ROK faces US pressure over anti-Iran sanctions

Much of Congress is calling out President Obama for his excessive use of executive power in a string of recess appointments this week. To some lawmakers, this isn’t the first time the commander-in-chief has stepped on the toes of his constituents.

To Ron Paul, in fact, Obama has transcended America into a practical dictatorship.

The commander-in-chief overstepped the Congress and appointed Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection, much to the chagrin of the US Senate, who were on recess at the time. Although the president has the power to make such appointments during Senate recess sessions, lawmakers have since become outraged that Obama could not have waited for them to give Cordray the go-ahead.

Now the new CFP chief will sit pretty in a paid federal position and await a decision from Congress to either approve or disapprove Obama’s appointment — a decision which could be months in the making. In the meanwhile, Cordray lacks any official authority to rule the CFP, essentially allowing him to vacate a ghost opening and be compensated for simply sitting pretty.

But why would the president do such a thing?

“It is disappointing that a former constitutional law professor does not understand that the President is not a dictator or a king who can simply ignore the Constitution whenever he feels frustrated by the system of checks and balances wisely put in place by our Founders,” Texas congressman and GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul says in an official statement.

His move, says the legendary libertarian politicians, shows a “clear disregard of the Constitution” and a “flagrant contempt for the rules.”

According to Paul, this isn’t first time that the current commander-in-chief has overstepped the Constitution either. Throughout the administration, says Paul, the president has bypassed the rules in order to make decisions favored by few but always to his liking. Most recently, the congressman attacked President Obama over his warning to Capitol Hill that he would get his jobs act through one way or another.

“The current administration has unabashedly stated that Congress’s unwillingness to pass the president’s jobs bill means that the president will act unilaterally to enact provisions of it piecemeal through Executive Order,” Paul said in an open letter last November. “Obama explicitly threatens to bypass Congress, thus aggregating the power to make and enforce laws in the executive. This clearly erodes the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. It brings the modern presidency dangerously close to an elective dictatorship.”

Elsewhere in Congress, Senator John McCain called the appointment of Cordray an “absolute abuse of power,” and Congressman Dan Burton said the president was acting in “direct dereliction of his oath to the American people to protect and defend the American Constitution.”

Ron Paul adds that the president “must be called to account for his actions.” Paul is currently challenging Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for the GOP party’s nomination in hopes of running against Obama later in 2012.

There is a big difference between fighting for America and fighting for democracy. According to the US military, putting your life on the line for the country is an act of courage. Voicing your political opinion, however, is an absolute no-no.

Before Ron Paul came in a close third at the Iowa caucus, CNN cameras caught up with Jesse Thorsen, a serviceman with the Army Reserves. As RT reported earlier this week, however, the live interview from Iowa was abruptly halted just as Cpl. Thorsen began praising Ron Paul for his campaign for the Republican Party nomination and the promises he vows to make as president. Later that evening, Paul welcomed Thorsen onto the stage to finish speaking so the rest of America could hear his message of support that was aborted during the live broadcast.

Supporting Ron Paul, says the Army, can be a bit of a problem.

Attending a partisan political event while clad in military garb is a violation of Defense Department rules, says the Pentagon. Although Thorsen was allowed to wear his uniform on the battlefield, doing so at Ron Paul headquarters on national television is against the rules. Now the DoD says that they are investigating the soldier as they determine how to handle the case.

According to a spokeswoman for the armed forces branch, Thorsen “stands alone in his opinions regarding his political affiliation and beliefs, and his statements and beliefs in no way reflect that of the Army Reserve.”

Thorsen shared on television live from Ankeny, Iowa during the caucus that Paul should be saluted for his stance on foreign policy, which affects him as an active duty soldier. “His foreign policy is by far, hands down, better than any candidate’s out there, and I’m sure you all know that. We don’t need to be picking fights overseas and I think everybody else knows that too,” said Thorsen.

Paul has stood out among GOP hopefuls as the one candidate adamantly opposed to continuing immense and costly military operations overseas. The congressman himself served in the United States Air Force in the 1960s before entering medicine and eventually politics.

Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what.

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms.

Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own definition of personal identifiable information, or PII, such data could consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.” Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC’s write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency.

Also included in the roster of those subjected to the spying are government officials, domestic or not, who make public statements, private sector employees that do the same and “persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest,” which to itself opens up the possibilities even wider.

The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn’t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses.

