Monthly Archives: December 2010
HAPPY NEW YEAR 2011!!!
To everyone that reads my blog and to my face book friends and family, Happy New Year and may 2011 be what we want it to be!!
Remember that while it’s the new decade, your government is still planing actions against you, are you planing your action against them? God bless the Republic State of America and all her people.
FBI, DHS, NYC Cops on alert……
Law enforcement officials across the country remained on high alert today for potential attacks on the New Year’s Eve holiday.
National security officials in Washington, from the Department of Homeland Security to the FBI, focused their attention on New York City and Times Square, where local law enforcement finalized preparations for the annual New Year’s Eve bash.
For now, however, there is no credible, specific terror threat timed to thecelebration, federal and local intelligence and counterterror officials told ABC News.
“We have no specific threats against the city on New Year’s Eve,” New York City’s Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. “Anytime large numbers of people come together, we put in our counterterrorism overlay. We have other events going on: We have a four-mile run in Central Park at midnight; a fireworks display at Prospect Park in Brooklyn; fireworks by the Statue of Liberty. … So it’s not just Times Square.
“But I can assure you we looked at all of these events closely. We will have several thousand police officers deployed. … We have every indication that it will be a safe and happy event. “
The New York Police Department put the finishing touches Thursday on the “ring of steel” it uses to protect revelers: a security screen consisting of 17-plus miles of barricades; entrance point searches; video feeds; and uniformed officers spaced every few yards.
“I can tell you that we have more cameras focused on this area now, we’re monitoring more cameras than we’ve ever done in the past,” said Kelly as he showed an ABC News team around Times Square.
There will also be numerous security measures not quite so apparent to the untrained eye that include chemical sniffers, biological sensors and handheld radiation wands and pagers.
A few fun facts for revelers to contemplate as they stand with noisemakers, hats and masks, bodies pressed against barricades, huddled against the cold and in some cases perhaps with their knees held close together to prevent nature’s urges from getting the best of them:
The ball weighs 6 tons and is 12 feet in diameter.
It begins its 60-second count to 2011 from a stanchion 400 feet above Times Square.
The ball consists of 32,000 lightbulbs.
90,690 feet of aluminum and wooden police horses have fenced the area in years past.
That 17.18 mile-protective fence weighed in, when last tallied by ABC News, at more than 355,000 pounds.
“When you come here, the energy is something that you’ve never experienced before and that’s feeling of community,” said Jeffrey Strauss of Countdown Entertainment, which runs the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. “It’s unique.”
“When you’re watching Times Square, you’re seeing people kissing and celebrating and having fun. That’s what New Year’s is all about,” Strauss said.
The city will not make an official crowd estimate. But in years past the estimates have ranged up to a million people. And worldwide electronic viewership has been estimated at a billion or more, Strauss said.
Officials charged with security are keenly aware of both last year’s attempted Christmas airplane bomb attempt, and last spring’s attempted Times Square bombing. They are deeply concerned that a stray backpack or plastic bottle containing a bomb, or bomb ingredients, could be slipped inside the police lines.
To keep partygoers safe, authorities have issued their annual reminders:
Backpacks and large bags are prohibited.
Alcoholic beverages are prohibited.
Property may not be abandoned at checkpoints.
Attendees who leave before the ball drops will not be able to return to their original viewing areas.
To enforce these rules and monitor for suspicious activity, there will be thousands of uniformed and plainclothes officers assigned to security tonight, including officers armed with radiation detectors and others handling bomb sniffing dogs. Snipers and heavy weapons teams will also be on hand.
Commissioner Kelly was asked if this was the most secure Times Square had ever been.
“Well, I certainly hope so,” he laughed.
Outside of Times Square, special roving units will have citywide duty, ready to move to any other location deemed in need of a critical response. And inside of the frozen zone there will also be “flying squads” of detectives and specialists ready to swoop in on any suspected terrorist, nutcase or common criminal.
In years past, there have been false alarms, including a threat passed on by Canadian authorities to the FBI that poison gas was hidden inside the pyrotechnics that would help ring in the New Year when they burst from the roof of Number One Times Square.
