Communities put a halt to red-light cameras

Red-light cameras that have been gaining a foothold in many states face a growing public backlash and outright removal.

The cameras, billed as safety devices since their introduction in the USA nearly 20 years ago, are increasingly viewed by many motorists as unreasoning revenue generators for hard-up local governments.

Well, duh!

you don’t have a point to make:

FBI broke law for years in phone record searches

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

And what exactly will happen to the FBI and those who manufactured false evidence to spy on American citizens? Mass firings? Withholding budgets? Stripping the FBI of wiretapping ability?

What? Oh? Absolutely fucking nothing will be done, and there is nothing we can do about it? Hey, the Golden Globes are on!

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

The sad thing about this isn’t that some delusional supplier to the US Military slaps little coded biblical quotes on the rifle sights…its that too many of the troops using these weapons actually believe they are engaged in some grand battle between dark and light. I guess if they inscribed “You’re killing innocents for oil” it wouldn’t cause the same amount of blood-pumping holy war gusto in the useful idiots doing the dirty work of American imperialism.

FDA Has No Authority Over Electronic Cigarettes, Judge Says

WASHINGTON—A federal judge said the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t have the authority to seize electronic cigarettes because the products don’t qualify as devices subject to the agency’s regulation.

In a 32-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon sided with electronic-cigarette makers Smoking Everywhere Inc. and Njoy. He criticized what he called the FDA’s “tenacious drive to maximize its regulatory power,” saying he found its interpretation of the law “unreasonable and unacceptable.”

Super snake’ fears on the rise in Florida

Fears of a new “super snake” emerging in the Everglades grew this week during a hunt to track South Florida’s invasive python population.

In Africa, the rock python eats creatures as large as goats and crocodiles. There have been cases of the snakes killing children.

Yikes!

Army prosecutes single mother for refusing to deploy and put her son in foster care.

Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old Army cook, refused to deploy to Afghanistan in November because she had no one to take care of her 10-month-old son. Hutchinson said when she brought her situation to her superiors’ attention, they told her that she would have to deploy anyway and place the child in foster care. “For her it was like, ‘I couldn’t abandon my child,’” her civilian attorney Rai Sue Sussman told the AP. After skipping her unit’s flight out of Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, GA, millitary police arrested her and confined her to the base while prosecutors decided how to proceed. Today, the Army filed charges against her and, if convicted in a court-martial, she faces several years in prison and a dishonorable discharge:

There are 70,500 single parents on active duty in the U.S. military, but cases like Hutchinson’s are “rare.” The Army requires all single-parent soldiers to submit a care plan for dependent children before they can deploy to a combat zone. Hutchinson had such a plan; her mother had agreed to care for the boy but became “overwhelmed” caring for three other relatives and decided she couldn’t keep the baby for a full year. An Army spokesman said the Army would not deploy a single parent with no one to care for his or her child.

So there isn’t a single job this woman could do at Fort Stewart that would allow her to stay with her child?

Madness.

ROBERTSON: [S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

The problem with Pat Robertson isn’t his insane ranting of gibberish about a mythical devil. We have bums on street corners ranting nonsense about demons, swarms of bats or aliens in their pants everyday as they hector us for spare change. (Which, by the way, is all Robertson is doing.) This isn’t the first time he’s spewed outrageous, incendiary speech to get his face on as many networks as possible so he can fleece the faithful once again. Remember his proclamation that Katrina was god’s judgment on abortion? Yeah, he’s always been a raving nutcase conman, one who makes backdoor deals with scum like Liberian dictator Charles Taylor while begging for money to send “relief”. The only difference between him and Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter is that Robertson doesn’t have love and hate cynically tattooed on his knuckles, but apart from that, they are both predatory animals using their wiles to get the almighty dollar.

No, the problem isn’t Pat Robertson and the thousands of other faith-based flim flam artists we’re infected with.

The problem is us.

The problem is that we were raised to treat anyone who drapes themselves in mythology and calls it “faith” with respect. Instead of laughing in their lying faces, we put them on television. Instead of holding them to task for their hypocrisy we write checks. We take them seriously.

Why? Because our raising tells us to. Because society tells us to. Hell, even our money tells us to. In God We Trust.

