According to TV station WYFF:
Sheriff Chuck Wright opened his news conference by saying, "Our form of justice is not making it." He said, "Carry a concealed weapon. That'll fix it."
Sheriff Chuck Wright opened his news conference by saying, "Our form of justice is not making it." He said, "Carry a concealed weapon. That'll fix it."
For Immediate ReleaseMonday, October 31, 2011
Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley made the following statement after the Justice Department provided more than 650 pages of documents related to the congressional inquiry into Operation Fast and Furious. Grassley has been conducting oversight of the strategy since January.
“There are 652 pages of documents that our investigators will scour over the next several days, beyond the few that the Justice Department pointed out. At first glance, though, the documents indicate that contrary to previous denials by the Justice Department, the criminal division has a great deal of culpability in sweeping the previous Wide Receiver strategy under the rug and then allowing the subsequent Operation Fast and Furious to continue without asking key questions.
“Most importantly, officials raised very appropriate questions related to Operation Wide Receiver at the same time that many of these same officials were receiving briefings on Operation Fast and Furious. It begs the question why they didn’t ask the same important policy questions about an ongoing case being run out of the same field division.
“It also appears that the impression left to Senate Judiciary Committee staff was false during a briefing by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein and several others last February. Despite their denials of gun walking, it appears that senior Justice Department officials clearly knew that it had happened in Operation Wide Receiver and ignored the red flags that it was happening in Fast and Furious.
“With every document that comes out, the Justice Department loses credibility and the faith of the American people.”
Where do we go from here? And I know that amidst all of the chatter and the debates, it can be hard to see clearly what’s at stake. Gets lost. Because these issues are complicated, and quite frankly, folks are busy, and they’re tired. We’re raising families and working full-time jobs, and many helping out in their communities on top of all that.
So many of us just don’t have the time to really follow the news and to sort through all the back and forth and to figure out how all of this stuff connects to our daily lives. But the fact is that in just a little over a year from now, we are going to make a decision between two very different visions for this country.It's a recurring theme with this administration. Remember Mr. Obama last July?
Well, let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large. The public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury option goes. They shouldn’t. They're worrying about their family; they're worrying about their jobs; they're worrying about their neighborhood. They've got a lot of other things on their plate. We're paid to worry about it.Y'all are too busy to figure out what's at stake. Government is complicated, and best left to professionals. Or so they say.
From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.
A record 49 percent of Americans live in a household where someone receives at least one type of government benefit, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The word is revolution, but no one's fired a shot
Each side has its battle plan, a million counter plots.
And the world is closely watching as we near the battle lines.
But if you're truly wise, you'll keep your eyes on Palestine.
David Hilliard, former chief of staff of the party, gave a rousing speech about organizing. Former party members will also speak at Laney College tomorrow afternoon from 4 to 6 p.m. to talk about their 10 point organizing principles.
"I bet Huey Newton is smiling on us right now," said a young man who took the microphone, before reading out the ten points, including housing, education, health care for black, poor and oppressed people, an end to police brutality, an end to wars of aggression and several others.
A woman in the crowd stood silently with her fist raised in the classic Black Panther pose.This was not an unplanned, spontaneous appearance. It was promoted in advance by OccupyOakland.org:
For Immediate Release
October 26, 2011
Grassley, Issa Press for Additional Information on Death of ICE Agent Zapata, Tactics Used in Texas
WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa are pressing for additional information into the murder of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata and the tactics used while conducting surveillance on known straw purchasers, raising concerns similar to policies of Operation Fast and Furious out of the Phoenix office.
The letter explains the inconsistent statements by the Justice Department regarding Otilio Osorio, his brother Ranferi Osorio, and Kelvin Morrison. The three straw purchasers were known to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, long before one of the guns purchased by the brothers was linked to the murder of Agent Zapata.
To make matters worse, Grassley and Issa wrote in their letter that documents indicate the ATF failed for more than three months to create a Report of Investigation on the November 9 transfer of firearms between the brothers and Morrison and a confidential informant, witnessed by ATF agents. The report was finally written on February 25, 2011—the same day the ATF received the report tracing the Zapata murder weapon back to the purchase by Otilio Osorio.The full release with related links and documents is available here.
