Pursuant to the right wing smear campaign that has been running against us for the last week, A document hold request has been sent today June 4th 2012 to the National Bloggers Club Inc, Foster Friess and Stephen Friess.

The filing is posted here:

Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal orders reparations be given to torture victims

Via Common Dreams:

May 13, 2012- Former US President George W Bush, his Vice-President Dick Cheney and six other members of his administration have been found guilty of war crimes by a tribunal in Malaysia.

Bush, Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five of their legal advisers were tried in their absence and convicted on Saturday.

Victims of torture told a panel of five judges in Kuala Lumpur of their suffering at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among the evidence, Briton Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee, said he was beaten, put in a hood and left in solitary confinement. Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi said she was stripped and humiliated in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Transcripts of the five-day trial will be sent to the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and the Security Council.

Via New York Amsterdam News:

By Herb Boyd, May 3, 2012- For more than four hours, a confederacy of Republicans assembled in the Caucus Room, an upscale restaurant in D.C., only hours after Barack Obama’s inauguration, plotting ways in which to immediately begin undermining his presidency.

This meeting included such senior politicos of the GOP as House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. The Senate members were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl.

Among the other Republican notables were Newt Gingrich and strategist Frank Luntz. Oddly, neither Mitch McConnell nor John Boehner was present.

-By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY

December 14, 2011- Time magazine has named "The Protester" as its Person of the Year for 2011, citing a worldwide outburst of people-power from Tunisia to Moscow to Wall Street.

"A year after a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself ablaze, dissent has spread across the Middle East, to Europe and the U.S., reshaping global politics and redefining people power," the magazine says.

An excerpt:

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change.

FULL STORY HERE:

Under Law, Judicial Conference Must Refer Issue to US Attorney General

WASHINGTON – Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, together with 19 Members of Congress, today sent a letter to the Judicial Conference, requesting that the Conference follow the law and refer the matter of Justice Clarence Thomas's non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to the Department of Justice. Throughout his entire tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas has checked a box titled "none" on his annual financial disclosure forms, indicating that his wife had received no income, despite the fact that his wife had in fact earned nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation from 2003-2007 alone.

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

-By Brad Friedman

September 27, 2011- It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.

Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

"We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines," said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team "We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine."

-By Eric W. Dolan for RAW Story

August 2, 2011- In an interview with Countdown host Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, former vice president and Current TV founder Al Gore said the United States needed an “American spring” like the Arab spring in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

“We need to have an American spring,” he said. “Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again. Not in the tea party style. There are people who are genuinely upset in the tea party, I understand that, but that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News and turned into a stalking horse for this right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on this country for a long time.”

“This country is in trouble,” Gore added. “Our democracy has been withering on the vine. This has been going on for some time.”

Monday on Countdown, Gore called the U.S. system of government “broken” and “in real trouble.”

Watch video, courtesy of Current TV, below:

New Financial Disclosure Form Raises More Troubling Questions

Washington, DC— In light of new financial disclosures provided Justice Clarence Thomas, ProtectOurElections.org today sent a letter  to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Public Integrity Section and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) urging that they investigate information recently revealed in Thomas’ 2010 Financial Disclosure Form.

ProtectOurElections.org has previously sent several letters to the FBI and DOJ alleging improper conduct by Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia. Those allegations are: