Laura Logan - What A Reporter Really Thinks About Benghazi and Afghanistan

CBS reporter Laura Logan has been suspended for a mistake in reporting on Benghazi lately.  It appears she and her producer did get this detail wrong.   http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/60-minutes-correspondent-lara-logan-producer-suspended-over-benghazi-story/article15625938/

Is suspension the right punishment, or should the retraction be enough?  And then get on with finding the straight story.  See retraction story here:  http://voices.suntimes.com/arts-entertainment/the-daily-sizzle/60-minutes-admits-it-messed-up-in-recent-benghazi-report/

Watch this speech by Logan in Chicago this year to the BGA (Better Government Association) and then decide if she should be silenced or not.  Or should her fervent interest in her stories (like Afghanistan) be used by her bosses as the driving force to produce the truth about the world?

Speech to BGA:  http://voices.suntimes.com/arts-entertainment/the-daily-sizzle/chicago-speech-helped-land-60-minutes-correspondent-lara-logan-in-hot-water-with-cbs/

The last two minutes are especially provoking.  

And, will this Administration ever come clean and admit how badly it fucked up in Benghazi?

Washington, DC -Still Treating Gun Owners Like Criminals

Treating gun owners like criminals

By Emily Miller, Washington Times (DC) November 22, 2013 6:50 am

The 1,800 or so criminals who have killed, robbed or assaulted innocent people in the District of Columbia so far this year were hauled into the police station to be fingerprinted, photographed and forced to undergo a criminal-background check. Now legal gun owners who have committed no crime are getting the exact same treatment. It's not fair.
The latest gun-control scheme that starts on Jan. 1 will force every legal firearm owner in the nation's capital to go in person to police headquarter to renew their registration certificates.
The Metropolitan Police Department filed proposed rules last week, and citizens have until Dec. 15 for comment. To avoid becoming a felon, anyone with a gun registered before 2011 will have to go to police headquarters to be fingerprinted, photographed, provide proof of address, pay a fee and confirm they may still legally possess the firearm. The Firearms Registration Section will then create a new registration certificate - now in the form of an ID card - for each gun.
This operation could end up making the rollout of Obamacare look smooth and easy. The police propose scheduling everyone in three- month windows based on their birthday. The eight windows start on Jan. 1 and go through 2015. They intend to set up an online system to make an appointment.
The department is trying to set up a system to accept credit cards for the $13-per-gun fee, but that has not been finalized. George Lyon, who was a plaintiff in the original Heller case, pointed out that it will cost him $104 to re-register his eight guns. "I don't see that they need a re-registration system at all," the Washington lawyer told me. "But if they do, this whole thing ought really to be done online, automated and without adding more fees."
The registration-renewal requirement is already being challenged in court. Heller v. District of Columbia - commonly known as "Heller II" - takes on the entire registration law that was enacted in 2009 after the Supreme Court overturned the District's 30-year-old handgun ban in the original Heller decision.
Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff, told me of the requirement, "What's the point? Will that make the bad guys come down and register? Nope, just the law-abiding."
Heller II is pending in federal district court with each side filing motions for summary judgment this month and next. "Re- registration is onerous and completely unnecessary and is a trap for the unwary," said Stephen P. Halbrook, the lead attorney for Heller II. "Fail to re-register for whatever reason, and you're committing a crime - possession of an unregistered firearm. This is plain harassment for exercise of a constitutional right."
The renewal process was supposed to be done online and by mail and start in 2012, but the police were not able to create a system to do it in time. Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier testified before the D.C. Council's Judiciary Committee in January 2012 against keeping the three-year limit on certificates because her department did not have the resources, and so it "may cost more than the potential benefit." City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson refused to let it drop, but passed a law to give D.C. police a two- year extension. In an interview late Wednesday, Mr. Mendelson said that, "The reason for renewals is to make sure people don't become disqualified to own a firearm."
The whole convoluted scheme will not do a single thing to make the city safer. Fingerprints don't change. The only reason for forcing a resident register all over again is the police didn't use a system that was able to retain the fingerprints until March of this year.
It is unnecessary to prove your home address or ownership because the law already dictates that a gun owner must notify the registry office with a change of address or gun sale, so the registration does not change otherwise.
Most importantly, the police can easily check if a registrant is still legally able to possess a gun by running his name and Social Security number through the FBI's background-check system.
A police spokesman estimates there are approximately 30,000 firearms registered to private citizens in D.C. This number is remarkably low for a city of 600,000 because most law-abiding people won't go through the 11 steps necessary to register. As Mr. Heller pointed out, the criminals aren't showing up at police headquarters to offer up their fingerprints or take a written test before buying guns.
Gun registration is a clear violation of the Founding Fathers' intent that the Second Amendment would prevent government tyranny. Once the government knows about every single gun owned by each citizen, then an armed populace is no longer a deterrent.
---
Emily Miller is a senior editor of opinion for The Washington Times and author of "Emily Gets Her Gun" (Regnery, 2013).