The development out of the DHS comes at the same time that U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady denied pleas from supporters of WikiLeaks who had tried to prevent account information pertaining to their Twitter accounts from being provided to federal prosecutors. Jacob Applebaum and others advocates of Julian Assange’s whistleblower site were fighting to keep the government from subpoenaing information on their personal accounts that were collected from Twitter.

Last month the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk Massachusetts District Attorney subpoenaed Twitter over details pertaining to recent tweets involving the Occupy Boston protests.

The website Fast Company reports that the intel collected by the Department of Homeland Security under the NOC Monitoring Initiative has been happening since as early as 2010 and the data is being shared with both private sector businesses and international third parties.

http://rt.com/usa/news/homeland-security-journalists-monitoring-321/

With the 2012 presidential election less than a year away, everyone is looking for ways to turn around America with an array of promises on the campaign trail that seemingly give each politician added credence over the others.

Radical times may call for radical ideas. But for Jeff Monson and likeminded others, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to examine that society could better itself if it tried, in turn propelling America’s economy out of the dumps and towards a future full of prospect.

“I think the first thing we need to do is socialize things,” said Monson, who calls himself an anarchist but is perhaps best known outside of politics but in the realm of sports. Monson, 40, is an American mixed martial artist that holds multiple titles across the globe for his athleticism. Currently, Monson holds the world heavyweight championship title in the International Sport Karate Association.

To the fighter, if America reexamined entities made available to the public and offered more fair and affordable services, society would see an improvement.

Roadblocks line the way to that future, however, and Monson says that one of the biggest is the role that big corporations play in the American way of live. President Obama may have campaigned on promises thought to be capable, but Monson says the commander-in-chief has since run into a brick wall. “Now he has to sacrifice a lot of his ideas,” Monson told RT. Although he may have had best intentions at first, politics in America are bought and sold by the corporations, said the fighter. “You have to get all those people out,” he said. “You have to get the people to make a decision. We live in a Democracy, supposedly, but it’s not really a Democracy—it’s a corpocracy.”

Obama, said Monson, came into the White House with a lot of promise. Without the success of big business, however, the president’s campaign in 2008 couldn’t have come through.

“He had to take a lot of heat (and) earn more money for his campaign than any other president in history,” said Monson. Now those big-money backers that helped put Obama in the White House “want something in return for their contributions.”

“He was the best candidate for what the corporations thought they could get,” said Monson. “He’s in there and he owes them and he’s kind of running into a brick wall. The corporations really run this country.”

Monson says that his ideas for America involve his personal ethos, anarchism, but the media often portrays such a notion as one too radical to be a reality. The wrestler revealed to RT, however, that “really, anarchy to me means everybody has absolute freedom.”

“What I think is the worst thing,” said Monson, is “people in the United States and around the world can’t do what they want to do with their life.”

“Actually contributing to society,” he added, “we waste our potential as human beings and I think that is the biggest crime of what we call capitalism.”

Also going to waste, said Monson, is the voice of each American, a mistake that is made by voting in officials unrepresentative of what the country needs.

“When you vote, you’re putting someone else’s idea of what should be instead of your own,” said Monson. “You are giving someone else permission to make decisions for me. It’s strange to me that people would give that kind of power to someone else.”

Writers take on Apple in copyright fight

A Beijing court has accepted a case filed by nine renowned Chinese writers against Apple Inc, demanding 11.91 million yuan (US$1.88 million) for the sale of illegal downloads of their work on its App Store.

Bei Zhicheng, an official with a writer rights protection alliance, told the Shanghai Morning Post that Apple is probably the only big Internet-related company in the country to directly earn money from selling illegal downloads of books.

Bei told the newspaper that on the App Store, Apple may take 30 percent of total sales of illegal copies sold by other companies on the platform.

Bei said this was “total theft.”

The writers’ alliance has urged Apple to follow Chinese laws to provide copyright certification of books being sold at the App Store, but the company has refused to do so, claimed Bei.

Around 20 million people in China using Apple products and its App Store, but many don’t know the platform is selling illegal copies of books, said Bei.

He said the platform has severely impacted on the legal book market as some illegal copies of books have been downloaded several million times at the App Store, costing authors millions of dollars.

The nine authors - who include famous writers Han Han, Li Chengpeng, Murong Xuecun - plan to sue Apple for illegally selling 37 works.

