US News // Current

Bill to Audit the Federal Reserve Makes It Over Another Hurdle

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/panel-votes-to-audit-feds-balance-sheet-2009-11-19... more

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2 Ejected From '05 Bush Event (Because Of Their Bumper Sticker) In Court

A federal appeals court on Wednesday heard arguments that two people who were booted... more

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Former evangelist: Religious right is ‘trawling for assassins’

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is concerned that President Obama's trip abroad has served to bring out "the unhinged among the president's critics."

Not only have the Wall Street Journal and the hosts of Fox News been issuing their usual dark mutterings, but a new slogan has began appearing on bumper stickers, tshirts, and even teddy bears: "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8."

That psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

Maddow seemed mainly amused by the teddy bears, but when she turned for comment to former right-wing evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer, he emphasized that in a religious context "it means something more threatening."

"The situation that I find genuinely frightening right now," Schaeffer explained, "is that you have a ramping up of biblical language ... and what it's coalescing into is branding Obama ... as 'not us.' ... Now he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel ... who should be slaughtered, if not by God then by just men."

"Really, this is trawling for assassins," continued Schaeffer, "and this is serious business. It's un-American, it's unpatriotic, and it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far right, have coalesced into a group that truly want American revolution. ... They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe. ... This bumper sticker simply says to them, 'It's open season.'"

Appearing increasingly agitated, Schaeffer went on to say, "This is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Koran, and Al Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Koran, in or out of context, calling for jihad and bloody war and the curse of Allah on infidels. This is the Old Testament biblical equivalent of calling for holy war. ... And what surprises me is that responsible -- if you can put it that way -- Republican leadership, and the editors at some of these Christian magazines .... do not stand up in holy horror and denounce this."

"I would just say to them, 'Where the hell are you?'" Schaeffer concluded. "'This is not funny any more, and be it on your head if something happens to our president.' ... There are not many steps left on this insane path."

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/evangelist-religious-trawling-assassins/MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is concerned that President Obama's trip abroad has served to... more

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MEDIA FAIL: News Caught Lying about Vaccine lines and numbers

MEDIA FAIL: Channel 10 News in Miami Caught Lying about Vaccine lines and numbers

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Private Joseph Foster recalls FT Hood Shooting

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Nearly 15,000 Enter Into Settlement With IRS Over Foreign Accounts

Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden released the following statement regarding the announcement today by the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue (IRS) regarding the results arising from previous settlements of civil and criminal cases against Swiss banking giant UBS AG.

The Justice Department and IRS announced that over 14,700 taxpayers have come forward to report previously-undisclosed foreign bank accounts under the voluntary disclosure program the IRS implemented following the settlement. This figure represents almost double the initial numbers the IRS announced in October and dwarfs the number of voluntary disclosures received in 2008.

“The Department of Justice is pleased with the extraordinary results achieved from this landmark settlement,” said Deputy Attorney General Ogden. “The message to American taxpayers is clear: the era of bank secrecy and hidden assets is over. We will continue to work closely with the IRS and our international partners to ensure that our tax laws are enforced fully and fairly, and that the rule of law is vindicated. We congratulate the IRS and the Department’s Tax Division, as well as our partners in the Swiss government, for this achievement.”

These voluntary disclosures, while extremely significant, are but one more step in the IRS and the Department’s efforts to hold those U.S. taxpayers who have undisclosed foreign accounts responsible for their actions. These efforts began in February 2009, with UBS AG’s agreement to enter into a groundbreaking deferred prosecution agreement, admitting guilt on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States by impeding the IRS. As part of the agreement, UBS immediately provided the United States with the identities of, and account information for, a number of U.S. UBS customers and paid $780 million in fines, penalties, interest, and restitution. The Department’s Tax Division worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida to obtain these unprecedented results.

To date, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted six U.S. customers of UBS whose information was provided pursuant to the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, and is conducting investigations of dozens of other UBS customers.

In addition to the deferred prosecution agreement, in August of this year, the IRS, the Justice Department, UBS and the Swiss Government, entered into a similarly landmark agreement, in the John Doe summons action, whereby the IRS was to receive thousands of additional undisclosed UBS accounts.

These criminal and civil efforts have, for the first time, breached Swiss bank secrecy and prevented taxpayers from hiding from the IRS regardless of the cross border nature of their accounts. Within the United States, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of taxpayers who have come forward to voluntarily disclose the existence of their foreign bank accounts and agree to pay tens of millions of dollars to the treasury.

The Department of Justice and IRS also made public the criteria set out in the settlement reached in the civil John Doe summons suit against UBS, which governed the selection of account holders to be identified as part of the settlement. The criteria cover accounts of various amounts and types, including bank-only accounts, custody accounts in which securities or other investment assets were held and offshore company nominee accounts through which an individual indirectly held beneficial ownership. These criteria allow the IRS and the Justice Department to target the most egregious foreign account holders.

http://pubrecord.org/law/6080/nearly-15000-citizens-enter-settlement/Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden released the following statement regarding the... more

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AP Poll: Most favor taxing the rich to pay for health bill

~House Health Bill has 5.4% income tax surcharge on $1M+ household incomes~ When it... more

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3 days ago
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190 comments

Hundreds Converge on Goldman Sachs DC Headquarters

Today, hundreds of workers, clergy members, community leaders, and other taxpayers... more

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4 days ago
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15 comments

CNN on our new "huge, huge bomb" to use against Iran

Here is Wolf Blitzer and Barbara Starr talking last night on CNN about the Iranians... more

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4 days ago
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Italian MP Denounces Bilderberg Influence During European Parliament Meeting

The Bilderberg group, with members like NYC mayor Bloomberg, is denounced for... more

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5 days ago
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Two Sunken Japanese Submarines Found Off Hawaii

The NY Times reports that two World War II Japanese submarines, including one meant to... more

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7 days ago
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Breaking up is hard to do

When it comes to understanding the real economy and the struggles of ordinary... more

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7 days ago
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America’s ‘Preposterous War On Pot’ Continues

Seven million Americans have been arrested since 1995 on marijuana charges and 41,000... more

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7 days ago
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Fox News declares cyberwar on liberal blogosphere

(From the link)

How do you annoy the maximum number of Liberal blogs with minimal effort? If you're Fox News, all you have to do is shut down the YouTube channel that supplies them with infuriating O'Reilly Factor clips. They did this today!

Spend even a few minutes on a politically-inclined blog that leans to the left, and you'll spot the little red-and-white "News1News" logo (above) attached to the upper-left corner a YouTube clip, usually of Glenn Beck ranting hilariously or otherwise being horrible. News1News specializes in capturing and uploading Fox bloviator's most outrageous statements for all of eternity. And each day, we bloggers—from the Huffington Post, Mediaite, Truthdig, Gawker, etc.—plucked newsworthy clips from News1News' Youtube channel, surrounded them with our words, and put them on our sites. (In fact, Mediaite's feature "Your Moment of Glenn" is all News1News clips.) From all this blog love, News1News videos had more than 20 million cumulative views by the time it was shut down. It was the simple, convenient way to stoke Liberal ire!

But today, it appears that Fox News determined it was time to close this one-stop Liberal blog fodder shop: They sent more than 150 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube regarding Fox News clips on the News1News channel, said the channel's proprietor, John. (John, a doctor living in Washington, DC, didn't want his last name used.) This put the channel well over YouTube's controversial "three-strike" copyright violation limit. News1News was shut down, and John was inundated with emails from caffeine-addled bloggers asking, frantically, "what happened!?"

