shotgun jesus

7/30

At least 139 of the Forbes 400 are Jewish

Some quick stats: We are reasonably certain that 139 of the richest 400 Americans are Jewish, including 20 of the richest 50. Those top 20 control some $211.8 billion in personal wealth.

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Mexico praises decision on Arizona law

Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Patricia Espinosa called Wednesday’s decision on Arizona’s immigration law “a step in the right direction.”

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Daily Kos: Climate skeptics should be euthanized…

A Daily Kos contributing editor has suggested that “Steve Milloy and his buddies” commit suicide or be euthanized apparently for the crime of opposing global warming alarmism.

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White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

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Google teams up with the CIA to spy on your internet activity/trends

Google and the CIA are teaming up to invest in a web monitoring software called Recorded Future, which scours the web to find connections between people and events, creating new privacy concerns when Google is already the subject of multiple investigations.

Recorded Future, which describes itself as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence”, provides analysis of information and trends online to companies building brand names, but also provides its services to intelligence agencies as part of counter-terrorism measures. The CIA’s investment subsidiary, In-Q-Tel, clearly recognises this potential and is to pump upwards of $10 million into the firm.

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Arizona sheriff not relenting after court ruling

Lost in the hoopla over Arizona’s immigration law is the fact that state and local authorities for years have been doing their own aggressive crackdowns in the busiest illegal gateway into the country.

Nowhere in the U.S. is local enforcement more present than in metropolitan Phoenix, where Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio routinely carries out sweeps, some in Hispanic neighborhoods, to arrest illegal immigrants. The tactics have made him the undisputed poster boy for local immigration enforcement and the anger that so many authorities possess on the issue.

“It’s my job,” said Arpaio, standing beside a sheriff’s truck that has a number for an immigration hotline written on its side. “I have two state (immigration) laws that I am enforcing. It’s not federal, it’s state.”

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Swastika no longer viewed as Nazi symbol

An American organization which monitors antisemitism has said that the Nazi swastika will no longer automatically be considered a hate symbol. The Anti-Defamation League said the swastika, until now inextricably linked with the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews, has for some people “lost its meaning as the primary symbol of Nazism and instead become a more generalized symbol of hate.”

The ADL released its annual audit of antisemitic incidents last week and said that numbers had fallen from 1,352 in 2008 to 1,211 the following year.

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7/29

Judge blocks parts of Arizona immigration law

A federal judge dealt a serious rebuke to Arizona’s immigration law on Wednesday when she put most of the crackdown on hold just hours before it was to take effect.

The ruling by US District Judge Susan Bolton sets up a lengthy legal battle as Arizona fights to enact the nation’s toughest-in-the-nation law. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer said the state likely appeal the ruling and seek to get the judge’s order overturned.

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CNN poll: 55% of Americans favor Arizona immigration law

As the Justice Department tries to block Arizona’s new immigration law from taking effect on Thursday, a new CNN/Opinion Research poll shows that a majority of the country favors the law.

Fifty-five percent of the 1,018 adults surveyed nationwide favor the law, compared to 40 percent who oppose it.

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Obama’s Afghan troop surge clears Congress

The House today sent President Obama a major war-funding increase of $33 billion to pay for his troop surge in Afghanistan, unmoved by the leaking of classified documents that portray a struggling military effort. The House voted 308-114 to approve the spending boost for the additional 30,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Other non-war provisions brought the total bill to nearly $59 billion.

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Jewish organizations protest Oliver Stone’s remarks about “Jewish control of the media” by canceling the airing of his upcoming TV show

A furious Haim Saban has mounted a campaign to get Showtime to cancel its planned airing of Oliver Stone’s 10-part series, “A Secret History of America,” in the wake of anti-Jewish remarks by the outspoken director.

Stone’s apology “is transparently fake,” Saban said in an interview with TheWrap. “He has been consistent in his anti-American and anti-Semitic remarks. I respect his First Amendment rights. I hope he respects mine.”

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The American middle class is dying

Once the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but that’s ending at a blinding pace. The American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer here at a historically unprecedented rate.

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New York Times caught whitewashing the Wikileaks story

The release of 91,000 classified military documents relating to Afghanistan by the organization known as WikiLeaks offers the opportunity for a controlled experiment in an analysis of media bias. This was a suggestion by the Nieman Journalism Lab immediately following the documents release. Three mainstream media organizations (The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel) were given the same amount of time to analyze these documents prior to their public release on July 25th and all three published their accounts on the same day. Therefore, any emphasis or de-emphasis in how the material was presented can be used to test hypotheses about the mainstream media through a process known as content analysis. This involves both assessing the meaning of a given text as well as measuring how frequent a word or phrase shows up in a specific context.

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Germany charges ‘Nazi camp guard,’

90-year-old denies being involved in killing 430,000 Jews in Belzec camp.

