there is NO SUCH THING as racial profiling by police in Los Angeles..

WHEW!… thats a relief!

PREFACE: hold in your mind an image of what ‘our fine sons’ do to Iraqi women and girls as you read these accounts of the treatment of their ’sisters in uniform’…….

‘The Department of Defense statistics are alarming — one in three women who join the US military will be sexually assaulted or raped by men in the military. The warnings to women should begin above the doors of the military recruiting stations, as that is where assaults on women in the military begins — before they are even recruited.

(perhaps its those sexy GI unitards?)

But, now, even more alarming, are deaths of women soldiers in Iraq, and in the United States, following rape. The military has characterized each of the deaths of women who were first sexually assaulted as deaths from “non-combat related injuries,” and then added “suicide.” Yet, the families of the women whom the military has declared to have committed suicide, strongly dispute the findings and are calling for further investigations into the deaths of their daughters. Specific US Army units and certain US military bases in Iraq have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of “non-combat related injuries,” with several identified as “suicides.”

94 US military women in the military have died in Iraq or during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). 12 US Civilian women have been killed in OIF. 13 US military women have been killed in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). 12 US Civilian women have been killed in Afghanistan.

Of the 94 US military women who died in Iraq or in OIF, the military says 36 died from non-combat related injuries, which included vehicle accidents, illness, death by “natural causes,” and self-inflicted gunshot wounds, or suicide. The military has declared the deaths of the Navy women in Bahrain that were killed by a third sailor, as homicides. 5 deaths have been labeled as suicides, but 15 more deaths occurred under extremely suspicious circumstances.

8 women soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas (six from the Fourth Infantry Division and two from the 1st Armored Cavalry Division) have died of “non-combat related injuries” on the same base, Camp Taji, and three were raped before their deaths. Two were raped immediately before their deaths and another raped prior to arriving in Iraq. Two military women have died of suspicious “non-combat related injuries” on Balad base, and one was raped before she died. Four deaths have been classified as “suicides.”

READ MORE

CONSUME

I am Oitancan Zephier, a former police officer of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, combat veteran of Afghanistan and a father.
Last week I quit my job when the protests started over the building of a hog farm by a corporation on private land surrounded by tribal lands.
I quit because the Bureau of Indian Affairs will not help us.
They stand and watch us get tossed in jail.
The filth of the pigs will effect every part of our Indian people here.

There is a Head Start school 2 miles away from the hog farm. There is a kindergarten through 12th grade school 4 miles away.
There is a daycare a couple miles away from the site. It is a prejudical act granted by the state of South Dakota to these pig farm owners.
We need your help.
If this is completed, they will assume jurisdiction of all that surrounds them.
The already began taking our tribal road, which we have intensely fought for 2 weeks now.

I have been thrown in jail while on our indian land by a state officer. That is wrong! I am begging you for your help.
If you can, please publish the cry for help below in any way you can.

Contact me if you can help; or please forward this on to anyone who can help us.

People! We need your help! Come to Marty, South Dakota now! Help us fight the Longview Farms Hogfarm and the State of South Dakota.

We need the help of every nation that is willing to help us! Don’t wait for an invitation. Please! Come help us now!

We’re too busy with things here to think of everyone that can help us. We have our hands full with whats in front of us.

Call us. Make suggestions. Give us advice! Whatever it is, help us! We need bodies.

We need people! people! people!

We need people willing to fight! We need people willing to go to jail by a state officer on indian land!

Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?

I went to jail while standing on a tribal highway by a South Dakota state deputy, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs watched.

That’s what is happening! It is wrong! We need money for bail. Many more of our indian people will be going to jail.

If we don’t fight this, Indian people will continue to lose land. Next time it will be your people.

Remember when a cry for help came out what “reason” or “excuse” you gave.

You’ll get it right back when you need help. The system keeps us locked in place. It keeps us working, paying bills and plugged into society.

In that mindset we’re all robots programmed to do what the government wants us to do pay taxes! Give them money!

“I gotta feed my family,” you’re thinking.

I know it. I was too but overcame it. Tunkasina (the grandfather) knows that our fight is right and honorable. Better things will follow for us.

This is really not about a hog farm! This is about the racist state of south dakota moving in the middle of Indian country and saying,

“This is our road!”

Tomorrow it will be “this is our land!”

We need to fight! We need your help!

Oi Zephier
Ihanktonwan Dakota
Yankton Sioux Tribe
Marty, SD 57361
mail to:Zephiero@hotmail.com
(605) 454-8355 (Cell)

…of war criminals and traitors..swinging limp at the end of a rope.

im dreaming of firing squads for dick cheney..antonin scalia..karl rove et. al.
…of rotting corpses left in the open to remind us of crimes grievous and foul.
i dream of people like pat robertson judged by his own Old Testament G-D..
and….

