NY Daily News reports on this sad story:

Brooklyn World War II vet Walter Martin and his wife, Rose, aren’t at the top of the NYPD’s most wanted list – it just feels that way.

Cops have swooped down on the law-abiding couple’s modest Marine Park home at least 50 times in the last eight years hunting bad guys – only to learn they were chasing a bad address.

They’ve come looking for murder and robbery suspects. Once, cops came hunting for one of their own – an NYPD officer accused of raping his 14-year-old stepdaughter.

Looks like a good excuse to put guard stations on every street like this. Or a wall with armed guards. And a moat. With sharks with frickin’ laser beams. And…

A recent increase in border patrol along side streets dividing Derby Line, Vt., and Stanstead, Canada, are causing confusion and animosity between locals and border patrol agents.

The situation came to a head recently when a local man was arrested while walking down a street he said that he has walked down for years without a problem.

“I walked over to Canada on a Saturday night around quarter to nine to get a pizza,” Buzz Roy explained. Roy lives and works in Derby Line. He walked down Church Street to the nearest pizza shop, which happens to be in Canada, and said that to his surprise he was stopped by state police and told that crossing on Church Street is illegal.

“Steam was coming out of my ears from the treatment by the state cop. I felt that he had been misinformed about my ability to enter the country on Church Street. I’ve done it my entire life many many many times,” said Roy.
[...]
He will fight the fine, but said that his story speaks to larger issues. “I firmly believe that to this day … they just make up rules from day to day.” [...] He said people are scared to come here. “They come up over the hill and they don’t realize they’re in the states until they see the American customs, and then they turn around and they get hollered at.”

Have these chuckleheads learned nothing from the past? Only the winners get to rewrite the history books. Plus, there are just too many people still around who actually lived through the past twenty years who know what really happened. Or are books and whatnot from these people meant to be fiction?

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.

Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.

But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.

Click pic for “America’s Prophet’s” website

Who could possibly guess that a psychic would be a fraud? Especially when he’s investing your life savings!

-The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a civil suit against “America’s Prophet” Sean David Morton, alleging he lied about using his psychic expertise in investing more than $6 million from investors.

Morton, of Hermosa Beach Calif., solicited individuals over nationally syndicated radio broadcasts, public appearances and newsletters to put money into Delphi Associates Investment Group. He claimed his psychic ability would be used to invest in foreign currencies, the SEC said in a suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In one newsletter, the SEC quoted Morton as writing “I called ALL the highs and lows of the market, giving EXACT DATES for rises and crashes over the last 14 years.”
[...]
The SEC charges Sean David Morton invested “only about half of the funds” with the foreign-currency trades he had promised the money would be put into. Further, the SEC said, the Mortons used at least $240,000 of the funds for their own nonprofit religious organization, PRI.

Morton, 51 years old and known as “America’s Prophet,” appears on a nationally syndicated radio show, “Coast to Coast AM,” with an audience of nearly 3 million listeners, the SEC said. He also publishes the monthly newsletter The Delphi Associates Newsletter, a paid, subscription-only newsletter that the SEC said has about 20,000 subscribers.

When Officer Adil Polanco dreamed of becoming a cop, it was out of a desire to help people not, he says, to harass them.

“I’m not going to keep arresting innocent people, I’m not going to keep searching people for no reason, I’m not going to keep writing people for no reason, I’m tired of this,” said Adil Polanco, an NYPD Officer.

Officer Polanco says One Police Plaza’s obsession with keeping crime stats down has gotten out of control. He claims Precinct Commanders relentlessly pressure cops on the street to make more arrests, and give out more summonses, all to show headquarters they have a tight grip on their neighborhoods.

“Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them?” said Officer Polanco.
[...]
This audio recording exclusively obtained by Eyewitness News seems to back up Officer Polanco’s assertion of a quota. You can listen to one officer as he lectures his rank and file officers during roll call at the 41st precinct.
[...]
Eyewitness News asked, “Are you telling me they’re stopping people for no reason, is that what you’re saying?”

“We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults. In order to keep the quota,” answered Officer Polanco.

