Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Yes, it is sad that the word terrorist is overused

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is telling the people of Florida about his plans for a permanent base on the Moon, and suggesting it may be possible for the satellite to become the 51st US state.

What is this, the 1960 election campaign?

I wonder for how long people will continue accepting everything. Probably indefinitely and then they will complain "ohhh how could this happen..."
Idiots. Being slaughtered will be the final act.

If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent.

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a huge, classified database of people known to be terrorists, those who are suspected of having ties to terrorism, and in some cases those who are related to or are associates of known or suspected terrorists. It feeds to smaller lists that restrict people's abilities to travel on commercial airlines to or within the U.S.

source

Seems to me a very naive report. and probably made by demand with provided misinformation, those numbers are ridiculously low.

Everybody is suspected

In a fascinating new paper, researchers at the Brookings Institution look at exactly that question and come up with some potentially shocking findings, albeit ones that come with plenty of caveats attached.

According to their calculations as many as 12 million Americans were living on $2 per day or less in 2012. That equates to one in four of the 46.5 million people in the US who were surviving below the official national poverty line of around $16 per day in 2012. It also amounts to 4 per cent of the population, a figure that the researchers point out is not flattering for the US when you compare it to Russia (with 0.1 per cent of the population living on $2/day or less according to the World Bank), the West Bank and Gaza (0.3 per cent), Jordan (1.6 per cent) or the urban populations in Argentina (1.9 per cent) and China (3.5 per cent).

The new study by Laurence Chandy, a Brookings fellow, and Cory Smith, a PhD candidate at MIT, is not the first to tackle the subject. It deliberately builds on another published last year which found that the US had seen a sharp increase in the ranks of its extreme poor since introducing welfare reforms in 1996. That study by Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan and Kathryn Edin of Harvard found 1.65 million households with 3.55 million children in them – or 4.3 per cent of all American households with kids – were living on $2 per day per person or less in the US in 2011. [...]

Estimating the number of extreme poor in the US, it turns out, is just as complicated as it is in the rest of the world.

Once you account for tax credits and in-kind benefits like food stamps and housing subsidies Chandy and Smith found that the number of Americans living on $2 per day falls to 3 per cent of the population, although the vast bulk of those people still shockingly live on less than $1.25 per day, the World Bank’s line for extreme poverty. [...]

In fact, when they applied the strictest potential criteria, which turn out to be those used by the World Bank in its assessment of developing countries, they found that there were arguably no Americans consuming $2 per day or less. “In other words,” they write, “if we measured poverty in the US as if it was a developing country, we would conclude that no-one falls under the $2 threshold”. [...]

The main reason for the divergence is simple: America’s poor report earning significantly less than they report spending and that has a lot to do with the structure of the US welfare system, the researchers argue.

Since the 1990s the poor in the US have received far fewer cash payments and far more in-kind benefits like food stamps than they used to.

But that isn’t necessarily positive, Chandy and Smith argue. Because of that structure in many cases America’s extreme poor are excluded from its cash economy, they say. The consequence is that those who are most poor in the US are consigned to “a state of purgatory where relatively robust levels of consumption ensure many of their most basic material needs are met, but the absence of a reliable source of income … makes it extremely difficult or impossible to cope with unexpected needs”. [...]

By using tax records the French economist Thomas Piketty and others have started publishing forensic analyses of the incomes of the richest 1 per cent, he points out, and triggered a global debate on inequality.

Much less reliable data is available, however, on the poorest in America and other developed economies, who often don’t file tax returns or pay taxes. And that, Chandy says, means that these days we know far less than we should about the lives of the bottom 15 per cent in America than we do about the top 1 percent.

The Minuteman Project’s “Operation Normandy” has been launched as of 1200 hours today (Monday, July 7). This event will dwarf the original Minuteman Project of 2005. I expect at least 3,500 non-militia volunteers to participate, plus uncounted groups of militias from all over the country.

If you are familiar with the Normandy invasion of France in 1944, then you have an idea how large and logistically complicated this event will be. However, there is one difference. We are not going to the border to invade anyone. We are going there to stop an invasion.

[...I]t will cover the porous areas of the 2,000-mile border from San Diego, Ca. to Brownsville, Texas.

Swat team burst into Peoria house looking for source of parody Twitter account that had upset town’s mayor



The police hadn’t even come for him. When four fully-armed officers of a Swat team burst into Jacob Elliott’s house in Peoria, Illinois in April they were looking for the source of a parody Twitter feed that had upset the town’s mayor by poking fun at him.

It transpired that one of Elliott’s housemates, Jon Daniel, had created the fake Twitter account, @peoriamayor, and so incensed the real-life official, Jim Ardis, with his make-believe account of drug binges and sex orgies that the police were dispatched. Elliott was just a bystander in the affair, but that didn’t stop the Swat team searching his bedroom, looking under his pillow and in a closet where they discovered a bag of marijuana and dope-smoking paraphernalia.

Elliott now faces charges of felony marijuana possession. He has also become the subject of one of the more paradoxical – if not parody – questions in American jurisprudence: can a citizen be prosecuted for dope possession when the police were raiding his home looking for a fake Twitter account?

A Peoria judge this week ruled that the police were entitled to raid the house on North University Street on 15 April under the town’s “false personation” law which makes it illegal to pass yourself off as a public official. Judge Thomas Keith found that police had probable cause to believe they would find materials relevant to the Twitter feed such as computers or flash drives used to create it.