TheWalk.com

Gun Owners of America filed its brief yesterday before the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of Dick Anthony Heller, who was denied the right to own a gun in the nations capital as a result of the draconian gun ban which exists there.

In this hard-hitting brief, GOA takes aim at the weak arguments put forth by both the DC government and the Bush Administration. But more than that, GOA examines the favorable text and context of the Second Amendment in great detail, while also documenting the pro-gun history that formed the backdrop of its inclusion into the Bill of Rights. Continue reading »

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Spending hours on a cell phone each day may affect the quality of a man’s sperm, preliminary research suggests. In a study of 361 men seen at their infertility clinic, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic found an association between the patients’ cell phone use and their sperm quality.

On average, the more hours the men spent on their cell phones each day, the lower their sperm count and the greater their percentage of abnormal sperm. Continue reading »

Texas Border Residents Take Homeland Security Chief to Court Over Land Seizures for Border Wall

By Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.
Inside the Checkpoints: Commentary from the Rio Grande
February 6, 2008
February is not a good month for Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. He has just been sued by a team of legal experts headed by Peter Schey of the Los Angeles based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

A stretch of the border wall in California. Chertoff hopes to build a similar one in Texas. Photos: D.R. 2008 Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

When Chertoff began wielding his power to build a border wall along the US-Mexico border, border residents knew it was an abuse of his power and that he was violating human rights and the Constitution. Finding someone to defend the owners of property along the border was not easy, especially when elected officials in highest offices of the respective states, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, in concert with the nationally elected officials, turned their heads, covered their eyes and failed to protect the people who elected them to protect them and their property rights from such abuses of power. Continue reading »

A choice between Gold or Fiat Currency, free markets made to run wild, and a Fed that has been wrong about so many things. Greenspan’s ideas toxic, and exercises of banking and bailing

Wall Street and the Fed haven’t changed one bit since the 1980s, the decade of greed. The supposed free market is less free and since Ronald Reagan’s executive order creating the “Working Group on Financial Markets” the market is more manipulated in favor of the insiders at the Fed, banking, investment banking and in brokerage than ever before. They certainly learned well that greed is good. The game has been geared to major financial profits for the leveraged speculator community. In that process Wall Street has snatched control from the Fed and the banking community. As a result, we have no regulation and control over securitization, derivatives and hedge funds. We remember well 35 years ago when the banking community via the SEC put Investors Overseas Services out of business for having a Fund of Funds. Today that is absolute child’s play. The Rothschilds did not want the competition, so a great mutual fund selling organization was destroyed. This is also part of what Wall Street is all about. That is connections and corruption, we know, we spent 28 years in the brokerage business. Continue reading »

Two weeks ago George Bush was sent on a mission to the Middle East to deliver a horse’s head. We all remember the disturbing scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” where Lucca Brassi goes to Hollywood to convince a recalcitrant movie producer to use Don Corleone’s nephew in his next film. The “Big shot” producer is finally persuaded to hire the young actor after he wakes up in bed next to the severed head of his prize thoroughbred. I expect that Bush made a similar “offer they could not refuse” to the various leaders of the Gulf States when he met with them earlier this month. The media tried to portray Bush’s trip to the Middle East as a “peace mission”, but that just a smokescreen. Continue reading »

When Glenn Beck interviewed Congressman Ron Paul a few weeks ago, he said that he had received death threats from people purporting to be Ron Paul supporters. I have heard other journalists make similar accusations against Congressman Paul’s supporters. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether any of this is true or not. And neither does anyone else.

My own experience has been that Congressman Paul’s supporters have always demonstrated grace, patience, and courtesy. I have met and worked alongside Ron Paul supporters in at least four states, and I have never personally witnessed any of the anger and bitterness of which they are accused.

Not that Ron Paul’s supporters do not have reason to be angry. They most certainly do. In fact, all of us should be angry. Continue reading »

Not content with spying on other countries, the NSA (National Security Agency) will now turn on the US’s own government agencies thanks to a fresh directive from president George Bush.

Under the new guidelines, the NSA and other intelligence agencies can bore into the internet networks of all their peers. The Bush administration pulled off this spy expansion by pointing to an increase in the number of cyber attacks directed against the US, possibly from foreign nations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will spearhead the effort around identifying the source of these attacks, while the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon will concentrate on retaliation. Continue reading »

Last week in Currituck County, N.C., Superior Court Judge Russell Duke presided over the final step in securing the first criminal conviction stemming from the deadly actions of Blackwater Worldwide, the Bush administration’s favorite mercenary company. Lest you think you missed some earth-shifting, breaking news, hold on a moment. The “criminals” in question were not the armed thugs who gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded more than 20 others in Baghdad’s Nisour Square last September. They were seven nonviolent activists who had the audacity to stage a demonstration at the gates of Blackwater’s 7,000-acre private military base in North Carolina to protest the actions of mercenaries acting with impunity — and apparent immunity — in their names and those of every American. Continue reading »

Drug War Beginning to Look Like One Giant Cover Story
By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

January 29, 2008

On a fall evening in a cotton field in Nicaragua, a group of armed men placed a series of torches in a line of planters along a makeshift runway.

About half an hour later, around 9 p.m. that evening, Friday, Nov. 26, 2004, a twin-prop Beechcraft King Air 200 touched down on that rural runway and came to a stop. The assembled men began to unload the plane, which was packed with cocaine, while holding the sole witness to the event, a local field hand, captive.

The Beechcraft King Air 200 on a runway in Nicaragua. Photo: Humboldt Rescue Organization

Before departing, the men attempted to set fire to the plane, but miraculously it did not burn. They departed the area in trucks with the plane’s valuable payload, leaving behind the lone witness, alive, and more than a half dozen AK-47 automatic rifles. Continue reading »

Americans’ distrust of societal institutions continues to grow, and now comes evidence of yet another burgeoning scandal: Fluoride-Gate. A torrent of recent bad news about the safety of fluorides has brought key names to the surface from the murky alphabet soup of players in the fluoride game at EPA, CDC, FDA, NIDCR, USDA, ADA, and AMA. The inevitable questions have begun about who knew what, when, and why was certain information kept quiet.

The first ominous drumbeats started in 2006, when a National Research Council committee recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency lower the allowable amount of fluoride in drinking water - to an unspecified level. As if that wasn’t unnerving enough, the committee specifically stated that kidney patients, diabetics, seniors, infants, and outdoor workers were susceptible populations especially vulnerable to harm from fluoride ingestion. Continue reading »