Posts Tagged ‘Your Rights’
“There are two basic points about health-care reform that President Obama wants to convey. The first is that, as he put it in an ABC special in June, ‘the status quo is untenable.” Our health-care system is rife with ’skewed incentives.’ It gives us ‘a whole bunch of care’ that ‘may not be making us healthier.’ It generates too many specialists and not enough primary-care physicians. It is ‘bankrupting families,’ ‘bankrupting businesses’ and “bankrupting our government at the state and federal level. So we know things are going to have to change.’
Obama’s second major point is that–to quote from the same broadcast–’if you are happy with your plan and you are happy with your doctor, then we don’t want you to have to change … So what we’re saying is, If you are happy with your plan and your doctor, you stick with it.’So the system is an unsustainable disaster, but you can keep your piece of it if you want. And the Democrats wonder why selling health-care reform to the public has been so hard?
Again and again, their effort has brought us into a land of paradoxes. Public skepticism is warranted when the President promises to cut costs while simultaneously providing coverage to nearly 50 million uninsured people. It is even more warranted when his congressional allies seek to raise taxes to pay for all the new spending that this cost-cutting entails. We aren’t talking about short-term spending either; this isn’t a trillion-dollar investment in a new system that will ultimately save money. The Congressional Budget Office says the leading health-care-reform proposals will increase health-care spending and make the budget harder to balance in the long run. Yet saving money is the President’s principal stated rationale for reform…”
source: time.com
“The media created myth that the town hall protests raging across the country are artificially manufactured is starting to crack, as the public takes the press to task for parroting the erroneous talking point that the demonstrations are the work of lobbyists and Republican organizations, and that they are fostered by underlying racism.
A caller to C-Span’s Washington Journal show perfectly clarified the issues we have been highlighting all along, that the protesters are not just Republican ‘right-wingers,’ they aren’t being prodded into action by lobbyists, and the anger is not just directed against Obamacare, but against the entire agenda, and especially against Congress passing legislation thousands of pages long without even reading it.
As we highlighted last week, ABC News reported that there was no evidence of lobbyists at the protests. Shortly after this, Obamanoids simply switched their talking point and started to claim that the demonstrations were all being organized by Republican organizations.
The C-Span caller who labeled herself an Independent stated that she only started going to protests as recently as July 4th and before that she wasn’t even political. The caller points out that the protests are growing because, ‘All these massive bills, thousands of pages long that are passed with almost no debate, no time for us to see what’s in it,’ and in complete contrast to promised of transparency on behalf of the new administration…”
source: infowars.com
“U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration needs to answer several questions about the privacy implications of a new version of a computer intrusion detection system that can reportedly read e-mail, a privacy and civil rights advocacy group said. The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), in a report released Tuesday, called on the Obama administration to release information about the legal authority for the so-called Einstein intrusion detection system, a version of which has been rolled out at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.>br/>
The CDT report also asks the Obama administration to release information about the role of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in the development and operation of Einstein 3, a new version of the software reportedly being developed. The second version of Einstein is deployed at the DHS and is being rolled out to other U.S. agencies. While Einstein 2 is able to detect malicious code during predefined code signatures, Einstein 3 will also be able to read e-mail and other Internet traffic, according to recent press reports.
‘This raises serious privacy concerns,’ the CDT report says. ‘While its predecessor merely detected and reported malicious code, Einstein 3 is to have the capability of intercepting threatening Internet traffic before it reaches a government system, raising additional concerns. According to press accounts, Einstein 3 will operate inside the networks of the telecoms …’”
source: cio.com
“Doubt the government plans to impose martial law and round up dissidents and other malcontents? Well, the Army National Guard is advertising for qualified personnel to work as Corrections Officers and Internment/Resettlement Specialists. ‘As an Internment/Resettlement Specialist for the Army National Guard, you will ensure the smooth running of military confinement/correctional facility or detention/internment facility, similar to those duties conducted by civilian Corrections Officers,’ a classified ad posted on the web states. ‘This will require you to know proper procedures and military law; and have the ability to think quickly in high-stress situations. Specific duties may include assisting with supervision and management operations; providing facility security; providing custody, control, supervision, and escort; and counseling individual prisoners in rehabilitative programs.
The term ‘rehabilitative programs’ is key. Glenn Beck and the corporate media may attempt to discredit the fact there are FEMA camps, but military documents demonstrate the government plans to herd people into internment camps. Army Regulation 210-35, entitled ‘Civilian Inmate Labor Program,’ provides ‘guidance for establishing and managing civilian inmate labor programs on Army installations. It provides guidance on establishing prison camps on Army installations.’
