We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers
More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined.

Wall Street Journal

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?...[Full Article]

So whatever became of Lt. Col. Lakin?
Army doctor half done with prison term for questioning Obama eligibility

World Net Daily

A military doctor who was court-martialed and sent to prison after questioning Barack Obama's eligibility to be president and refusing to follow orders that descended from the commander-in-chief is more than halfway through his sentence.

And now he has asked the nation in his writings to ponder the question of whether it is bound by the Constitution.

Dr. Terry Lakin, an Army doctor who refused to deploy again to Afghanistan when his chain of command refused to verify that Obama legitimately is president, is serving a six-month term at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas.

He remains under the Uniform Code of Military Justice but has been allowed to post online a series of observations he's made while serving his time. Those private communications to the Terry Lakin Action Fund suggest that his focus remains on the foundations of the nation and the rights and responsibilities of its citizens...[Full Article]

Budding artist Tilly, 5, gets to grips with her new bionic hand after losing limbs to meningitis

Daily Mail

A five-year-old girl who lost both her hands to meningitis is enjoying painting pictures again - after she was fitted with a state-of-the art prosthetic.

Tilly Lockey had both her hands amputated in 2007 and needs new limbs fitted every year as she grows.

She has now been fitted with a £24,000 right limb from a world-leading British bionics company that allows her to control all of her fingers using a sensor that picks up arm-muscle movements...[Full Article]

Picture this: Tilly Lockey can now grip a paintbrush without using a sponge to help

Helping hand: Tilly will have new limbs fitted every year as she grows

EXCLUSIVE: Federal Agents Told to Reduce Border Arrests, Arizona Sheriff Says

Fox News

An Arizona sheriff says U.S. Border Patrol officials have repeatedly told him they have been ordered to reduce -- at times even stop -- arrests of illegal immigrants caught trying to cross the U.S. border.

Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever told FoxNews.com that a supervisor with the U.S. Border Patrol told him as recently as this month that the federal agency’s office on Arizona's southern border was under orders to keep apprehension numbers down during specific reporting time periods.

“The senior supervisor agent is telling me about how their mission is now to scare people back,” Dever said in an interview with FoxNews.com. “He said, ‘I had to go back to my guys and tell them not to catch anybody, that their job is to chase people away. … They were not to catch anyone, arrest anyone. Their job was to set up posture, to intimidate people, to get them to go back.”

Dever said his recent conversation with the Border Patrol supervisor was the latest in a series of communications on the subject that he has had with various federal agents over the last two years. Dever said he plans to relay the substance of these conversations when he testifies under oath next month before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs...[Full Article]

Orwell 2011: Towards a Pervasive "Surveillance State" in America
Biometrics, Facial Mapping, "Computer-Aided ID"....

by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, March 28, 2011

Not since AT&T whistleblower Marc Klein's 2006 revelations that U.S. telecommunications giants were secretly collaborating with the government to spy on Americans, has a story driven home the point that we are confronted by a daunting set of invisible enemies: the security and intelligence firms constellating the dark skies of the National Security State.

As echoes from last month's disclosures by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous continue to reverberate, leaked HBGary emails and documents are providing tantalizing insight into just how little daylight there is between private companies and the government.

The latest front in the ongoing war against civil liberties and privacy rights is the Pentagon's interest in "persona management software."

A euphemism for a suite of high-tech tools that equip an operative--military or corporate, take your pick--with multiple avatars or sock puppets, our latter day shadow warriors hope to achieve a leg up on their opponents in the "war of ideas" through stealthy propaganda campaigns rebranded as "information operations."

A Pervasive Surveillance State

The signs of a pervasive surveillance state are all around us. From the "persistent cookies" that track our every move across the internet to indexing dissidents already preemptively detained in public and private data bases: threats to our freedom to speak out without harassment, or worse, have never been greater.

As constitutional scholar Jack Balkin warned, the transformation of what was once a democratic republic based on the rule of law into a "National Surveillance State," feature "huge investments in electronic surveillance and various end runs around traditional Bill of Rights protections and expectations about procedure."...[Full Article]

Another Illegal Killerthon

Lew Rockwell

by Ron Paul

Statement on Libya – Defining U.S. National Security Interests, Before the Foreign Affairs Committee, US House of Representatives, 31 March 2011

The American people have once again been suckered into an unconstitutional, undeclared, illegal, and unwise war. This is not a war in response to an attack on the United States. This is not a war against a regime that has threatened the United States. This is a preventative war. The president never claimed that any large-scale slaughter of civilians was taking place in Libya. Rather, the president has spent close to a billion dollars – so far – bombing a country because its government might at some point harm its civilians.

The president consulted NATO, the United Nations, and the Arab League for permission and authorization to use US military force against Libya. He ignored the one body that has the legal authority to grant that permission, the US Congress.

While we have not seen credible proof – nor has it been claimed – that the Gaddafi regime has engaged in any large-scale slaughter of Libyan civilians, we see increasing reports of civilians who have been killed in airstrikes by the forces that are supposed to protect them! It seems we may be causing the very problem our intervention was supposed to prevent.

After days of the administration’s public speculation about whether or not to arm the Libyan rebels, we hear from the media that the president already instructed the CIA to arm and assist the rebels several weeks ago. So we have gone from the phony pretext of stopping a massacre of civilians to engaging the US military and covert operatives directly to fight on one side of a civil war.

Who are the rebels we are fighting for in Libya? We don’t fully know. Press reports suggest that there are some 1,000 jihadists fighting on their behalf. Are we arming al Qaeda in Libya? It certainly appears possible.

This is not really a new war. It is in fact a continuation of the neoconservatives' 22-year war to remake the Middle East. Unfortunately the president has ignored the US constitution and decided instead to continue this misguided policy. This is a deeply flawed foreign policy that will only lead to escalation, blowback, and unintended consequences. Ultimately it is leading us to financial catastrophe. We must abandon the fantasy that we can police the world before it’s too late. Congress must stand up and say “no” to this illegal war.

Beef prices soar

CNN Money

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- If you're already shocked by how much your favorite cut of beef costs at the supermarket, brace yourself because prices will keep going up.

Surging commodity prices already have consumers paying more for groceries such as eggs, milk, cereal and meat. The price of beef in particular has shot through the roof.

In February, the average retail price per pound for beef was $3.87, up 12.4% versus a year ago, according to market research firm FreshLook Data...[Full Article]

Two New Orleans cops sentenced in Katrina slaying

Raw Story

CHICAGO – Two New Orleans police officers convicted of shooting and burning a man in the 2005 post-Hurricane Katrina chaos were sentenced to 25 and 17 years in jail for their crimes, officials said Thursday.

They were two of three police officers convicted in December in the September 2, 2005 slaying which was not investigated until early 2009 -- shortly after a high-profile media report.

Former NOPD Officer Warren was sentenced to 25 years for shooting a fleeing Henry Glover, 31, from the balcony of a police station.

Glover's brother and a friend flagged down a passing motorist, who put the mortally wounded man in his car to try to get medical attention for him.

When the men drove up to a makeshift police station seeing help, the police officers surrounded them at gunpoint, handcuffed them and let Glover die in the back seat of the car.

Greg McRae, who maintains his position with the department, was sentenced to 17 years in jail for driving off with the car, with Glover's body inside, and burning both the body and the car with a traffic flare...[Full Article]

FBI spied on little kids for days at a time, documents reveal

Raw Story

The digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced Thursday it had discovered violations stemming from the FBI's use of expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Documents obtained by the group as the result of pending Freedom of Information Act litigation suggest that abuses of surveillance powers granted by the PATRIOT Act had been flagged by the FBI.

Congress passed a bill in February that extended the roving wiretap, "lone wolf" and "library records" provisions of the PATRIOT Act until May 27. The three provisions allow authorities to conduct surveillance without identifying the person or location to be wiretapped, permit surveillance of "non-US" persons who are not affiliated with a terrorist group, and allow law enforcement to gain access to "any tangible thing" during investigations, respectively.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the three provisions should be made permanent. He also told the committee he was "not aware of any" abuses resulting from the provisions.

Among the heavily-redacted documents obtained by the EFF is a report [PDF] showing that the FBI monitored young children for five days, despite the fact that none of the voices being monitored matched the language of the target. The report concluded that the roving wiretap violation occurred as a result of an inadequate review of the wiretap renewal application...[Full Article]

Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak

Bloomberg

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya...
[Full Article]