The U.S. Senate is poised to approve a dramatic expansion of the AmeriCorps national community service program. Conservatives who oppose the measure say it is an attempt to greatly expand government’s role in providing community services by replacing charitable volunteers with paid government workers.
Senators voted 74-14 Monday to take up the Serve America Act, legislation that would more than triple the size of the AmeriCorps program over the next eight years, expanding its current 75,000 positions to 250,000.
Last week, a similar bill that would add 175,000 participants to the program passed in the House by a vote of 321-105.
President Barack Obama said at the time that expanding AmeriCorps is “timely.”
“At this moment of economic crisis, when so many people are in need of help and so much needs to be done, this could not be more urgent,” Obama said. “It is up to every one of us to do his or her small part to make the world a better place.”
But conservatives such as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C) call the expansion nothing more than “the federal government reaching further into the world of civil society” — an arena they say is best left to the local level and to organizations such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, United Way and Knights of Columbus.
In the run-up to next week’s G-20 summit in London, developing countries led by China and Russia are stepping up calls for the U.S. dollar to be pushed aside as the main global reserve currency.
China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, suggested this week that reforms to the international monetary system include the long-term goal of an international reserve currency not connected to an individual nation. China is the biggest holder of U.S. dollar assets and is concerned about the currency’s volatility.
A few days earlier, the Russian government put forward among its G-20 summit priorities a proposal for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to explore the possibility of creating a “super reserve currency accepted by the whole of the international community.” Russia said the proposal had broad support among other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, India and South Korea.
Salt Lake Nonpartisan Examiner >> Originally Published 23rd March 2009
It is another sound good piece of legislation. H.R. 1388 has a creative title; The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education (GIVE) Act. 321 representatives of the people voted approval for this legislation which, among many other things, strikes a blow to the rights of people to mount any protests against legislation. Listen closely, it outlaws the right to mount protests against proposed legislation.
This act is being presented as part of Pres. Obama’s goal of establishing a national service program. In his speech delivered in Colorado Springs, CO he wanted “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the the military.” As Rahm Emanuel further explained, “It’s time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, all Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service.”
Moscow News >> Originally Published 25th March 2009
Russia’s top mason and former presidential candidate, Andrei Bogdanov, is running in the Sochi mayor elections this spring. He is the 19th candidate seeking to get the top position in the Russian resort city that is hosting the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.
On Wednesday, Bogdanov arrived in Sochi, eyed by numerous businessmen ahead of the Olympics, to file his documents at the elections committee, Russian news agencies said.
He refused to comment on his chances to win the elections, but said he had a program developed to prepare Sochi for the Olympic Games. He also announced he was going to meet the voters and discuss their problems.
Andrei Bogdanov is known for heading Russia’s largest Masonic lodge.
“I am proud to be in and to head the great Masonic Lodge of Russia, whose members were Pushkin, Suvorov, and Kutuzov,” he said in one of his interviews.
SHAMELESS Gordon Brown declared yesterday he was PROUD Britain signed the hated Lisbon Treaty.
The PM lavished praise on the EU as he delivered his most pro-European speech to date.He said it was “uniquely placed” to drag the world out of the economic crisis.
And in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, he hailed the Lisbon Treaty which resurrected the discredited EU constitution.
Mr Brown refused last year to give British voters a referendum on the Treaty.
But yesterday he said defiantly: “I’m proud that by a large majority our British parliament ratified the Treaty.”
His fawning comments contrasted with his frequent clashes with Brussels during his ten years as Chancellor.
Anti-terror laws have been used more than 10,000 times by councils for trivial “crimes” such as littering, dog-fouling and taxi over-charging, it was revealed today.
But fewer than one in ten of these inquiries resulted in any form of penalty, a Freedom of Information request found.
Local authorities have been accused of misusing surveillance powers awarded by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and originally designed to combat terrorism.
The Liberal Democrats, who obtained the details, warned that Ripa was becoming a “snooper’s charter”.
The findings are based on a survey of 182 district and unitary councils in England and Wales which responded to a freedom of information request.
They showed that Ripa powers have been used on 10,288 occasions since 2004, but just nine per cent of those inquiries led to a successful prosecution, caution, or fixed penalty notice.
The alleged offences included littering, illegal street trading, taxi over-charging and taking the fairy lights from a Christmas tree.
Lib Dem local government spokesman Julia Goldsworthy said that when Ripa originally became law, only nine organisations – including the police and security services – were allowed to use it, but that has since been extended to 795 bodies.
“This Government sees civil liberties as little more than a temporary inconvenience. Slowly but surely, freedoms have been eroded,” she said.
“We’re now in a situation where dog fouling is considered enough to warrant surveillance by council officials.
An aircraft fitted with military-style thermal imagers is being used by a council to identify families wasting energy.
The data is being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to visit residents losing the most heat from their homes and offer them energy-saving advice.
Conservative-led Broadland District Council in Norfolk is one of the first local authorities to hire out the specially equipped spy plane at a cost of £30,000.
‘We realised it would be useful to see if any of the homes which were particularly hot were properties where people had not insulated their lofts,’ said Andy Jarvis, head of environmental services.
‘We also saw very cold properties and think we might have picked up people on low incomes who are not heating their homes because they cannot afford to.’
When a pilot scheme was introduced in Haringey, north London, in 2007 some critics complained it was an infringement of privacy.
But Broadland’s Liberal Democrat group leader Stuart Beadle said: ‘I think it’s a good thing.
‘Cameras are everywhere – people have to accept it.’
IRVINE, Calif.-Noted San Francisco architect Richard Gage told the audience at Freedom Law School’s annual health and freedom conference recently that his organization, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, is growing quickly and now has more than 600 structural experts who have grave doubts about the official story of what happened to the three World Trade Center buildings that were destroyed in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER VIDEO
AFP INTERVIEWS RICHARD GAGE OF ARCHITECTS FOR 9/11 TRUTH
“We hope to have 1,000 members by September and have over 600 now,” said Gage, a successful architect whose projects dot the California landscape.
The audience heard Gage describe the many problems with the official version, not the least of which is that fire is an “organic process” that could not have caused the symmetrical (uniform) destruction of the 110-story Twin Towers that morning, and the fall of the 47-story Soloman Brothers Building (Building 7) more than six hours later. These three buildings were part of the Rockefeller-inspired WTC complex, consisting of seven buildings on 16 acres.
Gage noted that the vaunted National Institute for Safety and Technology (NIST) study of the WTC buildings did not even look at the voluminous evidence of a controlled demolition of the three structures on 9-11, so it’s not as if the evidence was examined by NIST and declared inconclusive. NIST instead only examined the event “up to the point of collapse” and went no further. Thus, there is no way the government can objectively assess the entire catastrophic event.
“How can you find what you are not looking for?” Gage asked, adding that various forces that can destroy buildings-including fire and earthquakes-have obvious characteristics. Fire does not devour a structure uniformly because it randomly branches out wherever there is, say, furniture and other “fuel” to consume. The melting point of structural steel is around 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. The short-duration Twin Tower fires reached no more than 1,400 degrees (and that is very generous).
So for the government to say that burning jet fuel within the Twin Towers not only uniformly melted structural steel to the point of collapse-but brought the huge buildings down at near freefall speed-is the height of absurdity, not to mention that it is categorically impossible for fire to pulverize concrete. More than 90,000 tons of concrete was pulverized mid-air, along with metal decking. Blast waves blew out windows in buildings 400 feet away.
That third building that many Americans still are only dimly aware of, Building 7, really drives this issue home, in Gage’s view. “Well, the 600 architects I represent are most concerned about the freefall collapse of Building 7, the third skyscraper [that was] not hit by an airplane to fall on the afternoon of 9/11. This is a 47-story skyscraper that in the first hundred feet of its fall is falling at freefall speed. This is acknowledged by NIST. That can’t happen unless the structure [underneath] is removed. There is no resistance from the structure to that fall in the first 2.25 seconds. So this of great concern. Of course it falls symmetrically almost at freefall speed and collapses thereafter-the whole building is destroyed in 6.5 seconds,” as he told AFP in an exclusive interview.
He added: “NIST . . . claims that we have 10 fires [in Building 7], one of which was ‘roaring’ . . . and [the fires] ‘expanded the beams,’ knocking a girder off its seat and causing ‘an internal cascading collapse’-which is ludicrous because we would have seen all kinds of deformation on the perimeter structure. Anyway, they claim fires brought this building down, but fire is an organic process that doesn’t bring buildings down symmetrically at freefall speed, in the manner of a classic controlled demolition. So that’s the No. 1 key point of evidence.”