Grassley and Issa said that documenting investigative steps three months after the fact and only after a trace returned to the murder of a federal agent raises red flags about the nature of ATF’s investigation...
“What we’re trying to do is help on the back end, to reduce those monthly payments on those loans,” Duncan said. “To make sure folks have a better opportunity to be successful there — less defaults will strengthen the economy, and we can do this by ourselves. We don’t have to wait for Congress — we can’t wait for Congress. We’re moving ahead today.”
According to Duncan, the Know Before You Owe plan will cap monthly student loan payments at 10 to 15 percent of the graduate’s income.The Obama team has long advocated moving student loans out of the private sector and making them a government-only operation. Now they advocate more money for the pipeline while capping loan repayment. Sounds like a sure-fire way to run more deficits, and ultimately stick someone else with the bill.
Adolescents who drank more than five cans ofThe study was conducted in Boston high schools. Boston is already a city at war with soft drink consumption. Which begs the question of how much bias is cooked into the study and its results.
soft drinks per week (nearly 30% of the sample) were
significantly more likely to have carried a weapon and to
have been violent with peers, family members and dates
(p<0.01 for carrying a weapon and p<0.001 for the
three violence measures). Frequent soft drink
consumption was associated with a 9 - 15% point
increase in the probability of engaging in aggressive
actions, even after controlling for gender, age, race, body
mass index, typical sleep patterns, tobacco use, alcohol
use and having family dinners.
Nearly 300 bodies, many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head, have been collected from across Sirte and buried in a mass grave. The new government has been slow to confront allegations of atrocities by rebel fighters, despite repeated calls for them to do so.President Obama told us in March the U.S. military began airstrikes over Libya to "protect civilians." He later amended to the goal to include regime change.
The special episode will take you to the front lines as MTV cameras follow three young people who get swept up in the political movement that has quickly grown into a global phenomenon. Viewers will be introduced to Bryan, one of the leaders of the Occupy sanitation team. You'll watch as he steels himself against a potential fight with the city when he fears that their request to clean the park is an excuse to evict the protesters...
The problem for young protesters like Bryan is who do they turn to? Their parents, the government? Many believe it no longer matters who's in charge in Washington because none of those big money politicians has any answers. That might be why this group sees Occupy as a kind of war their generation must wage, one that might not end soon, but which they support because it allows them to speak out against corporate America and voice the concerns they have about not being able to find work. That also explains why nearly half (45 percent) have postponed a major life milestone (marriage, having children) because of the economy or their employment situation.
"Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
Certainly, adversaries learned from Saddam’s poor decision to face American forces head-on and will increasingly employ asymmetric attacks to defeat U.S. forces in the future. Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons represent one of the most likely and potentially devastating opportunities for this type of attack in the near future. Ranging from sophisticated intercontinental nuclear weapons specifically designed to generate EMP effects to relatively crude and cheap electromagnetic bombs, these weapons can destroy all electronic devices within a target area as small as an automobile or as large as the continental United States. As U.S. forces continue to modernize and rely on electronic systems for effectiveness, it will become increasingly probable that an adversary will use EMP to strike at America’s Achilles’ heel.The assessment, written by Major Colin R. Miller, USAF, goes on to state:
EMP poses a massive threat to U.S. theater operations through its potential to isolate forces and deny access to regions, its ability to nullify the U.S. technology advantage, and its potential to produce a devastating national catastrophe. Even more ominous is the fact that the means to produce EMP effects, both nuclear and non-nuclear, are proliferating.
Disarming the highways and filling them full of jack-booted thugs demanding to see our papers is no way to make them safer. Instead, it is a great way to expand government surveillance powers and tighten the noose around our liberties.
In 1785 Thomas Jefferson wrote to his fifteen-year-old nephew, Peter Carr, regarding what he considered the best form of exercise: "...I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independance to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks."
In late September 2009, ATF Phoenix Group VII supervisor Hope MacAllister walked into the Lone Wolf Trading Company. She had a message for the owner Andre Howard, according to sources familiar with the investigation into Fast & Furious in both DC and Arizona, and the message was this: "The amount of weapons you sell is about to dramatically increase." Howard, the sources say, was cautioned that "he might not have enough stock" to supply the straw buyers that MacAllister somehow knew were on the way and that "he should stock up on what they wanted."
A TSA spokesman told Channel 2 the event is known as Visible Inter-mobile Prevention and Response, or VIPER, an operation that is conducted with local authorities as a training exercise. The TSA spokesman said the operation is not in response to a specific threat.
The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.
Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.
The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.
The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.Potential evidence of what? It appears the FBI now presumes forms of electronic free speech are suspicious activity to the extent they must be monitored.
If ever there is an example of hyper-partisanship, the recent personal attacks challenging the honesty and competence of Attorney General Eric Holder regarding the ATF's errors in its "Fast and Furious" gun-tracking program should be Exhibit A.In 2008, the same Lanny Davis saw no problem going after questionable allies of Barack Obama if it seemed to favor Obama's Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.
Indeed, Davis has gone where others only tread in private. In the wake of revelations over controversial statements of Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, the Clinton campaign enforced a code of silence. Davis, in contrast, took to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal -- enemy turf in progressive circles -- expressing bewilderment about the relationship.
And even before William Ayers and the Weather Underground were thrust into the center of the political debate, Davis was posing questions to Obama on the matter during a segment of Fox News' Hannity and Colmes.
Like the "Arab Spring" uprisings that inspired its tactics, the word-of-mouth demonstration has tapped into a collective anger. Some protesters are upset about taxation; for others, the big issue is the high unemployment rate. Or corporate greed. Or the distribution of wealth.
The blowback from the White House and DOJ has been petty, nasty and has failed to responsibly address the serious charges Attkisson's reporting raises. This is exactly the White House contempt for the press that I wrote about shortly after Obama's inauguration. It's the White House I came to know when I criticized it for its war against Fox News in 2009.He goes on to say:
Team Obama, under the direction of David Plouffe, will try and find a way to punish CBS News for Attkisson's work, make no mistake about it. As I said two years ago, I have not seen a White House as vindictive in its dealings with the press since the one inhabited by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But CBS News isn't backing down so far.Despite solid reporting by CBS, many in the media continue to either avoid the story. or attempt to pass of their shallow coverage as serious effort.
“Now, eight months after Senator Grassley personally raised the issue with him, Attorney General Holder has officially admitted that this case involved ‘weapons that should have been interdicted but were not.’ That’s quite a reversal from the Department’s initial denial, which claimed the whistleblower allegations were false and that ‘ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally.’The Grassley release, in full, is available here.
"Occupy Wall Street is not a spontaneous uprising of disenchanted citizens frustrated with corporate plutocracy and capitalist excess. Rather, it is a planned, manufactured attempt to prop up Mr. Obama’s failed presidency. It is a page taken straight from the Alinsky playbook: Demonize bankers and businessmen in order to divert attention from the real source of our economic woes, Mr. Obama’s policies."
For Immediate Release
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Holder Received at Least Five Memos on Fast and Furious
WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa today said that Attorney General Eric Holder received at least five weekly memos beginning in July 2010, including four weeks in a row, describing the ill-advised strategy known as Operation Fast and Furious. The memos were to Holder from Michael Walther, the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center.
The Attorney General told Issa during a House Judiciary Committee in May 2011 that he had just learned of Fast and Furious a few weeks before. Yet, on January 31, in a previously scheduled meeting, Grassley personally handed him two letters about Fast and Furious. Grassley and Issa said they find it very troubling that Holder actually knew of Operation Fast and Furious much earlier, and in greater detail than he ever let on.
The memos specifically said that the straw buyers were “responsible for the purchase of 1500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug trafficking cartels.”
“With the fairly detailed information that the Attorney General read, it seems the logical question for the Attorney General after reading in the memo would be “why haven’t we stopped them?” Grassley said. “And if he didn’t ask the questions, why didn’t he or somebody in his office?”
“Attorney General Holder has failed to give Congress and the American people an honest account of what he and other senior Justice Department officials knew about gunwalking and Operation Fast and Furious. The lack of candor and honesty from our nation’s chief law enforcement officials in this matter is deeply disturbing,” Issa said.
Grassley and Issa have been leading the investigation into who approved the strategy to allow guns to be purchased by known straw buyers who then often transferred the firearms to Mexican Drug Cartels.
The memos can be found here.