Now, like most people who take an active role in maintaining their grip on reality, I don’t watch cable news, so I don’t know how much press this ponzi scheme slinging hysteric got, but I gather quite a bit. And from what I’ve read, people are debating what he said as if he wasn’t some gibbering fool on a street corner, but rather a serious person discussing serious things. We take at least a passive role in continuing his delusions out of the “respect” for “people of faith” instilled in us from birth.

This respect turns a blind eye to a church that devotes its energies to sheltering child molesters, instead of shutting them down via the RICO act, as we have done with other criminal conspiracies such as the mafia.

This respect allows fundamentalists to clog our courts with battles to erect statues to their delusion on the courthouse lawn, instead of prosecuting them under statutes against frivolous lawsuits and fining them into silence.

Our respect continues the discrimination against gays championed by people who supposedly follow the golden rule.

No, the problem isn’t the actively vile speech of Pat Robertson and his ugly ilk. It’s the passive silence we give to the mass hysteria of faith via our respect. It’s the credence we give to shared delusion that is the problem. Its the acceptance of unreality in lieu of reason, faith over fact, that opens the door to anything. Just as a simple paper cut opens the body to infection, this respect for the unbelievable opens our minds to an infection of falsehood. Put another way, if you believe in this, you’ll believe in anything.

Until we remove the unwarranted suspension of reality that our “respect” fosters, we’ll never be rid of the Pat Robertsons of the world. Gays will still be second class humans. Palestinians will still be subject to apartheid by the “chosen people”. Children will continue to be violated by perverts with no real recourse. Young men will still strap bombs to their chests and blow up their brothers. This is a myth that kills.

And we’re supposed to respect it? That is perhaps the ultimate delusion.

Google Threatening To Leave China Over Hacking, Email Leak

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. will stop censoring its search results in China and may pull out of the country after discovering that computers hackers had tricked human rights activists into opening their e-mail accounts to outsiders.

Google disclosed in a blog post that it had detected a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China.” Further investigation revealed that “a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” Google said in the post written by Chief Legal Officer David Drummond.

Finally. Gee Google, you surprised that a regime that routinely tramples the civil and human rights of its citizens (actions that you assisted with in censoring search results for years at their bequest) turned its hackers on you?

Silly Google, but glad to see something finally stops you from abetting totalitarian governments.

Well no duh, its in her DNA. In fact, it may well be ALL of her DNA:

Editor suggests group Liz Cheney fronts is bogus

The editor of a prominent progressive magazine has suggested that Liz Cheney’s political pressure group may be a bogus front that gives news networks an excuse to put the younger Cheney on TV.

This isn’t the first time that Cheney’s group has been accused of being a fraud. In October, radio host Bill Press said that the group is “a total media creation.”

Why is this hectoring harpy constantly on TV slinging bullshit?

Because the people that run the networks- and you- need her to continue the fictions that:

There is a war on terror

And people like her big dicked daddy are better at “fighting” it than some coon from Kenya.

Pathetic, dangerous and fictional. That’s our media, our government, and our nation. She’s just the blonde bimbo propped up to blather it at the moment. If you prefer brunettes, Governor Dingbat is now on Fox.

An Invitation to the Tea Parties to Join the Fight

The Wall Street Journal writes today about how the tea party movement might be turning on Wall Street. I don’t really believe it, but I’m excited by the possibility. Could the tea party guys actually be legitimate? Well, there is one way they can prove it.

But now, I’d like to change course and welcome them in. I believe portions of the movement are redeemable (we’ll find out soon enough if I’m smoking crack on this one). Yes, some of them are full-blown crazy with their birther theories and lunatic signs about holocausts and fascism. A lot of them are actually mad because they think they have lost their privileged position in the country (hence, the cries of “I want my country back”). But many of them are populists that have simply been led in the wrong direction.

I believe this to be the case, and as more and more people realize that Obama isn’t the Great Chocolate Hope they had convinced themselves he would be, I see great potential for a mass joining of the ranks, united in the belief that we’re being led to ruin by bankers, Washington and “the powers that be”.

Tanks in the streets baby, tanks in the f’n streets.