Fox News co-owner funded ‘Ground Zero mosque’ imam: report
The second largest shareholder in News Corp. — the parent company of Fox News — has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to causes linked to the imam planning to build a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, says a report from Yahoo!News.
According to the report from Yahoo!’s John Cook, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who owns seven percent of News Corp., “has directly funded [Imam Feisal Abdul] Rauf’s projects to the tune of more than $300,000.”
Cook reports that Prince Al-Waleed’s personal charity, the Kingdom Foundation, donated $305,000 to Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow, a project sponsored by two of Rauf’s initiatives, the American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative, which is building the Manhattan mosque.
The “Ground Zero Mosque”
I have tried to remain quiet on this issue in the hope that common sense would prevail. However, since it seems that what is a very simple matter is being hijacked for political expediency, I can no longer in good conscience remain silent.
As a Libertarian, the ground zero mosque issue is not really an issue. The Constitution protects the religious rights of all religions and the right not to believe. The Constitution also protects the rights of organizations and individuals to own and administer legally owned property. The laws regarding the regulation and enforcement of zoning, something I often don’t agree with, have permitted the use of this building by the organization wanting to build a center there. Everything else is irrelevant.
Hysteria about the mythical ground zero mosque
This week the conservative echo chamber is buzzing with righteous outrage over the fact that Muslims are building a “mosque” at ground zero. This is an insult to those died on that fateful day. How dare they! Palin called on Muslims to “refudiate” the building of it. Newt Gingrich, Rick Lazio and even the Anti-Defamation League have condemned it. Emails are flying and the blogosphere is lit up like a Christmas tree in Times Square. It’s even been implied that Muslims are trying to impose Shariah law on innocent Americans.
Senate Bill S510 Makes it illegal to Grow, Share, Trade or Sell Homegrown Food
S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money.
“If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.” ~Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower
Richard Foster for President – Medicare’s chief actuary vs. President Obama on the ObamaCare facts.
There probably isn’t a worse job in Washington than Medicare trustee, unpaid Capitol Hill interns included. Every year the trustees issue the gravest warnings about entitlement spending and at best prompt a moment of brow-furrowing before the political class returns to its default state of indifference.
This year’s report, issued last week, has more than the usual political meaning because Democrats are hailing it as validation of their claims that ObamaCare will save taxpayers money. The trustee report shows “how the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce costs and make Medicare stronger,” the White House said in a statement.
Breaking a Promise on Surveillance
It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone’s e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a judge for permission.
It is far more than a technical change. The administration’s request, reported Thursday in The Washington Post, is an unnecessary and disappointing step backward toward more intrusive surveillance from a president who promised something very different during the 2008 campaign.
Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
White House pushes for warrantless access to Internet records
Attorney speculates data could include Facebook friend requests
The White House has asked Congress to make it possible for the FBI to demand that Internet service providers turn over customers’ records in cases involving terrorism or other intelligence issues without first obtaining a court order.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act currently states that companies are required to provide basic subscriber data to the FBI, but lists only the four kinds of information that might be found on phone bills — customer’s name, address, length of service, and toll billing records.
In 2008, the Justice Department ruled that those four categories were “exhaustive,” making some companies reluctant to provide any additional information. The proposed amendment would add the phrase “electronic communication transactional records” to the list in order to include the recipients of emails and when they were sent and received — though not their content. It might also cover web browsing history.
Technocrats may set off a rebellion
When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.
During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.
Nalliah Thayabharan: 
Edward G. Nilges: 