Never mind that fireworks 395 feet above street level would make a lousy mechanism for dispersing gas; a team of New York City cops climbed up, took samples, determined there was no threat and the revelries went on.
As the city slept in on Jan. 1, 2010, more than 150 members of the Dept. of Sanitation swept up an estimated 46.96 tons of confetti and debris in just a few hours. Officials estimated that cleanup cost was $54,000 in 2009.
Big Sis wants to beef up Afghan border!!!
KABUL, Afghanistan — During an unannounced New Year’s Eve visit to Afghanistan, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to the country’s mountainous border region near Pakistan to see first-hand her department’s efforts in the war effort there.
“Seeing is worth a thousand words,” Napolitano said after the tour, to which Fox News was granted exclusive access. “This all involves safety and security in this part of the world. And that is something that has direct connection as well to the United States.”
She described her department’s role in war-torn Afghanistan as a “complement” to the military operations there.
Her agency has about two dozen officials in Afghanistan, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Customs and Border Protection officers, and Border Patrol agents. Many are training Afghan security forces to manage their country’s borders.
Although the Afghan government receives most of its money from foreign allies, customs fees and tariffs account for more than half of the money Afghanistan generates on its own. Increasing that revenue flow is a top priority for U.S. officials working to stabilize the chaotic country.
Earlier Friday, Napolitano and her staff met with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Hours later, a fleet of military helicopters took Napolitano, her staff and a Fox News crew to Torkham Forward Operating Base, about five miles from Torkham border crossing, a main access point for supplies coming through Pakistan to NATO forces in Afghanistan.
At the base, she ate lunch with some of the troops who protect her agency’s officials in the war zone. She called it an “honor.”
The trip to the border region culminated with a helicopter flight over the Torkham border crossing. Getting to the crossing by ground was deemed too dangerous.
In May, according to Pakistani reports, security forces at Torkham crossing “defused an explosive device fitted to a container taking supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan.”
Nearly three months ago, Torkham crossing was shut down for 11 days by Pakistan after a U.S. helicopter strike in the border region killed two Pakistani soldiers. The crossing was reopened after American officials apologized, but during the shutdown about 150 trucks were destroyed and many people were injured as they became easy targets.
Nevertheless, U.S. officials described the Torkham area as generally not hostile toward the U.S. military.
Officials said the growing Homeland Security presence in Afghanistan is the product of an effort launched under the Obama administration. Officials say it is part of a “vision” from the late U.S. envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, who sought to include more federal agencies in the war and nation building effort here.
In early November, customs and border officers and agents from Homeland Security’s investigations unit conducted a one-week workshop for 44 officers from Afghan law-enforcement agencies, training them on the interdiction and investigation of cash smuggling. Such criminal activity funds terrorist and criminal organizations.
In January 2010, a “Customs Academy” opened in Kabul, training as many as 200 recruits in an effort to turn the Afghanistan Customs Department into “a modern service,” as the U.S. embassy put it in a press release.
In addition to the Homeland Security officials already on the ground in Afghanistan, several more are expected to land there over next month. Those ranks don’t include the more than 50 former CBP officials hired privately to support the DHS mission there.
Napolitano was expected to ring in the New Year with U.S. personnel at the embassy in Kabul. A bonfire was being prepared as of early Friday evening.
The New Year’s Eve trip was Napolitano’s first to Afghanistan since joining the Obama cabinet.
She was in the country once as Arizona governor.
Florida “No Refusal” DUI Checkpoints (Police State)
Tampa, Florida– With New Year’s Eve only days away, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration expects this to be one of the deadliest weeks of the year on the roads.
But now a new weapon is being used in the fight against drunk driving.
It’s a change that could make you more likely to be convicted.
“I think it’s a great deterrent for people,” said Linda Unfried, from Mother’s Against Drunk Driving in Hillsborough County.
Florida is among several states now holding what are called “no refusal” checkpoints.
It means if you refuse a breath test during a traffic stop, a judge is on site, and issues a warrant that allows police to perform a mandatory blood test.
It’s already being done in several counties, and now Unfried is working to bring it to the Tampa Bay area.