…..then i awake.

WAIT!..dont we execute drug-addled ANARCHISTS in the good ‘ole USA?

(if a 16 year old in Denver had made statements like these..his grandmothers body would be being exhumed by Homeland Security looking for “anarchist literature”…WTF? Operation Chaos?)

take your pill..its OK.

In 1995, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Republican strategist Grover Norquist launched the “K Street Project.” (i) Named for the Capital Hill street housing many lobbying firms, the Project gave lobbyists direct access to Washington lawmakers through weekly policy and strategy meetings.

The most infamous K Street lobbyist was Jack Abramoff, who worked for the firm Greenberg Traurig. Abramoff, now in prison, took money from his American Indian tribe clients, and laundered it to Congressional Representatives in return for legislative and policy favors aligned with the Project’s political agenda.

But this was not just any money laundering enterprise. Abramoff’s dry cleaner was converting money to election fraud.

In 2002, the New Hampshire GOP received three $5,000 checks, just in time to pay $15,600 to a telemarketing company that jammed the phone lines of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote campaign in the morning hours of the election.

The three $5,000 checks? One each from two separate Abramoff tribal clients and the third from K Street loyalist Tom DeLay’s ARMPAC.(ii)

The phone jamming trick, contributing to GOP Senator Sununu’s narrow win, shows the magical rabbits that can pop out of a hat when Capital Hill lobbyists focus their attention on elections.

In its heyday, the K Street Project held election “reform” dead center in its crosshairs.

Project activities like New Hampshire’s phone jamming, Ohio’s “Coingate” and Tom Delay’s Texas “PAC-gate”, spun lobbyist money into election fraud gold. K Street masterfully laundered funds to influence election campaigns, policies, and processes around the nation. The Project functioned as one big money-laundering-for-election-fraud apparatus.

K Street’s most influential project was the 2002 sweeping election reform known as the “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA), whose architect, former Congressman Bob Ney, is also now in federal prison. (iii) HAVA was brilliantly subversive, spinning money into a sparkling, rich, complex and intricate golden gateway to perpetual election fraud.

HAVA’s most benign outcome was to feed billions of dollars to an unsavory e-voting industry, including Greenberg Traurig’s client, Diebold Election Systems.(iv) Its most insidious and dangerous outcome was the creation of the myth of verified voting and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a White House agency with unprecedented power over the nation’s elections.

Election 2000 – Election Reform 2002

In the aftermath of Election 2000, the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision(v) dealt one terrible blow after another to our nation’s democracy. The subversion of the democratic process that began with this decision continued with HAVA and its agency of perpetual subversion: the EAC.(vi)

In 2002, the K Street-influenced Congress passed HAVA with great theatrical fanfare. The American people, still reeling from Election 2000, received it with a wholesale willingness to suspend disbelief.

But when the smoke had cleared, a closer look revealed that HAVA had codified, rather than fixed, Election 2000’s largely unreported but most egregious trespasses of democracy (vii):

1. Electronic voter registration databases: In Florida 2000, up to 94,000 eligible
   voters – all identified as “Democratic-leaning”- were unjustifiably purged
   from electronic voter databases and not allowed to vote.
2. Electronic voting machines: Florida 2000’s electronic voting equipment mistabulated
   countless votes. In Volusia County alone, computers tabulated
   for Candidate Al Gore negative 16,022 votes.
3. Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: Florida
   2000’s vote count was stopped by the Supreme Court, effectively deciding
   the election for us.

HAVA alchemy transformed these three root causes of the Election 2000 catastrophe
into the law of the land:

1. Electronic voter registration databases: HAVA required every state in the nation
   to implement electronic voter registration databases.
2. Electronic voting machines: HAVA mandated accessible voting equipment, specifically
   recommending and funding computerized touch screen machines.
3. Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: HAVA
   created the Election Assistance Commission, four presidential appointees
   with broad and ever-expanding powers over the nation’s election systems.

Post-HAVA elections have delivered one disaster after another - from e-voting
crashes, unequal distribution of expensive computerized equipment, registration
database complications and abuse (viii),
electoral lawsuits, and the multi-billion dollar e-voting industry’s coups over the nation’s democratic election processes (ix).

Outsourced Elections and Secret Vote Counting

The Election 2000 media message was filled with butterfly ballots, pregnant chads (x), and video clips of Florida election officials staring at computer punch cards struggling to discern the “intent” of the voter.(xi)

In 2002, HAVA’s message was that paper ballots caused chaos in Florida, but HAVA would take care of that, distributing nearly $3 billion to the states to buy electronic vote registration databases and paperless touch screen voting machines.

