Link: http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-7546-0-8-8--.html

According to the ACLU of Maryland, a 13-year-old female student at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance on Jan. 27. The teacher reportedly ordered the girl out into the hallway, where he threatened the girl with detention and then sent her to the school counselor's office. The next day, when the student again refused to stand for the pledge, the teacher called school officers to remove her from the classroom and take her to the counselor's office once again. "When the student’s mother reached out to an assistant principal for help in dealing with the teacher’s abusive and improper actions, the official said her daughter should instead apologize for her 'defiance.' The student did apologize, twice," the ACLU states. The right to sit silently during the Pledge of Allegiance has been held up by the US Supreme Court, and is enshrined in Maryland state law and Mongtomery County Public Schools' own policies, reports the Washington Post.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/11/liz-cheney-keep-america-safe

Not long after the Twin Towers fell, Dick Cheney declared the death of more than two centuries of American tradition. "It will be necessary for us to be a nation of men, and not laws," he said. The then vice-president did his best to follow through by riding roughshod over the constitution and international laws by promoting torture, indefinite detention without trial and support for secretive military tribunals in which defendants were stripped of many of their rights.

Link: http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/2010/03/07/normalizing-the-police-state-and-how-it-ends-with-taser-firing-drones/

Kathryn Winkfein, a 72-year-old great-grandmother, was tasered (twice) by an officer for getting shouty after she was pulled over for a traffic offense. Youtube commenters — ever the empathetic bunch — said Winkfein was “asking to be tasered.” Another said Winkfein clearly has to take some “responsibility” for being tasered. Worse than the police state itself are the people who can’t rush to defend the oppressors quickly enough. That student was asking for it. Grandma shoulda kept her mouth shut. Digby calls this the “normalizing of torture.” Not only are people unsurprised by tasering these days, but they watch it for entertainment on Youtube. This normalizing goes beyond tasering, however. It’s now normal for the state to monitor citizens, and for any kind of mass protest to be immediately restricted by the government.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_war_economy

The concept of permanent war economy originated in 1944 with an article by Ed Sard (alias Frank Demby, Walter S. Oakes and T.N. Vance, a Trotskyist) who predicted a post-war arms race. He argued at the time that the USA would retain the character of a war economy; even in peacetime, US military expenditure would remain large, reducing the percentage of unemployed compared to the 1930s. He extended this analysis in 1950 and 1951.[1] The term was also used by the CEO of General Electric and vice-chairman of the War Production Board, Charles E. Wilson ("Electric Charlie," not to be confused with "Engine Charlie," Charles Erwin Wilson of General Motors) to refer to an institutionalized war economy —ie. a semi-command economy to be directed by corporation executives, based on military industry, and funded by government. The term refers to the economic component within the military-industrial complex (MIC) (aka. "the Iron Triangle") whereby the collusion between militarism and war profiteering are manifest as a permanently subsidised industry. Wilson warned at the close of World War II that the US must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a "permanent war economy."[2]

Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/03/a-detention-bill-you-ought-to-read-more-carefully/37116

Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump. According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

Link: http://www.whale.to/b/crow.html

by Martha Rose Crow, M.S. Auto comes from the Greek reflexive pronoun while genocide comes from the Latin words gens meaning "race, tribe" and -cidere meaning "kill." (source: http://wikipedia.org) American Autogenocide is the deliberate, systematic and legal murder of American citizens by socially-engineering the die-off of populations that are “problematic” for the interests of wealth and power. Most victims prematurely die from social forces targeted at them to cause them to wear out by stress. This process is called "Weathering Away" or "Attrition By Stress." Although it has to be “legal,” autogenocide is always committed under the radar so the media won’t be compelled to report it and so the people won’t see it or understand it. More, the genocide is blamed on the victims and their deaths are hidden-attributed-to other causes rather than the primary one of autogenocide. What is different between this genocide and other genocides is that this unique genocide doesn't produce mass graves. Instead, the victims are spread over a large geographic area and buried singly, thereby hiding the body count. This keeps the deaths sanitized and homogenized. It also keeps the autogenocide surreal; thus enabling the village to deny It's existence when clues to It's existence are ambundant and abundantly transparent.

Link: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1338.htm

New reports coming from the United States today are revealing one of the most insidious plots to have ever been perpetrated against the American people and will leave an estimated 30 million of them homeless as their wealth is transferred to the elite bankers currently ruling over them and led by President Obama. To fully understand this plot to destroy the entire middle class of the United States one must know about the banking giant behind it named Goldman Sachs, who put Obama into the American presidency for the express purpose of committing the largest robbery in the entire history of the World, and who in the riveting article about this banking giant by the Rolling Stone Magazine titled “Inside The Great American Bubble Machine” they are blamed for “engineering every major market manipulation since the Great Depression”, and which, in part, states: