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POPSPolice Eject a Man from Yankee Stadium for Trying to Use the Bathroom During "God Bless America" When I was in High School, I would refuse to bow my head in prayer: I'm an atheist and refused to pray to any god, especially while at school, during regularly scheduled school hours. Once, some "Christians" a few seats away from me started eying me and telling me to "Bow your f***ing head you Satan worshiper or we'll kick your f****ing ass!"… This is exactly like that, except this time the "Christians" are "Police" and kicking your ass means telling you what and who to pray to or face police harassment by ejection and threats of bodily harm.
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POPSMcCain Showed Best How to React to Russian Force
Obama’s initial reaction was to urge both the rapist and the victim to show restraint , while McCain spoke forcefully to denounce the invasion and to call for specific actions, including withdrawal from “sovereign Georgian territory,” an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council, action by other official bodies and the creation of “a truly independent and neutral peacekeeping force.” Ten days later, McCain’s first response appears to have been the right one. Obama reflected uncertainty in part because of inexperience and in part, too, because he was responding as events unfolded. He is far more comfortable, as indeed the administration’s critics are, in letting President Bush act and then declaring that he or they would have been smarter, wiser and righter had they been making the decision. President Bush’s strongest response was to reach agreement with Poland last Thursday to base 10 interceptor missiles to protect Europe from those fired by Iran or Nort
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POPSMcCain is Rapidly Emerging as the 3 A.M. President In contrast, Barack Obama was all over the map, first equivocating Georgia and Russia as equally at fault and calling like a tired parent for all sides to just stop,making no moral distinction between an invader state and a nation invaded. "Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint and avoid escalation into a full scale war," he said. It was a call for peace at any price, and implied that if Georgia should take exception to a foreign invasion, its self-defense was culpable. Jimmy Carter would be so proud. Obama then lazily called on the U.N. to take care of the problem, which ignores the U.N.'s long record of inaction. All the same, turning it over to the U.N. conveniently extricates the U.S. from any responsibility to an ally and shields Obama from peace lobby criticism. Obviously, one candidate has a superior sense of America's strategic interests and the emerging threats over the other, and Russia's invasion of Georgia has laid it out starkly.
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POPSComputer visuses hit one million They say it is due to an increasingly professional digital criminal underground. Doesn't that just mean they're making increasing amounts of money? Looks like Vista is as infectious as Windows has ever been. I suppose it pays to become more well versed on the capability, and mechanisms of computer viruses, and watch out for them in addition to relying on antivirus programs. If my programs have found a virus trojan etc, I can't delete it until I've found out what I can about it. I don't remember having any real trouble since I started using firefox, but I'd be surprised if any could compete with some of the operator errors I've had to fix. It can be hard to fix something when the answer can be found on line, and the computer won't boot.
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POPSEnding Londonistan Preface by Melanie Phillips Both at home and abroad, Britain has lost any shared understanding of the threats that must be faced and how to do so. Indeed, with its steady loss of the power of self-governance to the European Union, there is no longer any clear idea of where political responsibility lies. In short, the RUSI paper asserts that Britain's security is being put at greater risk from without because British democracy itself is at risk from within . In allowing the progressive fragmentation of British society and the weakening of its military and defense infrastructure, the government has left Britain open to the pincer movement of cultural colonization and terrorist attack. The only solution is for Britain to rediscover its historic identity, restore its power to rule itself, and reassert the mutual obligations between government and people. Gwyn Prins and Robert Salisbury, "Risk, Threat and Security," RUSI Journal, Feb. 2008.
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POPSOn line threats materializing faster online criminals have latched on to programs that help them automatically generate attacks based on publicly available information about vulnerabilities. In the past they apparently spent more time finding such holes themselves, but no longer find that as necessary. "The bad guys are not the ones actively finding vulnerabilities - they've shifted their business to standing on the shoulders of the security research community," Kris Lamb, operations manager for X-Force, said in an interview. "They don't have to do the hard work anymore. Their job is packaging what's been provided to them."
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POPSGnomes In Crisis current climate, gnomes receive no legal protection or aid. They don't even receive fishing rod subsidies anymore." "We hope this report will highlight the plight of a much loved, and greatly under-rated garden figure." Download the report (pdf) here If you feel strongly about the protection of gnomes, we urge you to write to your MP asking them to support an EU directive to place all gnomes under the protection of the Pope.