Because, now, if you try to watch Hannity's infamous apology to Jon Stewart on the Huffington Post, or Michael Jackson's "ghost" on Gawker, or Glenn Beck saying dumb stuff on Truthdig, you will only see "This Video is no longer available due to copyright claim by Fox News LLC". (SPOOKY!!)

Which, granted, these clips did belong to Fox, and they were well in their rights to have them taken down, as specified by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So how do we know this is a politically-motivated move by Fox to hinder the liberal blogosphere's ability to make fun of them? Because plenty of Fox News clips are still available on YouTube—only on conservative-leaning channels: GlennBeckDailyClips, for example has more than 630 clips of, well, the Glenn Beck Program. And ConservativeNation has 186 stomach-churning videos from the whole spectrum of quality Fox News programing. Also: Duh, Fox News would totally do something like this.

News1News is back up, at a new address—at least until Fox takes it down again. But what's surprising about this whole episode isn't that Fox will use digital copyright law to fight back against its political opponents; it's that the operators of these popular cable news-ripping YouTube channels are actually pretty important players in the blog game. Think about it: They not only get to select which cable news clips have the possibility of "going viral" and becoming news themselves, but if they're taken down, whole swaths of video-based blog posts become a lot of words surrounding a big empty space.

Fox News thought John was important enough to take down, even though he's just some guy whose hobby is clipping videos and putting them on YouTube. And John said that network bigwigs took enough notice when one of his MSNBC clips hit 500,000 views that VP of Digital Media, Mark Lukasiewicz, personally called him to say they had their eye on him. (Mark Lukasiewicz could not be reached for comment because he is important and it is 9:30pm.)

How does John do it? "I DVR things," he said. "I know what people are going to find interesting. You can watch a Bill O'Reilly show and you can pick out the things that are going to make heads explode. Literally, when my head explodes I know it's going to be a good clip."(From the link) How do you annoy the maximum number of Liberal blogs with minimal... more

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7 days ago
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ACORN sues Congress for defunding it; Group says Congress bowed to Fox News

The community organizing group ACORN, recently walloped by conservative activists who posed as a prostitute and a pimp and tried to get employees to incriminate themselves, is suing Congress for defunding its organization.

The group has teamed with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has filed suit on their behalf. It argues that Congress' move infringed on their Fifth Amendment right to due process, and their First Amendment right to freedom of association.

The complaint was filed this morning in the U.S. District Court of New York.

From a release issued to RAW STORY:

"Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a case challenging Congress’s unconstitutional defunding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The case charges Congress with violating the Bill of Attainder provision in the U.S. Constitution, violating the Fifth Amendment right to due process, and infringing on the First Amendment right to freedom of association by targeting affiliated and allied organizations, as well."

CCR attorneys say members of Congress violated the Constitution by declaring an organization guilty of a crime and punishing it and its members without benefit of a trial.

Said CCR Cooperating Attorney Jules Lobel, “It's not the job of Congress to be the judge, jury, and executioner. We have due process in this country, and our Constitution forbids lawmakers from singling out a person or group for punishment without a fair investigation and trial. Congress, as well as individuals and organizations must abide by the rule of law.”

The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order to prevent the government from reallocating funds designated for the organization and its affiliates and a preliminary injunction to stop Congress from singling out a single organization for punishment without proper investigation or due process.

The plaintiffs are ACORN, the ACORN Institute, and the New York ACORN Housing Company. The suit is ACORN v. USA and was filed in federal court in the Eastern District of New York.

more at link...

