “a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered ‘certain’ aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs).”

One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chief of Counter-Terrorism for Turkey’s intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery. Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel’s gallery, Marc Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman’s underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel into the spying ring.

The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.

Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo

Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel’s gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated $25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.

US interests also converged with those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.

Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.

State Secrets

Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony.

In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting ” ’sensitive diplomatic relations,’ protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia…” This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.

As Sibel says in the interview:

I have information about things that our government has lied to us about… those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.

Summary

The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.

It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.

The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.

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Perils of Obamacare: The Three Big Lies

by Michael D. Tanner

In making his case for a government takeover of the US health-care system, President Obama is going far beyond the usual Washington truth-stretching.

Take a look at just a few of the most common claims:

"If you like your current health-care plan, you can keep it." Even White House spokesmen have said that Obama's oft-repeated pledge that you can keep your current insurance isn't meant to be taken literally. The reality is that millions of Americans — perhaps most Americans — will be forced to change insurance plans.

First, the president supports an individual mandate — a requirement that every American buy health insurance. And not just any insurance but insurance that includes all the benefits government thinks you should have. That insurance could be more expensive or include benefits that people don't want or are morally opposed to, such as abortion services.

And that doesn't just affect those without insurance today. The bills now before Congress say that while you won't be immediately forced to switch from your current insurance to a government-specified plan, you'll have to switch to satisfy the government's requirements if you lose your current insurance or want to change plans.

Plus, the president supports the creation of a government insurance program that would compete with private insurance. But because this ultimately would be subsidized by American taxpayers, the government plan could keep its premiums artificially low or offer extra benefit.

In the end, millions of Americans would be forced out of the insurance they have today and into the government plan. Businesses, in particular, would have every incentive to dump their workers into the public plan. The actuarial firm the Lewin Group estimates that as many as 118.5 million people, roughly two-thirds of those with insurance today, would be shifted from private to public coverage.

"You will pay less." The Congressional Budget Office has made it clear that the reform plans now being debated will increase overall health-care costs, yet President Obama on Friday repeatedly said that his reform would reduce costs and save Americans money.

But no matter how many times he says it, the truth is you will pay more — much more — both in higher taxes and in higher premiums.

The final health-care bill is expected to cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. That means much higher taxes, and not just for the wealthy.

If one totals up all the new taxes in the House Democratic health-reform bill — the income surtax, the penalties on businesses and individuals that fail to buy into the government health plan, as well as other fees and taxes — the cost to US taxpayers will top $800 billion. New York City will face marginal tax rates as high as 57 percent.

At a time of rising unemployment and economic stagnation, that is like throwing an anchor to a drowning man.

In addition, the new insurance regulations expected to be part of the final bill are likely to drive up insurance premiums. And, if the new government-run plan under-reimburses doctors and hospitals — as Medicare and Medicaid do — providers would be forced to recoup that lost income by shifting their costs to private insurance, driving up premiums. A study by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance estimates that the president's proposals could increase premiums by 75 to 95 percent.

"Quality will improve." Anyone who thinks a government takeover of the health-care system will improve quality of care has only to look at the health-care programs the government already runs: The Veterans Administration is overwhelmed with problems, Medicaid is notorious for providing poor quality at a high cost — and Medicare has huge gaps in coverage.

Worse, however, on Friday, Obama endorsed the creation of a government board with the power to dictate how your doctor practices medicine and all but endorsed the rationing prevalent in nationalized health-care systems around the world.

In short, when it comes to claims about the wondrous new world of government-run health care, a bit of skepticism might be in order.

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Checking Workers, Binding Employers

by Shikha Dalmia, Reason
Union bosses will be the only winners under the Employee Free Choice Act

Big Labor is on a roll. With the installation of Minnesota Democrat Al Franken to the Senate, and another change of heart by Sen. Arlen Specter, the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has just scored two more votes. To secure the remaining votes for a filibuster-proof majority, unions staged a massive rally in Arkansas to pressure Blanche Lincoln, the state's Democratic senator who has withdrawn her support for the bill, to pull a Specter and change her mind yet again.

Arkansas is ground-zero for unions because it is a right-to-work state with low union enrollment. EFCA's elimination of secret ballot elections for unionization has garnered most of the critical attention. But the bill contains another controversial provision: compulsory arbitration. This would be no less destructive to the rights of employers and workers, and the economy as a whole. Exhibit A: Michigan.

In 1969, the Wolverine State embraced a form of compulsory arbitration nearly identical to the one proposed in EFCA to resolve disputes with its police and firefighters. Years later, Detroit mayor Coleman Young—who had authored the original law as state senator—rued what he had done. "We now know that compulsory arbitration has been a failure," he lamented to the National Journal in 1981. "Slowly, inexorably, compulsory interest arbitration has destroyed sensible fiscal management and has caused more damage to the public service than the strikes it was designed to prevent."

Most citizens agree. Just seven years ago 54 percent of Michigan voters turned down a union-sponsored ballot proposition to extend compulsory arbitration to all state employees. Nearly every newspaper in the state—liberal and conservative—editorialized against it. Why?

Under normal circumstances, when employers and workers negotiate an initial contract they are required by law to bargain in good faith until they come to an agreement. If they reach an impasse, workers can call a strike. But because a strike is costly for both sides there is a strong incentive for them to concede as much as possible to reach a compromise.

However, since emergency personnel—firefighters, police and the like—are barred from going on strike in many states, about 20 states have embraced some form of compulsory bargaining. If the two sides can't agree on a contract within a prescribed time, either one can invite a three-member panel jointly selected by the union, city, and the state government to intervene and impose a settlement.

This process is supposed to install a contract expeditiously. But a review of 29 arbitration cases in 2005 and 2006 by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that the average time involved in a case was almost 15 months—not the four-and-a-half months that the law prescribed, defeating its whole purpose. Moreover, because an arbitration board doesn't have to live with the consequences of its decision, it has no reason to come up with a workable solution—just one that is politically expedient.

Thus a board, convened at the request of Detroit police and firefighters in 1978, ordered the city to pay $46 million in cost-of-living adjustments. This destroyed the city's already fragile budget, ultimately triggering layoffs of a quarter of its police force. The police eventually accepted a three-year wage freeze in 1981—but not before the crime rate, which had been falling before the layoffs, began soaring again.