The number of American votes counted by computers went from 71.5% in 2000, to
84% in 2004, and 86% in 2006.(xii)

This was a cataclysmic change for election systems, and six years later, election officials continue to struggle with the transformation of familiar and manageable low-tech elections to the complex high-tech theatre wrought by HAVA.

The destabilizing effect on America’s mechanism of democracy has been substantial. Techno-elections have caused shortages of poll workers, who, with an average age of 72 years, are averse to the complexities of e-voting(xiii). America’s elections are now plagued by general confusion and the inability of our public officials to independently administer our elections without corporate support services. Corporate employees now appear at our elections to assist poll workers in using their equipment, administer “fixes” for equipment malfunctions, and to hold vote data and election results in their black box secret vaults away from public scrutiny.

Each election cycle county and municipal coffers are emptied to meet the newly enriched and empowered e-voting industry’s ever-increasing demands for programming, maintenance, upgrades and training.(xiv)

What is going on here? A Republican House attorney, involved in the original drafting of HAVA, once remarked to me, “They are trying to complexify our elections to the point where citizens have no idea what is going on.”

This is more than just a story of greedy corporations.

The Swiftboating of Paper Ballots and the Launch of Verifiable Voting

The truth behind the corporate media’s 2000 “hanging chad” story is that Florida’s much maligned “paper ballots” were really just the paper component (the computer punch cards and computer-scannable paper) of a failed computerized voting system, poorly designed and in some cases delivered on intentionally defective paper(xv).

Real paper ballots are pieces of paper with candidate names printed on them in legible human-readable letters, on which voters simply mark an “X” by the name of their candidate of choice. Real paper ballots counted by real human beings have no hanging chads obscuring voter intent.

Unlike real paper ballots, the ballots in Florida 2000, designed for computers to read, were confusing to human voters. Additionally, they were intentionally produced on defective paper to conflict with the computer operations.

But the nation remained distracted by hanging chads, and congressional magicians pulled HAVA’s multibillion dollar e-voting coups out of their hats. Voila. America’s elections were transformed in the blink of an eye.

From “Right to Vote” to “Opportunity to Verify a Voting Machine”

Technology-based elections are the keystone of HAVA. Through HAVA, K Street money modified elections for technology rather than voter needs. This continues to this day in nearly every proposal for post-HAVA federal election reform.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the now normative vocabulary of election reform: “verifiable voting.”

HAVA states that a voting system must “permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted.”(xvi)

HAVA’s language is significant. When a voter marks a paper ballot with pen or pencil, he has no need to “verify” his choice. A voter only needs to “verify” his vote when it has been marked and/or counted by a computer.

HAVA intent was to technologize America’s elections, even down to the terminology used to define voters’ rights, transforming our constitutional right to vote into the opportunity to verify a voting machine’s vote, and turning voters and election officials into quality control agents for the e-voting industry. Removing elections from the public domain, verified voting now centralizes power in the hands of technology experts and private corporations using proprietary trade secret software to count our votes.

HAVA initiated an ongoing program of government grants to fund a cottage industry of computer scientists and statisticians devising elaborate protocols to support the “verifiability” and “auditability” of technology-based elections.

HAVA’s anti-democratic notion of “verifiable voting” has even diverted many voting rights activists from the fundamental and core principles of democratic elections: publicly owned and operated, fully observable elections with citizen controls over every aspect of the voting system. Many grassroots activists are now fighting for the opportunity to verify and audit voting machines rather than the right for fair and open voting and vote counting.

Despite the inherently false premise of verifiable voting, it has become the clarion call for 21st century election reformers in congress, the EAC, and grassroots movements alike.

Secret Vote Counting: Touch screens and Optical Scanners

After HAVA rolled computerized touch screen machines into roughly 40% of America’s polling places, reformers clamored for “voter verified paper audit trails”(VVPAT)(xvii).

This reform would send more money to the e-voting industry to attach printers to their touchscreen voting machines. The printers would then display a receipt-like printout to voters, who could look through a window and “verify” their vote.

But VVPAT, corporate controlled and proprietary, denies citizens the opportunity to oversee how their vote is being recorded and counted. Computer scientists remind us that a computer can easily be programmed to display one thing, record another, and count something altogether different. To make things worse, the display window in many of the VVPAT machines is inadequate for voters to even read the print out. Studies soon showed that between 10-20 percent of VVPAT paper records are unreadable and unusable for the purposes of “verifying” the votes in a recount. Other studies showed that only a very small percent of voters “verify” their vote in this manner.(xviii)

Ultimately, many VVPAT reformers abandoned the cause.

