Anticipating Obama’s Promise on Executive Action Relief for Millions of Undocumented Resident, One Central Ohio Resident Fighting to Stay With His Family

What: Rally and delivery of over 500 signatures asking David Deweese, Supervising Officer at the Customs Enforcement (ICE) Immigration Office to Stop the Deportation of Angel Bustos

When: November 14, 2014 - 10am

Where: Customs Enforcement (ICE) Immigration Office - Leveque Tower - 50 W. Broad St., Suite 306 - Columbus, Ohio 43215

Who: April Withrow; wife of Angel Bustos, family members, people of faith, friends and allies

Columbus, Ohio- As the nation waits on President Obama to unveil his “Ten Point Plan” for overhauling the U.S. Immigration policy via executive action which may suspend deportations for millions: one family in Columbus may be broken apart soon.

When Ángel Bustos arrived at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Columbus on October 27, he never imagined may never see his wife and son again. Ángel was accustomed to weekly meetings with ICE while his petition to remain in the US was being processed. David Deweese, supervising ICE officer for the Columbus field office, denied Ángel’s petition.

Camera rolls as NSA whistleblower reveals all

Edward Snowden in Citizenfour (Praxis Films)

Remember Deep Throat, the mysterious source who helped to unravel the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal by meeting a reporter in a parking garage? Citizenfour begins with a series of cryptic email exchanges that makes that secrecy precaution seem like child’s play.

“This will not be a waste of your time,” a would-be informant assures documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. When Poitras and a couple of reporters for a British newspaper finally meet the informant in a Hong Kong hotel, this proves to be the understatement of the decade.

The man is Edward Snowden, a consultant who until recently had been working with the National Security Agency. He has an astounding story to tell about how much the government has infringed on the average citizen’s privacy in its efforts to fight terrorism. As Poitras’s camera watches and the reporters take notes, he proceeds to do just that.

How the GOP bought, rigged, stole and lynched the 2014 election

First in a series

Since the Bush-Cheney-Rove theft of the 2000 election in Florida, the right of millions of American citizens to vote and have that vote counted has been under constant assault.

In 2014, that systematic disenfranchisement may well have delivered the US Senate to the Republican Party.  If nothing significant is done about it by 2016, we can expect the GOP to take the White House and much more.

The primary victims of this GOP-led purge have been young, elderly, poor and citizens of color who tend to vote Democratic.  The denial of their votes has changed the face of our government, and is deepening corporate control of our lives and planet.

There’s no doubt the Democrats have alienated their core constituency and given millions of their former supporters little reason to vote.  Perpetual war, blank checks for mega-banks, stiffing the working poor while giving away the planet to the rich----these are all part of the malaise.   Our political landscape is currently defined by corporate personhood and its gutting of the Democratic Party.  

Did the British extreme right use allies in the Metropolitan Police to silence a private citizen and threaten journalists?

Serious questions have been raised about the abuse of police powers in favour of far right politicians after a whistleblower from nationalist party United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) claimed to have been framed and intimidated by police officers with extreme right sympathies.

Jasna Badzak, who worked as a press officer for senior UKIP Member of European Parliament Gerard Batten before reporting his incitements to racial hatred to the police, has revealed that she believes she was the target of a criminal conspiracy by several officers to set her up. An anonymous journalist involved in reporting Badzak's case has since sent evidence to former Conservative MP Louise Mensch which, if true, “threaten[s] them if they wrote negative stories on Batten”.

Scytl has all the tools it needs for election fraud

Free Press readers may be familiar with Scytl, the promoter of online and mobile voting, and their apparent connections to the intelligence community. Renewed research into Scytl has revealed new connections to the intelligence community, new market positioning, and new opportunities for both personalized surveillance and electronic election fraud.

Scytl's 2012 entry into the American election market occurred through the purchase of SOE software, a Tampa based manufacturer of election management and reporting software known as the Clarity suite. Scytl initially maintained essentially a front address in Virginia while digesting SOE during the the 2012 election cycle. Since then there has been a pattern of SOE rebranding and reorganizing itself along with a merger and new set of strategic partnerships.

