Weblog

Ann Arbor may have a serial rapist on the loose (annarbor.com)
Five recent assaults including two rapes have people scared, angry and frustrated.

Amy Winehouse is dead at 27 (Daily Mail)
I am gonna miss her.

TSA worker stole watches, debit card from LAX bags (LA Times)
There's a story like this about every week from some airport about  a TSA employee/s effing up or stealing.

How multinational corporations weasel out of taxes they owe (iSteve)
For tax purposes Microsoft is a manufacturing enterprise located in Puerto Rico.

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Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in Cuba for pelvic abscess treatment (Yahoo News/AP)
That's what they're telling us anyhow.

Hackers who got web security jobs as a result of their hacks, crimes and pranks  (PC Magazine)
So crime can pay.

TSA Agents claim they're getting cancer from the scanning machines (Mike Adams, Natural News.com)
Didn't the government assure us that those machines were safe?

Field & Stream editors pick the top 25 AR-style rifles (slide show w/comments)
The Armalite AR-10 and the Remington R-25 look pretty nice.

Ex-Ann Arbor city council member Leslie Morris and her husband donate $50k for local park (Mary Morgan, Ann Arbor Chronicle)
Putting their money where they live. I used to live across the street from that park.

Italian-owed Chrysler  can't block sale of "Imported From Detroit" t-shirts and swag as a copyright infringement (Brent Snavely, Detroit Free Press)

The Ypsitucky Rustbelt Revival!: Black Jake & the Carnies (Detroit Metro-Times)
" 'Nothing brings a band together like a crusade though, and the Carnies found theirs when the Ypsilanti city workers refused to grant permits to a festival bearing the name "Ypsitucky," deeming it to be offensive.' People from Ann Arbor call us Ypsitucky when they want to call us stupid,' Miller says. 'But people from Kentucky are like, what's so offensive about 'tucky'? There are a lot of people that came to the town a long time ago from Kentucky with the auto plants, and way back in the day they were looked down upon by everybody else in town. A lot of the young people have embraced it as a hip label for Ypsilanti, but the old people think it's offensive. So the city put the screws to the festival and said that it couldn't be in the park with that name. They had to cave and now it's called the Michigan Roots Jamboree."

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Glen Greenwald's hit-piece on a hit-piece in The Nation.
It has bothered me for a while that American progressives and their fellow travellers in Left-wing  America have completely abandoned the championing of liberty, privacy and autonomy. Unless of course it is for the sexually deviant or regarding abortion rights. On every other issue the progs want more government, less privacy, oppose self-determination and genuine little "d" participatory democracy.
 The Nation seems to think that that because I don't want TSA guards squeezing my or my family's gonads that I'm part of some vast Right-wing conspiracy funded by the Koch brothers. Mark Ames and Sasha Levine should've stayed in Russia. You'd think being censored and then booted from Russia for being critical of Putin and his ilk would have taught then a little more respect for civil liberties, the rule of law and some appreciation for personal liberty. Sadly, it seems that it didn't.

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Toronto election illustrates the problems of a megalopolis concocted by elites.
"Clearly this result shows that the concerns expressed by the opponents of amalgamation were largely valid. Amalgamation failed to create cost savings, and has created a dysfunctional megacity. Rather than having six municipalities where voters are focusing on solving local problems, we have one gigantic city with the core and the suburbs fighting for their share of the public purse. This leads to the schizophrenic policy decisions we see today." 

An analysis of the "pass-over syndrome" gripping self-hating white elites
"If a large-scale Day of Racial Reckoning ever comes, Passover Syndrome sufferers will find that when it comes to hating whites, nonwhites truly don’t discriminate. Rather than the sweet scent of compassion, those with the disorder emit the rancid smell of fear. If a real race war were ever to pop off in America, they’d be the first to perish.
The only mystery is which side would kill them first."

Somali-born naturalized American citizen arrested in car bomb plot in Portland.

Serbian-born California man arrested for running an explosives factory in his suburban LA home.

Annals of Democracy, cont'd.

The Tea Party and the TSA  - R.B. Fox blogging @ Front Porch Republic.com/

"Yes, I think it’d be wonderful to see the Tea Party movement turn on the TSA, perhaps if the organization’s latest actions can be painted as 'unconstitutional' somehow. Let’s try to make sure that Glen Beck has to fly on a commercial airline sometime in the near future, and see what he thinks of it all.

Indeed. And Limbaugh, John Boehner, Harry Reid, VP Biden and all the rest of the federal big-shots too. Then and only then can we expect sanity be restored to the field of aviation security. As long as it's only the peons that have to contend with the TSA things will stay as they are. I myself haven't flown since 2001.

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Four pistols belonging to bodyguards of Israeli PM disappear from JFK Airport - NYPOST.com

And so it goes. The shin bet officers should have just carried them on their persons. Now there are four Glock 17 handguns out there somewhere. Stupid.

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TSA airport screener whose small penis size was noted by his co-workers when he was accidentally scanned, beats the shit out of annoying co-worker who teased him about it with a steel baton - Miami Herald

Federal court official seeks to correct prosecutors' claims in Hutaree case - Detroit News

"Chief Pretrial Services Officer Alan Murray said in a court filing.
'Contrary to Mr. Waterstreet's belief, the court-ordered "home detention" does not allow unmonitored release the entire day,' Murray said in the affidavit. 'The Global Positioning Satellites System allows a defendant to be monitored, at all times.' "

While I think as the story implies that the Hutaree defendants will be convicted or plead-out to some NFA offenses of a technical nature (i.e., having illegally short barreled rifles and shotguns) they'll walk on the most serious and dramatic charges (e.g., sedition, terrorism, WMD, possession of explosives, conspiracy to murder) despite USDA Waterstreet's attempts to inflame and prejudice the public who are all potential jurors.