Today many reformers would willingly exchange all touch screen voting machines for optical scanners using voter marked paper ballots. I myself have, in the past, advocated for just such a solution as a great way to reintroduce voter marked paper ballots into every polling jurisdiction in the nation, itself a step in the right direction.

But I had to step away from that position. Because optical scan technology, like the touch screens, keeps the count itself secret and proprietary. Citizens and candidates are denied access to the count, even when the computers perform such bizarre tabulations as were seen in Florida 2000’s negative vote count for candidate Gore.

Corporate controlled, trade secret optical scanners, like their touchscreen brothers, turn public votes into privatized election data.

Democratic Elections: Core Principles

Many voting activists continue to fight for optical scanners. But the fight for verifiable voting is, in fact, nothing more than a fight to continue the outsourcing of our elections to private corporations using secret vote counting technologies.

To fight for verifiable voting is to perpetuate the subversion of our democratic elections. Secret vote counting is the antithesis of democracy. When you rationalize the use of secret vote counting in America, you ignore the core principles of democratic elections as defined by the Founders. These core principles define democratic elections as those with citizen controls, that are publicly owned and operated, in which the entire voting system (with the exception of the secret ballot) is fully observable. You can not inject privately controlled secret vote counting into this equation. It does not add up.

I recently asked a national organization supporting voting rights through legal action to help eliminate privatized secret vote counting in New Hampshire. My appeal was rejected because New Hampshire uses paper ballots and optical scanners, and they would never take a case that “prosecutes optical scanners” when they were fighting to replace touch screen machines with optical scanners in so many other parts of the nation.

That same organization sent observers to the New Hampshire 2008 Primary recount, and one has to wonder if they still believe quite as strongly in the myth of verified voting after that experience.

In New Hampshire, many officials and politicians point to the state’s accessible recounts to justify the use of secret vote counting technology to count 84% of New Hampshire votes on election night. This is just another manifestation of the myth of verified voting. The logic behind this is that it is somehow excusable to allow secret vote counting on election night because, theoretically, you can always count the paper ballots by hand in a recount. But how does this play out in real life?

In the 2008 Primary recount, as the verified voting teams launched their NH recounts, the citizen voting rights activists decided to test the core principles of democratic elections. National activists came to New Hampshire to observe the recount, focusing on the ballot chain of custody, as the paper ballots were transported from New Hampshire cities and towns to the state capital for the recount. After all, they reasoned, what good is “verifying” the vote, if you can’t be sure the vote you are verifying is the actual vote that had been cast on election night?

What the citizen observers discovered was that verifiable voting is as mythological as the unicorn. They discovered they could not, in fact, verify that the votes being verified were the votes that had been cast on election night because there was virtually no oversight on the ballot chain of custody. Boxes of ballots had to be delivered from cities and towns to a central location for the recount. But the state did not allow for citizen controls at all in this process. (xviiii)

The state obstructed citizen observation of the ballot deliveries by transporting the ballots in state vehicles at high speeds that eluded their citizen chaperones. The state delivered the ballots under cover of darkness preventing citizen oversight. The state utilized K-9 police units with fiesty barking police dogs to prevent citizens from approaching as ballots were unloaded from state vehicles to the centralized recount location. And the state broke its own law by not providing secure ballot containers to the cities and towns, resulting in ballots being stored and transported in cardboard boxes, often broken open and unsealed, often cluttered with miscellaneous labels and writing, and for which it was impossible to detect whether or not any tampering might have occured.

And who’s to say what might have occured with those torn and abused cardboard boxes of ballots in the days and weeks they were left unattended in the locked but unsecured closets of New Hampshire’s old town halls?

The verified voting scenario in New Hampshire’s 2008 Primary recount is starkly different from a real democratic election, such as those held in 45% of New Hampshire’s polling places, where the votes are counted on election night, by hand, with at least one public observer for every one counter, using proper counting methods to reconcile all the numbers (number of voters checked in, number of ballots cast, number of uncast or spoiled ballots, number of blank ballots started with, etc.).

New Hampshire’s e-voting proponents are dead wrong when they claim that verified voting rationalizes secret vote counting. The truth is, nothing rationalizes secret vote counting unless you want to have a form of government that is quite other than the democratic republic that is our American birthright.

Which brings us back to the core principles of democratic elections. Both the New Hampshire and the Massachusetts Constitutions, the two earliest constitutions in the nation, drafted by the nation’s Founders and predating the United States Constitution, include a requirement to count the votes in open meeting. In open meeting. That means, where everyone can observe the count. Black box vote counting, where anonymous programmers working for private corporate interests, often with partisan ties, using proprietary trade secret technology, does not meet this constitutional requirement.

Verifiable voting is nothing more than a myth perpetuated by the e-voting industry and locked into place by K Street lobbyists. An audit, a recount, a computer receipt…. None of these are adequate substitutes for the right to vote and to have your vote counted publicly and fairly and honestly.