“I think you’ll see the difference because people will not drink and drive. I truly believe that,” she said.
Not everyone is on board, though.
DUI defense attorney Kevin Hayslett sees the mandatory blood test as a violation of constitutional rights.
“It’s a slippery slope and it’s got to stop somewhere,” Hayslett explained, “what other misdemeanor offense do we have in the United States where the government can forcefully put a needle into your arm?”
The federal government says Florida has among the highest rates of breathalyzer refusal.
“Now you’ve got attorneys telling their clients, don’t blow, don’t blow! Because we know from the results from these machines that they’re not operating as the state or the government says they’re supposed to operate,” said Stephen Daniels, a DUI consultant and expert witness.
Supporters, though, say you could see the “no refusal” checkpoints in the Bay area by October.
“We don’t want to violate people’s civil rights. That’s the last thing we want to do, but we’re here to save lives,” Unfried said.
She adds that this type of checkpoint would be heavily advertised, with the goal of deterring any drunk driving.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has recently said he wants to see more states hold similar programs.
http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/story.aspx?storyid=165079&catid=250
NYC UNION (sanitation department/garbage) snarle streets in protest!!!!
These garbage men really stink.
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.
“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.
Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.
VIDEO: BLOOMBERG: WE DID NOT DO A GOOD JOB
The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”
New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.
The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.
They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in com bating a fierce, fast-moving bliz zard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.
The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.
In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.
Sources said budget cuts were also at the heart of poor planning for the blizzard last weekend. The city broke from its usual routine and did not call in a full complement on Saturday for snow preparations in order to save on added overtime that would have had to be paid for them to work on Christmas Day.
The result was an absolute collapse of New York’s once-vaunted systems of clearing the streets and keeping mass transit moving under the weight of 20 inches of snow.
The Sanitation Department last night denied there was a concerted effort to slow snow removal.
“There are no organized or wildcat actions being taken by the sanitation workers or the supervisors,” said spokesman Matthew Lipani.
Joseph Mannion, president of the union that represents agency supervisors, said talk of a slowdown “is hogwash.” But he admitted there is “resentment out there” toward Mayor Bloombergand his administration because of budget cuts.
His counterpart at the rank-and-file’s union, Harry Nespoli, has also denied there is a job action, though he admitted his guys are working lucrative 14-hour shifts.
Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: “We would hope this is not the case.”
But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.
And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.
One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.
“That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can’t move,” said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg — quickly becoming the public face of failure this week — spent a second consecutive day yesterday defending himself to critics of his administration’s handling of the storm.
He took reporters to The Bronx to explain that the city is coming back to life and to tout his administration’s efforts.
“Can’t work much harder,” Bloomberg said.
But Hizzoner admitted, “We didn’t do as good a job as we want to do or as the city has a right to expect.”
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty promised that every street will have been plowed by 7 this morning, but then he offered this hedge: “Will somebody find a street that I missed? Maybe.”
Bloomberg and Doherty also offered a series of excuses for the failed response to the blizzard. They blamed residents for shoveling snow into streets that had already been plowed and for tying up 911 with non-emergency calls.
“This was a failure in the operations and ultimately, as the mayor tells us very often, the buck stops with him,” said Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-SI).
Additional reporting by C.J. Sullivan and Anthony Affrunti
FACEBOOK plays around with RFID chips and YOUR PROFILE!
Developers attending today’s Facebook conference, f8, are being issued with RFID badges integrated with their Facebook profiles for clocking into site locations.
The details come from the All Facebook, which reports that Facebook is being atypically opaque about the data gathered from the radio frequency identification tags. But given the experimental nature of the service that’s unsurprising – the point of the conference is to inspire people to create applications, not define their limits.
The tags are short-range, so delegates have to make an active effort to have the tag scanned, but doing so will automatically sign them up to a related Facebook group and record their presence for plotting on a wall-screen in the main hall.
It’s not the first time that a conference has had RFID-enabled badges – it’s de rigeur these days – but connecting the identity to a Facebook profile opens up all sorts of opportunities for linking the online network with the real world, and for Facebook to gather yet more information about its users. ®
Federal Judge says FCC cannot enforce ‘Net Neutrality’!
