motherjones:

Chart of the Day: We really have no idea who’s paying for campaign ads.

(via silas216)

ryking:

Armored gunman, 4 people dead in Arizona shooting

A man equipped with several firearms and body armor killed four people, including a toddler, on Wednesday in Gilbert, Ariz., authorities told azcentral.com. They believe he then killed himself.

J. T. Ready, a neo-Nazi and member of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, was among the dead, according to azcentral.com. It is unclear what role he played in the shootings.

Ready was also (at one time and possibly at the present) a Republican. He was running for Pinal County’s sheriff’s office and both a friend and ally to disgraced Republican Russell Pearce. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a profile of Ready here.

(Source: diadoumenos, via silas216)

fuckyeahdrugpolicy:

As House Passes CISPA, The Fight Is Just Beginning | Forbes

Despite growing resistance to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, CISPA has cleared its first legislative hurdle. But the battle over the widely-criticized information-sharing bill is just heating up.

In an earlier-than-expected vote Thursday evening, the House of Representatives voted 248 to 168 in favor of the bill, which was originally designed to allow more sharing of cybersecurity threat information with government agencies.

The legislation has drawn the ire of legislators, civil liberties groups, security practitioners and professors, and hundreds of thousands of petitioners, who say the bill tramples over users’ privacy rights as it allows Web firms like Google and Facebook to give private users’ information to government agencies irrespective of other laws that protect users’ privacy. “It’s basically a privacy nightmare,” says Trevor Timm, a lawyer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “CISPA would allow companies to hand over private data to the government without a warrant, without anonymity, with no judicial review.”

But even before it passed, the House voted to amend the bill to actually allow even more types of private sector information to be shared with government agencies, not merely in matters of cybersecurity or national security, but in the investigation of vaguely defined cybersecurity “crimes,” “protection of individuals from the danger of death or serious bodily harm,” and cases that involve the protection of minors from exploitation.

That statute, which in effect widened the most controversial portion of the bill just hours before it came to a vote, is sure to draw even more heat as the bill works its way through the legislative branch and reaches President Obama’s desk. The president currently backs a bill in the Senate put forward by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, designed to increase the cybersecurity regulatory powers of the Department of Homeland security, which has been opposed by the GOP and stalled in the legislature.

The White House came out Wednesday with a strongly-worded statement slamming CISPA and pushing its regulatory approach in a threat to veto CISPA, writing that “cybersecurity and privacy are not mutually exclusive” and calling CISPA an intelligence bill rather than a security bill that treats civilians as subjects of surveillance. (White House watchers have observed, however, that the president’s advisors similarly recommended that he veto the National Defense Authorization Act, which he instead signed into law.)

Regardless, reconciling the House bill in its new, even more controversial form with a Senate version, even as the White House opposes the central thrust of the legislation, will only rekindle the controversy that has grown around CISPA in the last week.

The EFF’s Timm says he sees the House’s early vote on CISPA as an attempt by its author, representative Mike Rogers, to squeeze the bill through before its opposition grew any stronger. “We’ve seen an explosion of a variety of groups and congressmen coming out against the bill,” he says. “As the Senate debates this, it’s good that privacy and civil liberties will be front and center.”

also check out:

What is CISPA?
Why CISPA Is Worse Than SOPA
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Stop Cyber Spying

(via silas216)

(Source: demnewswire, via silas216)

underthemountainbunker:

…

Catholicism and American politics: then and now

50 years ago:

“But because I am a Catholic and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again — not what kind of church I believe in for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference — and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.” — President John F. Kennedy, in a 1960 speech, assuring Southern Baptist leaders that as the nation’s first Catholic president, he would not take orders from the Pope. 

And today:

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country… To say people of faith have no role in the public square, you bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come in the public square and make their case. That makes me throw up and it should make every American.” — Rick Santorum, today, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. 

(via silas216)

theatlantic:

Virginia Senate Rejects ‘Personhood’ Bill

After a committee approved a bill that would give “unborn children” the legal rights of citizens, the bill was defeated Thursday in the Virginia Senate.

Read more. [Image: Associated Press]

(via silas216)

leftish:

OBVIOUS CONCLUSION:  Believe the Politicians!

(via silas216)

politicsplus:

Republicans Greedy on Transit

 

House Republicans have just put together a transportation bill so horrid, that even Obama’s Republican Secretary of Transportation has called it “the worst transportation bill” he had ever seen.  The crux of this measure is gutting federal support for public transit, a slap in the faces of poor Americans, minorities and environmentalists, while providing benefits for Big Oil…

(via silas216)

soupsoup:

Private sector jobs created by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’s first three years in office.

(via silas216)