We could not get any farther from the Founders’ vision.

---

(i Think Progress, “If You Don’t Know About the K Street Project, You Don’t Know Jack”, January 13, 2006.

(ii Marshall, Joshua, “Three Years Later, GOP Can’t Shake Taint of ’02 Tactics,” The Hill,, October 20, 2005 and Cohen, Adam, “A Small Time Crime with Hints of Big Time Connections Lights up the Internet,” New York Times,, April 17, 2006.

(iii) Rolling Stone, “Editorial, A Call for Investigation,” June 1, 2006.

(iv) BlackBoxVoting.ORG, “The Road to Boondoggle was Paved with Good Intentions,” January 30, 2007.

(v) Cornell University, Supreme Court Collection, George W. Bush, et al., petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr., et al.

(vi) Tobi, Nancy, “The EAC Certification Ponzi Scheme” , October 3, 2006.

(vii) Tobi, Nancy, “The Gifts of HAVA to American Democracy: Time to Ask for a Refund”, October, 2005.

(viii) Wolf, Richard, USA Today, “Legal Voters Thrown off Rolls,” January 2, 2008.

(ix) Fitrakis, Bob and Wasserman, Harvey, What Happened in )Ohio, New Press, October, 2006.

(x) Jones, Douglas, “Chad—From Waste Product to Headline”, 2002.

(xi Jackson, Brooks, CNN, “Hanging Chads’ often viewed by courts as sign of voter intent”,,November 16, 2000.

(xii) Brace,Kimball Election Data Services, Overview of Voting Equipment Usage in United States, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting (.pdf format) and 2006 Voting Equipment Study.

(xiii) Drinkard, Jim, USA Today, “Panel Cites Poll Workers’ Age as Problem”, August 9, 2004.

(xiv) Myerson, Rosemary , “Comparison of Operating Costs”, February 8, 2005, and Voting Machines ProCon.org, Voting Machine Issues, Costs, http://www.votingmachinesprocon.org/subacquisition.htm.

(xv) Breslauer, Alan, BradBlog, “Dan Rather Reports Video: ‘The Trouble with Touch Screens’ Will be Huge Trouble for Sequoia, ES&S and Maybe the Republicans from the 2000 Election!” , August 15, 2007.

(xvi) Help
America Vote Act of 2002 Public Law 107-252, Section 301

(xvii) Hall, Joseph Lorenzo, UC Berkeley School of Information, “Design and the Support of Transparency in VVPAT Systems in the US Voting Systems Market,” , 2006.

(xviii) Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, May 2005, and Lehto, Paul, “Ultimate Nightmare for Democracy, High Confidence Yet Total Fraud” , May 21, 2007.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing.
Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply.
There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice.
This is ridiculous.”

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock.
A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.

“You can’t eat this every day. It’s too heavy,” a health care executive from Palo Alto, Sharad Patel, grumbled as his son loaded two sacks of the Basmati into a shopping cart. “We only need one bag but I’m getting two in case a neighbor or a friend needs it,” the elder man said.

The Patels seemed headed for disappointment, as most Costco members were being allowed to buy only one bag.
Moments earlier, a clerk dropped two sacks back on the stack after taking them from another customer who tried to exceed the one-bag cap.

“Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history,” a sign above the dwindling supply said.

Shoppers said the limits had been in place for a few days, and that rice supplies had been spotty for a few weeks.
A store manager referred questions to officials at Costco headquarters near Seattle, who did not return calls or e-mail messages yesterday.

An employee at the Costco store in Queens said there were no restrictions on rice buying, but limits were being imposed on purchases of oil and flour. Internet postings attributed some of the shortage at the retail level to bakery owners who flocked to warehouse stores when the price of flour from commercial suppliers doubled.

The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.

“It’s sporadic. It’s not every store, but it’s becoming more commonplace,” the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. “The number of reports I’ve been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I’d say in the last three to five weeks.”

Spiking food prices have led to riots in recent weeks in Haiti, Indonesia, and several African nations.
India recently banned export of all but the highest quality rice, and Vietnam blocked the signing of a new contract for foreign rice sales.

“I’m surprised the Bush administration hasn’t slapped export controls on wheat,” Mr. Rawles said.
“The Asian countries are here buying every kind of wheat.”
Mr. Rawles said it is hard to know how much of the shortages are due to lagging supply and how much is caused by consumers hedging against future price hikes or a total lack of product.

“There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don’t realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short,” Mr. Rawles, a former Army intelligence officer, said. “Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out.”