Compulsory arbitration also nudged other Michigan cities, including the working-class towns of Hamtramck and Highland Park, into bankruptcy. In 1999 an arbitration panel awarded Hamtramck police officers $2.1 million in pay raises and back pay, pushing it into state receivership. Under receivership, which is only used in extreme situations, the state government takes over the city's finances and appoints its own manager to run the city. Hamtramck was ultimately forced to impose a combination of service cuts and tax increases, all of which accelerated the exodus of its residents. Highland Park, wishing to avoid similar arbitration, gave its public safety officers raises it couldn't really afford and was also forced into receivership.

A 2006 task force convened by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who supports compulsory arbitration, found that local government costs in arbitration states are 3-5 percent higher compared to nonarbitration states. "While small in percentage terms, the impact in dollar terms is huge," the task force concluded. Given that local governments in Michigan alone spend over $23 billion annually, this works out to over a billion in extra spending for them.

Michigan's experience is hardly unique. Former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis also tried to limit public-sector compulsory arbitration during his first term. In 1977, Mr. Dukakis argued that compulsory arbitration "has removed legitimate management prerogatives in the area of staff assignments, (and) transfers from the control of municipal officials at a time when they are under severe pressure to improve their management and make savings." Mr. Dukakis failed to stop compulsory arbitration, but two years later Massachusetts voters approved a ballot initiative that effectively scrapped it.

Should EFCA pass, the costs of compulsory arbitration in the private sector will dwarf those in the public sector. That's because businesses, unlike government, can't just bill taxpayers to pay off unions. They have to compete.

In a dynamic economy, a business's survival depends upon its ability to constantly cut costs and innovate. But a company forced into binding arbitration will be frozen for two years (the duration of the initial contract) from making any changes to any aspect of its business that is covered by the contract. Literally every issue—from its 401(k) contributions to its reliance on outside labor—could potentially become subject to review by a government panel that has neither the company-specific knowledge nor the incentive to turn a profit.

Businesses are not the only losers in compulsory arbitration. Currently, any contract negotiated by union officials has to be ratified through a vote of rank-and-file members. Under compulsory arbitration, workers do not get this vote. In other words, the card check provision in EFCA will take away the right of workers to vote to form a union, and the binding arbitration provision will take away their right to vote on a contract.

The only clear winners under this law would be the union bosses, who will obtain new powers without any new accountability. If Michigan's experience suggests anything, it's that rank-and-file workers, businesses, and the American economy will suffer. Sen. Lincoln and her colleagues should bear this in mind before they make their final decisions.

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Healthcare is a Good, Not a Right

by Congressman Ron Paul

Political philosopher Richard Weaver famously and correctly stated that ideas have consequences. Take for example ideas about rights versus goods. Natural law states that people have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A good is something you work for and earn. It might be a need, like food, but more “goods” seem to be becoming “rights” in our culture, and this has troubling consequences. It might seem harmless enough to decide that people have a right to things like education, employment, housing or healthcare. But if we look a little further into the consequences, we can see that the workings of the community and economy are thrown wildly off balance when people accept those ideas.

First of all, other people must pay for things like healthcare. Those people have bills to pay and families to support, just as you do. If there is a “right” to healthcare, you must force the providers of those goods, or others, to serve you.
Obviously, if healthcare providers were suddenly considered outright slaves to healthcare consumers, our medical schools would quickly empty. As the government continues to convince us that healthcare is a right instead of a good, it also very generously agrees to step in as middle man. Politicians can be very good at making it sound as if healthcare will be free for everybody. Nothing could be further from the truth. The administration doesn’t want you to think too much about how hospitals will be funded, or how you will somehow get something for nothing in the healthcare arena. We are asked to just trust the politicians. Somehow it will all work out.

Universal Healthcare never quite works out the way the people are led to believe before implementing it. Citizens in countries with nationalized healthcare never would have accepted this system had they known upfront about the rationing of care and the long lines.

As bureaucrats take over medicine, costs go up and quality goes down because doctors spend more and more of their time on paperwork and less time helping patients. As costs skyrocket, as they always do when inefficient bureaucrats take the reins, government will need to confiscate more and more money from an already foundering economy to somehow pay the bills. As we have seen many times, the more money and power that government has, the more power it will abuse. The frightening aspect of all this is that cutting costs, which they will inevitably do, could very well mean denying vital services. And since participation will be mandatory, no legal alternatives will be available.

The government will be paying the bills, forcing doctors and hospitals to dance more and more to the government’s tune. Having to subject our health to this bureaucratic insanity and mismanagement is possibly the biggest danger we face. The great irony is that in turning the good of healthcare into a right, your life and liberty are put in jeopardy.

Instead of further removing healthcare from the market, we should return to a true free market in healthcare, one that empowers individuals, not bureaucrats, with control of healthcare dollars. My bill HR 1495 the Comprehensive Healthcare Reform Act provides tax credits and medical savings accounts designed to do just that.

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Hey There Obama (Drink the Kool Aid)

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Hate Crimes – the Lesson Unlearned

by Chris Clancy

My family moved from Dublin to London in the early 1960s. A large Irish immigrant family. We did not move into an Irish community. Maybe things would have been easier if we had. As kids growing up in London, my brothers and sisters and I quickly became aware that we were unliked and unwanted – we simply accepted that this was the way of things – as children do.

At school there was a lot of teasing, name-calling, mimicking our accents, Irish jokes and so on – but it was bearable – just.

I have to say that we were never hit or beaten up. This was probably due to the fact that we had an older brother who would take on anyone. Mess with us and you messed with him. Mess with him and you wouldn’t bother again – it just wasn’t worth it.

When the "The Troubles" erupted in Northern Ireland at the end of the 1960s feelings towards us took a turn for the worse and stayed that way for many years. We were getting a taste of what other minority groups had had to put up with for far longer than us. I won’t bore you with stories about how we "suffered," if that’s the right word, but we lived through it and learned to cope with varying shades of open hostility. As such, therefore, I feel well qualified to write about prejudice, hate and discrimination, having been at the sharp end of it.

Things started to change in the late 1980s. I don’t know how much this had to do with what was going on in schools but certainly the arrival of new wave comedians went a long way to making entertainment based on crude, insulting and vulgar jokes about race, religion etc. a thing of the past. Why did they make such a difference? Because they were original, talented and damned funny; they reached a hell of a lot of people.

Much of what had passed for humour beforehand gradually came to be regarded as cheap, boring and tasteless. Things were changing for the better, things were evolving by themselves – human action in action if you like – a growing realisation that we were all in this together, no-one was leaving – so we’d better just learn to get on with each other.

OK, things weren’t perfect – there was still a long way to go – I’m not looking back at the past like some old fart wearing rose-tinted glasses, but things were changing.

