kpete
kpete's JournalShooting at Columbia Mall in Howard County, Md
Police are at the scene of a shooting at Columbia Mall in Howard County, Md., WTOP radio is reporting.
Howard County Fire and Rescue say there is an active shooter in the mall, Spokeswoman Denise Weist told the radio station.
Weist says the department received the call at about 11:15 a.m. Saturday. Police and fire officials are on the scene. There are no immediate reports of injuries.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/25/columbia-mall-shooting/4893295/
A lone pianist plays "Imagine" by John Lennon to army of riot police in #Kiev
Sarah Reynolds @Sarah__Reynolds
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A lone pianist plays "Imagine" by John Lennon to army of riot police in #Kiev pic.twitter.com/lVkSVqy7OE via @woo_judy
11:01 PM - 13 Jan 2014
Some of the pictures - and the accompanying narrative - that have come across Twitter from Kiev have been truly amazing, yet the story barely merits a word or two in the United States.
MORE AMAZING PICS:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/25/1272390/-Images-from-Kiev
Share of young people 25-34 living with their parents (worldwide statistics - surprising)
http://qz.com/169492/whos-still-living-with-their-parents/
peace, kp
Bailout Architect Runs For California Governor; World Laughs - By MATT TAIBBI
Bailout Architect Runs For California Governor; World Laughs
By MATT TAIBBI
POSTED: January 24, 12:05 PM ET
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Kashkari's platform seems to be centered around restoring jobs and schools, but also seems targeted at waste – he called Jerry Brown's $68 billion high-speed rail project a "crazy train" and said it reflected "misplaced priorities."
Humorously, and predictably, Kashkari's campaign has already sprouted serious leaks. It turns out he has a somewhat spotty voting record (I do, too, to be honest, but I'm not running for governor), and he's already had to acknowledge publicly that he has not always voted – although, he says, "I believe voting is very important."
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The Kashkari story is a perfect little allegory about the arrogance and cluelessness of the people who run the American economy. Kashkari talks passionately about free markets, forgetting that he was the individual who was actually in charge of the biggest-in-American-history government program to subvert the free market, bailing out countless institutions that should otherwise have gone out of business due to their own incompetence and corruption.
He talks about how the "free markets" allocate capital better than any system we have, but then again he was the person who had to step in when that system failed and institute a different system of capital allocation, one in which public treasure was unorganically re-allocated from taxpayers to private companies. His complaints about "misplaced priorities" are almost beneath comment – there's just not much to say about someone who committed public funds to million-dollar bonuses but believes regular people accepting government benefits have a "me-first" mentality.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/bailout-architect-runs-for-california-governor-world-laughs-20140124#ixzz2rMaECUZA
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Christie tied to scandalous prison & its former VP Bill Palatucci-Chairman Christie 2013 Reelection
Salon's Josh Eidelson is breaking an original story, Chris Christie’s Texas horror: Meet the scandalous prison company he’s long promoted, about Governor Christie's lobbying for the controversial corporation that owns these immigration detention centers, criticized as being some of worst in the country. It turns out that the former senior vice-president of the Community Education Centers, Bill Palatucci, also served as chairmen of Christie's 2013 reelection campaign, and is co-chair of Christie's inaugural committee, and part of his innermost circle.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/24/1272261/-Christie-tied-to-scandalous-private-prision-company-and-its-former-vice-president-Bill-Palatucci
Chris Christie’s Texas horror: Meet the scandalous prison company he’s long promoted
A corporation Christie's lobbied for and long pushed runs notorious detention center with a slew of vocal opponents
“I’ve visited a bunch of detention facilities in Texas, and that’s by far the worst,” said the opponent, Bob Libal, who directs the prison reform group Grassroots Leadership and visited the Polk County Adult Detention Center with other activists in 2012 and 2013. His allegations echo a 2012 report from the Detention Watch Network, a coalition including the ACLU and the American Immigration Lawyers Association as well as Libal’s group: “Inadequate medical care, poor nutrition, lack of access to legal services, absence of meaningful programming, and a willful neglect of those who are imprisoned there plague the Polk detention center.”
CEC’s ties to Chris Christie and track record running halfway houses in New Jersey have drawn harsh scrutiny, including a series of stories in the New York Times. Reporter Sam Dolnick wrote in 2012 that Christie, who was a registered lobbyist for CEC in 2000 and 2001, “has long championed the company,” and the state had paid out tens of millions to CEC but “not closely examined” its “financial standing or operations, according to documents, former company executives and state officials.” Former employees told the Times “that the company had kept staffing levels very low” and thus “did a poor job delivering counseling and other services intended to help inmates make the transition to society.”
The Times also wrote that the Christie administration “took no action in response to the [state] comptroller’s warning,” following a critical audit of New Jersey halfway houses, “that regulators were kept in the dark about Community Education’s finances.” When legislators responded to a Times investigation by passing stronger halfway-house oversight rules, Christie narrowed them with a line-item veto, a move the Times noted drew accusations of “trying to protect Mr. Palatucci, the company executive who is his close friend.” The paper wrote that documents suggest CEC CEO John Clancy “highlighted Mr. Palatucci’s ties to Mr. Christie in an effort to impress investors and secure desperately needed financing for the company.” ...
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/24/chris_christies_texas_horror_meet_the_scandalous_prison_company_hes_long_promoted/
http://www.njbiz.com/article/20140124/NJBIZ01/140129843/Christie-ties-reportedly-led-to-big-gains-for-Wolff-&-Samson
'Bridgegate' The monitor closest to the bridge shut down at the height of the traffic jams
Talk about disappearing into thin air.One night before local access lanes to New Jersey's George Washington Bridge were closed last fall in an apparent act of political retribution that sparked miles-long traffic jams for four straight days, an air quality monitor run by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton abruptly ceased collecting data.
