As they battle the holiday crowds this weekend, frazzled travelers at Chicago airports also will have the option of stopping to get protection against the swine flu virus.

A clinic at O’Hare International Airport run by the University of Illinois at Chicago began offering H1N1 flu vaccines in nasal mist form this week. City officials say the clinic also hopes to receive arm-shot vaccines this week and plans to open kiosks to administer the mist form of the vaccine at both O’Hare and Midway this weekend.

“We feel that it is a good amenity and service for travelers passing through the airport as well as the employees working at the airport,” said Gregg Cunningham, a spokesman for the Department of Aviation.

City officials said the UIC clinic at O’Hare now has several hundred doses of the nasal mist, which it is offering in Terminal 2 to qualified individuals. They would not specify how many more doses of the hard-to-find vaccine the clinic had ordered or how many were expected this week.

Full article here

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Fall Of The Republic – Buy the DVD here

 

Controversy erupted when reports emerged that the Pentagon was close to completing a robot designed to forage for its own fuel by consuming “biomass in the environment,” raising concerns that the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) might be intended to fuel itself from the bodies of the dead.

The EATR was designed by Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI), in cooperation with Cyclone Power Technologies Inc.

According to RTI, EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. The patent pending robotic system can find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment, as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, diesel, propane and solar) when suitable.”

The vagueness of the term “biomass” led many commentators to ask whether the Pentagon was actually developing a cannibal killer robot. Responding to such allegations, RTI insisted that the robot will be programmed to consume only vegetable matter.

“Despite the far-reaching reports that ["biomass"] includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions.”

RTI president Bob Finkelstein was vague as to how the robots would be programmed to avoid human or animal flesh.

“There are certain signatures from different kinds of materials,” he said.

Even if the robot does not feed on humans, its use may still constitute a war crime.

“The robot steamers are envisaged as being equipped with powerful articulated arms in order to rip trees or bushes out of the earth and stuff them into their glowing maws,” wrote Lewis Page in The Register.

“By way of a treat, it seems that the machines will also be able to loot or forage more conventional fuel supplies from the petrol tanks of cars,” he wrote. “Hapless drivers or householders will be in no position to object to such robotic plundering.”

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Fall Of The Republic – Buy the DVD here

 

WASHINGTON — The city of Washington has agreed to pay 13.7 million dollars to some 700 demonstrators and bystanders mistreated by police during demonstrations against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 2000.

“We think it’s an historic settlement. It’s the largest settlement for a protest case in Washington D.C. and we believe in the country,” Partnership for Civil Justice, which filed the class action lawsuit, said in a statement.

The settlement after nine years of legal action was signed Monday and needs to be confirmed by the courts in the coming months, Partnership spokeswoman Mara Verheyden-Hilliard told AFP on Tuesday.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

Around 680 demonstrators and some unsuspecting tourists and reporters were arrested in April 2000 during World Bank and IMF meetings in the US capital. The marches followed similar protests during a World Trade Organization meeting months earlier in Seattle, Washington state.

“Some of them were held on a bus with their hands tied behind their back for up to 12 hours. They were denied food, water, people were not allowed to go to the bathroom. People on the bus would be forced to urinate on themselves,” the spokeswoman said.

Full story here.

Health Secretary Andy Burnham is urging the nation to stop eating meat in a bid to save the planet.

Speaking at the launch of a new report on how rising temperatures will affect the public, Mr Burnham said eating a more vegetarian diet would cut the impact of livestock on the climate – as well as improve health by lowering the amount of saturated fat consumed.

The Health Secretary is supporting calls for a 30 per cent reduction in the number of farm animals bred for meat.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

The move is sure to trigger accusations of ‘gesture politics’ and is also unlikely to receive a warm welcome from Britain’s beleaguered farming industry.

Mr Burnham’s comments came as scientists at the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia faced calls to resign in wake of allegations they had suppressed data.

Full story here.

Large sums promised to developing countries to help them tackle climate change cannot be accounted for, a BBC investigation has found.

Rich countries pledged $410m (£247m) a year in a 2001 declaration – but it is now unclear whether the money was paid.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has accused industrialised countries of failing to keep their promise.

The EU says the money was paid out in bilateral deals, but admits it cannot provide data to prove it.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

The money was pledged in the 2001 Bonn Declaration, signed by 20 industrialised nations – the 15 countries that then made up the European Union, plus Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland.

They said they would pay $410m per year until 2008. The date the payments were meant to start is unclear, but the total should be between $1.6bn and $2.87bn.

Full story here.

With the introduction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s 2,074-page health insurance nationalization bill, we can be thankful for one thing at least. It will most likely be the last bill of its kind introduced this year. Who’d have time to wade through another?

This doesn’t mean there is anything in the bill to be thankful for. Like its Senate predecessors and House counterpart, it should offend any advocate of liberty and good economic sense.