At the moment, large chain retailers seem more prone to shortages and limits than do smaller chains and mom-and-pop stores, perhaps because store managers at the larger companies have less discretion to increase prices locally.
Mr. Rawles said the spot shortages seemed to be most frequent in the Northeast and all the way along the West Coast.
He said he had heard reports of buying limits at Sam’s Club warehouses, which are owned by Wal-Mart Stores, but a spokesman for the company, Kory Lundberg, said he was not aware of any shortages or limits.

An anonymous high-tech professional writing on an investment Web site, Seeking Alpha, said he recently bought 10 50-pound bags of rice at Costco. “I am concerned that when the news of rice shortage spreads, there will be panic buying and the shelves will be empty in no time. I do not intend to cause a panic, and I am not speculating on rice to make profit. I am just hoarding some for my own consumption,” he wrote.

For now, rice is available at Asian markets in California, though consumers have fewer choices when buying the largest bags. “At our neighborhood store, it’s very expensive, more than $30″ for a 25-pound bag, a housewife from Mountain View, Theresa Esquerra, said.
“I’m not going to pay $30. Maybe we’ll just eat bread.”

citx- may i suggest CAKE?

pass it down….

citizens get ready
a new culinary sensation is heading to your town..sooner than you think

so get out your apron and rolling pin..we ARENT starving today!

most important..as the name suggests..is the mud.

you are probably NOT going to get your hands on any of that PRIME haitian garbage dump mud..

suffused as it is with generations of flavorful (and nutritious) trash scraps.

but you CAN have the next best thing..

on garbage day..and WITHOUT rinsing the can..fill your trashcans at the bottom with four fingers of soil lightly tossed with any new food scraps you can get your hands on..
then add another four fingers of fine gravel and top with an old window screen that fits
TIGHTLY into the bottom of the can.

now just use the can as usual for six to eight weeks..

then just remove screen and..as they say in haiti..VOILA!

sweet mud!

now the FUN part..

(two cups of mud will yield about two dozen “pies”)

two cups of mud
one cup of any kind of cooking oil..(be creative) or BUTTER (lucky you!)
two tablespoons of sugar or sweet substitute

mix into paste

portion into silver dollar sized rounds on a cookie sheet..
(or the fender of a UNFOR armored personnel carrier on a sunny day)
and bake at 350 degrees for thirty minutes..

enjoy with your choice of beverage on the veranda!

LUXURY IS A STATE OF MIND!!

Though Senator Barack Obama has never—neither in his Senate votes nor in his campaign literature—
strayed from the conventional position of support for Israel, he has in this primary season been dogged by the issue.
The flare-up last week surrounding Obama’s allegedly “anti-Jewish” campaign cochairman, sparked by a piece in the conservative American Spectator magazine,
was only the latest instance in which his foes have suggested that Obama has an “Israel problem.”
Yet even as Obama has been subjected to intense scrutiny, Senator Hillary Clinton has received virtually no attention
for taking an unconventional position on Israel (albeit in a direction approved by pro-Israel hardliners).
Her vow of support for Israel’s claim on an “undivided Jerusalem,” if enacted, would mark a major—and problematic—break with longstanding U.S. policy.

Under the heading “Standing with Israel against terrorism,” Clinton’s official policy paper,
released last September and currently touted on her campaign website, states,
“Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital,
secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.” With the phrase “an undivided Jerusalem as its capital,”
Clinton seems to take a hardline position on a deeply contested facet of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
and a position like this should have garnered at least passing interest from the mainstream media.
So how come nobody’s paying attention?

The answer may lie within the long history of empty rhetoric on Jerusalem doled out by presidential candidates.
Perhaps the lack of interest can be chalked up to uncertainty in how to interpret Clinton’s position.
Or it may be that right-wing pronouncements that give short shrift to the Palestinian side are simply not seen as remarkable.
(An exception to the media silence on Clinton’s position was the American Prospect’s Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli.)

Clinton is toying with one of the few most important final-status issues that will have to be resolved as part of any two-state solution.
Israel captured the eastern half of Jerusalem during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
While Israel has declared the whole of an expanded Jerusalem its capital, the international community views east Jerusalem as occupied territory
and the potential capital of any future Palestinian state.
In recognition of the contested status of Jerusalem, the United States and other countries maintain their embassies in Tel Aviv.

“Jerusalem is not only of political, religious, and emotional significance to Palestinians.
It’s the cultural and economic capital of any future state of Palestine.
To carve out east Jerusalem from the rest of Palestine would be to deprive of it the geographic area
which traditionally has been the heart of the Palestinian economy,” said Philip Wilcox, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer
who served as consul general and chief of mission in Jerusalem and is now president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a D.C. nonprofit.
“It’s an absolute deal –breaker, and there will be no peace if there isn’t an agreed political division of Jerusalem.”