Greens occupy record vote

Anita Rios received nearly 100,000 votes as the Green Party candidate for governor this Election Day 2014. This 3.3% of all votes in Ohio needs to be placed in historical context. The Ohio Greens needed 2% of the statewide vote to remain on the ballot for future elections.

In five Ohio counties, the Greens polled more than 4% of the total vote: Athens County at 6.52%, Franklin County at 4.53%, Cuyahoga County at 4.28%, Portage County at 4.4% and Meigs County at 4.3. The only counties showing Rios votes under 2% were Darke, Mercer and Putnam. She received more than 2% in all 85 remaining Ohio counties.

The Green Party, committed to grassroots democracy and reining in unfettered corporate capitalism, reached numbers in Ohio that often reflect a much broader mass progressive movement.

In 1932 for example, Norman Thomas received 2.2% of the vote as the Socialist candidate for President. Scholars speak of the Socialist Party as the last mass movement of the “Old Left.” The high point of the Old Left was Eugene Debs’ 6% of the vote, gained in 1912 at the apex of the progressive era.

Film offers innovative plot device and little else

Alex Ross Perry says he was inspired to write and direct Listen Up Philip because he read a novel in which the central character disappears for much of the book. He thought it would be interesting to make a movie in which the same thing happens.

After seeing Listen Up Philip, I think he should have waited for a little more inspiration.

Perry says he also was influenced by a period in his own life when he was forced to travel and thus lost touch with his own friends and relationships: “they were all being put on hold.”

But presumably Perry had been a more devoted friend than title character Philip (Jason Schwartzman), who’s so self-centered and devoid of empathy that he’s basically absent from other people’s lives even when he’s physically present. In light of that shortcoming, what difference does it make to them—or to us—if he decides to go away for a while?

The oldest profession is not prostitution, but does begin with pro

 

As we see the end of another political season, we all thank God that the end of this wave of propaganda is almost here.  But it made me think - why are billions of dollars spent each political season trying to make us come to decisions that in so many cases are against our own self interests??  As one of innumerable examples, the governor of Ohio Kasich is asking us to vote for him in part on his platform on education, yet he has reduced funding to public education by over one half of billion dollars.  His move clearly forces all of us to pay more for our children's tuition and for every student's tuition in the form of increased property taxes.

Did the CIA try to thwart the nation’s last investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination?

 

“The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation,” says G. Robert Blakey, the former general counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which issued its report in 1979.

“It is time that either Congress or the Justice Department conducts a real investigation of the CIA,” Blakey said at a conference last month. “Indeed, in my opinion, it is long past time.”

Blakey, shown at left, urged the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to comply promptly with a federal law unanimously passed by congress in 1992 requiring release of JFK records.

Archives leadership refuses to release the documents until 2017 without CIA or presidential approval. The CIA has said it lacks the personnel to process the documents sooner in ways that protect national security.

But at what point does refusal to cooperate with a murder investigation signify a broken system?

An Election---and a Nation---Lost in Vietnam & Afghanistan

The GOP/corporate coup d’etat is nearly complete.

 The Republicans now control the major media, the Supreme Court, the Congress and soon the presidency.

 Think Jeb Bush in 2016.

 All throughout America, right down to the local level, buried in a tsunami of cash and corruption, our public servants are being morphed into corporate operatives.

 Our electoral apparatus is thoroughly compromised by oceans of dirty money, Jim Crow registration traps, rigged electronic voting machines, gerrymandering, corrupt secretaries of state.

 The internet may be next.  Above all, if there is one thing that could save us a shred of democracy, it’s preserving net neutrality.  This fight could in fact outweigh all the others, and may be decided soon.  Whatever depression you may now feel, shake it off to wage this battle.  If we now lose the ability to freely communicate, we are in the deepest hole of all.

 The roots of this corporate coup reach where they always do when empires collapse---useless, cancerous, debilitating, endless imperial war.

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