As for the Twin Towers, he said there are “many similar features of controlled demolition, but very different as well. It’s explosive. Everything is being ejected outside of the footprint – 95 percent of the debris. Four-ton perimeter wall units are being hurled laterally 600 feet, which takes 55 miles per hour instant acceleration out of the sides of the tower. Now underneath all three buildings we have several tons of molten metal [at 2,700 F or hotter, which stayed hot for 3-4 months] which is not created by jet fuel or office fires or anything else. Where does all this come from? We have video evidence, photographic evidence. The official government reports don’t even talk about it; nor do they talk about the dozens of explosions heard by 118 witnesses recorded orally by the chief fire commissioner of the City of New York.”
Gage continued: “It’s extraordinary what we don’t have in the [NIST] report, and that’s what we focus on in Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. In addition in the towers we have 110 floors of four-inch thick concrete; they are an acre in size each. We’re looking for some of those floors at the bottom of the pile. The photographs don’t reveal any of them-just a pile of debris two or three stories high.”
“Where did the ‘pancakes’ go?” AFP then asked Gage, referring to the government’s “pancake” theory, wherein the heavy collapsing floors from the top overwhelmed the structure below and “pancaked” down to the bottom. Counting both towers, 220 floors were missing on that “Black Tuesday.”
“That’s what we’re looking for is pancakes,” he replied. “We’ve got the ‘syrup,’ we have no pancakes. The ‘syrup’ is the molten metal.”
He went on to say: “Also we are looking at explosions that occurred 20, 40 and 60 stories down-below the collapsing building! Where are they coming from? NIST says they are ‘puffs of air’ because there are piledrivers pushing down the building and that air has to come out somewhere, right? They are not puffs of air; they are pulverized building materials and they occur at 160 to 200 feet per second. These are propelled by explosive speeds.”
As determined by former Brigham Young physicist Steven Jones-and reiterated by Gage-the telltale signs of an ultra-hot incendiary known as thermite (which becomes thermate with sulfur added) were found in the dust at 4-5 distinct locations in New York. Thermite can reach temperatures of 4,500 F and can be explosive when it’s souped up. Microspheres formed from molten iron constitute some of the evidence, as well as red chips comprised of unignited thermite. Gage believes that nano-thermite is the most likely culprit, since it is a “quieter” but ultra-powerful explosive.
“Al Qaeda probably did not have access to these buildings or to thermite (or thermate), which was not made in a cave in Afghanistan,” Gage commented, adding, however, that his organization [www.AE911truth.org] does not formally probe who the perpetrators were. But he fears whoever pulled it off could do it again because the truth has long been suppressed, leaving Americans vulnerable.
Gage’s group supports a new, genuine investigation, whereas the official “investigation” did not even include establishing a crime scene at the WTC complex and ended with the official 9/11 Commission report that does even mention Building 7.
Mark Anderson is corresponding editor for American Free Press.
Not Copyrighted. Readers can reprint and are free to redistribute – as long as full credit is given to American Free Press – 645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite 100 Washington, D.C. 20003
Obama has reportedly ordered an end to use of the phrase “Global War on Terror,” a label adopted by the Bush administration shortly after the September 11 attacks.
FOX News >> 25th March 2009
The Obama administration has ordered an end to use of the phrase “Global War on Terror,” a label adopted by the Bush administration shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
In a memo sent this week from the Defense Department’s office of security to Pentagon staffers, members were told, “this administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT.] Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’”
A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, from whom the direction reportedly came, told the Post there was no guidance given from the agency and that it was merely the “opinion of a career civil servant.”
A Pentagon spokesman said there was no memo or specific directive instructing officials to stop using the ‘Global War on Terror’ phrase but acknowledged that the department has officially adopted ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’ as the new term for the war.
COMMENTARY: This is a typical example of how the Orwellian Double-Speak method is used to fool people… particulary by the Obama machine that is founded on false hope, or ‘CHANGE’ (that we can all believe in).
It’s not the ‘Global War on Terror’… its something completely different. Its the ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’.
That’s like saying, “We’re not watching the film ‘The Rundown’ tonight… we’re watching ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ instead”. They’re the same film just with different names (see below).
So by re-branding the Global War on Terror, to the unsuspecting masses of sheeple it draws in a false feeling of a new-era. It’s all the same under Obama, if not worse because he’s expanding the bugger!.
Keep checking back to our headlines as we continue to expose the Obama Deception (and see that we’re not just randomly mouthing off here!).
