President Obama: President Barack Obama on Friday staunchly defended the sweeping U.S. government surveillance of Americans’ phone and internet activity, calling it a modest encroachment on privacy that was necessary to defend the United States from attack. Obama said the programs were “trade-offs” designed to strike a balance between privacy concerns and keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks. Benjamin Franklin:
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Read moreToday is Memorial Day, the annual holiday where we pay tribute to those who gave their lives in service to their country. As always, not enough attention is focused on the men who made those ultimate sacrifices possible. for example: William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whose baldfaced lies propaganda brand of yellow journalism sucked the US into the Spanish-American
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Late Saturday we posted a Scrogues Converse Roundtable looking at the IRS/Tea Party controversy. The debate got started when our colleague Dr. Sid Bonesparkle suggested that perhaps the IRS wasn’t out of line in taking a good hard look at organizations dedicated to undermining the tax system trying to organize using 501 status, which is reserved for social welfare oriented
Read moreYou’ve probably noted the controversy surrounding the Internal Revenue Service’s apparent “profiling” of groups aligned with the Tea Party. A discussion on the issue broke out here at S&R this week, with our colleague Sid Bonesparkle suggesting on our internal e-mail forum that perhaps such action, even if it only involved a couple of “rogue” agents, might not be entirely
Read moreA Special Guest Commentary From Randy Wayne Boudreau, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Tea Party All right thinking citizen patriots hate gummit. Wasteful bureaucrats living off hard workers like you and me. Might as well be welfare queens. And now, thanks to the good folks at Deadspin – private, non-union workers, I should note – we know who the highest
Read moreNatalie Maines has a new solo CD set to drop Tuesday. It’s entitled Mother, and it’s simply wonderful. If you’d like a preview you can stream it at NPR. I think we can now safely call Maines a former C&W artist. Mother, which is largely a collaboration with Ben Harper and his band, lies solidly to the Americana side of the
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It’s become a little too common a story: police thugs beating the hell out of a citizen (who may or may not have done anything) citizen with camera takes pictures or video of police abuse police arrest photographer because apparently it’s illegal to record police brutality The new trend is to make photographing the police illegal, although they will also
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Ah, yes. The advantages of living in a security state. Authorities have clear video images of two separate suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings carrying black bags at each explosion site and are planning to release the images today in an appeal for the public’s help in identifying the men, according to an official briefed on the case. The official
Read moreThe speculation began before the smoke cleared: who was responsible for Monday’s terror attack at the Boston Marathon? What was their motive? Not only is it human to speculate, it’s just about impossible for us not to. We’re inherently theoretical animals, constantly seeking more informed and reliable ways of understanding and explaining (and predicting) how the world works. (Well, most of
Read moreBoulder DA: Is it wrong to give false testimony to a federal agency? Thomas Wierdsma: No, happens all the time. We reported a couple of times late last year on the outrageous case of Charles and Thomas Wierdsma. Charles is a corporate prisons executive (The GEO Group) who routinely beat his wife and Thomas, his dad (a GEO Group Sr. VP), threatened
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Legislators in North Carolina recently introduced a bill to make Christianity the official state religion. That bill has now been turfed, but we can probably expect similar moves in the future. An Omnibus Poll, sponsored by YouGov.com and the Huffington Post, reveals just how far from the nation’s roots we have traveled on the subject of separating church and state
Read moreThe National Rifle Association has issued a recommendation for safeguarding America’s schools. A task force working for the National Rifle Association recommended Tuesday that at least one armed guard be stationed on every campus in America as part of a three-month review on how to make schools safer in the wake of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. [sigh] Why
Read moreUPDATE: It’s official. _____ English Premiership side Sunderland AFC is considering hiring Paolo Di Canio to be its new manager. Di Canio would replace Martin O’Neill, who was turfed after Saturday’s 1-0 loss to Manchester United. Providing negotiations proceed smoothly, club officials hope to announce his appointment on Monday morning. It remains unclear whether he will be hired on a
Read moreGay marriage will finally get its day before the Supreme Court. The issues are legally and culturally complex and the outcome uncertain in the eyes of many observers. I’m no Constitutional scholar, but I think I know what might happen here. I expect that the Court’s left-leaning justices will vote to strike down gay marriage bans (the Defense of Marriage
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lullaby pit 