AUSTIN — Texas taxpayers will pay the legal defense fees for Gov. Rick Perry, who is under criminal investigation for allegedly illegally withholding state money from the Travis County District Attorney’s office.
KVUE News and the Austin American-Statesman reported Sunday that Perry had hired well-known Austin lawyer David Botsford to represent him. The hiring came as a grand jury was about to begin reviewing Perry’s actions. Continue reading “Texas taxpayers to pay Perry’s legal fees”
Poland’s defense minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, announced Friday that U.S. soldiers will be deployed to the Eastern European country as part of a NATO expansion plan in response to Russia’s involvement in the crisis in Ukraine.
A powerful magnitude 7.2 earthquake has struck Mexico’s capital and Pacific coast, shaking buildings, shattering windows and sending residents fleeing into the streets.
There were no immediate reports of major damage or injuries.
Today I bottled my first batch of Kombucha tea! I want to write down this process so in 15 days when those bottles have finished fermenting I can see if they taste good or not and if they do not I can change what I did and if they taste wonderful I can keep on doing it the same way!
First a friend of mine brought me over a SCOBY (or a Kombucha Colony), she has been making her own Kombucha Tea since 2008. Her SCOBY was very thick so she peeled it apart and poured enough tea in it (starter tea) to cover it and then drove it to my house!!! Continue reading “Home Made Kombucha Tea”
“Since 9/11, the feds have issued a plethora of homeland-security grants that encourage local police departments to buy surplus military hardware and form their own SWAT units.
By 2005, at least 80 percent of towns with a population between 25,000 and 50,000 people had their own SWAT team. The number of raids conducted by local police SWAT teams has gone from 3,000 a year in the 1980s to over 50,000 a year today.” Continue reading “Stats To Prove Government Terrorism”
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — An avalanche swept down a climbing route on Mount Everest early Friday, killing at least 12 Nepalese guides and leaving four missing in the deadliest disaster on the world’s highest peak. Several more were injured.
The Sherpa guides had gone to fix ropes for other climbers when the avalanche struck an area known as the “popcorn field” for its bulging chunks of ice at about 6:30 a.m., Nepal Tourism Ministry official Krishna Lamsal said from the base camp, where he was monitoring rescue efforts. Continue reading “Avalanche sweeps down Everest, killing at least 12”
MOKPO, South Korea (AP) — The investigation into South Korea’s ferry disaster focused on the sharp turn it took just before it began listing and on the possibility that a quicker evacuation order by the captain could have saved lives, officials said Friday, as rescuers struggled to find some 270 people still missing and feared dead.
Police said a high school vice principal who had been rescued from the ferry was found hanging Friday from a pine tree on Jindo, an island near the sunken ship where survivors have been housed. He was the leader of a group of 323 students traveling on the ship on a school excursion, and said in a suicide note that he felt guilty for being alive while more than 200 of his students were missing. Continue reading “Doomed ferry’s sharp turn, slow evacuation probed”
Libertarian ideology favors privatization. However, in practice privatization is usually very different in result than libertarian ideology postulates. Almost always, privatization becomes a way for well-connected private interests to loot both the public purse and the general welfare.
Most privatizations, such as those that have occurred in France and UK during the neoliberal era, and in Greece today and Ukraine tomorrow, are lootings of public assets by politically-connected private interests. Continue reading “Privatization: Looting the public purse”
Regardless of how people feel about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over his cattle’s grazing rights, a lot of Americans were surprised to see TV images of an armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary wing of the BLM deployed around Bundy’s ranch.
They shouldn’t have been. Dozens of federal agencies now have Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams to further an expanding definition of their missions. It’s not controversial that the Secret Service and the Bureau of Prisons have them. But what about the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? All of these have their own SWAT units and are part of a worrying trend towards the militarization of federal agencies — not to mention local police forces. Continue reading “The United States of SWAT?”
Nine individuals who regularly posted comments on the white supremacist forum Stormfront were found guilty of murdering almost 100 people over the past half-decade, according to a report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For those of you out there that thought there was any truth to Obama opposing Putin in Russia, you might want to rethink that and fast. He’s proving just how flexible he really is these days. There is a fight within the Administration, with one side supporting surveillance flights from Russia over American soil and the other opposing it. One guess which side Obama is on. Continue reading “Spying The Open Skies Of America”
The United States Postal Service is looking to get in on the big-data-for-profit game played by tech giants like Facebook and Google, and begin mining and selling private data gathered from personal mail sent from and received by Americans everywhere.
I told Scott H. Greenfield at Simple Justice that I would answer the question posed in the title. And so I shall.
The following is not intended as an excuse. Indeed, it may be viewed as an indictment. With the foregoing keenly in mind, and in no particular order, here are some of my thoughts on why I have tended to believe cops most of the time. Continue reading “Why does Judge Kopf believe cops most of the time?”