The closest state-run monitor to the bridge with its data posted online, the monitor started measuring air pollution again more than two days later – just as a key pollution indicator was starting to decline.
"They're missing data for 2 1/2 days – that's weird," says Ann Marie Carlton, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who studies air quality.
"I was really, really shocked when I saw there was no data. You might see a monitor go offline for a day because they're cleaning it or doing maintenance or calibration, but for it go down for this many days is intriguing."
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/01/22/air-monitors-see-spike-in-pollution-during-bridgegate
Uncle Sugar Needs To Meet Aunt Flo
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Now, Michael, Dear… Let’s talk a little about the reproductive system. I’ll try to use simple terms so as not to talk over your tiny little head (the one on your shoulders and not in your pants). I don’t know much about Uncle Sugar, but during a certain age that can be shorter for some and longer for others, we women get a monthly visit from Aunt Flo. She’s fairly predictable that Flo, but sometimes she can throw you for a loop just for the hell of it. It’s certainly far from full-proof, but if you are very careful you just might be able to time your ”relations” around Flo’s visit and avoid a pregnancy. Pay no mind to those large Catholic families. They might just be bad at math or maybe they thought Aunt Flo was a heavy sleeper. (Think about it.)
Now for some women, sex is something they would prefer to avoid. Just look at Janet Huckabee with her three children. But for most women – and most men – sex is something that happens more than just the third Thursday after the second Friday of odd-numbered days in months that end in R. Like I told you, it can get a little tricky. In fact, most women don’t equate having sex to getting pregnant at all. Why? Because they don’t have to. Birth control gave women the freedom to be planned mothers (or not) rather than livestock existing simply to grow the herd. Come to think of it, maybe Janet Huckabee didn’t tell Mike about everything that was in her medicine cabinet.
Most women use birth control for… well, birth control. But some women actually use it for other reasons like less painful periods, PMS relief and relief from endometriosis. Yes, Mr. Huckabee – medical reasons beyond just limiting the number of unwanted pregnancies and children. God forbid that birth control be covered by health insurance companies. What could be worse than that? I don’t know… maybe a prescription drug commercial ending with the phrase “if an erection lasts longer than 4 hours seek medical attention”? But that is what this is really all about. It’s not about fighting for women’s rights. It’s not even about fighting for the life of the unborn. It’s about sex. Specifically it’s about sex being ok for men but not women. And honestly, Mr. Huckabee, that makes it even more difficult to understand why Republicans hate the gays. Hell if it were up to me, I would have insurance companies pay for condoms and early pregnancy test sticks too. One would reduce the number of STDs and the other would save those Palins a lot of money. Poor things up there in Alaska just waiting for Aunt Flo to fly in on a bomber from Russia…
Now if Mr. Huckabee would like to redefine the war on women, I’m all for it. But let’s call it what it really is – the hunt for Red November Voters. So I have a solution. If you believe women should have the freedom to decide when and how often to bring children into the world, vote for your friendly Democrat – preferably a female. If you would prefer that sex exists simply as a means to procreate, vote for Huckabee or any other old, white Republican.
The rest:
http://margaretandhelen.com/2014/01/24/uncle-sugar-needs-to-meet-aunt-flo/
LOL!!! Republican Party Demands Investigation Into NSA Spying
Republican Party Demands Investigation Into NSA Spying
In the latest indication of a growing libertarian wing of the Republican party, the RNC "passed a resolution Friday calling for an investigation into the "gross infringement" of Americans' rights by National Security Agency programs that were revealed by Edward Snowden," Time reports.
The measure passed by an "overwhelming majority" by voice vote and declares "the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution."
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2014/01/24/republican_party_demands_investigation_into_nsa_spying.html
?Did this Tor developer become the first known victim of the NSA's laptop interception program?
Did this Tor developer become the first known victim of the NSA's laptop interception program?
Submitted by sosadmin on Fri, 01/24/2014 - 14:29
Last night Andrea Shepard, a core Tor developer living in Seattle, posted this message to Twitter:
https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/statuses/426597381727989760
The image she linked to shows the shipment tracking details for a computer Shepard ordered from Amazon, the global internet superstore and cloud computing giant that in late 2013 secured a $600 million contract with the CIA. Here's the image:
As you can see, the tracking details are highly unusual. Instead of shipping the computer directly from the Amazon storage facility in Santa Ana, California, to Shepard in Seattle, the package was first dispatched to Dulles, Virginia. From Dulles, it moved another four times around the military and intelligence belt in suburban Washington DC, finally landing in Alexandria at 11:03 am on January 23.
Contrary to Amazon's shipment tracking summary, Virginia is not the package's final destination. Shepard does not live in Alexandria and told Amazon to ship the computer to a Seattle, Washington address. You can see this for yourself in the top right hand corner of the image.
MORE & Larger Images?????:
http://privacysos.org/node/1311
Holder: Trust me, the NSA’s surveillance is totally cool
Holder says, just be patient, or something:
In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview on Thursday with msnbc, Holder also spoke about new voting rights legislation, Republican Voter ID laws, Wall Street prosecutions and the Obama administration’s efforts to reform the War on Drugs with more rehabilitation programs. (See video below.)
On the NSA findings, Holder said he hadn’t read the new report from the government’s privacy and civil liberties board, but noted that “at least 15 judges on about 35 occasions have said that the program itself is legal.”
When asked about judges who disagree, including a Washington federal court that rebuked the bulk data collection last month, Holder, himself a former Washington judge, contended the legal consensus is now clear.
http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/holder-people-just-need-be-patient
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/23/civil-liberties-board-nsa-phone-surveillance-program-likely-illegal-should-be-stopped/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/24/holder-trust-me-the-nsas-surveillance-is-totally-cool/
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