However, that didn’t stop the state and getting more and more involved. Here was yet another gravy train for career politicians. The upshot is that we now have a raft of legislation to do with "hate crime."

If free speech means putting thoughts into words then this must be the ultimate in statism – be careful what you think!


What does "hate crime" mean anyway?

This, from the UK Home Office:

"Hate crime is any criminal offence committed against a person or property that is motivated by an offender's hatred of someone because of their:

race, colour, ethnic origin, nationality or national origins
religion
gender identity
sexual orientation
disability"
Hate crime can take many forms including:

physical attacks – such as physical assault, damage to property, offensive graffiti, neighbour disputes and arson
threat of attack – including offensive letters, abusive or obscene telephone calls, groups hanging around to intimidate and unfounded, malicious complaints
verbal abuse or insults – offensive leaflets and posters, abusive gestures, dumping of rubbish outside homes or through letterboxes, and bullying at school or in the workplace
Did we really need new legislation to deal with this?

I can hear Bastiat beginning to turn in his grave – yet again.

What were the unseen affects of this legislation?

How many people do you know who would actually carry out hate crimes as detailed above? Not many I bet, if any. The people who do actually carry out such crimes are a tiny minority who will do so anyway regardless of whether the legislation is there or not.

The effect of this legislation was to erect barriers where there were none before, to create division and resentment where there was none before and to achieve precisely the opposite of what was intended. Twin this with the multi-cultural mantra of "celebrating diversity" and we have a very nasty cocktail being mixed for the future.

Art Carden in this piece writes about tolerance and pluralism – about how "thoughtcrime" legislation serves only to create "us versus them" situations.

Coerce people to come together and you’ll only drive them apart.

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred – brute, blind, virulent hatred – than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes." ~ Ayn Rand

Leave people alone and they will come together.

"The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that. Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences." ~ Milton Friedman.

The last part of this quote bears repetition.

"Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences."

Isn’t this, ultimately, what hate crime legislation does?

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It is Official: WHO Recommends Mandatory Injections to Almost Two Hundred Countries

by Barbara Minton

(NaturalNews) Executives from Baxter, Novartis, Glaxo-Smith Kline, and Sanofi Pasteur have seats at the advisory group that on July 13th recommended mandatory H1N1 vaccination of everyone in all 194 countries that belong to the World Health Organization (WHO), according to a report just issued by journalist Jane Burgermeister. WHO spokesperson Alphaluck Bhatiasevi confirmed that Dr. Margaret Chan did not give the press briefing at WHO headquarters in Geneva as anticipated. At short notice, Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny stepped in to announce that "vaccines will be needed in all countries."

According to WHO documents, vaccines "such as those that are formulated with oil-in-water adjuvants and live attenuated influenza vaccines are important." Health workers, pregnant women, healthy young adults of 15 to 49 years, and healthy children will be the targeted groups of the world wide vaccine effort.

"All countries should immunize their health-care workers as a first priority to protect the essential health infrastructure. As vaccines available initially will not be sufficient, a step-wise approach to vaccinate particular groups may be considered," according to Paule-Kieny. The Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunisation established by the Director-General of the WHO in 1999, suggested the following groups for consideration, noting that countries need to determine their order of priority based on country-specific conditions: pregnant women; children over the age of 6 months with one of several chronic medical conditions; healthy young adults of 15 to 49 years of age; healthy children; healthy adults of 50 to 64 years of age; and healthy adults of 65 years of age and above.

In view of the anticipated limited vaccine availability at global levels and the potential need to protect against "drifted" strains of virus, SAGE recommended that promoting production and use of vaccines such as those that are formulated with oil-in water adjuvants and live attenuated influenza vaccines was important.

WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan endorsed the above recommendations on July 11, 2009, acknowledging that they were well adapted to the current pandemic situation. She also noted that the recommendations will need to be changed if and when new evidence becomes available.

Three-stage vaccinations may create perfect cytokine storm

The vaccine is to be given by a series of three injections. Speaking on the Republic Broadcasting Network with Dr. Rebecca Carley as host on July 11th, meta-analyst and vaccine researcher Patrick Jordan reported belief that the first injection will be for the purpose of turning off the victim's immune system. The second injection will be for the purpose of loading people with deadly organisms. And the third injection will be to turn the immune system back on for the purpose of creating a cytokine storm that will deal a lethal blow to the body.

In his chronicle of the connection between vaccines and death, Jordan pointed out that in 1915 the pertussis vaccine became available and was widely given. This bacterial poison from whopping cough, called pertussis coxon, so depresses the immune system that it is used in laboratories today to turn off nutrafils and reduce white blood cell counts. Then, in 1918, soldiers who had received the pertussis vaccine were deployed to Europe, where they were given another unknown vaccine. They were then exposed to a Lucite gas, which is an arsenic compound, and phosgenegas, a chlorine compound. As a result, their immune systems kicked in with a cytokine storm that killed many of the otherwise healthy young men. This is the 1,2,3 punch Jordan is warning will come again with the "swine flu" vaccinations.

We have been conditioned to think of external microbes as our enemy during a time of influenza. But our own immune systems are potentially more lethal. When the body detects foreign microorganisms indicating an infection, it can respond by overprotecting the site of that infection. In its hurry to get antibodies to the infection site, the body may dispatch so many that the level of cytokines becomes highly elevated, creating a cytokine storm that can be fatal. For example, during a lung infection, a cytokine storm can potentially block airways and result in suffocation. (What is a Cytokine Storm, www.wisegeek.com)

Jordan continued by painting a picture outlined in the WHO Memorandum Number 1 with a study that found virus infections make antibody and antigen complexes. These complexes can clog blood vessels or implant tissue, making the body eventually attack itself. The main focus of this study was kidney disease. Animals with induced immune system deficiency were infected with lethal virus until every single cell in their bodies reflected the disease. But for a time these animals ran around like there was nothing wrong with them because their immune system was so depressed that it was making no effort to fight the disease, and there was no immune response. The WHO experimenters then took their lab animals and stimulated the cell-mediated immune response, and the animals died immediately from their bodies attacking themselves in the kind of cytokine storm associated with the 1918 Spanish flu.

Even if this described scenario does not develop, Jordan points out that the current "swine flu" vaccine is made with an adjuvant that may contain a material poison, salmonella, or typhoid fever toxin, along with squalene. Although not known with certainty, the second round of injections given to the soldiers in 1918 is believed to have contained typhus. Squalene produces auto-immunity and eventually death in everyone who takes it.

Squalene contributed to the cascade reactions known as Gulf War Syndrome that left GIs with arthritis, fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, photosensitive rashes, chronic fatigue, chronic headaches, ulcers, dizziness, weakness, memory loss, seizures, mood changes, neuro-psychiatric problems, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and other diseases.


ML: Gee, no conflicts of interest on that panel. Eh?

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Police given powers to enter homes and tear down anti-Olympics posters during 2012 Games

by James Black

Police have been handed 'Chinese-style' powers to enter private homes and seize political posters during the London 2012 Olympics.

Little-noticed measures passed by the Government will allow officers and Olympics officials to enter homes and shops near official venues to confiscate any protest material.

Breaking the rules could land offenders with a fine of up to £20,000.

Civil liberties groups compared the powers to those used by the Communist Chinese government to stop political protest during the 2008 Beijing Games.

Anita Coles, of Liberty, said: 'Powers of entry should be for fighting crime, not policing poster displays. Didn't we learn last time that the Olympics should not be about stifling free expression?'

The powers were introduced by the Olympics Act of 2006, passed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, supposedly to preserve the monopoly of official advertisers on the London 2012 site.

They would allow advertising posters or hoardings placed in shop or home to be removed.

But the law has been drawn so widely that it also includes 'non-commercial material' - which could extend its reach to include legitimate campaign literature.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: 'This is a Government who just doesn't understand civil liberties. They may claim these powers won't be used but the frank truth is no one will believe them.'

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: 'This sort of police action runs the risk of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. 'We should aim to show the Chinese that you can run a successful Olympics without cracking down on protestors and free speech.'

Scotland Yard denied it had any plans to use the powers.

Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison said: 'We have no intention of using our powers to go in and take down demonstration posters.'

But critics said that - given the powers were now law - it was impossible to predict what would happen in three years time.

Campaigners said the existence of the powers was 'dreadful'. Peter McNeil, who is against the holding of equestrian events in Greenwich Park said: 'It's bullying taken to another level. It's quite appalling that this should happen in a democracy.'
The power emerged as the Home Office and police outlined the £600million security operation for the Games, which will cost more than £9billion in total.

They said hundreds of flights could have to be diverted every day, with planes prevented from passing over the main venue for the London games.

Olympic security chiefs said they expected to have to 'manage' the airspace over the Olympic Park in east London.

A senior Home Office official said: 'We do expect there will have to be some management of the airspace. We do not expect that any airports will have to close.'
The officials said they had no evidence of a specific terror threat against the Games at the moment.

But current preparations assume the terror threat level will be at 'severe' during the event, despite it being reduced to 'substantial' for the UK earlier this week. It is the lowest threat level nationwide since before the July 7 attacks in 2005.
A DCMS spokesman said: 'The advertising provisions in the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 are there to prevent ambush marketing and the over-commercialisation of the Games, not to prevent or restrict lawful protests.

'The measures will only apply to areas within a few hundred metres of the London 2012 venues. The Government is currently developing detailed regulations for advertising during the Games which will enable these powers to come into effect. The Government will be consulting on the regulations in 2010.'

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9/11's a lie

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Pfizer to Pay Tens of Millions for Deaths of Nigerian Children in Drug Trial Experiment

by David Gutierrez, NaturalNews.com

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has agreed to pay $75 million to settle a class action lawsuit filed against it by Nigerian parents who claim the company caused harm to their children by using them as guinea pigs in a nonconsensual, unlicensed drug trial.

The case began in 1996, when Pfizer needed a human trial to gain approval for its new antibiotic Trovan. When an epidemic of meningitis, cholera and measles broke out in Kano, Nigeria, the company quickly put together a research team and flew them to that country. Pfizer set up a tent right near the medical station where Doctors Without Borders were giving free treatments and recruited 200 children to participate in an unlicensed drug trial.

Parents say they were not told that proven medications were being distributed only yards away, that their children were being enrolled in a drug trial, or that animal studies had suggested that Trovan could cause liver and joint damage.

Eleven of the 200 children in the study died, and parents claim that others suffered from brain damage, organ failure and other severe side effects.

The case broke when Pfizer researcher Juan Walterspiel, who had been schedule to take part in the trial but was left behind, wrote a letter to Pfizer's then chief executive William Steere, saying that the Kano study was "in violation of ethical rules."

"Some of the children were in critical condition and most of them malnourished, which made oral absorption even more unpredictable," he wrote. "At least one died after a single oral dose."

Class action lawsuits were filed against the company in a variety of jurisdictions in Kenya and the United States, while various levels of the Nigerian government also filed their own lawsuits against the company.

The current settlement comes in a class action suit filed in Nigeria. In addition to a pending class action suit in the United States, Pfizer may still face criminal prosecution in Nigeria. In January 2008, a Nigerian judge issued arrest warrants for several top company officials after they failed to appear in court.

Sources for this story include: www.independent.co.uk.

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Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak

CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. military wants to establish regional teams of military personel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus — the swine flu — this fall, according to Defense Department officials.

The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The officials would not be identified because the proposal from the U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.

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Now Legal Immunity for Swine flu Vaccine Makers

by F. William Engdahl

The US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has just signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from any lawsuits that result from any new “Swine Flu” vaccine. Moreover, the $7 billion US Government fast-track program to rush vaccines onto the market in time for the Autumn flu season is being done without even normal safety testing. Is there another agenda at work in the official WHO hysteria campaign to declare so-called H1N1 virus—which has yet to be rigorously scientifically isolated, characterized and photographed with an electron microscope—the scientifically accepted procedure—a global “pandemic” threat?
The current official panic campaign over alleged Swine Flu danger is rapidly taking on the dimensions of a George Orwell science fiction novel. The document signed by Sebelius grants immunity to those making a swine flu vaccine, under the provisions of a 2006 law for public health emergencies.

Not so sage SAGE

That is once the WHO in Geneva, on recommendation of the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group on Immunizations, declared H1N1 to be Phase 6 or Pandemic, automatic emergency health response programs could be activated even in countries such as Germany where reported outbreaks of even “suspected” H1N1 can be counted to date on the fingers of slightly more than one hand.

The WHO’s SAGE is also worth scrutiny. Its Chairman since 2005 has been the UK Director of Immunization at the British Department of Health, Dr David Salisbury. In the 1980’s Salisbury reportedly drew major fire for backing a massive vaccination of children with a multiple MMR vaccine manufactured by the predecessor company of GlaxoSmithKline. That vaccine was pulled off the market in Japan after significant numbers of children developed adverse reactions to the vaccine and the Japanese government was forced to pay significant compensation to the victims. In Sweden the MMR vaccine of GlaxoSmithKline was removed after scientists linked it to outbreaks of Crohn’s disease. Apparently that had little impact on WHO SAGE chairman Salisbury.

According to one independent UK investigator, Alan Golding, who obtained Freedom of Information documents on the case, in “1986 Trivirix, an MMR compound containing the Mumps Urabe strain AM-9, was introduced in Canada to replace MMR I. Concerns regarding the introduction of MMR in the UK are recorded in the minutes of the Joint Working Party of the British Paediatric Association and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) Liaison Group on June 26th of that year. Such concerns were soon to prove well grounded, as reports began to come in of an increased incidence of aseptic meningitis in vaccinated individuals. Ultimately, all MMR vaccines containing the Urabe strain of mumps were withdrawn in Canada in early 1988. This was before Urabe containing vaccines were licenced by the Department of Health for use in the UK…”

The report adds, “Smith-Kline—French, the pharmaceutical company who became Smith-Kline-Beecham and were involved in UK manufacture at that time, were concerned about these safety issues and were reluctant to obtain a UK license for their Urabe-containing vaccines. As a result of their ‘concern’ that children might be seriously damaged by one of their products, they requested that the UK government indemnify them against possible legal action that might be taken as a result of ‘losses’ associated with the vaccine, which by then was known to carry significant risk to health. The UK government, advised by Professor Salisbury and representatives from the Department of Health, in it’s enthusiasm to get a cheap MMR onto the market, agreed to this request.”

Today the same Dr Salisbury is advocating global proliferation of untested H1N1 vaccines, also manufactured by the same firm, now called GlaxoSmithKline.

The last phoney Swine Flu Disaster

The last time the US Government faced a new swine flu virus was in 1976. Thousands filed claims contending they suffered side effects from the shots. This time, the government has taken steps to prevent any possible legal remedy should thousands of US citizens suffer severe complications as a result of being given untested vaccines.

In 1976 President Gerald Ford, facing a difficult re-election campaign, was advised by the head of the CDC, David Sencer, to launch a mass national vaccination. As today with H1N1 Swine Flu, Sencer also used the scare of the alleged 1918 flu pandemic. Notably, some scientific researchers maintain that the deaths during the flu wave of 1918-1919, in the aftermath of the ghastly First World War, came not from any virus but from the governmental campaigns of mass vaccination against “Spanish Flu.” Interestingly, the Rockefeller University and Foundation was in the middle of that event as well.

Cases of what was then called swine flu were found in soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J. in 1976, including one death. That death, whose true cause is in dispute as the soldier, sick with influenza was put on a forced march despite and fell dead, was used by Sencer to convince Ford to launch one of the most infamous public health fiascos in US history, forcing Sencer’s resignation as CDC head. Federal officials vaccinated 40 million Americans during a national campaign. A pandemic never materialized, but thousands who got the shots filed injury claims, as they contracted a paralyzing condition called Guillain-Barre Syndrome or other side effects. At least 25 people died after receiving the vaccine died and 500 developed Guillain-Barre syndrome, an inflammation of the nervous system which can cause paralysis and be fatal. The US Government was forced to pay damages after vaccination victims made it a national scandal. In the end the 1976 Swine Flu vaccine proved far worse than the disease.

Sencer was fired in 1977 for the fiasco but by then the damage had already been done.

No Safety Test? Don’t worry, be happy…

The story gets worse. Now that the Obama Administration has signed a document of immunity from legal prosecution, the FDA in the United States and UK health authorities have decided to let Big Pharma put vaccine products onto the market before any tests of the possible harmful side effects of the vaccines are even known.
The first doses of swine flu vaccine will be given to the public before full data on its safety and effectiveness become available. The untested “pandemic” vaccines will be spread over two doses in a higher quantity, and one brand reportedly will contain a chemical additive, an adjuvant, to make it “go further,” dramatically potentially increasing the risk of side-effects.
Children will be among those first in line for the shots and may get the vaccine more than a month before trial results are received.
In the UK the government’s National Health Service, NHS, has been ordered to plan for a worst-case scenario in which swine flu might cause 65,000 deaths over the coming winter, including several thousand deaths among children.
The British Government has placed advance orders for 132 million doses of vaccine with two manufacturers, GlaxoSmithKline and Baxter, who have licensed “in advance” three "core" vaccines in preparation for a pandemic, conveniently enough even though we are told by WHO and epidemiologists that we cannot prepare in advance for what could be a more ominous mutation of the currently very mild H1N1 problem.

Curiously enough, a full year before any reported case of the current alleged H1N1, the major pharmaceutical company, Baxter, filed for a patent for H1N1 vaccine: Baxter Vaccine Patent Application US 2009/0060950 A1. Their application states, “the composition or vaccine comprises more than one antigen.....such as influenza A and influenza B in particular selected from of one or more of the human H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, H1N2, H9N2, H7N2, H7N3, H10N7 subtypes, of the pig flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N1 and H3N2 subtypes, of the dog or horse flu H7N7, H3N8 subtypes or of the avian H5N1, H7N2, H1N7, H7N3, H13N6, H5N9, H11N6, H3N8, H9N2, H5N2, H4N8, H10N7, H2N2, H8N4, H14N5, H6N5, H12N5 subtypes."

The application further states, “Suitable adjuvants can be selected from mineral gels, aluminium hydroxide, surface active substances, lysolecithin, pluronic polyols, polyanions or oil emulsions such as water in oil or oil in water, or a combination thereof. Of course the selection of the adjuvant depends on the intended use. E.g. toxicity may depend on the destined subject organism and can vary from no toxicity to high toxicity."

With no legal liability, could it be that Baxter is preparing to sell hundreds of millions of doses containing highly toxic aluminium hydroxide as adjuvant? Perhaps it is time to demand that all leading officials of WHO, SAGE and CDC, the US Obama Administration, Cabinet officials and members of Congress who voted the $7 billion H1N1 emergency funds and who have gone along with the declaration of pharmaceutical company immunity from subsequent prosecution for damage from their products. The same should apply as well for other national health bodies demanding its citizens take the H1N1 vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline or Baxter to see if it is really safe.

And WHO stopped even tracking H1N1

Another indication that the world is being taken for colossal suckers in the entire WHO Swine Flu scare scenario, the WHO itself, the world body entrusted to monitor outbreaks of so-called pandemics or even epidemics worldwide, has just decided to stop tracking Swine Flu or H1N1 Influenza A as they prefer to name it now, so as not to offend Smithfield Foods and other industrialized pig CAFO producers.

The World Health Organization in a “briefing note” posted on their Web site posted the baffling notice that they would no longer track outbreaks of H1N1. The last WHO update, issued July 6, showed 94,512 confirmed cases in 122 countries, with 429 deaths. The WHO apparently claims that the numbers of laboratory-confirmed cases were actually meaningless.

The briefing note said countries would still be asked to report their first few confirmed cases. It also said countries should watch for clusters of fatalities, which could indicate the virus had mutated to a more lethal form. Other “signals to be vigilant for,” it said, were spikes in school absenteeism and surges in hospital visits. The Atlanta CDC has also agreed to the WHO count drop. Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, admits that the existing tests to confirm H1N1 Influenza A are not even certain, but rather hit-or-miss. “Bad measures can be worse than no measures at all,” he stated. So the WHO has decided to drop tests that anyway did not give a scientific picture of who had H1N1 or not, and as well they have decided to drop counting any test results or cases of H1n1 around the world with the comment that “we can assume almost all cases are H1N1 Swine Flu. This is science on which basis we are told to vaccinate our young? Whoah there…Not with our children.

F. William Engdahl author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order.

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Jonathan Emord on PBS - The FDA's Evil Empire

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FDA Seeks Power to Dictate Farming Practices Nationally

by Aaron Turpen, Aaron's EnvironMental Corner

House Resolution 2749 (read it here) is a bill which would give the power to a Food and Drug Administration official to decide what can and can’t be done in farming. It allows for perpetrators of a basically unnamed offense to be prosecuted and receive up to ten years in prison and be assessed $100,000 fines. Per offense.

That’s really the gist of the bill, though I’ve obviously been scant on real details.

A great writeup by Ethan Huff of Natural News on HR 2749 explains in much more detail how the bill works. The Bill is called the “Food Safety Enhancement Act” and seeks to “reform the food supply” so that viruses and pathogens such as Swine Flu and Mad Cow Disease are better able to be controlled.

In reality, the bill is a huge nod to factory farms and GMO seed makers and a giant set of chains for small farms and local, artisan producers.

After you’ve learned about what the bill entails and how it will do nothing but put small, local (and healthy) producers out of business in favor of factory farms, you can help fight this bill’s passage:

A petition can be electronically signed to go to your representatives in Washington at PeaceTeam.net.

You can also sign a petition against HR 2749 and in support of HR 778 (to legalize raw milk products) at Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund at ftcdf.org.

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Obama's Science Czar Considered Forced Abortions, Sterilization as Population Growth Solutions

John Holdren, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, considered compulsory abortions and other Draconian measures to shrink the human population in a 1977 science textbook.

By Joseph Abrams, Fox News

President Obama's "science czar," John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, "compulsory sterilization," and the creation of a "Planetary Regime" that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet -- controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.

Holdren, who has degrees from MIT and Stanford and headed a science policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for the past 13 years, won the unanimous approval of the Senate as the president's chief science adviser.

He was confirmed with little fanfare on March 19 as director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, a 50-person directorate that advises the president on scientific affairs, focusing on energy independence and global warming.

But many of Holdren's radical ideas on population control were not brought up at his confirmation hearings; it appears that the senators who scrutinized him had no knowledge of the contents of a textbook he co-authored in 1977, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," a copy of which was obtained by FOXNews.com.

The 1,000-page course book, which was co-written with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, discusses and in one passage seems to advocate totalitarian measures to curb population growth, which it says could cause an environmental catastrophe.

The three authors summarize their guiding principle in a single sentence: "To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people."

As first reported by FrontPage Magazine, Holdren and his co-authors spend a portion of the book discussing possible government programs that could be used to lower birth rates.

Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.

To help achieve those goals, they formulate a "world government scheme" they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world's resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an "armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force" to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.

Holdren's office issued a statement to FOXNews.com denying that the ecologist has ever backed any of the measures discussed in his book, and suggested reading more recent works authored solely by Holdren for a view to his beliefs.

"Dr. Holdren has stated flatly that he does not now support and has never supported compulsory abortions, compulsory sterilization, or other coercive approaches to limiting population growth," the statement said.

"Straining to conclude otherwise from passages treating controversies of the day in a three-author, 30-year-old textbook is a mistake."

But the textbook itself appears to contradict that claim.

Holdren and the Ehrlichs offer ideas for "coercive," "involuntary fertility control," including "a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child," which doctors would be expected to do right after a woman gives birth.

"Unfortunately," they write, "such a program therefore is not practical for most less developed countries," where doctors are not often present when a woman is in labor.

While Holdren and his co-authors don't openly endorse such measures on other topics, in this case they announce their disappointment -- "unfortunately" -- that women in the third world cannot be sterilized against their will, a procedure the International Criminal Court considers a crime against humanity.

Click here to see the passage on sterilizing women | Click here for the full section on "Involuntary Fertility Control"

"It's very problematic that he said these things," said Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Lieberman faulted Holdren for using government as a solution to every problem and advocating heavy-handed and invasive laws.

But other members of the scientific community said accusations against Holdren are wholly misplaced.

"John Holdren has been one of the most well-respected and prominent scientific voices urging the federal government to address global warming," wrote Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement.

Holdren's co-authors, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, said in a statement that they were "shocked at the serious mischaracterization of our views and those of John Holdren," caused by what they called misreadings of the book.

"We were not then, never have been, and are not now 'advocates' of the Draconian measures for population limitation described -- but not recommended" in the book, they wrote.

Still, William Yeatman, an energy policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, faulted the Senate for not screening Holdren more strenuously during his hearings before confirming his nomination by unanimous consent both in committee and in the full Senate.

Despite "the litany of apocalyptic warnings that turned out to be incorrect, no one was willing to stick his neck out" and vote no, Yeatman said.

Some of Holdren's views on population came under fire during the otherwise quiet confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, where Sen. David Vitter, R-La., asked him to revisit his past statements about environmental catastrophes that have never come to pass.

"I was and continue to be very critical of Dr. Holdren's positions -- specifically his countless doomsday science publications and predictions that have been near universally wrong," Vitter told FOXNews.com.

"I wish that the Commerce Committee had taken more time to evaluate his record during his nomination hearing, but like with everything else in this new Washington environment, the Democratic majority and the White House were pushing to speed his nomination along," Vitter said.

Vitter grilled Holdren during the hearing, asking him to clear up his 1986 prediction that global warming was going to kill about 1 billion people by 2020.

"You would still say," Vitter asked, "that 1 billion people lost by 2020 is still a possibility?"

"It is a possibility, and one we should work energetically to avoid," Holdren replied.

Sen. John Kerry, a leading Democrat on the committee, said the renewed scrutiny was essentially a Republican smear on Holdren's good record. Kerry told FOXNews.com that senators already had "ample opportunity" to question Holdren, who "made clear that he does not and never has supported coercive approaches, end of story.

"The Commerce Committee and the Senate then unanimously concluded what I have long known -- that John Holdren is a leading voice in the scientific community and we are fortunate to have him lead the fight to restore the foundation of science to government and policymaking that has been lacking for almost a decade."

Holdren has confronted a number of challenges during his four-decade scientific career, including nuclear arms reduction, and was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics," as the Nobel Committee said.

Now his greatest focus is global warming, which he said in a recent interview poses a threat akin to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

Holdren told the Associated Press in April that the U.S. will consider all options to veer away from that cliff, including an experimental scheme to shoot pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays and cool the earth, a last resort he hoped could be averted.

"Dr. Holdren is working day and night for the Obama Administration and the American people, helping to develop science and technology policies to make the country stronger, more secure, and more energy independent, and to make Americans healthier and better educated," his office told FOXNews.com.

Four months after Holdren's confirmation, his critics are keeping a wary eye on his work in the White House, where they assert that he has the president's ear on scientific issues.

"It is interesting that this 30-year-old book is finally coming to light," said Lieberman, of the Heritage Foundation.

"The people who are concerned about Holdren, quite frankly we didn't do enough homework."

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The New Mr. America

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Obama Signs Executive Order Barring Release Of His Birth Certificate

Freedom Medium

UPDATE: At the time this post was published it appears as though we may have been misinterpreting the section of US Code covered by this Executive Order. While this EO may not necessarily cover Obama’s birth certificate, the question raised in the post still applies. Why, with everything going on at the time, was this one of Obama’s first orders of business? For a more precise analysis of this EO and its implications see Pamela Geller’s comment below or visit this link: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html. Our attention to the eligibility issue started with the case of Major Cook because of the implications the outcome of his case could have on all members of the military and the potential of a Constitutional crisis. We will continue to follow his case and others that reach the courts.

Original Post:
First, we did a story about an Army Major who filed suit regarding his deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that Obama was not America’s legitimate Commander-In Chief.

World Net Daily thought highly enough of this article to link to it on their front page.

Then we did an article pointing out the differences between a Birth Cerificate and a Certification Of Live Birth.

Some of the biggest names in conservative news have weighed in on this topic, such as Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and numerous others have offered their opinions.

One of the people at the forefront of this issue is Joseph Farah and his staff over at World Net Daily.

They are even running an online petition demanding Obama produce a long-form birth certificate.

Thanks to the alertness of our great friend and loyal supporter Erica, who gave us the heads-up on this. it appears that the issue of Obama being forced to produce a copy of his birth certificate may prove to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
On January 21st, 2009, his very first day in office, Barack Obama implemented and signed into law Executive Order 13489.

For those of you who can’t take the time to read it. here is the section that applies:
“Sec.2
Notice Of Intent To Disclose Presidential Records
When the Archivist provides notice to the incumbent and former Presidents of his intent to disclose Presidential records pursuant to section 1270.46 of the NARA regulations, the Archivist, using any guidelines providied by the incumbent and former Presidents, shall identify any specific materials, the disclosure of which he believes may raise a substantial question of executive privilege.”

Now for all of you who commented on our previous articles that we were no more that right-wing nut jobs, that this thing about Obama’s birth certificate was a non-issue, and those of you who tried to shift the focus of the stories, doesn’t this strike you as just a little odd?

That the first order of business Obama took care of on day one of his Presidency was to sign off on an Executive Order that states that only the records he chooses to be made public will be released?

This is the subject that was at the absolute top of his agenda?

If this isn’t proof that Obama is hiding something, I don’t know what is.

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The Dangerous Minimum Wage Mirage

Why raising the minimum wage will hurt workers and worsen the economy
by Steve Chapman

The federal government is trying to strengthen the U.S. auto industry. So here's a great idea for what it can do: Tell the Big Three to raise their prices across the board.

That would help in some obvious ways. Higher prices would mean bigger profit margins on every sale. Bigger profits would mean more jobs. More jobs would mean more workers buying new American cars.

But anyone can see that raising prices wouldn't work, because it would dry up sales. If American consumers were willing to pay more for American cars, dealers would already be charging higher prices. This is such an obviously boneheaded idea that no one would ever dream of doing it.

But in the realm of employee compensation, the federal government is taking that absurd notion and putting it into law. Come Friday, the federally mandated minimum wage will jump from $6.55 an hour to $7.25—an 11 percent increase. At a time when employers are laying off workers, Washington is going to make it more expensive to keep them.

If you're a minimum wage employee, your job will pay more, but only if it still exists. These days, most companies are scrutinizing every position on the payroll to make sure it's worth the cost. Raise the toll, and some employees will find they are no longer valuable enough to make the cut.

Economists generally agree that increases in the minimum wage cause unemployment even when the economy is prospering—something it has not been doing for the last year and a half. David Neumark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, estimates this rise will destroy some 300,000 jobs among teens and young adults.

Even proponents of the increase understand the tradeoff. Otherwise they would demand an even bigger hike. If you can force employers to pay higher wages without reducing employment, why set the minimum at $7.25 an hour? Why not $17.25? Why not $37.25?

The suspension of disbelief required to support the minimum wage will only take you so far. It's impossible to deny that if it were illegal to pay someone less than a mere $36 an hour, a lot of jobs would vanish. But a small dose of poison is still poison, and in this case it's being administered to a patient who is already ill.

Supporters make a virtue of bad timing by claiming the change will provide a stimulus exactly when the economy needs it. The liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington insists that a minimum wage increase "would not only benefit low-income working families, but it would also provide a boost to consumer spending and the broader economy."

Not likely. Companies, unlike the government, can't create cash at will. Any money they give to workers has to be obtained by cutting jobs, reducing employee benefits, or slashing other expenses that happen to be someone's income. Net stimulus: zero.

Besides eliminating minimum wage jobs, the increase stands to have another little-noticed effect: pushing people into jobs that pay even less. Some employees are exempt from the law, including those working in newspaper delivery, fishing, and seasonal amusement parks, as well as staffers at companies with annual revenues of less than $500,000 a year.

