US says it may kill Americans abroad

Sounds like the best thing American ‘terrorists’ could do would be to stay at home. Of course, the thing to note here is that Obama has “embraced” yet another Bush policy. How’s the “Change(TM)” working out for all the Kool-Aid drinking Obamabots?

From Raw Story:

In a striking admission from the Obama Administration’s top intelligence officer, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced Wednesday that the United States may target its own citizens abroad for death if it believes they are associated with terrorist groups.

“We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee. He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with “specific permission” from higher up.

If “we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that,” Blair said in response to questions from the panel’s top Republican, Representative Pete Hoekstra.

Intelligence officials ‘certain’ U.S. will be attacked in the next six month

They’ve been ‘predicting’ this sort of thing regularly since 9/11. Eventually it will happen, even if they have to ‘help’ it along.

From NewJerseyNewsRoom.com:

America’s top intelligence officials have delivered a sobering assessment to Congress, saying that the al-Qaida terrorist network remains a persistent threat to the United States because its followers have been able to adapt their methods to make detection difficult.

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair testified Wednesday to the House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that the threat from al-Qaida remains strong.

“We have been warning in the past several years that al-Qaida itself, and its affiliates and al-Qaida-inspired terrorists remain committed to striking the United States. And in the past year, we have some names that go behind these warnings,” he said.

Blair named as examples from the past year Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born man charged with plotting to use weapons of mass destruction in the United States and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

Driver’s Licenses for the Internet?

Sure, great idea. Will I need to take some type of proficiency test before I can get my license? Will I need to get my computer inspected yearly? Will I need some type of insurance? And what exactly is the purpose of this anyway? What are they supposedly trying to protect all of us from? Unlicensed users? Unlicensed computers? Yeah, I can see this taking off in a big way. If you can’t shut something down, you can at least regulate it out of existence.

From The New York Times:

Today’s idea: Let’s have “driver’s licenses” for the Internet to counter online fraud, hackers and espionage, a Microsoft executive suggests.

Internet | Maybe on your busy junket to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week you missed the panel where Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and technology officer, offered up the Internet licensing proposal above. Barbara Kiviat of the Curious Capitalist blog was there, and summarizes the idea thusly:

First Lady Now Requires 26 Servants

Give her a break. This is just her way of helping the economy get back on track, creating jobs where none existed.

From CanadaFreePress:

“In my own life, in my own small way, I have tried to give back to this country that has given me so much,” she said. “See, that’s why I left a job at a big law firm for a career in public service,”— Michelle Obama.

We were wrong.

Michelle Obama, as we reported on July 7, is not served by twenty-two attendants who stand by to cater to her every whim.

She is served by twenty-six attendants, including a hair dresser and make-up artist.

The annual cost to taxpayers for such unprecedented attention is approximately $1,750,000 without taking into account the expense of the lavish benefit packages afforded to every attendant.

Little did American voters realize the call for “change”  would result in the establishment of an Obama oligarchy.

The discovery of the additional attendants was made by D’Angelo Gore of factcheck.org and by calls to Katie McCormick Lelyyeld, Michelle Obama’s press secretary.

12 more glaciers that haven’t heard the news about global warming

From I HateTheMedia.com:

The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are…uhhhhh…never mind.

Turns out the IPCC’s chicken little story that all the Himalayan glaciers are melting is just another exaggeration. Or fraud. Take your choice. You know, like the stats coming out of East Anglia CRU. And its claim that Antarctica is melting. And that Greenland’s ice cap is melting. And that sea levels are rising. And that the polar bears are dying. Fact is, some glaciers are retreating, but many others around the world are growing.

“But how is that possible? How can glaciers be growing when the world is warming up like a package of Jiffy-Pop in a microwave?”

Here are a dozen glaciers (or groups of glaciers) around the world that are growing almost as quickly as global warming skepticism.

1. Himalayan glaciers are growing, not shrinking

Things are not as they seemed to be in the IPCC report. Not only are the Himalayan glaciers not shrinking, they’re growing. Discovery reports:

Perched on the soaring Karakoram mountains in the Western Himalayas, a group of some 230 glaciers are bucking the global warming trend. They’re growing. Throughout much of the Tibetan Plateau, high-altitude glaciers are dwindling in the face of rising temperatures. The situation is potentially dire for the hundreds of millions of people living in China, India and throughout southeast Asia who depend on the glaciers for their water supply.

