I would vote for Mark Sanford over 90% of the Republicans currently in Congress. Not because he is necessarily a better man than them. But because I know that he would actually do the job he was elected to do. He already has the record to prove it. I vote for candidates who I believe, [...]
"The Obama administration wants legislation enacted that will punish Internet service providers who fail to cooperate with FBI requests and court orders. The FBI has revealed that its agents often 'lack the time' to obtain search warrants, and so they have gotten into the bad habit of asking Internet service providers to let them in without warrants. The second category of punishment sought by the administration is for Internet service providers as to which the FBI has obtained a warrant. A search warrant does not require the custodian of those specific items to find them for the government. This proposed legislation would change all that." Continue reading →
"After Forbes's Andy Greenberg broke the news that Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed have successfully created a (apparently) working gun with a 3D printer, Rep. Steve Israel, who has been warning of doom, doom!, should this day come, quickly issued a press release calling for new laws to head off the menace of DIY weaponry. Israel's objection is, allegedly, that Wilson's 3D-printed gun is made of ABS plastic, and therefore invisible to metal detectors (Wilson built a hunk of metal into his gun to address this concern, but it could easily be left out)." Continue reading →
"Panic erupted on Friday at Pine Eagle Charter school in rural Oregon when two masked men carrying handguns burst into a teachers’ lounge and opened fire. After the initial chaos, the terrified teachers realized the guns were firing blanks and that they were the subject of an unannounced shooter drill. The little school in Halfway, Oregon was having an in-service day, so the children were at home at the time of the drill. The terrifying action has drawn criticism from many but Principal Cammie DeCastro has defended it, saying, 'For us not to know how we were going to respond is leaving us open'." Continue reading →
"Based on our review of the approximately 2,400 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil contained within the START database, we determined that approximately 60 were carried out by Muslims. In other words, approximately 2.5% of all terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1970 and 2012 were carried out by Muslims.* This is a tiny proportion of all attacks. We determined that approximately 118 of the terror attacks – or 4.9% – were carried out by Jewish groups such as Jewish Armed Resistance, the Jewish Defense League, Jewish Action Movement, United Jewish Underground and Thunder of Zion. This is almost twice the percentage of Islamic attacks within the United States." Continue reading →
"It's been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 per prisoner annually. The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba. By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say." Continue reading →
"Foreign companies are flocking to Cambodia for a simple reason. They want to limit their overwhelming reliance on factories in China. Problems are multiplying fast for foreign investors in China. Blue-collar wages have surged, quadrupling in the last decade as a factory construction boom has coincided with waning numbers of young people interested in factory jobs. Starting last year, the labor force has actually begun shrinking because of the “one child” policy and an aging population. Foreign investment in China slipped 3.5 percent last year, after rising every year since 1980 except 1999, during the Asian financial crisis, and 2009, during the global financial crisis." Continue reading →
"An equally plausible explanation is that ambiguity and an unwillingness to retreat was the cause of all the fuss. Troops from both the Chinese and Indian militaries cross the unmarked border on a regular basis, sometimes unaware of having done so. 'This sort of situation happens easily because the two sides have different understandings of the Line of Actual Control,' said Zhang Li, a professor at Sichuan University. Indian politicians disagree, saying that Chinese troops deliberately crossed into Indian territory and have since refused to leave. The government has promised to defend Indian interests, while opposition parties accuse it of cowardice and inaction." Continue reading →
"With Muammar Gaddafi dead, the hunt is on for a new hate figure on whom to spew venom; far more satisfying than actually evaluating our own role in the creation of human misery. For the governments that lead us into war, of course, it makes perfect sense that we do not stop to look back at the last invasion before impatiently demanding the next one - if we realized, for example, that the 1999 bombing of Serbia - the textbook 'humanitarian intervention'- actually facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo it was supposedly designed to prevent, we might not be so ready to demand the same treatment for every other state that falls short of our illusory ideals." Continue reading →
"US defense contractors had the Moet flowing as Hagel merrily congregated with that prodigy of democracy - United Arab Emirates (UAE) Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed - to celebrate the sale of 25 F-16 fighter jets. There's more on the way; 48 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD missile interceptors, at a cool US$1 billion. The Pentagon is sending one of its only two of such systems to Guam this month to counter that other threat - missiles from North Korea. Obama in Syria is fast becoming a remix of Reagan in 1980s Afghanistan. We all know what came out of those 'freedom fighters' afterwards." Continue reading →