First and foremost among its defects is the individual health insurance mandate: Every individual would be forced to buy government-defined comprehensive medical coverage (or to have it bought by one’s employer). A fine up to $750 awaits anyone who defies the mandate.

As Shikha Dalmia points out in Forbes this week, the individual insurance mandate is the major outrage in the whole “health care reform” scam. I would say it’s the keystone. Remove it and most of the rest crumbles to the ground.

Who do these politicians think they are? Our lives are not theirs to dispose of.

Politicians love to sugarcoat their threats of force. So the Reid bill calls the mandate “shared responsibility.” To those who wonder by what authority the government can make us buy insurance against our will, the bill alludes to the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to “regulate. . . commerce among the several states.” (For a fuller story on the clause, see this.) The bill says, “The individual responsibility requirement provided for in his section . . . is commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce.”

How would an insurance requirement affect interstate commerce? The bill says that since without the requirement people wouldn’t buy insurance until they are sick, it therefore “will minimize this adverse selection and broaden the health insurance risk pool to include healthy individuals, which will lower health insurance premiums. The requirement is essential to creating effective health insurance markets in which improved health insurance products that are guaranteed issue and do not exclude coverage of pre-existing conditions can be sold.”

In other words, for the sake of making the insurance market work better, we must be forced to buy coverage. How’s that for a justification?

It’s amazing how many fallacies can be stuffed into one argument. To begin, medical insurance isn’t really interstate commerce. One of the few sensible things proposed during the public discussion on medical care is that the federal ban on interstate purchase of coverage be repealed. Residents of California are not free to buy less-fancy, less-expensive policies offered in Arizona. They are stuck with policies made more expensive by California’s overbearing regulatory regime. Interstate sales would increase competition and lower prices, but the ruling party shows no interest in that idea. So how can this be about interstate commerce?

There’s more that is wrong with the argument. Typically, the Commerce Clause has been invoked against barriers to the free flow of interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has occasionally upheld the prohibition of activities (such as growing wheat for one’s own use in violation of an acreage-allotment program or dispensing medical marijuana) that were said to adversely affect interstate commerce. But the insurance mandate would represent the first time that individuals were compelled to buy product or service in the name of making interstate commerce more effective. The Congressional Budget Office calls it “unprecedented”: “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”

Even under the most expansive reading of the Commerce Clause, how does compelling the purchase of insurance qualify as regulating interstate commerce?

The nub of the bill’s argument is that if healthy people are not forced to buy coverage, the insurance market won’t work properly. Why not? Because same bill would compel insurance companies to accept all applicants for coverage, sick or healthy, without price discrimination. That is, the bill creates the incentive for people to opt out of insurance until they are sick. Obviously, that would not be good for the insurance market.

Self-Caused Problem

The individual insurance mandate, then, is a solution to a problem the bill itself would create. The authors invoke the Commerce Clause to protect interstate commerce from a threat they themselves pose to it. They could avert the threat simply by not imposing guaranteed-issue on insurers.

But of course the advocates of nationalized medicine wouldn’t do that. Guaranteed issue is at the center of their scheme. They want to proclaim that they brought universal coverage to America. Freedom must take a back seat to their objective, which is to disguise a welfare program as insurance and put us on the road to government-administered rationing.

The “reformers” are quick to point out that people without insurance go to emergency rooms for medical care and sometimes don’t pay their bills, shifting the costs to the rest of us. But Shikha Dalmia notes that uncompensated care accounts for less than 3 percent of the country’s total medical bill. To save $40 billion a year, we should spend more than $100 billion a year and lose more liberty? No thanks.

One reason for uncompensated care is that emergency rooms are forbidden to turn away patients (even in non-emergencies) who have no means of payment. Who imposed that prohibition? The government, of course. That may sound humane, but one unintended consequence is a likely contraction of charitable care. Why set up facilities for the indigent if they can turn up at any emergency room?

Again we see Mises’s Law at work: Intervention begets intervention. Government action creates problems that politicians then use to justify more government action. Undoing the first intervention would help solve the problem, but politicians have little incentive to move in that direction.

Government has suppressed the free market in medical care both on the supply and demand sides. As a result, medical services and insurance are artificially expensive, pricing many people out of the market. Instead of removing the interventions and letting the free market — including mutual-aid associations and philanthropy — lower prices and create more widespread coverage, the politicians propose to pile on more market-suppressing measures. Freedom is the first casualty. But we can also anticipate an aggravation of the current system’s worst features.

Forcing individuals to buy insurance is an intolerable assault on our liberty — not to mention a massive subsidy to the insurance companies. (They’re mad the penalty is not greater.) How many more usurpations can we be expected to tolerate?

The gun banning front group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, headed by New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, came out with a full page ad in the Washington Post recommending that the Federal Government now link the secret No Fly list to National Instant Background Check System (NICS) and use this to prevent gun owners on the list from buying guns.

