New legislation has been proposed in Iran that could make blogging a crime punishable by death. Cyrus Farivar has a story on today’s edition of the PRI radio show The World: Iran considers harsh penalty for some bloggers
Over at Global Voices, Hamid Tehrani writes: On Wednesday, Iranian members of parliament voted to discuss a draft bill that seeks to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society.†The text of the bill would add, “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,†to the list of crimes punishable by death.
Democrats who changed their votes on the new FISA bill received an average of $8,000 from Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. Will the public servants with real convictions please stand up? Check out the data at MAPLight.org
“To assume that [climate change] is a problem is to assume that the state of earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.”
Filed under:Bill of Rights — posted by 3wire on 6/22/2008 @ 9:42 pm
For those of you still laboring under the delusion that the Democrats are any different than the Republicans when comes to your constitutional rights, here is more evidence to the contrary.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives quickly passed a bill Friday that will expand the government’s ability to install blanket wiretaps inside the United States. It will also put an end to the lawsuits filed against the nation’s telecoms for helping the government spy on Americans without getting the necessary court orders.
Senator Chris Dodd has inserted into a new housing bill a requirement that all electronic payments be reported to the government.
Privacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology and small business organizations like the NFIB sharply criticized this idea when it first appeared earlier this year. What is the federal government’s purpose with this kind of detailed data? How will this database be secured, and who will have access?
Saudi Arabia Did More Last Week to Lower Gas Prices Than Congress Did
The Left just doesn’t seem to get it. They spent much of last week ridiculing the President for visiting Saudi Arabia in an effort to lower oil prices. Here’s what Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on Friday:
“The president seems to value his friendship with the Saudis more than his obligation to help the American people with gas prices.”
But what Senator Schumer doesn’t seem to understand is that the Saudis did more last week to lower oil prices than liberals in Congress did.
While liberals were voting to prevent domestic production from oil shale, the Saudis, following President Bush’s visit, agreed to boost their oil output by 300,000 barrels a day. It won’t fix the problem, but at least it won’t make it worse, which is exactly what liberals in Congress did last week.
As Americans, we all need to ask ourselves the following: Which is it — the Congress or Saudi Arabia — that has a greater obligation to ease our energy prices? And which is the greater obstacle to energy independence and security?
Gamers have to get good at mapping things in their heads, remembering landmarks, and just generally orienting themselves. It’s more than I gained from Boy Scouts, anyway, which mostly taught me how to get bored making a bird feeder before getting kicked out for not having proper respect for power tools.
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Mr. Olbermann, if you truly believe that 4,000 American service men died for nothing then you have a responsibility to do everything in your power to stop the war and impeach the president. All you have the courage to do is yell into an inanimate object and end your rants every night with a phrase that is not even an original. You sir, are no Edward R. Murrow.
By the way, his title is Mr. President whether you want to acknowledge that or not.
Filed under:Our Money — posted by Q Ball on 5/2/2008 @ 12:47 am
Plato wrote: “Where there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.”
I have recently become aware of the FairTax, a proposal to eliminate our current system and replace it. As I learn more about the details I can not help but be in favor of it. Most people in this country don’t realize the amount of money that the government takes from them. The FairTax would create a system of a consumption tax, which means the only taxes paid would be on goods and services rendered at the retail level. This is an incomplete description however and I implore anyone reading this to check it out for themselves and to not dismiss an idea that has the potential to increase the prosperity of this country.
A 17-year-old Iraqi girl was murdered by her father in an honour killing after falling in love with a British soldier she met while working on an aid programme in Basra, it has been claimed.
Rand Abdel-Qader was stamped upon, suffocated and stabbed by her father, then given an
unceremonious burial to emphasise her disgrace. Police released her father without charge two hours after his arrest.
“Not much can be done when we have an honour killing case,” said Sergeant Ali Jabbar of Basra police. “You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws. The father has very good contacts inside the Basra government and it wasn’t hard for him to be released and what he did to be forgotten.”
…her father, Abdel-Qader Ali, was told of their friendship by a friend, he accused her of having an affair with a British soldier and killed her in front of his wife, Leila Hussain, and their sons. “I screamed and called out for her two brothers so they could get their father away from her. But when he told them the reason, instead of saving her they helped him end her life,”
Elizabeth Palacios… spent 45 days in the slammer for selling bacon dogs, and with the lost time from work, fines, and attorney’s fees, she fears she might lose the house that bacon dogs helped buy. She must provide for her family, but remains trapped between government regulations and consumer demand. Customers don’t care about safety codes, says Palacios. “They just want the bacon.â€
Filed under:General,Our Money — posted by Q Ball on 4/24/2008 @ 5:29 pm
Two new oil fields have been discovered off the coast of Brazil. Experts estimate that both oil fields could hold a total of 40 billion barrels of oil. Hopefully the environmentalists will not try and prevent the drilling like in Alaska.
…Barack Obama is a liberal, but not a conscientious one. I don’t much care if he declines to wear a flag pin; I can overlook his wife’s limited capacity for patriotic pride; and I defended his relationship with his former pastor. But his comfortable association with an unrepentant former terrorist should induce queasiness in anyone who shares the humane values that Obama extols.
On Sunday night a libertarian minded young woman was arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial while listening to her IPod. She was part of a group who decided to celebrate the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. Watch the video of one of her compatriots and I hope you will be as pissed off as I am. We consistently give the state ever increasing power that now the security guards at memorials think the can arrest people on a whim.
In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company’s research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for “weeks at a time”, and would last for decades.
So-called ‘racetrack’ memory uses the ‘spin’ of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.
Filed under:War on Terror — posted by 3wire on 4/8/2008 @ 5:24 pm
WASHINGTON (CNN) — When a grenade bounced off his chest and fell to the floor near his fellow troops, Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor acted out of instinct. His actions didn’t stem from a lack of training. His instant reaction was to protect his comrades. The Navy says he committed a selfless act: jumping on the grenade and taking the full force of the blast.
President Bush presented Monsoor’s parents with a posthumous Medal of Honor for their son at an emotional White House ceremony. (more)
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