In Mao’s China, the government established a sprawling system of administrative detention centers — known as Laogai — designed to reeducate dissidents and other social misfits through forced slave labor. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, a network of gulags — a Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies — were established, primarily for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state.’”
source: infowars.com
“he Venezuelan government has ordered the closure of 34 radio stations, the head of the national telecommunications regulator, Conatel, has said. Diosdado Cabello, who is also minister of public works in the government of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said the closures were due to the stations’ inability to meet legal operating requirements, and warned that more closures may follow.
‘They will have to cease transmission once they have received the order’, Cabello said on Friday. ‘This is about legitimate authority of the government to manage the radio spectrum… We are only implementing what the law says…’”
source: aljazeera.net
“Don’t think for a second that cleaning out your browser cookies, hoisting that firewall, and installing identity theft software makes a dent in protecting your privacy in the new digital world.
Every time we activate our cell phone, swipe a credit card, or use EZ-Pass to sail through toll booths, we leave a record of our whereabouts and clues to our behavior for others to tap that never even existed 20 years ago. All that Web browsing you do on your Android or iPhone device, all the weather updates you may get via that connected GPS unit—these things not only tell someone somewhere what data matters to you but also reveal where you accessed it. As the Web moves off the desktop and into every niche of the physical world, with it goes all of the privacy concerns that still aren’t resolved online. Clean out those Firefox cookies if you like, but Web privacy is only the beginning. At the same time the privacy front evolves, experts in the field are also rethinking the ramifications of these mountains of data. In the future, they warn, governments and corporations may be able to violate your privacy without even having to identify who you are.
‘It has grown by orders of magnitude since the birth of the Internet and our use of cell phones,’ says Stephen Baker, BusinessWeek journalist and author of a new book on digital data gatherers, ‘The Numerati.’ From email replacing letters to downloading music from iTunes instead of purchasing CDs, our habits, tastes, and movements now are recorded in ways that can be connected…”
source: computerpoweruser.com
“THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday. The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction. Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far. But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000 – a potential total bill of £400million. Ministers hope the move will reduce the number of youngsters who get drawn into crime because of their chaotic family lives, as portrayed in Channel 4 comedy drama Shameless. Sin bin projects operate in half of council areas already but Mr Balls wants every local authority to fund them…”
source: express.co.uk
“Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to New York to deliver a speech to the boss today. She told the Council on Foreign Relations there will be no departure from the Bush administration in regard to homeland security. It will be the same agenda with a few minor changes — for instance, the color-coded threat advisory will be chucked.
‘Napolitano sang the praises of counter-terrorism intelligence being shared between federal, state and local agencies through arrangements known as fusion centers,’ writes Frank James for NPR. Napolitano said she plans ‘to make them a top priority for this department to support them, build them, improve them and work with them.’
Translation: the feds will continue the full-steam ahead effort to federalize state and local law enforcement, an effort that began in earnest under Bill Clinton and picked up critical momentum during the reign of George W. Bush. ‘Napolitano sounded just like her predecessors Ridge and Michael Chertoff,’ James continues. ‘And she talked about educating the populace about how to be the eyes and ears of counter-terrorism and also how to respond to the aftermath of man-made or natural disasters,’ or for that matter government contrived false flag operations. Napolitano told the internationalist cabal in New York that the American people suffer from ‘complacency’ and this is a ‘threat in the United States.’ In order to combat complacency, the government has to do more to ‘educate’ the public on the threat posed by terrorists and other miscreants. In other words, Napolitano admitted the incessant warnings of impending doom — from dirty bombs in major cities to bad guys taking out nuclear plants — have not worked…”
source: infowars.com
“…The Internet remains one of the most powerful means ever created to give voice to repressed people around the world. Unfortunately, new technologies have also given authoritarian regimes new means to identify and retaliate against those who speak out despite censorship and surveillance. Below are six basic ideas for those attempting to speak without falling
victim to authoritarian surveillance and censorship, and four ideas for the rest of us who want to help support them…
1. Understand Risk Assessment
2. Beware of Malware
3. Choose the Least-Risky Communications Channels
4. Use Encryption to Prevent Surveillance and Censorship of your Web Usage
5. Be Careful of What and Where You Publish
6. Should I use a Tor Bridge…”
source: eff.org
“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.”
source: infowars.com