Does this not open up a window for military personal being blackmailed? And should not the issue of been level corroboration with the police and connection to the allege crime not her sexual relationship for discharge?

AJC….”I played by ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Newsome told The Associated Press by telephone.

“I just don’t agree with what the Rapid City police department did. … They violated a lot of internal policies on their end, and I feel like my privacy was violated.”…..

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has come under renewed debate after Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for a sweeping internal study on the law earlier this year.

As the review is under way, officials were also expected to suggest ways to relax enforcement that may include minimizing cases of third-party outings. In particular, Gates has suggested that the military might not have to expel someone whose sexual orientation was revealed by a third party out of vindictiveness or suspect motives.

The Rapid City Police Department says Newsome, an aircraft armament system craftsman who spent nine years in the Air Force, was not cooperative when they showed up at her home in November with an arrest warrant for her partner, who was wanted on theft charges in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Newsome was at work at the base at the time and refused to immediately come home and assist the officers in finding her partner, whom she married in Iowa — where gay marriage is legal — in October.
Police officers, who said they spotted the marriage license on the kitchen table through a window of Newsome’s home, alerted the base, police Chief Steve Allender said in a statement sent to the AP. The license was relevant to the investigation because it showed both the relationship and residency of the two women, he said.
“It’s an emotional issue and it’s unfortunate that Newsome lost her job, but I disagree with the notion that our department might be expected to ignore the license, or not document the license, or withhold it from the Air Force once we did know about it,” Allender said Saturday. “It was a part of the case, part of the report and the Air Force was privileged to the information.”…….

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Once again it is only time before it blows up if we do nothing!

AJC- The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.

It’s time to start cashing them in.

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

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As I warned in the past this is a real problem. Sad part is people like Mac on both sides are only worry about how they get their money before it blow up!

B-Promised pensions benefits for public-sector employees represent a massive overhang that threatens the financial future of many cities and states.

LIKE A CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE, populist rage burns over bloated executive compensation and unrepentant avarice on Wall Street.

Deserving as these targets may or may not be, most Americans have ignored at their own peril a far bigger pocket of privilege — the lush pensions that the 23 million active and retired state and local public employees, from cops and garbage collectors to city managers and teachers, have wangled from taxpayers.

Some 80% of these public employees are beneficiaries of defined-benefit plans under which monthly pension payments are guaranteed, no matter how stocks and other volatile assets backing the retirement plans …

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No one wins the war the war on drugs other than gangs and terrorist.

AP-Earlier this morning, Sen. Dick Durbin announced that he and Sen. Jeff Sessions had reached a “compromise” in the Senate gym over Durbin’s bill, which would have eliminated the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity for crack vs. powder cocaine.

“If you ever wonder if anything good ever happens there, it appears something good might have happened there,” Durbin said, which may or may not have been an oblique reference to former Congressman Eric Massa’s tale about being lobbied by Rahm Emanuel in the House gym. “Senator [Orrin] Hatch was there to witness it.”

The compromise was that Durbin would accept Sessions’ amendment to change the disparity from 100 to 1 to 20 to 1. In return, Sessions offered to withdraw his amendments that would have narrowed the circumstances under which a judge could reduce penalties for offenders who acted with “fear, impulse or affection,” and would have imposed a 10-year mandatory maximum for simple possession rather than eliminating the five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession entirely.

“My position is for one to one, equity and equality in sentencing, but in order to get things done you have to be prepared to make mutual concessions,” Durbin said. “That’s what we have done.”

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It is no secrete the Chinese government been abusing the internet to crack down on human rights activist as well using heavy handed censorship. Should the Obama administration take a stronger action against China beyond just condemning them and if so what?

AJC-China’s top Internet regulator insisted Friday that Google must obey its laws or “pay the consequences,” giving no sign of a possible compromise in their dispute over censorship and hacking.

“If you want to do something that disobeys Chinese law and regulations, you are unfriendly, you are irresponsible and you will have to pay the consequences,” Li Yizhong, the ministerof Industry and Information Technology, said on the sidelines of China’s annual legislature.

