So how much good to we think this will really do if they have no authority to detain or arrest anyone crossing?

It is not like we have the ability to rapidly deploy US customs officers to the scene all along the border.

This sounds more like a deceptive political stunt in an election year.

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Guard troops to deploy to Arizona border on Monday

PHOENIX – The first of 532 National Guard troops are set to begin their mission in the southern Arizona desert on Monday under President Barack Obama’s plan to beef up U.S.-Mexico border security, although they won’t have any law enforcement authority.

About 30 troops will start their jobs on the border Monday, and waves of more troops will be deploying every Monday until all 532 are expected to be on the Arizona border by the end of September. In May, Obama ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to boost security along the border.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said the first of 224 National Guard troops allocated for his state have finished their training and are expected to be deployed to the state’s border on Wednesday.

Troops in New Mexico were in different stages of training and don’t yet know when they’ll be deployed on the border. A Texas National Guard spokesman did not immediately return a call for comment.

The troops will be “extra eyes and ears” for U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, and though they will have guns for self-defense, they will not have the authority to arrest anyone, said Arizona National Guard spokesman Lt. Valentine Castillo.

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Link to full original article: Guard troops to deploy to Arizona border on Monday

Do you think their could be a slight bias?  Even a little deception or selective journalism being practiced?

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Obama, Democrats got 88 percent of 2008 contributions by TV network execs, writers, reporters

Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.

By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.

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Link to full original article: Obama, Democrats got 88 percent of 2008 contributions by TV network execs, writers, reporters

Looks like the administration called off the dogs (EPA).  I agree with the author that it was probably politics.  I would bet this is not the last time we see this.  It will be back, say early November?

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EPA Surrenders to NRA on Gun Control Issue

EPA rejects attempt to regulate lead in bullets after NRA protests

In a swift and unexpected decision, the Environmental Protection Agency today rejected a petition from environmental groups to ban the use of lead in bullets and shotgun shells, claiming it doesn’t have jurisdiction to weigh on the controversial Second Amendment issue. The decision came just hours after the Drudge Report posted stories from Washington Whispers and the Weekly Standard about how gun groups were fighting the lead bullet ban.

The EPA had planned to solicit public responses to the petition for two months, but this afternoon issued a statement rejecting a 100-page request from the Center for Biological Diversity, the American Bird Conservancy, and three other groups for a ban on lead bullets, shot, and fishing sinkers. The agency is still considering what to do about sinkers.

The decision was a huge victory for the National Rifle Association which just seven days ago asked that the EPA reject the petition, suggesting that it was a back door attempt to limit hunting and impose gun control. It also was a politically savvy move to take gun control off the table as the Democrats ready for a very difficult midterm election.

The NRA has spent two years tracking down rumors that the Obama administration wants to impose gun and ammo bans on the public, but hasn’t found anything credible. While the lead ban was viewed initially as a substantial chance for the administration to move into challenging the Second Amendment, the swift rejection by the EPA settled concerns inside NRA headquarters today.

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Link to full original article: EPA Surrenders to NRA on Gun Control Issue

More information behind the stated reasoning of the EPA…

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NRA Warns Against New Gun Control Push … From EPA

Environmental agency ponders whether lead in bullets is poisoning wildlife

The National Rifle Association, already on high alert over gun control rumors, has gone to battle stations to fight a new scheme before the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict hunters and anglers from using lead bullets, shot and sinkers.

Chief NRA lobbyist Chris Cox charges in a letter to the EPA that the effort amounts to “a vehicle to implement gun control” and could end hunting by most who can’t afford the higher priced alternatives to lead.

At issue: lead, the most widely used material for making bullets, shot, and sinkers. The Center for Biological Diversity says in a 100-page petition that lead used by outdoorsmen and women can be blamed for causing deaths in some 130 species of birds like eagles. “Lead-based bullets fragment on impact, distributing toxic lead particles widely throughout carcasses, and making it impossible for scavenging animals or humans to avoid ingesting lead along with meat,” says the center, joined on petition by the American Bird Conservancy, the Association of Avian Veterinarians, and two other groups.

The NRA counters that claims lead is causing a horrific toll on wildlife is bogus. The proof, they say, is the population explosion of American Eagles around the nation, including some inside Washington’s beltway.

But more importantly, says the NRA, the EPA is barred from regulating ammo or fishing sinkers under the Toxic Substances Control Act. But the ammo foes think that they have found a way around that by asking the EPA to regulate elements of ammo and the element they want banned is the lead.

Cox said that would counter what Congress has intended in previous laws. “Put another way, if Congress exempts a cow from regulation, one could hardly argue that it nevertheless would allow for regulation of the hide attached to the cow’s body,” said Cox.

Despite the opposition from the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the firearm and ammunition industry, the EPA is considering banning lead. It is seeking public comment until Halloween.

See the NRA’s letter to the EPA.

See the anti-lead petition.

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Link to full original article: NRA Warns Against New Gun Control Push … From EPA

So what can you trust?  Reality seems to not match their message.  Deception.  The worst part is we are spending money we don’t have on initiatives that don’t work, we are just printing it.

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SPIN METER: What Biden didn’t mention on stimulus

FRESNO, Calif. — Vice President Joe Biden said this week that the Obama administration “hit the accelerator” toward spending $5 billion under the economic stimulus law to weatherize people’s homes, create thousands of jobs, help consumers save money and put the nation on track for energy independence.

Yet the weatherization program the vice president highlighted in his visit Thursday to New Hampshire is widely considered among the least organized spending projects under the $814 billion economic stimulus law and has regularly been targeted for criticism of its slow progress by auditors and outsiders. Biden didn’t hint much at its troubles.