More People Want Guns than Obamacare

Another good data bit from Bob Livingston's Personal Liberty Digest:  
Original link:  bar-graph-people-want-guns-a-lot-more-than-they-want-obamacare/

---------------
Three takeaways here: One – the Federal government can build a complex networked database that handles high volumes if it wants to; Two – Healthcare.gov isn’t experiencing high volumes of traffic by any applicable standard; and Three – people are a hell of a lot more interested in buying guns than they are in buying Obamacare.

The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check (NICS) system processed 1.68 million applications for background checks for would-be gun buyers throughout the Nation in October. During the same month, Healthcare.gov managed to enroll 49,100 people in Obamacare.
Here’s how that looks in a bar graph (H/T: ZeroHedge):

Is NSA Spying Making You Self-Censor Your Writing?

Do you find yourself limiting your speech?  Come to think of it, I do.  I limit Facebook posts to mostly bland stuff.  I don't talk about several issues that the current government deems unacceptable, by their standards.  What do you not do anymore?

See full article at link below.  This article is repeated from Bob Livingston's Personal Liberty Digest. 

NSA Spying Has Led Writers To Self-Censor

November 12, 2013 by Sam Rolley 

A new survey conducted by a leading literary organization finds that the recent revelations of pervasive spying on American citizens have had a chilling effect on the intellectual freedom, creativity and social discourse of American writers.

The PEN American Center, a nonprofit literary group, partnered with the FDR Group to produce the report titled “Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor,” which notes that 85 percent of writers expressed worries about the government’s ongoing surveillance of American citizens. Seventy-three percent of respondents said that they “have never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today.”

The report also notes:

–28% have curtailed or avoided social media activities, and another 12% have seriously considered doing so;
–24% have deliberately avoided certain topics in phone or email conversations, and another 9% have seriously considered it;
–16% have avoided writing or speaking about a particular topic, and another 11% have seriously considered it;
–16% have refrained from conducting Internet searches or visiting websites on topics that may be considered controversial or suspicious, and another 12% have seriously considered it;
–13% have taken extra steps to disguise or cover their digital footprints, and another 11% have seriously considered it;
–3% have declined opportunities to meet (in person, or electronically) people who might be deemed security threats by the government, and another 4% have seriously considered it.

Writer comments on the matter included statements like: “I assume everything I do electronically is subject to monitoring.”

And: “I feel that increased government surveillance has had a chilling effect on my research, most of which I do on the Internet. This includes research on issues such as the drug wars and mass incarceration, which people don’t think about as much as they think about foreign terrorism, but is just as pertinent.”

A similar chilling of creative expression and research by U.S. writers and journalists occurred after the passage of the  2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which included provisions allowing the Federal government to detain indefinitely any citizen suspected of aiding foreign terrorist organizations. The Act sparked a lawsuit by activists and reporters — including such notable names as Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf and Daniel Ellsberg — who claimed a section of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Barack Obama in December, could give the Federal government legal powers to detain any dissident voices.

Corporate Taxes Actually Paid

Here's some info from Forbes Magazine from 2010.  www.forbes.com

Some friends were denigrating corporations again, so I chimed in with some facts as I know them: Average taxes paid by most corporations is about 35%. It is not $83 billion per year that the FED is injecting into the economy, it is $83 billion per month. Food stamp program went from 27 million people subsidized to 47 million in only 5 years and the cost doubled too.

If you don't like that the FED keeps printing money each month, then call the White House, where this plan originates. Get your budgets in order - inflation is coming.

I googled "what companies paid in taxes" as suggested and got the following links.  

Here is some perspective on GE's taxes. They just follow the rules made by Congress: ge-exxon-walmart-apple-corporate-taxes

For all the outcry over GE, a number of corporate titans are paying much higher rates than the average citizen.  Top 20: Many pay more that 35%. ge-exxon-walmart-apple-corporate-taxes_slide

My bet is that the majority of large and small US companies pay close to 30%. Also note how the top three (ExxonMobil, Conoco, Chevron) are the supposedly evil oil companies. Also note how much these companies pay to other countries. These top 20 form a significant part of the about $700 billion of total corporate income tax.

Obamacare Poop

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said about Obamacare:

“We have to pass it, to find out what’s in  it”

A physician called into a radio show and said:

"That's the definition of a stool sample".

That pretty well sums it up.