Doesn't sound like a big group, does it? But in 2008, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.94 million Americans were below the "minimum" wage—compared to 286,000 getting the actual minimum. When the floor went unchanged for 10 years, the number of workers in sub-minimum jobs steadily declined. But in 2007, when the mandate went from $5.15 to $5.85, the total climbed by 14 percent, at a time when overall employment was stable.

That's not a coincidence. Economist Alan Reynolds of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington has found that when the minimum wage went up in 1996 and 1997, the number of workers beneath the floor expanded by more than 75 percent—even though the economy was booming. It looks like the minimum wage destroys some low-paying jobs and replaces them with lower-paying ones, to the detriment of the people who are supposed to benefit.

Economics punctures alluring myths about the sources of material improvement, which is why it is known as the "dismal science." But the victims of the minimum wage will find that the truly dismal thing about economics is what happens when you ignore it.

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Government Creates Human Suffering

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Just how bad is the current plague of economic fallacy?

Consider the front page of the New York Times today (July 15, 2009):

SEACHANGE IS SET IN A HEALTH PLAN – House Democratic leaders took a big step toward guaranteeing health insurance for most Americans on Tuesday as they unveiled a bill that detailed how they would expand coverage, slow the growth of Medicare, raise taxes on high-income people and penalize employers who do not provide health benefits to their workers.

A BLEAKER PATH FOR WORKERS TO SLOG – In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so. It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment.

It's sometimes said that economics is a difficult subject because it requires high-level, abstract thinking, and tracing of cause and effect through several logical steps. And yet, really, how hard can it be to see the contradiction in the above?

Here is the problem. Mandating benefits to employees imposes costs on employment. The would-be worker bears the cost. It makes the worker more expensive to hire. The employer has to pay not only a salary but also a benefit. If you make it more expensive to hire people, fewer people will be hired.

It is no different from eggs at the supermarket. If they are $2 each, you will purchase fewer of them – you will economize. This is nothing but the law of demand: consumers will demand less of a good at a higher price than a lower price. A salary plus benefits amounts to a price that the employer must pay to purchase the work of a laborer. At a higher price, less work will be purchased by the employer.

That means that requiring employers to provide health benefits to employees and potential employees will make the job situation today worse not better. It will intensify the current problem that people want to work more but are having a hard time getting employers to hire them.

The answer is the same in every recessionary environment. The price of labor must fall in order for the surplus of workers to be absorbed into the market. Raising the cost of hiring only further entrenches the problem and creates new forms of unemployment.

There is no real reason to prove these assertions empirically since they flow from the logic of economics. Nonetheless, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway spent years accumulating evidence of the link between full employment and lower labor costs, on the one hand, and higher labor costs and unemployment on the other. What they found in their book Out of Work was that the entire problem (or nearly the entire problem) of unemployment can be explained through the issue of the costs of hiring and employing. In other words, there is no mystery here. Unemployment can be created or solved by the application of policies and laws.

In a free market, however, there is no unemployment that persists that isn't chosen by the workers themselves. That's because the price of labor is continually fluctuating based on supply and demand. Everyone who wants to work can work, simply because we live in a world in which there is always work to do. Only artificial interventions can generate the unemployment problem we have today.

Even so, and for reasons that are unknown and can only mystify the learned person, the Congress and the Obama administration keep trying to pretend as if reality doesn't exist. Here they are imagining that they can just order businesses to give everyone health care and then suddenly health care for all comes into being.

As with all programs, we have to ask: what is the cost? I don't mean what the cost adds up to in terms of government spending. I mean: what is the social cost of overpricing labor relative to what the market would bear? In this case, there is no way to know in advance, but we can know that fewer people will be hired than otherwise.

And then what happens? Business goes to government hoping for a subsidy or for fully socialized medicine as a way of sloughing off the costs on the whole of society instead of bearing them directly.

Sadly, there is no way that free health care can be granted to all living things with the stroke of a pen. Broadening availability will require that the entire sector be turned over to the private sector, so that it can be controlled through the price system like everything else.

As it is, the imposition of new penalties on business will make them less, not more, likely to hire people, which will thereby intensify the labor problem. It is like trying to cure a drug overdose with the injection of poison. New mandates on business are exactly what we do not need.

In other words, the whole idea is just plain dumb, not to mention incredibly ill-timed. The worst possible time to be imposing new mandates on business of any sort is during a downturn. Make the mandates labor specific and you have a recipe for causing the unemployment rate to land in the double digits and go up from there, higher and higher until the entire economy shuts down.

Presumably, not even Congress and the President would benefit from this result.

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Witch Hunt

WitchHuntMovie.com

On the night John Stoll was roused from his bed and carted off to jail, his attitude bordered on the cavalier.
"Aren't you worried?" His lawyer wondered.
"Hell no, I ain't worried," John answered. "I didn't do this. You can't convict me of something I didn't do."

It was more than two decades before John Stoll was free again.

Executive Producer Sean Penn proudly presents "Witch Hunt," a gripping indictment of the United States justice system told through the lens of one small town. It's John Stoll's story, but it's also the story of dozens of other men and women who found themselves ensnared in a spiral of fear, ignorance and hysteria. These people are Americans, working class moms and dads, who were rounded up with little or no evidence, charged and convicted of almost unimaginable crimes. All sexual. All crimes against children. Years, sometimes decades later, they would find freedom again, but their lives and the lives of their children would be changed forever. This film shows viewers what the real crime in this case is, not molestation, but the crime of coercion. Viewers hear from the child witnesses who were forced to lie on the witness stand as they describe scary sessions with sheriff's deputies in which they were told -- not asked -- about sexual experiences that happened to them. Their coerced testimony led to dozens of convictions. Many times their own parents were the ones they put behind bars.

Soon after the trials, the children started to crack. They told adults of the lies they'd been forced to tell on the stand and hoped it would make a difference. It didn't and the convicted continued to sit in prison. As the allegations grew more outlandish, California's Attorney General wrote a scathing report on the court misconduct, but instead of being buried by criticism, Kern County District Attorney Ed Jagels thrived, doing what he did best-- putting people away. He boasted one of the highest conviction rates in the country. This strategy served him well. Jagels is still in office today. Through new interviews, archival footage, and unflinching narration by Mr. Penn, the filmmakers construct an intimate film that illustrates a universal point; when power is allowed to exist without oversight from the press, the community or law enforcement, the rights of everyday citizens can be lost for decades. National film critic Marshall Fine says, "This is a chilling story about American law-enforcement run amok and untethered. It's particularly timely in the wake of revelations about the way the Bush administration has trampled American civil rights. A movie that can't help but move you - to tears and to action."

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