A federal appeals court struck a blow against the desire of the Federal Communications Commission to enforce net neutrality rules on the Internet, ruling the FCC must first get Congress to approve such a sweeping expansion of its regulatory power.
The decision made it clear that the FCC has no authority to force Comcast to stop managing its broadband network as it sees fit—in this case by throttling back the speed of a relative handful of “bandwidth hogs” who use bitTorrent programs to share enormous files. Comcast said it throttled the “hogs” to ensure speedy service for the majority of its customers in 2007, but no longer does so.
The United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia handed down the 36-page decision on April 6. Commonly referred to as Comcast v. FCC, the ruling stated that the FCC’s “ancillary authority” over the broadcast and cable industries “is not the equivalent of untrammeled freedom to regulate activities” on the Internet, too.
Comcast said in a statement after the ruling was issued that “our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation.”
“We have always been focused on serving our customers and delivering the quality open-Internet experience consumers want,” the company said.
A Test Case
The case was largely seen as a test of the FCC’s authority to, in the words of Chairman Julius Genachowski, act as a “cop on the beat” on the Internet. A majority of commissioners on the FCC have stated they want to impose net neutrality rules, rather than let the concept of a “free” and “open” Internet be something industry players embrace voluntarily with market forces guiding the policy.
The FCC has been collecting comments on its net neutrality proposal for months, with the deadline for submissions coming just days after the decision by the DC Circuit Court.
The ruling might make the FCC’s whole net neutrality project moot, and could affect the regulatory goals the commission laid out in the National Broadband Plan it released in March.
Larry Downes, a fellow with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society, notes that the decision can only be seen as a thorough knock-down of the FCC’s position, because “there is not a single reference to any arguments made by Comcast.”
“Instead, the court begins and ends by dismantling the brief of the FCC, rejecting every effort to tie the Commission’s ‘ancillary jurisdiction’ to something—anything!—in the Communications Act that could justify the sanctions.”
Congress Trumps the FCC
Judge David Tatel made clear when writing the unanimous 3-0 decision that only Congress can award such power to the commission, and has failed to do so.
“Because the [FCC] has failed to tie its assertion of ancillary authority over Comcast’s Internet service to any statutorily mandated responsibility,” the commission does not have the power to regulate the management practices of an Internet service provider (ISP), wrote Tatel, an appointee of President Clinton who took his seat on the bench in 1994.
“Notwithstanding the difficult regulatory problem of rapid technological change posed by the communications industry, the allowance of wide latitude in the exercise of delegated powers is not the equivalent of untrammeled freedom to regulate activities over which the statute fails to confer [to the FCC],” the ruling said.
The FCC, however, remains defiant about attempting to regulate net neutrality rules, saying in a statement the court did not “close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”
Praise for the Ruling
Jim Harper, director of Information Policy Studies at the Washington, DC-based Cato Institute, praised the decision, saying it “marks another turning point in the debate over whether the federal government should regulate Internet access services.”
“What’s entertaining about it is that the problem was solved two years ago by market processes—sophisticated Internet users, a watchdog press, advocacy groups, and interested consumers communicating with one another over the Internet,” Harper said.
Carl Gipson, director of small business, technology, and telecommunications research at the Seattle-based Washington Policy Center, said this ruling “should put a huge dent in the plans of FCC Chairman Julius Genochowski to issue Net Neutrality rules—which is good seeing as how Congress has yet to actually order him to do so.”
“The ruling hammers again and again on the difference between congressional policy and regulatory authority,” Gipson added. “Perhaps this is an inane difference to most people, but the FCC’s attempt to regulate network management by ISPs shows how important it is for regulating agencies to stick to the intent of their legislative mandate.”
Disappointment Elsewhere
Advocates of allowing the FCC to regulate net neutrality rules expressed disappointment with the ruling.
“[This] decision means there are no protections in the law for consumers’ broadband services,” said Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Washington, DC-absed Public Knowledge. “Companies selling Internet access are free to play favorites with content on their networks, to throttle certain applications or simply to block others.
“In addition, as of now, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) ambitious National Broadband Plan to help boost the economy is in legal limbo,” she added. “In our view, the FCC needs to move quickly and decisively to make sure that consumers are not left at the mercy of telephone and cable companies.”
S. Derek Turner, research director for the Washington, DC-based advocacy group Free Press, said the ruling “has forced the FCC into an existential crisis.”
“As a result of this decision, the FCC has virtually no power to stop Comcast from blocking Web sites,” he said. “This cannot be an acceptable outcome for the American public and requires immediate FCC action to re-establish legal authority.”
Next Step? Ask Congress
Adam Thierer, president of the Washington, DC-based Progress & Freedom Foundation, said “the question now is whether the FCC learns its lesson—that it should seek the proper authority from Congress to impose new regulations like Net neutrality rules—or if the agency instead engages in another effort to concoct regulatory authority via regulatory classification.”
Thierer is referring to the possibility that the FCC would attempt to reclassify broadband as a service under “Title II” authority. Such a move would arguably grant the FCC the authority the court just struck down.
“The next step will be for advocates to run to Congress, asking it to give the FCC authority to fix the problems of two years ago,” Harper said. “But slow-moving, technologically unsophisticated bureaucrats do not know better than consumers and technologists how to run the Internet.
“If they get that authority, your online experience will be a little more like dealing with the water company or the electric company and a little less like using the Internet,” he added.
James G. Lakely (jlakely@heartland.org) is co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of InfoTech & Telecom News.
Rove predicts obama’s re-election??? You decide….
VAN SUSTEREN: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that she’s going to stay through I think this administration which is another two years and then leave. Um, she said she’s not going to run for President, she’s out. What are your thoughts? You think we’ll see her as a contender, and will she finish the last two years of this administration?
ROVE: Oh, I think she definitely will finish the last two years. I don’t think she’s going to run in 2012. That’s even duplicitous for a Clinton. I’m not certain that I agree, that I accept what she said about she’s not going to be a candidate in 2016. I think she will.
VAN SUSTEREN. I meant ‘16, I meant ‘16.
ROVE: Yeah, I suspect she will be a candidate. She’s going to think about being a candidate in 2016. And we’ll know by about 2014. If she leaves the administration in 2014 or 2015 in order to give herself a chance to write a book about her experiences and reconnect with the grassroots then she might entertain it. She’ll be younger in 2016 than John McCain was when he ran and she will, I suspect, be a big presence on the Democrat (sic) scene.
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So Rove thinks Barack Obama will be President in 2014 and 2015? Whooooops. I’m sure that’ll disappoint his colleagues at Fox, half of whom seem to be candidates for President themselves
http://www.infowars.com/rove-predicts-obama-2012-re-election/
111th Congress leave a trail of disaster. Spent more money than any other Congress…
What comes to mind when you think of “the worst”? President James Buchanan. The 1962 Mets. Vanilla Ice. Now add to that list the 111thCongress, which is finally slated to wrap up business this week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just didn’t want to give up that gavel. This may have been the worst Congress since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide ushered in the Congress that gave us the Great Societyand the Vietnam War. Memo to voters: Democratic landslides are usually followed by disastrous results.
The 111th Congress got off to a fast start. Barely two weeks into the Obama era, it enacted an $800 billion stimulus bill, the largest in American history. Why take any time to study the contents when you know exactly what to do? The problem was that most of the money went to states to preserve the jobs of government workers. Some stimulus. The president said it would keep unemployment at 8 percent. It is now near 10 percent.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/20/good-riddance-to-the-111th-congress/
DHS gives CIA/DEA green light for Operation Northwoods? or just more Security?
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.cdc63f449543115516a6ee1f2c569704.4f1&show_article=1
The United States is stepping up security at “soft targets” like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday.
“We look at so-called soft targets — the hotels, shopping malls, for example — all of which we have reached out to in the past year and have done a fair amount of training for their own employees,” Napolitano said.
“And so we have enhanced measures going on at surface transportation, not because we have a specific or credible threat there, but because we know, looking at Madrid and London, that’s been another source of targets for terrorists.”
More on this subject at the link below