If opposing a compromise on Jerusalem is a deal breaker, one would think there would be more importance attached to Clinton’s words
—especially appearing in the unequivocal construction of Israel’s “right to exist” that “must never be questioned.”
If Clinton did, as president, endorse Israel’s annexation of all of Jerusalem, it could mean nothing less than a repudiation of the concept of a two-state solution. And while her position mirrors that of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), it actually puts her at odds with some prominent Israeli officials,
notably Vice Premier Haim Ramon, who have publicly spoken about the need to cede the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
One explanation for this incongruity is that Clinton’s statement is nothing more than election-year rhetoric.
That is, her stand may tell us more about the fraught politics of Israel/Palestine in the United States
than it does about how a Hillary Clinton administration would approach the conflict.

“I think it is said in the knowledge that this is a rhetorical commitment only. And that all past presidents once coming to office have recognized that the problem of Jerusalem is one that has to be resolved through negotiations,” Wilcox said.
That interpretation would be in keeping with an old tradition of presidential candidates making empty promises on Jerusalem.
A favorite, going back to Ronald Reagan, is to pledge to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made and then broke that promise and,
in so doing, had to repeatedly waive the requirements of a 1995 law—of which John McCain was one of 76 Senate cosponsors—demanding the embassy be moved.

This campaign season, none of the remaining candidates seem to have made that pledge, at least publicly.
Earlier this month, however, Haaretz reported that a Clinton surrogate told a Cleveland audience that Hillary Clinton would move the embassy to Jerusalem.
John McCain, for his part, was quoted on his Mideast trip last week as saying that he supported Jerusalem “as the capital of Israel”—a weaker formulation than Clinton’s.

So is there an electoral gain, at least perceived by the candidates and their advisers, to making these types of promises?
While it’s impossible to know how many American Jews would vote on the basis of Jerusalem, the most recent American Jewish Committee poll found 58 percent opposed to compromise on the status of Jerusalem as a “united city” under Israel’s jurisdiction, putting them in line with Clinton.
But the number of American Jewish voters is not that high.
M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, a dovish advocacy group in Washington, believes that voters simply aren’t part of Clinton’s calculus.
Her Jerusalem position,” he said, is “designed to appeal to money people. The single-issue donors in the Jewish community tend to be far to the right.
It’s throwing red meat out to some people who desperately want to eat some red meat. It’s not a serious commitment.”

But to discern whether Clinton is serious about moving the embassy or supporting an “undivided Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital, one has to look at the history of her position and undertake the not-so-simple task of interpreting it.

Clinton’s rhetoric dates back to when her husband was attempting to broker a compromise on the holy city.
She first took the position in 1999, prior to announcing her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in New York. (It was later in the same campaign that Clinton was slammed for hugging and kissing Suha Arafat, the wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, at a ceremony on the West Bank, where Suha, speaking in Arabic, accused the Israeli government of using poison gas against Palestinian women and children. Hours after the event, Clinton condemned her.)
“I personally consider Jerusalem the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel,” she wrote in a letter to the president of Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, echoing the exact language favored by some Israeli politicians.
That stand was interpreted in the media as an obvious pander, a play for support among the hardline segment of New York’s sizable Jewish community. “Israel’s new friend Hillary Clinton, born-again Zionist” read the headline in her hometown paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
As Michael Tomasky later wrote in Hillary’s Turn, his book about the 2000 campaign, “The Jerusalem question is always an issue in New York campaigns, and anyone running for dogcatcher in New York signs on to the position Hillary took.”

Her position might have been New York politics as usual, but it had serious implications for her husband’s administration.
A spokesman for Bill Clinton’s State Department immediately distanced the administration from her comments, saying that the “first lady was expressing her personal views” and that the U.S. position on Jerusalem—that it was a matter to be negotiated between the parties themselves—had “not changed.”

And, yet, despite Hillary Clinton’s strong words in ‘99 and today, there is still linguistic wiggle room that allows her to support the idea of a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem. “Well, [Clinton’s statement] is strong, but if people are determined to be a little bit creative in the way they interpret these things, ‘undivided’ sometimes literally means ‘don’t put the barbwire back up,’” said William Quandt, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a longtime observer of America’s role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. “In 1967 there was a divided Jerusalem,” he added, referring to the period before the 1967 war when Jerusalem was physically divided, a state of affairs to which no one wants to return.
Clinton’s campaign did not respond to a request for clarification of her position.

Then there’s the ambiguity embedded in the very term “Jerusalem.” James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, notes that it can be construed several ways.
“Is it Jerusalem as defined by its municipal boundaries in 1967?
Is it what Israel unilaterally and illegally annexed that was recognized by no one, including the United States government?
Is it the expanded greater Jerusalem that now includes the settlement belt?”

But no matter how Clinton defines the borders of Jerusalem or whether the policy paper is intended as empty rhetoric, her position is emblematic of her record on Israel. As others have pointed out, her campaign position paper on Israel doesn’t even mention a two-state solution.
She virtually never utters the word “Palestinians.”
Her Senate website describes her as “a leader in supporting Israel’s right to build the fence”—what others call the wall—that juts deeply into the West Bank and has been widely criticized for violating the human rights of Palestinians.
She personally toured the barrier in late 2005.
All this, and yet somehow Barack Obama is the only candidate whose position on Israel has drawn fire.

”aint that a bitch?”

Russian Foreign Ministry Officials are reported to be ‘alarmed’ today over a ‘presentation’ made by the United States War Leaders to President Putin at this weeks NATO summit in Romania and which details the Americans plan to begin a nuclear attack against Iran’s atomic facilities in the next two weeks.

Most disturbing of these reports, according to Foreign Ministry Analysts, are the United States ‘offers and threats’ towards Russia to ‘remain neutral’ in this conflict or face the combined weight of the American and EU central banks deliberate collapsing of the Western banking system, and US dollar, and which is estimated will cause the loss of nearly $800 billion of Russian foreign reserves.

To the ‘offers’ presented to President Putin for keeping Russia out of this war, these reports continue, will be NATO’s rejection of Ukraine and Georgia membership into the Western Military Alliance and the ending of the planned US Missile Shield being planned for Poland and the Czech Republic.

In what, sadly, passes for diplomacy these days with the United States, this ‘presentation’ to President Putin is eerily reminiscent of the offer made to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan prior to the US invasion of their country after their rejection of the American offer, and which French news sources reported was stated, “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”

To the likelihood of the US carrying out their brutal expansion of their war against the Muslim peoples of the World with a nuclear attack upon Iran there remains today little doubt as Saudi Arabia has ordered their people to prepare for nuclear war, and as we can read as reported by Iran’s Press TV News Service, and which says:

“Saudi Arabia is reportedly preparing to counter any ‘radioactive hazards’ which may result from a US strike on Iran’s nuclear plants.

Popular government-guided Saudi newspaper Okaz recently reported that the Saudi Shura Council approved of nuclear fallout preparation plans only a day after US Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Kingdom’s high ranking officials, including King Abdullah.

As a result of the Shura ruling, the Saudi government will start the implementation of ‘national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the Kingdom following expert warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors’.”

Israel is, likewise, said to be preparing for this new war, and as we can read as reported by Israeli News Sources, and which state: “Defense Minister Ehud Barak authorized on Sunday evening the plans for a national emergency drill, which is scheduled to take place in two weeks time.”

Russian Military Analysts, in these reports, further state that with a US nuclear strike against Iran, Israel will, also, launch a simultaneous against Syria, and as we can read, as reported by Israel’s Ynet News Service:

“Syria is preparing for a comprehensive Israeli strike which will be combined with an attack on Hizbullah, sources in Damascus have told the London-based Arabic-language al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. The sources, which refused to reveal their identity, reported that Syria was closely monitoring the movement of Israeli forces along the northern border.

The newspaper reported Wednesday that Damascus viewed the Israeli media reports and statements made by senior Israel Defense Forces officials as incitement and attempts to prepare the Israeli and global public opinion for a war against Syria.

In addition to the military preparations, the sources said, Damascus has raised its security alert level for fear that Israeli forces would infiltrate its territories through one of its bordering countries, mainly referring to Lebanon.

Over the past few weeks, the Syrians have stationed three armored divisions, special forces and nine mechanized infantry divisions opposite Lebanon’s western valley, as the Syrians estimate that a ground Israeli invasion may take place in that area.”

As the American people remain under the greatest threat in their history to their freedom, and as Britain’s top economic experts are stating that the US is now falling into a Great Depression, with the most of their citizens receiving food aid in their entire history, while at the same time their Military reports the spending of over $1.6 trillion on new weapons for their wars, one cannot but shudder to think of the grave consequences should their grab for total World domination fail.

But, with all of the failed attempts by many Global powers in the past to establish their rule over the entire World, and should the United States fail in their nuclear attack against Iran, and with the added backdrop of the growing crisis of our Earth being able to feed its own people, even the most simple of minds can see the folly of the Americans desires.

This cannot, however, be said of the American people, who continue leading their ‘American Dream’ lives while being led to their own destruction along a road paved with celebrity trivialities and banal stories of nothingness that passes for news in America.

Never has it been more true the age old saying, “For those who do not learn history… they are doomed to repeat it.”

let the lessons begin...

FOOD RIOT