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POPSMcCain Hits Obama On Iraq, Outlines Afghanistan Plan some of whose members have national restrictions on where their troops can go and what they can do. This is no way to run a war.” The Arizona senator touted the Afghan army as a “great success story” and said it needs to be expanded. He added that the global community should share the cost of doubling the size of the Afghan army. “We must convince Pakistanis that this is their war as much as it is ours. And we must empower the new civilian government of Pakistan to defeat radicalism with greater support for development, health and education,” McCain said. “Sen. Obama has spoken in public about taking unilateral military action in Pakistan. In trying to sound tough, he has made it harder for the people whose support we most need to provide it,” he added. “I will not bluster, and I will not make idle threats. But understand this: When I am commander in chief, there will be nowhere the terrorists can run, and nowhere they can hide.”
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POPSU.S. Terrorism Watch Tops 1 Million This over-the-top dragnet has included people like Sen. Kennedy, Kat Stevens, and recently a former federal prosecutor! 50,000 individuals are included on the Transportation Security Administration "no-fly" or "selectee" lists that subject them to travel bans, arrest or additional screening. The Justice Department's former top criminal prosecutor says the government's terror watch list likely has caused thousands of innocent Americans to be questioned, searched or otherwise hassled. Former Assistant Attorney General Jim Robinson would know: he's one of them. More than 30,000 airline passengers had asked the Homeland Security Department to clear their names from the list as of October 2006.
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POPSShame Russia and China continue to support the world's worst regimes all in the name of money.
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POPSFISA This is a great article outlining exactly what the Presidential power is and his responsibilities to the FISA court are.
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POPSPolluter appeasement But unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are by far the greatest preventable threat to Americans' LLPH. Yet the government spends virtually nothing to fight global warming -- certainly no significant amount of new money has been allocated for this major threat (the Clinton administration tried, but the Gingrich Congress reversed that effort, reducing or zeroing out every program aimed at climate mitigation or even adaptation). Indeed, most conservatives, including John McCain, oppose even continuing existing incentives for carbon-mitigating strategies like solar and wind power. Conservatives in Congress seem likely to strongly oppose any major effort at a legislative solution (see "Anti-science conservatives must be stopped").
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POPSChild Detainees Battle System Alone
Eight immigrant youths suing the Abraxas Hector Garza Treatment Center in San Antonio describe being beaten repeatedly, so severely that several required hospitalization. The abuse continued even after it was reported to their caretakers' supervisors. In Nixon, Texas, ten detained young people filing a Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid lawsuit allege repeated assault and retaliation upon reporting the abuse. Of course, most abused detainees do not have access to pro bono lawyers and cannot hope to sue; much more often than not, their stories go untold. For the most part, however, the facilities' violations are kept from the public eye - and the eye of the federal government doesn't see much of them either, according to a recent OIG report noting that "interviews with Department of Unaccompanied Children's Services central office officials indicate that little oversight of facilities occurs." Federal officials aren't required to meet with children when they visit the facilities.
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POPSSeeds of Current Propaganda found in Reagan Era 
Enduring Skills Beyond these individuals, the manipulative techniques that were refined in the 1980s — especially the skill of exaggerating foreign threats — have proved durable, bringing large segments of the American population into line behind the Iraq War in 2002-03. Only now — with more than 4,100 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead — are many of these Americans realizing that were manipulated by clever propaganda, that their perceptions had been managed. For instance, the New York Times recently pried loose some 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents revealing how the Bush administration had manipulated the public debate on the Iraq War by planting friendly retired military officers on TV news shows. Retired Green Beret Robert S. Bevelacqua, a former analyst on Murdoch’s Fox News, said the Pentagon treated the retired military officers as puppets: “It was them saying, ‘we need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’” [NYT, April 20,
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POPSIraqi Councilman Kills U.S. Soldiers Two members of the Iraqi parliament recently visited the US in an effort to more fully explain their concerns with a continued US presence. First, that it is a threat to their sovereignty. Secondly, that our continued presence contributes to instability in the region. They feel that they are capable of defending themselves against foreign threats, and solving their own problems. Now one Iraqi councilman has taken matters into his own hands. BAGHDAD, June 23 -- Two U.S. soldiers were killed and three were wounded Monday when a council member opened fire on them after a meeting in a small town south of Baghdad. Residents Rafi Suleiman, 39, and Abu Dawood said in phone interviews that Ajil, a Sunni tribal leader, opened fire on the soldiers without provocation. Suleiman said the soldiers were in town for the opening of a park built with U.S. funds. The FBI sent a team of agents to Baghdad to investigate the shooting. None of the guards has been charged
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POPSWell, duh!
The question was specifically focused on a military response, but Obama didn’t talk about the military, or any use of force at all. “Well, first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans,” Obama said. “And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.” “The second thing,” Obama continued, “is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, A, to find out that we don’t have other threats and attacks potentially out there; and B, to find out do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.” The reference to “some action” might be interpreted as an endorsement of the use of force, but in the rest of his response, Obama softened even that notion. “But what we can’t do is then alienate the world community
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