Li gave no details of Beijing’s talks with Google Inc. over the search engine’s January announcement that it planned to stop complying with Chinese Internet censorship rules and might close its China-based site.
“Whether they leave or not is up to them,” Li said. “But if they leave, China’s Internet market is still going to develop.”

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By Ernest F. Hollings

EC-Washington engages in the grandest fraud on jobs. The people are led to believe that tax cuts stimulate growth and jobs and that borrowing and spending money stimulates jobs.

I’ll never forget as Chairman of the Budget Committee briefing Ronald Reagan with Alan Greenspan in the Blair House just before Reagan was sworn in as president. The economy was not good, and I can hear Reagan exclaiming now: “I promised to balance the budget in a year, and there’s no way to do it.” I explained it would take three years, and I would be glad to help in a bi-partisan effort to try to bring it in balance. The rest is history. President Reagan launched the policy of “growth” to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes, giving the United States its first trillion dollar debt in his first term, with another trillion dollar growth in debt in his second term. President George W. Bush, bragged that he was a Reaganite, stimulated the economy by cutting taxes, which increased the national debt $5 trillion. Instead of growth, the economy lost 673,000 private jobs in eight years under President George W. Bush.

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In the temple courts [Jesus] found men selling cattle, sheep and doves and other
sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. [John 2:14 & 15.] Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. [Luke 12.15.] Truly, I say unto you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. [Matthew 19:23] You cannot serve both God and Money. [Matthew 6:24.]But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. [Luke 14:13 &14.] Love your neighbor as yourself. .[Matthew 22:39] So in everything, do to others as you would have them do to you.[Matthew 7:12.] If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. [Matthew 19:21]

P-On his daily radio and television shows last week, Fox News personality Glenn Beck set out to convince his audience that “social justice,” the term many Christian churches use to describe their efforts to address poverty and human rights, is a “code word” for communism and Nazism. Beck urged Christians to discuss the term with their priests and to leave their churches if leaders would not reconsider their emphasis on social justice.

“I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

Later, Beck held up cards, one with a hammer and sickle and other with a swastika. “Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: ’social justice.’ They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy.”

Audio: The Glenn Beck Program

What do you think?

NCR-Twenty-five pro-life Catholic theologians and Evangelical leaders yesterday sent letters to members of Congress urging them not to let misleading information about abortion provisions in the Senate health care bill block passage of sorely-needed reform.

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that the Senate health bill upholds abortion funding restrictions and supports pregnant women.

The letter included a page by page analysis of the Senate bill as it pertains to abortion.

The group asked members of Congress “to make an informed decision about this legislation based on careful deliberation guided by facts.”

“We believe that the provisions below provide extensive evidence that longstanding restrictions on federal funding of abortion have been maintained. Furthermore, this bill provides new and important supports for vulnerable pregnant women,” the letter states.

The complete text of the letter follows:

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What do you think?

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A sin tax on junk food?

Yahoo-(Reuters) – U.S. researchers estimate that an 18 percent tax on pizza and soda can push down U.S. adults’ calorie intake enough to lower their average weight by 5 pounds (2 kg) per year.

The researchers, writing in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine on Monday, suggested taxing could be used as a weapon in the fight against obesity, which costs the United States an estimated $147 billion a year in health costs.

“While such policies will not solve the obesity epidemic in its entirety and may face considerable opposition from food manufacturers and sellers, they could prove an important strategy to address overconsumption, help reduce energy intake and potentially aid in weight loss and reduced rates of diabetes among U.S. adults,” wrote the team led by Kiyah Duffey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

With two-thirds of Americans either overweight or obese, policymakers are increasingly looking at taxing as a way to address obesity on a population level.

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The Independent Institute

By Senior Fellow Robert Higgs

Many commentators would have us believe that the economy hit bottom in the second quarter of 2009, and afterward commenced a recovery, albeit a “jobless” one, as employment continued to decline. The main reason for believing in this recovery seems to be that real gross domestic product (GDP) reached a trough in the second quarter of 2009 and increased somewhat in the following two quarters.

