WASHINGTON POST: The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track one target or trace a whole network of associates, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or […]
SMUS: Apple Is Rotten And Spoiling The Barrel
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY As you’ve no doubt already heard, Apple, Inc.’s CEO Tim Crook — oops, I mean Cook — appeared before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to be grilled as to why the company screwed the U.S. Treasury out of some $12.5 billion in federal corporate income tax over the passed two years. Guess who won? Turns out it wasn’t even close. Tim “The Skim” wowed ’em, cowed ’em, and put ’em down for the count! Hell, by the time it was over, the old Crookster — there I go again, Cookster — had them eating […]
AMEN: Michelle Bachman Will Not Seek Re-Election
NEW YORK TIMES: Representative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican who made an ill-fated run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, announced Wednesday that she would not seek a fifth term in Congress next year. She made the announcement just six months after being re-elected in what was her most challenging Congressional campaign since she was first elected to the House in 2006. Her announcement also comes as her former presidential campaign faces inquiries into its fund-raising activities. “I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth Congressional term,” she said in a video on her campaign Web […]
HOODWINKED: Teatard Jim DeMint & The Heritage Foundation’s Racist Immigration Propaganda
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY In case you missed it, Jim Boy has left the building. Recognizing that even if he departed there would still be ample Tea Partiers remaining to carry on the obstruction, Jimmy figured the time was ripe to try his hand at running one of the country’s most inglorious research outlets: the Heritage Foundation. While there is little question about his possessing all the illiberal qualities necessary to hold down such an enterprise’s presidency — after all, for nearly 15 years now he’s been one of the most salient national shills for any and all things anti-immigrant, […]
The Shockingly High Cost Of Cheap Clothes
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Sale! Sale! Boys’ and girls’ fashion jeans – cheap! Grab ’em at Children’s Place! Ladies’ pants suits – cheap! Buy two and save even more at your nearest Cato! Outfit the entire family for less! You always get more for your money at Walmart! Always! Gee, from all outward appearances you’d think that today’s garment business was the perfect win-win situation for all concerned. Consumers enjoying low prices — brand names and retailers enjoying high profits. Free enterprise functioning at its best, no? Well, yeah, except for the folks who actually make the clothes that is. […]
Is Alex Jones A False Flag Planted By The Gummint To Discredit Paranoid Gun Nuts? ‘Cuz It’s Working!
DAILY BANTER: Let’s take a ride down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, shall we? Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings when an InfoWars stooge crashed several law enforcement press conferences, I was speaking with The Daily Banter founder Ben Cohen about Alex Jones. We were joking about circulating a rumor that Jones was actually a government covert operative manufactured and trained to infiltrate the fringe conspiracy theory groups on the far-right. Ben and I speculated that perhaps the government had instructed “Special Agent Jones” to invent a roster of crazy over-the-top theories meant to deliberately distract conspiracy theorists from real-life […]
VIDEO: The Man Who Sent The President Ricin
“This is KC & I approve this video,” he says on his You Tube page, echoing the sign-off his ricin letters to the president and the senator. He might be a lousy bioterrorist, but he’s not a bad honky tonk singer. Well, he’ll have a captive audience for the next rest of his life. RELATED: Associated Press, quoting an FBI agent, separately identified the suspect as Paul Kevin Curtis, 45, of Corinth, Mississippi [PICTURED, BELOW RIGHT]. The letter to Obama was intercepted at an office away from the White House, where all mail to the president is subjected to a […]
Woman Is Still The N-Word Of The World
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ripped sole control of reproductive rights from the iron fist of the patriarchy and handed it back to the people who actually do most of the living, dying and birthing in this matter: women. The patriarchy has been furiously lashing out legislatively ever since. Alabama’s de facto overturning of Roe v. Wade is but the most recent example of male dominance in the War Of The Womb, which begs the question: Why do so many American women appear to be waving white flags and allowing men to dictate what they […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Death To DOMA!
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY As just about everyone knows by now, the Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of the federal government’s Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) or as I like to call it, Deprival Of Matrimony Act. If ever a SCOTUS finding in favor of the plaintiff(s) appeared to be a slam dunk, this would be the one. No less than the First and Second Circuit Court of Appeals and eight other federal courts have already found most of DOMA’s constituent parts to be unconstitutional. So why all the blather and bother? Well, when four […]
SMUS: Sequestration Without Representation Is Tyranny!
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY This one’s for all the folks who are going to be adversely affected by the “sequester.”There are many examples of why there should never have been any such thing, but verbiage constraints limit me to highlighting only the top four which I’ll present in the order of the magnitude of their egregiousness. But before I get into the meaty implications of the matter, allow me to digress for just a moment. For once (there may have been others but I’ll be damned if I can remember even one) I’m going to give Republicans credit for […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Deliver Us From Evil
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY With Pope Benedict XVI on the lam, it’s time once again for the Catholic Consiglieri to elect a new Don. My first reaction upon hearing that disgraced Vulture (the truly beautiful black and red bird doesn’t deserve association with this far-less-than-princely predator) Roger Mahony would be allowed to vote for the new Pope (and it turns out he’s wasn’t the only one) was: You’ve got to be sh*tting me! My second was: Well, of course he will, and why not? Hell, if for literally scores of years, the hierarchy of the Catholic church had deemed the […]
SMUS: You Cannot Benghazi The Gay Away
BY WILLIAM C. HENRY It hasn’t been formally consented to by the full U.S. Senate, but following yesterday’s 14/11 party-line Armed Services Committee vote, it appears that America’s next Secretary of Defense will almost certainly be the former Republican Senator from Nebraska, Chuck Hagel. The committee’s “advice and consent” work was hardly a seamless process, however, thanks in large part to Tea Party suck-up Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Turns out the hearing had to be adjourned immediately following each of his opening remarks/questioning periods so that janitors could refill the room deodorizers. Sure, there were a number of other Republican […]
A Conversation About Legalizing Marijuana In Pennsylvania With State Senator Daylin Leach
BY JONATHAN VALANIA State Senator Daylin Leach (D-Montgomery/Delaware) was born in Philadelphia in 1961. He attended Temple University, where he graduated with a degree in political science, and earned a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center in 1983. After law school, Sen. Leach moved back to the Philadelphia metropolitan area where he practiced law for 17 years, and taught constitutional law, legal ethics and First Amendment law at Cedar Crest and Muhlenberg colleges. He was first elected to the General Assembly in the fall of 2002, and in 2008 he was elected to the Pennsylvania Senate. Senator […]