CALL FOR IMMEDIATE ARREST OF 5 SUPREME COURT JUSTICES FOR TREASON

If they would just require that our politicians wear the logos of their corporate sponsors (like NASCAR and other sports) at least we could know who our elected officials are really representing. This court decision just legitimizes what we all know has gone on for years anyway.

From VeteransToday.com:

Five members of the Supreme Court declared that a “corporation” is a person, not a “regular person” but one above all natural laws, subject to no God, no moral code but one with unlimited power over our lives, a power awarded by judges who seem themselves as grand inquisitors in an  meant to hunt down all hertics who fail to serve their god, the god of money.

Their ruling has made it legal for foreign controlled corporations to flush unlimited money into our bloated political system to further corrupt something none of us trust and most of us fear.  The “corporation/person” that the 5 judges, the “neocon” purists, have turned the United States over to isn’t even American.  Our corporations, especially since our economic meltdown are owned by China, Russia and the oil sheiks along with a few foreign banks.  They don’t vote, pay taxes, fight in wars, need dental care, breathe air, drive cars or send children to school.  Anyone who thinks these things are people is insane.  Anyone who would sell our government to them is a criminal and belongs in prison.  There is nothing in the Constitution that makes this “gang of five” bribe sucking clowns above the law.  There is nothing in the Constitution that even mentions corporations much less gives them status equal to or greater than the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government.

The Supreme Court of the United States has no right to breathe human life into investment groups owned by terrorist sympathizers, foreign arms dealers or groups working for the downfall of the United States and everything we believe in, but 5 “justices” have done just that.  We now have a new government above our government, above our people, one above any law.   Five judges have created institutionalized gangsterism as the new form of government for the United States.

School Calls in Bomb Squad To Inspect Kid’s Science Project

Absolute insanity… and a total lack of any type of common sense or critical thinking on the parts of all the adults involved. I think it’s especially nice that they decided not to prosecute the kid. Also, just what type of school policies did he violate? Bringing some type of functional science project to a science fair? Having electronic components?

From NoOneHasToDieTomorrow.com:

Slashdot points us to the story of an 11-year-old student who tried to build his own motion-detector system as a science project, and when he brought it to school to show people, school officials thought it was a bomb and freaked out.

They called the police, evacuated the school and all of the expected chaos followed. Law enforcement even brought in a robot to examine the device, and the student’s house was searched for explosives (none found, of course). After all of this (and it was said that the student and his parents were “very cooperative” throughout the ordeal) you might think the family deserves an apology. Instead:

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent….

I’m trying to figure out what “policies” could have been violated, and why it would require that he and his parents get counseling. It wasn’t the kid who did anything wrong. It was the school officials who freaked out. Perhaps they should be the ones to seek counseling?

IRS Commissioner: ‘I Find the Tax Code Complex, So I Use a Preparer’

This is just insane. Will they actually do anything to fix it? No, because it is, by definition, supposed to  be complex so that your odds of screwing up are greatly increased. And then, bang, AUDIT!!

From CNSNews:

The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas Shulman, told C-SPAN on Sunday that he uses a tax preparer to do his federal income tax return because he finds the tax code too complex to handle the job himself.

“I use a preparer,” Shulman told C-SPAN anchor Steve Scully on the network’s Newsmakers program. “I’ve used one for years. I find it convenient. I find the tax code complex, so I use a preparer.”

Scully followed up by asking Shulman, “How would you make it easier? How would you make it less complex?”

Shulman said: “I don’t write the tax laws. Congress writes the tax laws so that’s a whole different discussion.”

The U.S. tax code currently is over 67,000 pages.

Geithner’s Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure

From Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

Nurse Outduels IRS Over M.B.A. Tuition

This woman is my hero.

From Yahoo! News:

How One Woman Went to Tax Court and Won Deduction

A Maryland nurse accomplished two rare feats in her battle with the Internal Revenue Service: She defended herself against the agency’s lawyers and won, and she got a ruling that could help tens of thousands of students deduct the cost of an M.B.A. degree on their taxes.

The U.S. Tax Court handed Lori Singleton-Clarke her victory last month, saying the 47-year-old Bryantown, Md., woman had properly deducted nearly $15,000 in business school tuition. The Tax Court ruling should make it easier for many other professionals to deduct the expense of a Master in Business Administration degree.

After getting word of the court decision, “I nearly yelled the roof off the house,” Ms. Singleton-Clarke says. “I still can hardly believe it.”

The IRS’s rules on deducting work-related tuition are complicated and onerous, ultimately preventing most students from deducting their tuition. But this case clarifies the rules and will likely lead to more taxpayers taking the deduction, tax experts say.