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/acorn-sues-congress-defunding/The community organizing group ACORN, recently walloped by conservative activists who... more

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8 days ago
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Bill Clinton Warns, 'The Worst Thing We Can Do is Nothing'

President Bill Clinton, veteran of political battles galore, went to Capitol Hill... more

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9 days ago
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Sen. Graham(R) censured by republicans for sensible climate stance

The Republican Party of Charleston County, S.C. on Monday voted to censure Sen.... more

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9 days ago
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11 comments

R.I. Gov. Vetoes Same-Sex Funeral Rights

Gov. Don Carcieri vetoed legislation Tuesday that would give same-sex couples in Rhode... more

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9 days ago
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15 comments

Stewart catches Fox News falsifying footage to make GOP protest look bigger

How many protesters were in attendance at Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachmann's... more

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9 days ago
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Tea Partiers' Next Target: The Climate Bill

The Tea Party movement earned its stripes at town hall protests this summer by claiming that Democratic health care reform efforts would result in defenseless grannies being hauled before "death panels." Now the tea partiers have a new target—the cap-and-trade legislation moving through Congress—and new, unlikely victims to protect—the poor.

One of the key recruiting tools in conservative activists' push against the climate bill is a recent documentary called Not Evil, Just Wrong. The film styles itself as the latest conservative answer to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It has no commercial distributor, but instead debuted on an October 18 webcast heavily promoted by social conservative organizations like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association, as well as local Tea Party groups. Organizers claimed the online premiere attracted some 400,000 viewers.

Now the tea partiers are calling for local chapters to host screenings on November 21. An Escondido, California, branch recently invited members to a "record-setting international Cinematic Tea Party," in terms reminiscent of a social justice rally: "Join the Resistance against the extreme environmentalism that threatens the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in the developed and developing world; this is the new road to poverty in America." (To facilitate these screenings, the filmmakers are selling a "Platinum Party Pack" on their online store, which for $99.95 gets you all the fixings for a rockin' party: invitations, T-shirts, posters, and even a small red carpet.)

Red carpet notwithstanding, Not Evil is unlikely to garner its creators, a pair of Irish former journalists, any Oscar nominations. The film is poorly organized and rehashes the familiar talking points of climate change deniers—global warming as bad science; climate concerns as hysteria akin to that over killer bees, etc. Pushing those views are the usual suspects, including Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace founder turned nuclear power lobbyist, and Thatcher-era British politician Sir Nigel Lawson.

Where Not Evil differs slightly from the standard denialist script is insistence that cutting carbon emissions will hurt the poor. "For too long, with environmentalists, it's not enough about people," says Ann McElhinney, one of the filmmakers, in an interview. "Is it warming? Is it cooling? Who knows? Is it caused by us? There's even more disagreement about that. All of these things should be about people. We should be fighting for the poor."

more at link...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/tea-partiers-next-target-climate-bill

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So let's get this straight. The Tea Partiers are NOW concerned about the poor... not their health or medical bills, but their electricity bills. How thoughtful...The Tea Party movement earned its stripes at town hall protests this summer by... more

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10 days ago
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tagged w/ US News

Bill to Audit the Federal Reserve Makes It Over Another Hurdle

2 Ejected From '05 Bush Event (Because Of Their Bumper Sticker) In Court

Former evangelist: Religious right is ‘trawling for assassins’

MEDIA FAIL: News Caught Lying about Vaccine lines and numbers

Private Joseph Foster recalls FT Hood Shooting

Nearly 15,000 Enter Into Settlement With IRS Over Foreign Accounts

AP Poll: Most favor taxing the rich to pay for health bill

Hundreds Converge on Goldman Sachs DC Headquarters

CNN on our new "huge, huge bomb" to use against Iran

Italian MP Denounces Bilderberg Influence During European Parliament Meeting

Two Sunken Japanese Submarines Found Off Hawaii

Breaking up is hard to do

America’s ‘Preposterous War On Pot’ Continues

Fox News declares cyberwar on liberal blogosphere

ACORN sues Congress for defunding it; Group says Congress bowed to Fox News

Bill Clinton Warns, 'The Worst Thing We Can Do is Nothing'

Sen. Graham(R) censured by republicans for sensible climate stance

R.I. Gov. Vetoes Same-Sex Funeral Rights

Stewart catches Fox News falsifying footage to make GOP protest look bigger

Tea Partiers' Next Target: The Climate Bill

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