Although macroeconomists, especially in theoretical work, tend to equate the economy’s aggregate output and its aggregate income, this equation does not hold when output is measured by GDP. To arrive at the concept known as national income (or net national product at factor cost), one must deduct several items, the most important of which is the capital consumption (or depreciation) allowance on the fixed capital stock. In 2008, for example, GDP was $14,441 billion, and national income was $12,635 billion. Even then, one has not arrived at personal income, and getting there requires several additional deductions. In 2008, personal income was estimated to be $12,239 billion.

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It look like the Cheney family hates the rule of law!

HB-The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees — and now it’s coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.

On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, “An Attack That Goes Too Far.” Author Paul Mirengoff, called Cheney’s effort to brand DoJ officials the “Al Qaeda 7,” “vicious” and “unfounded” even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.

Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, contrasting what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in some respects, finding it worse.

“It could be worse than some of the assertions made by McCarthy, depending on some of the validity of those assertions,” Mirengoff said, explaining that at least McCarthy was correct in pinpointing individuals as communist sympathizers. “It is just baseless to suggest that [these DoJ officials] share al Qaeda values… they didn’t actually say it but I think it was a fair implication of what they were saying.”

Mirengoff isn’t alone among conservative legal theorists who think the ad campaign by Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, is distasteful. In a statement to the American Prospect, John Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, called the effort “unfortunate.”

“It reflects the politicization and the polarization of terrorism issues,” Bellinger said. “Neither Republicans nor Democrats should be attacking officials in each other’s administrations based solely on the clients they have represented in the past.”

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The Independent Institute

By Research Analyst Anthony Gregory

Former Democratic VP candidate Joe Lieberman and former GOP presidential candidate John McCain have introduced a new detention policy bill in response to the Christmas Day underwear bomber. From The Atlantic: “A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity.”

This is another reminder of why, as horrible as Obama is on practically every issue, his competition was likely no better. Not that I expect Obama to veto this monstrosity. On detention policy, he has proven himself to be approximately as bad as his predecessor, if not worse.

Can we build a bipartisan police state, complete with the destruction of the last vestiges of due process, while we distract the public with political sideshows and debates over whether the government should control 60% or 61% of the economy? Yes we can.

A race to the bottom! As wages go down and jobs go overseas spending will go down. Henry Ford was right when he said he wanted to pay his employees enough to buy his products!

MSN….Its typical shopper appears to be tapped out.

The world’s largest retailer reported $112.8 billion in worldwide revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter, up 4.6% from a year earlier. But Wal-Mart also said U.S. same-store sales fell 1.6% in the period and noted that traffic in U.S. stores fell slightly. Same-store sales are considered an important measure of a retailer’s health…..

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….Still, Wal-Mart shares fell 1.1% after the quarterly results were announced on Feb. 18.

One explanation for sales weakness is deflation. The company said prices for groceries and consumer electronics continued to fall, causing customers to spend less on each shopping trip…..

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The Independent Institute

BY Senior Vice President Mary L.G. Theroux

The current $350 million ad campaign for the 2010 Census, including the much-maligned $2.5 million Super Bowl spots, urges individuals to “Tell your story.” The Census Bureau is particularly eager for minorities and illegal immigrants to do so, as they are traditionally believed to be the most undercounted.

Yet widespread non-compliance, especially among those most likely to be discriminated against by a majority, may not be rooted strictly in the “ignorance” the ads are designed to overcome. History—including very recent history—shows that the information provided to the Census can be used against you.

The most recent examples occurred in 2002 and 2003, when the Census Bureau turned over information it had collected about Arab-Americans to Homeland Security.

Data from the 1940 Census was used to intern Japanese, Italian, and German Americans following the U.S.’s entry into the war, and to monitor and persecute others who escaped internment. In addition to providing geographic information to the War Department, the Census Bureau released the name, address, age, sex, citizenship status and occupation of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., area to the Treasury Department in response to an unspecified threat against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943.

There may well be other instances of such data sharing of which we remain unaware, as the full scope of the personal information released during World War II has only recently been brought to light.

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