We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.— Ronald Reagan
Secretary of State John Kerry’s Tuesday call to his Russian counterpart has gone unanswered for nearly a week after North Korea tested a nuclear device.
It is not the first time Moscow has not returned calls from the State Department: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had difficulty getting through to her counterpart when she was in the post. http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/russia-humiliates-kerry-ignores-his-calls-for-a-week/
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Local law enforcement officials and state governments have also vowed civil disobedience.
Over 280 sheriffs and eight state sheriffs’ associations have vowed to protect citizens’ Second Amendment rights against new gun laws.
The Utah Sheriffs’ Association used unusually strong language:
We, like you, swore a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and we are prepared to trade our lives for the preservation of its traditional interpretation.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/new-gun-laws/?singlepage=true
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In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day.
At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.
Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center’s director, Doug Naquin.
The center already had “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/4/cia-following-
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(Written by Thomas Sowell)
A nation's choice between spending on military defense and spending on civilian goods has often been posed as "guns versus butter." But understanding the choices of many nations' political leaders might be helped by examining the contrast between their runaway spending on pensions while skimping on military defense.
Creating pensions that offer generous retirement benefits wins votes in the present by promising spending in the future. Promises cost nothing in the short run -- and elections are held in the short run, long before the pensions are due.
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/02/19/guns-and-pensions-n1513748
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Conservatives were electrified the other week by Dr. Ben Carson's appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast. Partly it was because he was taking it to The Man.
But partly we were all thrilling to Dr. Carson because he is a living breathing poster boy for the idea of personal responsibility.
Put simply, we conservatives thrilled to Ben Carson because we are the People of the Responsible Self.
Let me explain. Or rather, let sociologist Robert Bellah explain.
In "Evolution of Religion" Bellah argues that the "conception of a responsible self" got started over two millennia ago when religion promised "man for the first time that he [could] understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it."
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/dr_ben_carson_and_the_responsible_self.html#ixzz2LLTU62kH
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In a recent interview, Al Gore lamely defended the sale of his ailing Current TV channel to Al Jazeera because of the network's strong coverage of Climate Change -- something which Al Gore thinks the American media needs to emulate. Shockingly, Gore extolled Al Jazeera as a respectable independent news agency, even though the network is funded by oil-rich Qatar. Qatar belongs to the OPEC cartel, which is a conglomeration of giant state-owned oil companies that manipulate oil markets and help fund Middle Eastern terrorism.
One of the reasons why Al Gore was impressed with Al Jazeera's coverage of Climate Change is because Michael Mann, the poster boy for the global warming and/or climate change apocalypse, has been extensively featured by the pan-Arab network. In 2012, Michael Mann was interviewed three times by Al Jazeera on the network's Inside Story Special Report. Mann, professor of meteorology and the director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University, is the leading prophet of climate change Armageddon. Mann was at the center of the Climategate scandal when thousands of e-mails from East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) were released, exposing embarrassing correspondences among scientific colleagues bent on warning the world about the imminent global warming apocalypse. Thanks to Climategate, Mann is widely known for his "nature trick," which he used to help "hide the decline" by piecemealing together disparate sets of data -- all so that his infamous hockey stick graph could show unprecedented global warming over the past 50 years.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/getting_gored_michael_manns_apocalyptic_prophecies_and_al_jazeeras_green_jihad.html#ixzz2LLXK7Jbt
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The lone conservative columnist at the largest and most influential newspaper in Kentucky says he quit writing for the paper because editors are refusing to publish his opinion piece calling
the publication out for its apparent liberal bias.
the publication out for its apparent liberal bias.
Columnist John David Dyche told The Daily Caller Monday that he’s written for the Louisville Courier-Journal for about a decade and his column had never been rejected until last week.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/18/conservative-columnist-resigns-after-kentucky-paper-refuses-to-run-op-ed-on-publications-liberal-bias/#ixzz2LLXjpq61
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its second batch of emails from former administrator Lisa Jackson’s secret email address Friday, but the researcher who sued the agency to obtain the records says it improperly redacted nearly all of the information.
The emails, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), are from Jackson’s pseudonymous, secondary email account under the name “Richard Windsor.”
The emails are the second of four batches of roughly 12,000 emails from the “Richard Windsor” account the EPA has been ordered to disclose.http://freebeacon.com/whole-lotta-redactin-going-on/
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Finally! Obama is snapped leaving $1m golfing weekend with Tiger Woods after he imposed controversial picture black out
Obama played at exclusive Florida course on Sunday with Tiger Woods
President refused to say if he had been beaten by the champion golfer
Cost of Air Force One trips to and from Florida, along with hotel rooms, greens fees and exclusive golf lessons comes to $989,207
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280855/Obama-pictured-leaving-1m-golfing-weekend-Tiger-Woods-imposed-controversial-photo-black-out.html#ixzz2LLafW3b7
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BEIJING — A U.S. security firm has tied more than a hundred cyber attacks on U.S. corporations to China’s military, according to a report released Tuesday.
The 60-page study by investigators at the Alexandria-based Mandiant security firm presents one of the most comprehensive and detailed analysis to date tracing corporate cyber espionage to the doorstep of Chinese military facilities. And it calls into question China’s repeated denials that its military is engaged in such activities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/report-ties-100-plus-cyber-attacks-on-us-computers-to-chinese-military/2013/02/19/2700228e-7a6a-11e2-9a75-dab0201670da_story.html?hpid=z2The 60-page study by investigators at the Alexandria-based Mandiant security firm presents one of the most comprehensive and detailed analysis to date tracing corporate cyber espionage to the doorstep of Chinese military facilities. And it calls into question China’s repeated denials that its military is engaged in such activities.
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Spurred by the Affordable Care Act, hundreds of pilot programs called Accountable Care Organizations have been launched over the past year, affecting tens of millions on Medicare and many who have commercial health insurance.
The ACOs are in effect latter-day health-maintenance organizations—doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers grouped together to provide coordinated care. The ACOs assume financial responsibility for the cost and quality of the care they deliver, making them accountable to patients. With President Obama's re-election making it certain that the Affordable Care Act will begin taking full effect next year, the number of ACOs will continue to increase.
We believe that many of them will not succeed. The ACO concept is based on assumptions about personal and economic behavior—by doctors, patients and others—that aren't realistic. Health-care providers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build the technology and infrastructure necessary to establish ACOs. But the country isn't likely to get the improvements in cost, quality and access that it so desperately needs.
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When farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman walked into an Indiana courtroom four years ago to face off against biotechnology giant Monsanto Co., he argued in his own defense.
Today, standing in the U.S. Supreme Court, Bowman, 75, will have a fleet of attorneys beside him — and the eyes of the business world on his case.
The hearings bring the Creve Coeur-based company into the country’s highest court, and could have consequences that go well beyond the company’s interests, and beyond agriculture.
In 2007, Monsanto sued Bowman, saying he infringed on its patent when he planted the offspring of the company’s Roundup Ready soybeans. Bowman argued that the progeny of those beans fell beyond the reach of the patent.
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