Steve Palmer reminds us of this quote:

“This is legislation that puts our own Justice Department above the law. When National Security Letters are issued, they allow federal agents to conduct any search on any American, no matter how extensive or wide-ranging, without ever going before a judge to prove that the search is necessary.”

What we should learn from this story is that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans: their major goal is and has always been obtaining power and control over others.

“Smokers are never told that up to 75% of successful ex-smokers quit unaided,” said a public health expert, who reviewed hundreds of studies into quitting smoking and is now calling for more effective campaigns and policies worldwide.

Drug companies, tobacco control advocates and public health professionals are over-promoting nicotine replacement therapy and other smoking cessation drugs, according to Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie from the University of Sydney, Australia.

The pharmaceutical industry is influencing public health practice away from methods that are proven to help the majority of smokers to quit, they said in their review in the journal PLoS Medicine.

“For obvious reasons (a $1.7 billion market in 2006) the pharmaceutical industry is intent on pathologising a process that for decades saw millions of people quit unaided,” Chapman said.

A demonstration of a full-body scanner on German television last week revealed that the device, which uses infrared technology, was able to detect little more than a cellphone, a knife, and the girth of the man walking through it.

The problem? He was also packing a bomb.

“Admittedly, he only faced the scanner from the front and not from the side,” wrote computer security pro Bruce Schneier. “But he also didn’t hide anything in a body cavity other than his mouth — I didn’t think about that one — he didn’t use low density or thinly sliced PETN, and he didn’t hide anything in his carry-on luggage. Full-body scanners: they’re not just a dumb idea, they don’t actually work.”

Global Warming Fraud — This should be interesting.

Finally, efforts are being made by the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, to sue Al Gore and his cohorts for perpetrating “the greatest scam in history” — the fraud of global warming. Thirty thousand others, comprised of scientists and experts, are also willing to join in that lawsuit.

So how did this fraud all get started? It all started in Chicago shortly after Earth Day, April 17, 1995, when Al Gore went to Fall River, Mass., to give his green sermon speech. He was soon joined by Maurice Strong and Peter Knight, a registered lobbyist and Gore’s former top Senate aid.

It didn’t take long before the Chicago Climate Exchange was formed and “a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism” was formed. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs, and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman. The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange, also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiative. John is the brother of William Ayers who was one of the founders of the Weathermen.

Obama, at the time, was active in this scam and knew darn well what was going on, but three years later that did not stop him from funding these leaders in the man-made global warming movement. The first attempt to improve the environment was a grant of more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for research and development. That turned out to be a failure, so they were awarded another $8 million in federal taxpayer’s cash. That, too, was a failure. Present major funding is courtesy of Edward Rothschild’s World Bank.

Found by Mike Hutchins.

The last few weeks of political developments around the American-European financial system make us feel like we are back in the USSR. During the final years of communism’s decline, Soviet bureaucrats argued for futile tweaks to laws that would crack down on speculators and close “loopholes” – all in the vain hope they could keep the unproductive system of incentives intact. The US, UK and key European countries are now making the same errors. Rather than recognising the dangerous systemic failures in our financial system, their leaders are proposing bandages that can – at best – only postpone another, possibly much larger, meltdown.

There is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday cycle. Whenever it fails, we rely on lax money and fiscal policies to bail it out. This response teaches the financial sector a simple lesson: take large gambles to get paid handsomely, and don’t worry about the costs – they will be paid by taxpayers (through fiscal bail-outs), savers (through interest rates cut to zero), and many workers (through lost jobs). Our financial system is thus resurrected to gamble again – and to fail again. Such cycles have been manifest at least since the 1970s and they are getting larger. This danger has even been recognised at the Bank of England, where Andrew Haldane, responsible for financial stability, recently published an eloquent critique of what he calls our “doom loop”.

Slashdot – Jan. 16, 2010:

“Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players’ internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both failed a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified.”

It’s shocking enough that people are willing to spend $500 for a Blu-ray player, but $3500?! My $250 PS3 is more than good enough for me.