Nearly 18 months since it started, the stimulus weatherization program has experienced spending delays, inefficiencies and mismanagement. In Biden’s home state of Delaware, the entire program has been suspended since May, and last month federal auditors identified possible fraud.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — An occasional look behind the rhetoric of public officials.

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In his visit to Manchester, N.H., Biden said the program already had retrofitted 200,000 homes and would meet its ambitious goals of nearly 600,000 homes by March 2012.

He called it “one of our signature programs” under the stimulus law, saying that “thousands of construction workers across the country are now on the job making energy-saving home improvements that will save working families hundreds of dollars a year on their utility bills.”

What Biden failed to mention:

_In Alaska, the program has yet to retrofit one home.

_In Texas, auditors found the private contractor earning the most in stimulus money did shoddy work on 60 percent of the houses it was hired to weatherize.

_In California, a contracting company paid nearly $3 million to caulk low-income residents’ homes didn’t train two dozen of its employees, the state’s inspector general found last week.

Just months ago, at the one-year anniversary of the stimulus law, the Energy Department’s inspector general complained in a report about “little progress” weatherizing homes and said the government’s best efforts “appeared not to have significantly increased the tempo of actual units weatherized across the nation.”

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Link to full original article: SPIN METER: What Biden didn’t mention on stimulus

Who knows if this guy is right, but isn’t the fact that we find it feasible that a company would do it more telling?

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Analyst: Citigroup Is Cooking the Books

An all-out war has broken out between Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and a prominent securities analyst who is saying that the big bank may be cooking the books by inflating its earnings through an accounting gimmick, FOX Business Network has learned.

The analyst, Mike Mayo, of the securities firm CLSA, has been telling investors that Citigroup (C: 3.72 ,+0.06 ,+1.64%) should take a writedown, or a loss on some $50 billion of “deferred-tax assets,” or DTAs. That is a tax credit the firm has on its financial statement that Mayo says is inflating profits at the big bank by as much as $10 billion. For that critique, Mayo has been denied one-on-one meetings with top players of the firm, including CEO Vikram Pandit, Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach, and any other member of management, while other analysts enjoy full access to the bank’s top executives, FBN has learned.

In fact, Mayo hasn’t had a meeting with Pandit or anyone in Citigroup management since around the time of the financial crisis, in the fall of 2008, when Citigroup was on the verge of extinction and needed an unprecedented series of government bailouts to survive.

Since then Citigroup has been profitable, albeit marginally. Though it posted a loss for the full year of 2009, after it repaid a government bailout loan during the fourth quarter and began to unwind Uncle Sam’s ownership stake. One reason Citigroup may be unwilling to write off its DTAs: to do so may sink the troubled bank back into unprofitability.

Now, Mayo’s continued criticism of the firm’s accounting has turned a testy relationship between Pandit and Mayo into one of the most-bitter analyst-CEO confrontations seen on Wall Street for some time. When asked about the matter, a spokeswoman for Citigroup would only say “I have no comment on Mike Mayo.”

Mayo told FBN: “I’d like to know why all my competitors get meetings with Pandit and the key people there and I don’t.”

Stock research has been among the most controversial—and some would say—conflicted businesses on Wall Street. Companies employ a number of methods to force analysts to hype their shares, including as Mayo is charging, withholding access to key executives who can provide insight into the company’s operations. In 2003, big firms like Citigroup and others paid billions of dollars in penalties to settle regulatory charges that their analysts inflated stock ratings in order to win lucrative stock underwriting business from the companies they cover, leading to billions of dollars in losses for investors who relied on the dubious analysis to buy stock.

Mayo, meanwhile, has had a sometimes-testy relationship with the various companies he covers. While other securities analysts look to curry favor with management in order to gain access, or so their firm’s could do business with the companies they cover, Mayo is often confrontational during meetings and on analyst conference calls.

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Link to full original article: Analyst: Citigroup Is Cooking the Books

Propaganda is what we have replaced news with these days. 

This video shows how it is done, and how the common viewer, that did not see or hear the original audio would have a completely different understanding than the truth. 

This is how we have gotten to where we are as a nation.  Through this type of deception, and blatant disregard for the truth.

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Glenn Beck exposes ABC’s propaganda piece on 8/28

This morning Claire Shipman did a piece for Good Morning America on Beck’s 8/28 that was nothing more than an intentional hatchet job. ABC intentionally took a statement (not even a complete sentence) Beck said out of context so bad that it makes him out to be some kind of racist hate monger. Beck refers to it as propaganda piece that he likens to something Joseph Goebbels would have done.

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Link to full original article: Glenn Beck exposes ABC’s propaganda piece on 8/28

These are some of the worst injustices done by this administration. 

The mess they have created with Gitmo and their proposed trial system is unbelievable. 

It is amazing who they let off and who they go after.  It is as if we have flipped reality upside down. 

It is deception on multiple levels….

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Administration halts prosecution of alleged USS Cole bomber

The Obama administration has shelved the planned prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged coordinator of the Oct. 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, according to a court filing.

The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attack, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.”

The statement, tucked into a motion to dismiss a petition by Nashiri’s attorneys, suggests that the prospect of further military trials for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has all but ground to a halt, much as the administration’s plan to try the accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in federal court has stalled.

Only two cases are moving forward at Guantanamo Bay, and both were sworn and referred for trial by the time Obama took office. In January 2009, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directed the Convening Authority for Military Commissions to stop referring cases for trial, an order that 20 months later has not been rescinded.

Military officials said a team of prosecutors in the Nashiri case has been ready go to trial for some time. And several months ago, military officials seemed confident that Nashiri would be arraigned this summer.

“It’s politics at this point,” said one military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy. He said he thinks the administration does not want to proceed against a high-value detainee without some prospect of civilian trials for other major figures at Guantanamo Bay.

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Link to full original article: Administration halts prosecution of alleged USS Cole bomber