NRA Frightened Democrats Silent on Gun Issue

It is a perfect example of what's wrong with government and why no matter which Democrat is elected nothing will be done about the easy access to guns:

The deadly shooting at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., is just the latest example of a growing problem on school campuses across the country. The issue of gun control is certain to be salient in the minds of voters in DeKalb and, for example, Blacksburg, Va., where shots killed 33 people at Virginia Tech University last April.

But so far, the Democratic presidential hopefuls have offered no solutions or preventive measures to combat this problem. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., offered his sympathies, but specified no new ideas to enforce gun control in his home state of Illinois. "I've said before, and continue to believe, that we need to do a more effective job of enforcing our gun laws," he said, speaking in Milwaukee, Wis., on Friday.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., offered similarly vague statements. "We just have to figure out how we are going to get smart about protecting our kids," she said.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Organization, a grassroots effort to prevent gun violence, says we need leadership from both Clinton and Obama on this issue.

But the candidates are quick to remember what happened to Al Gore in 2000. Gore lost West Virginia, in large part, because of negative ads paid for by the NRA. "I think a lot of candidates and politicians are afraid of getting the gun lobby upset," said Helmke. "They fear that talking about guns, it's gonna lose them elections."

Just as with the Virginia Tech shooter, the individual responsible for the massacre in Illinois was mentally unfit to own a gun. Why can't our government even agree that a background check should be done to determine if someone is mentally unstable to purchase a gun? Therefore, mass shootings will continue to go on almost on a weekly basis while the politicians remain silent. Our government is owned by lobbies like the NRA, not the American people. This is why we need an alternative to the two-party sellout.

Michael Moore Exposes Hillary Clinton on Health Care

Leave it to Michael Moore to show government, and the Clintons, at their hypocritical worst. Hillary Clinton went from "Hillarycare" to a darling of the healthcare industry. This video is a must see for those who wonder why 40 million Americans are without health insurance while costs keep rising:

Error Gave F.B.I. Unauthorized Access to E-Mail

Are we slowly losing our freedoms? Under the guise of fighting terrorism the government, with the help of the private sector, has been violating our rights on a unprecedented level. It seems as if no one is looking out for us. We've allowed a President to tear up the Constitution, and Congress to turn acquiesce because they don't want to lose the next election. Are you just going to sit by and let your freedoms disappear. NOT I:

A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

F.B.I. officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government’s wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: “It’s inevitable that these things will happen. It’s not weekly, but it’s common.”

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

[...]In the warrantless wiretapping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, technical errors led officials at the National Security Agency on some occasions to monitor communications entirely within the United States — in apparent violation of the program’s protocols — because communications problems made it difficult to tell initially whether the targets were in the country or not.

Past violations by the government have also included continuing a wiretap for days or weeks beyond what was authorized by a court, or seeking records beyond what were authorized. The 2006 case appears to be a particularly egregious example of what intelligence officials refer to as “overproduction” — in which a telecommunications provider gives the government more data than it was ordered to provide.