Thursday, Oct 10th
Last update06:44:04 AM GMT
The fact that U.S. troops are getting new headgear to protect them from gunfire during “homeland security operations” will once again stoke fears that the government is preparing for violent civil unrest on U.S. soil.
Using the Army to conduct domestic operations is illegal under Posse Comitatus except under extreme circumstances.
It may seem trivial, but not to social networking junkies or campaigns mindful of the need to project a digital image of popularity and power.
An analysis by the technology firm Barracuda Labs found most of the Twitter users who followed Romney over that July weekend were probably fake, although it’s impossible to know who’s behind the spike: Romney’s campaign, a supporter or an opponent. Romney went from 673,000 to 814,000 followers during that time, though that number has since risen to more than 861,000. President Barack Obama has more than 18 million followers.
On March 17, 2011 Greene County resident Robert Allan Shipman and his company, Allan’s Waste Water Service Inc., were charged with illegally dumping millions of gallons of natural gas drilling wastewater, along with restaurant grease and sewer sludge across six counties in Pennsylvania from 2003-2009.
Pennsylvania is one of several states that sit atop the gas-rich underground rock formation the Marcellus Shale. Hydraulic fracturing, the process used for retrieving the gas, is a water-intensive drilling method that not only requires massive volumes of water to unlock the gas, but also generates millions of gallons of wastewater when the drilling is done.
Moscow's top court has upheld a ban on gay pride marches in the Russian capital for the next 100 years. Earlier Russia's best-known gay rights campaigner, Nikolay Alexeyev, had gone to court hoping to overturn the city council's ban on gay parades.
He had asked for the right to stage such parades for the next 100 years. He also opposes St Petersburg's ban on spreading "homosexual propaganda". The European Court of Human Rights has told Russia to pay him damages.
As one would expect, among the readers who posted here there was a strong level of both support for the event (and any anti-fracking advocacy) and critiques of our effort, typically from gas industry functionaries or labor that supports hydraulic fracturing on behalf of jobs.
Our implausible world can take almost any topic or subject, skewer it, spin it around in its rotisserie barbecue: give it a few and, voila! Everything goes out a nice, golden brown.
Just like Meals, Ready to Eat, or MREs -- field rations for military members in the familiar brown plastic packets, for example. The meals are popular with survivalists, campers, hunters, and others away from their ranges-in-home, let alone from antelope playing near the 'fridge.
Wiki tells us the U.S. government requires the following information be printed on each MRE case: U.S. Government Property, Commercial Resale is Unlawful.
So, what's the implausibility here? It's not true.
“The law has turned ordinary people into criminals for engaging in normal human behavior,” says Liz Reitzig, one of the event’s organizers. “I am proud to stand with others as we peacefully do not comply with these laws.”
On August 18, 2012 a group of mothers and others, members of the advocacy groups, the Raw Milk Freedom Riders and Lemonade Freedom Day, will take their raw milk and lemonade to the lawn of the US Capitol to celebrate their right to “voluntary exchange.”
By offering raw milk and lemonade for sale or barter, which is illegal in many places including Washington DC, these mothers and other activists risk criminal charges, and possibly jail. Last August, in a similar protest, three people were arrested for selling 10-cent cups of lemonade.
If you want to know what PBS would like without government funding turn on A&E, History Channel, or the ever oxymoronic Learning Channel. These networks have been long held up by Republicans as the private sector alternative to PBS, but look at the programming that these channels actually contain. Would Sesame Street be replaced with Pawn Stars? Instead of Antiques Roadshow, how about Storage Wars? Replace Downton Abbey with Toddlers and Tiaras.
Romney was asked by Fortune where he would cut government spending, and he answered, “There are three major areas I have focused on for reduction in spending. These are in many cases reductions which become larger and larger over time. So first there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to strand (sic) on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.”
Mitt Romney was essentially telling Elmo and the rest of Sesame Street to stop being a bunch of bums and get a job. Mitt Romney’s vision for America includes the death of Amtrak, slashed funding for the arts and humanities, and a privatized PBS.
The Army suicide pace this year is surpassing last year, particularly among active-duty soldiers where there is a 22% increase — 116 deaths so far this year vs. 95 during the same seven months last year, according to Army data.
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