The head of an organization called 10 Amendments for Freedom says Congress has been looting federal and military retirement funds to help it pay down the deficit.  The money it owes to the federal workers’ retirement fund and military retirement fund is now over $1 trillion. So… they’re basically going to make postal workers go postal and piss off guys trained to kill. Good plan, fellas.

I love this quote from the story: “In the future, little kids in kindergarten and their children will have to repay these funds.”

Which makes it impossible for me not to think of this:

Credit Jesse Ventura for bringing this discussion back to the public arena.  His Dec. 2009 episode of “Conspiracy Theory” dealt with the events of Sept. 11, investigating such aspects as the miraculous disappearance of all four black boxes, and the fact that Building 7 collapsed without having been hit by a plane.  Probably the biggest revelation from the show was Ventura’s interview with one of the clean-up workers, Nicholas Demasi, who claimed to have personally seen at least one of the black boxes being recovered:

Now a group of architects and engineers is calling for another investigation of the towers’ collapses.

The truth will out.

This week CNN is running special programming as part of a series called “Broken Government,” which will “examine all branches of government and explore how much of the system may be broken beyond repair.”

“Broken government” is a very innocuous, vague way to characterize the current state of affairs in Washington.  Some might say it is a convenient way to avoid holding the current president accountable for a year’s worth of unkept promises, increased deficit spending and soaring unemployment.

But to hold the current president accountable would require holding the previous president accountable too.  The government is only broken to the extent that our elected officials will not do what we the people want them to do.

When he left office, 73 percent of Americans disapproved of the job President Bush was doing.  Today, 54 percent of Americans disapprove of the job President Obama is doing.

Why must this be the pattern of American politics?  When over half the country disapproves of a president’s performance, it can only mean some of the very people who voted him into office now regret doing so.

Democracy, as they say, is the worst form of government except for all the other ones.  It is a beautiful system in theory; so why doesn’t it play out in reality?  It is because the people have been marginalized.  We get angry over issues, we have riotous town hall meetings, yet nothing is done.

The recent phenomenon of the Tea Party is exactly what is needed to preserve democracy, and the recent selection of Ron Paul as the choice for Republican nominee for president in 2012 in a poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference is a sign that “those Ron Paul people” are not fringe-y crackpots- they’re normal Americans looking for someone to finally, at long last, keep his word.

Young people especially are going to be looking for someone to follow through on his promises after potentially four years of being burned by President Obama.  (Will Gitmo still be open in 2012? Will we still be in Iraq?) The Ron Paul Revolution should be the place disenfranchised, traditionally straight-ticket voters find a home two years from now.

My man Ron Paul came out on top of the presidential straw poll of the Conservative Political Action Conference.  Understandably the media is calling Paul being the top candidate “surprising”.  This is the same Ron Paul that calls for abolishing the Fed.  Not exactly mainstream stuff.

Ron Paul is credited by many for creating the Tea Party movement.  If that is the case, the Tea Party movement is not going anywhere.  To this point the GOP has mainly tried to distance itself from the the Tea Party movement- this is clear indication they must embrace it.

However,  Paul is a libertarian.  He says all the time Republicanism today is nothing like what it used to be. He wants to legalize marijuana. He has called for immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq for years, famously acquainting Rudy Guiliani with some facts in a 2008 presidential debate…

In other words, if Ron Paul is winning presidential straw polls, then everybody in Washington is out of touch with the people. The people are tired of greedy fatcats being bailed out, but they’re also tired of soaring health care costs and the Republicans who hold up reform simply to be disagreeable.

The two-party system is broken, or more accurately it was a stupid idea from the start. Democracy should be something more than having a “choice” between two blood relative, Skull & Bones, super-rich Harvard grads.  It should be grassroots like Obama’s support in 2008, only for real change, for once.

Palestinians dressed as Na’vi.

Why so blue, Palestine?

It’s official: the United States will default.  In a year’s time, our debt will be $3.5 trillion.  Porter Stansberry says, according to a formula created by Alan Greenspan and some other guy:

“If you can’t pay off all of your foreign debts in the next 12 months, you’re a terrible credit risk. Speculators are going to target your bonds and your currency, making it impossible to refinance your debts. A default is assured. So how does America rank on the Greenspan-Guidotti scale? It’s a guaranteed default.”

Even if we pooled the entire savings of every American we would only come up with $600 billion.  Add to that the US gold, oil and foreign currency reserves totaling about $500 billion, and we’re still not even halfway there.

So what will the government do? Fire up the presses to the tune of $2 trillion. This will steadily devalue the dollar until foreign investors decide the dollar isn’t coming back. Then it will be a mad dash to unload the dollar before everybody else, while it still has some value.

On an episode of The Sopranos, one guy knew another guy was going to get whacked so he borrowed money from him. Maybe I should borrow some money…

After the Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that states were free to establish their own privileges for journalists under the First Amendment, Maryland was the first to do so.  However, the statute protects only a person “who is, or has been, employed by the news media in an news gathering or news disseminating capacity.”1 Now a proposed bill before the Maryland House of Representatives would extend shield law protection to college journalists.

According to a recent article posted on the Student Law Press Center website, the issue has arisen in connection with the Innocence Project, whose website defines the group as an organization begun in 1992 to utilize DNA testing and criminal justice system reform to help exonerate wrongfully-convicted people.  The Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois has its own version of the Innocence Project in which students use investigative journalism to look for evidence of wrongful convictions.

David Protess, the professor who runs the program at Medill, was subpoenaed last year in connection with a murder case.  The subpoena requested, among other documents, all the notes, emails, syllabi and student grades for the class.

The creator of the bill hopes other states will follow Maryland’s example in giving college journalists the same protections as professional journalists.

Hopefully Texas will do just that.  Last year Gov. Perry signed off on the Free Flow of Information Act, which gives journalists a qualified privilege, meaning they can protect sources but they may be required to reveal information in certain cases, such as felony trials or trials involving death.

However, the Texas FFIA defines a “journalist” as a person who gathers or dispels information “for substantial financial gain.”  Unpaid college journalists obviously would not fall under this category.

But neither do bloggers.  The line between the three groups, the pros, the students and the bloggers is becoming increasingly less clear.  Many professional journalists are also in fact now bloggers.  If a college student should happen to get one lone article printed in a major newspaper, which paycheck wouldn’t qualify as “substantial financial gain”, should that student still not have the same protection as the author of a column that might appear right alongside his own?

It is unfortunate that in the language of the bill as it was originally filed in the Texas House, the definition of “journalist” did include people who are or were “employed by an institution of higher education.”  Had that version of the bill passed, Gov. Perry would have been leading the pack in the movement to protect freedom of the press.  To amend the bill now would simply be following the leader.  Nevertheless, it is a move that the Texas legislature should make to truly keep the flow of information free.

1.  Student Press Law Center. http://www.splc.org/legalresearch.asp?id=57. 2003.