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New translation of the Koran to reduce radicalism

Old and busted Koran: “Kill infidels”; new, hot Koran: “Love and accept all,”

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7/28

ADL audit: Anti-Semitic incidents at ‘troubling’ level

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States remained at a “sustained and troubling” level, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit.

The 2009 audit of anti-Semitic incidents, released Tuesday, recorded 1,211 incidents of vandalism, harassment and physical assaults against Jewish individuals, property and community institutions across the U.S. last year.

The number fell from the 1,352 incidents reported in 2008, but some of the decline was likely because of revised methodology for reporting and tracking incidents that was unveiled in the ‘09 audit, the ADL said.

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Oliver Stone caves to Jews

His latest comments brought swift condemnation Jews in the US and Israel and forced the 63-year-old to make a contrite apology.

He said: ‘In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret.

‘Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry,’ he said, adding that the Holocaust was an ‘atrocity’.

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Judge sharply questions federal argument against Arizona law

A federal judge sharply questioned the Justice Department’s key argument that Arizona’s immigration law interferes with federal enforcement of immigration law.

“Why can’t Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have entered or remained in the United States?” U.S. Judge Susan Bolton asked in Thursday’s hearing, according to the Washington Post.

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Israel demolishes Bedouin village

About 300 residents of a village in the Negev desert have lost homes and possessions.

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Former UN inspector Hans Blix says Iraq war illegal

Dr Blix told the Iraq inquiry the UK had sought to go down the “UN route” to deal with Saddam Hussein but failed.

Ex-Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who advised the war was lawful on the basis of existing UN resolutions, “wriggled about” in his arguments, he suggested.

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BP gets $32 billion in spill charges

BP Plc’s newly named chief executive on Tuesday called the Gulf oil spill a “wake-up call” for the entire industry as the company tallied up its losses and disclosed two U.S. investigations.

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But, they also get a $10 billion tax credit

… because the company has lost so much money from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That means taxpayers could be covering roughly half of the $20 billion pledged by BP for a fund to compensate people and businesses harmed by the disaster.

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US cannot account for $8.7B in Iraqi funds

A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.

The $8.7 billion in question was Iraqi money managed by the Pentagon, not part of the $53 billion that Congress has allocated for rebuilding. It’s cash that Iraq, which relies on volatile oil revenues to fuel its spending, can ill afford to lose.

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Jim Rogers predicts a new recession in 2012

Jim Rogers, the market sage, has warned the global economy is just two years away from another recession, but remains ill-prepared to cope with the after-effects. Meanwhile, Robert Shiller, co-creator of the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller house price index, warned that the next downturn may come even sooner.

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LOL

7/27

What a disappointment

Just as with the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, the oil from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico has… disappeared. How dare Mother Nature bug the ec-hysteriacs and the state, who now are all dressed up with no place to go.

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Goldman Sachs reveals where bailout cash went

Goldman Sachs sent $4.3 billion in federal tax money to 32 entities, including many overseas banks, hedge funds and pensions, according to information made public Friday night.

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Mexico sending human rights inspectors to US border to monitor SB 1070 deportations

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission said Monday it is sending inspectors to U.S. border crossings to monitor deportations that might result if Arizona’s new immigration law goes into effect as planned Thursday.

The law is being challenged by the U.S. government in court, but the federal judge hearing the case hasn’t indicated whether she might agree to the challenge’s request that the measure be put on hold.

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Are the Wikileaks documents over-hyped old news?

Longtime Afghanistan watchers are diving into Wikileaks’ huge trove of unearthed U.S. military reports about the war. And they’re surfacing, as we initially did, with pearls of the obvious and long-revealed. Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan veteran and Center for a New American Security fellow, compared the quasi-revelations about (gasp!) Pakistani intelligence sponsorship of Afghan insurgents and (shock-horror!) Special Operations manhunts to news that the Yankees may have lost the 2004 American League pennant. It’s a fair point, but it conceals what’s really valuable about the leaked logs: they’re a real-time account of how the U.S. let Afghanistan rot.

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First results from Large Hadron Collider announced

A group of University of Toronto high-energy physicists, along with their 3,000 ATLAS colleagues, announced they have broken world records in the search for new particles as the first findings from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were presented this morning in Paris, France.

The first results, following only three months of successful operation of the LHC, have “re-discovered” some of the familiar particles that lie at the heart of the Standard Model of physics. The Standard Model theory has formed the basis of theoretical particle physics for more than 30 years, explaining the particles of matter and the forces that bind them. The first results confirm that the Standard Model is working as expected.

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Israel and US sign deal to upgrade Arrow missile shield

Israel and the United States have signed an agreement to make the Arrow II ballistic shield capable of shooting down missiles at a higher altitude, the Israeli Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

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