And just last week, Attorney General Eric Holder endorsed this legislation on behalf of the Obama Administration. Fortunately for US gun owners, Congress has failed to act and that is why Bloomberg’s MAIG is now pushing to connect the two.

According to the Government Accountability Office, over the past five years people on the terrorist watch list, also called the No Fly List bought guns more than 850 times. This is a Secret List kept by the federal government that has no rhyme or reason as to who gets on it and no known way to get off it. Remember, this is the same secret list that the late Senator Kennedy was listed on for a period of time, preventing him from flying on commercial airlines.

In addition to the No Fly list MAIG is also calling for closure of the imaginary Gun Show Loop Hole and a repeal of Tiahrt Amendments which require the FBI to destroy records of approved background checks performed on gun purchasers within 24 hours.

ACTION 1: Check the Mayors Against Illegal Guns website and see what Mayors belonging to MAIG live in your state and call them and demand they resign from a group that’s mission is banning legal gun ownership and infringing on your second amendment rights. http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/

ACTION 2: Write your congressman and demand that they Vote down any attempts by the Obama Administration and MAIG to introduce any bills that would allow the secret government No Fly list to be linked with the National Instant Background Check System.

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Fall Of The Republic – Buy the DVD here

 

Nearly 100,000 passengers were pulled aside by TSA behavior watchers last year, and it remains to be proven whether you can spot terrorists by the looks on their faces.

Here’s a question to ponder the next time you’re taking off your shoes at airport security: Can you spot terrorists by the look on their faces?

For the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the answer is yes. For the past few years, airports across the country have been using what many call “behavioral surveillance” to weed out potential hijackers among us, by covertly examining travelers’ facial expressions and body language as they go through security. Unlike those airport employees who herd us along as we remove our shoes and relinquish all liquids over three ounces (with dubious results), this new program, named “Screening Passengers by Observational Techniques,” or “SPOT,” is carried out by TSA employees who have been trained to monitor travelers’ faces and movements. As Americans head out of town this holiday season, more than 3,000 “Behavior Detection Officers” will be at 161 airports nationwide, watching our every move.

Tthe TSA boasts that the SPOT program is “derivative of other successful behavioral analysis programs that have been employed by law enforcement and security personnel both in the U.S. and around the world.” Yet, the success of the SPOT program remains highly questionable. This month the Washington Post reported that, in 2008 alone, Behavior Detection Officers across the country pulled 98,805 passengers aside for additional screenings, out of which 9,854 were questioned by local police. 813 were eventually arrested.

The cost of the program, according to TSA spokesperson Ann Davis, was $3.1 million.

In an e-mail correspondence with AlterNet, Davis could not say how many of the 813 arrests led to convictions — or for that matter, whether any terrorists were caught. “Many of the SPOT cases that resulted in arrests remain under active investigation by law enforcement,” she said. “TSA doesn’t always hear back from the investigative agencies on the outcome of the cases so we cannot track convictions.”

Full article here

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Fall Of The Republic – Buy the DVD here

 

The Justice Department has concluded that there is insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for allegedly misleading Congress about the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

The decision was first disclosed yesterday by Murray Waas in a little-noticed posting on the blog of New York Magazine. The magazine cited public court records and federal law enforcement officials as its sources.

Although Gonzales remains under investigation by the Justice Department for two other matters, it had been allegations that he gave false or purposely misleading testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the warrantless eavesdropping program that placed him by far in the greatest legal jeopardy.

In not bringing criminal charges, however, investigators for the Department’s Inspector General, which conducted the investigation, hardly let Gonzales off the hook completely. They concluded that Gonzales testimony before Congress about the eavesdropping program was “confusing,” “incomplete’ and had the “effect of misleading” both Congress and the public.

A major reason that Gonzales escaped criminal charges, according to people close to the investigation, was that he was willing to do something that he had steadfastly refused to even contemplate before: admit that many of his most controversial decisions, first as White House counsel, and later, as Attorney General, in authorizing, overseeing, and concealing the eavesdropping program were done at the specific directive of former President Bush.

In other instances, Gonzales and his attorneys argued to the Justice Department that Gonzales’ actions were done in furtherance of Bush administration’s policies, and thus he did not act with personal intent to do wrong.

“He was willing to be lightning rod in the past for the President,” one legal source close to the investigation purportedly told New York Magazine, “He has done that during the entire course of his career. But it was pressed upon him that that was not going to work in this instance—and he did what he had to do.”

The internal Justice Department watchdog agency, the department’s Inspector General, which conducted the investigation, has no prosecutorial powers of its own.

If during the course of an investigation, however, the Inspector General can seek to have a criminal prosecutor or even special prosecutor take over his investigation to determine if criminal charges are warranted. However, in this case that wasn’t done.

With more and more people changing their minds about man-ma de global warming as a consequence of the increase in juvenile alarmist propaganda on behalf of the warmists, Al Gore’s lies are increasingly being confronted in the public arena.