In March, 2011, Baidu, China’s biggest online search engine, has to delete 2.8 million unauthorized works of literature, following protests.

Obama urges no “political games” on jobs plan - Americas - Al Jazeera English.

Barack Obama, the US president, has called on Republicans not to play “political games” with his
jobs plan as he pressed for swift passage of a $447bn package he hopes will revive the US economy and boost his re-election prospects.

Four days after challenging the US Congress to act in a televised address, Obama stepped up his campaign to sell his proposals to American voters as he prepared to send the jobs bill to lawmakers later on Monday.

“This is a bill that is based on ideas from both Democrats and Republicans, and this is a bill that Congress needs to pass, no games, no politics, no delays,” Obama said in an appearance in the White House Rose Garden.

The president, who pushed through an $800bn economic stimulus package in 2009, will see his re-election chances hinging heavily on his ability to reduce stubbornly high unemployment above 9 per cent.

3 held in Detroit over bathroom trips on plane.

Judging time in the can now? How could anyone have gotten anything of potential danger through the invasive security checks anyway? Yes - the terrorists have won - we are now afraid of too much time in the bathroom. We could quit flying altogether - abstinence is the best prevention.

3 held in Detroit over bathroom trips on plane 11 Sep 2011 Amid anxiety over the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, police detained three passengers at Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport on Sunday after the crew of the Frontier Airlines flight from Denver reported suspicious activity on board, and NORAD sent two F-16 jets to shadow the flight until it landed safely, airline and federal officials said. Also Sunday, NORAD sent two F-16s to escort a Los Angeles-to-New York American Airlines flight after three passengers made repeated trips to the bathroom, officials said. Flight 34 landed safely at New York’s Kennedy Airport. Frontier Flight 623, with 116 passengers on board, landed without incident in Detroit after the crew reported that two people were spending “an extraordinarily long time” in a bathroom, Frontier spokesman Peter Kowalchuck said.

Interpol issues arrest warrant for Gaddafi [Where's Bush/Cheney's?] 09 Sep 2011 Interpol, at the request of the International Criminal Court at The Hague, has issued a Red Notice arrest warrant for Gaddafi and members of his government. The move by Interpol, the international police agency, comes as Colonel Gaddafi remains in hiding in an unknown or undisclosed location.

You think this is correct? We have to have men standing on the streets with full auto weapons?
We have become what we use to despise and it is getting worse by the day…

America the Police State…

Coffee Talk!

PS: Update-
NEW YORK (CBS 2) — The latest terror threat has come out just as a brand new CBS/New York Times poll shows 1 out of 3 New Yorkers still thinks about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks at least once a week.

CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer has an exclusive look at the city’s post-9/11 security.

There are radiation detection boats in the waters, cameras that have been placed all over lower and Midtown Manhattan and there are cops with guns and tanks and all kinds of weapons, because in New York a terror attack could come from anywhere, and anyone.

“There’s no shortage of people who are willing to give up their lives for the cause,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

It’s been 10 years but our concerns about terrorism are still staggering and constant. Even the death of Osama bin Laden didn’t lessen the fear.

Two thirds of Americans, 67 percent in a stunning CBS/New York Times poll say killing the al Qaeda mastermind didn’t make them feel safer.

But that’s not all. A majority – 57 percent — say subway security measures are insufficient.

And as for other potential terror targets:

* Only 27 percent say airports are a lot safer

* Only 20 percent say bridges and tunnels are safer

* And just 14 percent say area nuclear plants are safer

Kramer sat down with Commissioner Kelly for a rare and candid talk about terror. Some of the arrows in his anti-terror quiver are pretty amazing and newly revealed.

For openers, he has his own navy.

“We actually have the ability to have a small submarine, not manned, to check the part of the boats that are submerged,” Kelly said.

“We have a new boat on order. We envision a situation where we may have to get to an island or across water quickly, so we’re able to transport our heavy weapons officers rapidly.”

Kelly also has his own army — 1,000 anti-terror cops with tanks and weapons, carved out of the NYPD after 9/11.

“We have to do things differently. We know that this is where terrorists want to come,” Kelly said.

But in the city’s war on terror it’s often about what you don’t see. You do see the cops and the weapons and the bomb dogs. You don’t see the legion of bi-lingual undercover officers and analysts. You also don’t see much of the intricate web of surveillance cameras the commissioner continues to build.

“Now you’re going to see a fairly rapid increase in the number of cameras,” Kelly said.