Bradley Manning Trial: Defense Counsel Ask How Passing Info to Journalist is “Aiding and Abetting the Enemy”?

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Photo Credit: APThe defence team representing Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked reams of state secrets to WikiLeaks, has made one last attempt to persuade the judge presiding over his court martial to dismiss the most serious charge against him: that he “aided the enemy”.

Manning’s civilian lawyer David Coombs said that to convict the army private of such a severe offence would set an “extremely bad precedent”. It would place US society on a “very slippery slope, of basically punishing people for getting information out to the press.”

Addressing the judge in a military court in Fort Meade, Coombs said that “no case has ever been prosecuted under this type of theory: that an individual, by the nature of giving information to a journalistic organisation, would then be subject to” a charge of “aiding the enemy”. Conviction of such an office would bring “a hammer down on any whistleblower or anybody who wants to put information out”.

The lawyer’s comments were recorded by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is employing court stenographers during the Manning trial as a way of overcoming the high level of official secrecy that surrounds the case.

The “aiding the enemy” charge has become the seminal battle in Manning’s prosecution, with the US government, in its determination to come down hard on official leakers, ranged against advocates of freedom of information. Under the terms of the charge, Manning is accused of having given valuable intelligence to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and its affiliate groups simply by dint of having leaked documents that were then posted by WikiLeaks on the internet.

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Hispanic Networks Granted Exclusive Interviews With Obama But Fail to Ask Even One Question About Zimmerman

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Photo Credit: qnrLeading Hispanic television networks Univision and Telemundo were granted two interviews apiece with President Obama today, but not one interviewer asked the president a question about the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, according to transcripts and sources familiar with the interviews.

The four interviews were intended to focus on immigration reform, but the absence of any inquiry related to the high-profile court case surprised even the White House…

Television industry executives also expressed surprise: “It’s unbelievable that any journalist with access to the President this week wouldn’t ask the first African-American president about his reaction to the verdict,” said one D.C.-based executive.

Instead, the interviewers focused on immigration reform, giving President Obama the opportunity to tout the economic benefits of reform and to criticize House Republicans for opposing the immigration bill on political grounds.

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Hypocritical Nancy Grace Makes ‘Racist’ Claim that Zimmerman is Back to ‘Driving Through Taco Bell and Having a Churro’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Newsbusters Just when it seemed that the racial tensions couldn’t get any worse after George Zimmerman’s “not guilty” verdict regarding the charge of the second-degree murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin, along comes Nancy Grace, the host of a weeknight news/interview program on the HLN cable news network, who did her best to fan the flames even higher.

Responding to lead defense attorney Mark O’Mara’s closing argument on Friday night asking the jury to give Zimmerman his life back, the acerbic host growled: “Give Zimmerman back his life? He’s out on bond driving through Taco Bell every night, having a churro”…

Since then, Grace has been accused of using “a very poor choice of words” herself, with some even going so far as to call her a racist for the language she used.

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PBS’s Tavis Smiley: Our Babies are being Shot Dead in the Street, What’s the Use of having a Black President? (+video)

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Tavis Smiley is furious that President Obama has not done more to combat racism in America, and that anger was on full display Monday night. On his self-titled PBS program, Smiley unleashed a pair of long-winded leftist rants barely disguised as questions to his guest, Dr. Tricia Rose from Brown University.

Rose, who directs Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, had suggested that Obama was incapable of ending structural racism in America by himself. Hearing that, Smiley erupted: “[I]f you’re right about this, then what the heck is the value of us celebrating a black president?”

Apparently Smiley had rather high hopes when President Obama was elected. He continued:

“But all of this hoopla about his being the first black president, if it doesn’t redound to you in some meaningful way when your back is to the wall and your babies are being shot dead in the streets, if it doesn’t redound to you in some meaningful way at that point… what is the value of having a black president?”

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There Are No Indispensable Men

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Photo Credit: SenRockefellerThere are no indispensable men, but go to Washington and everyone treats everyone else as indispensable.

Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have been in the United States Congress since 1985. In that time the national debt has grown from $1,823,103,000,000.00 to $16,066,241,407,385.89. In that time the GOP went from being the part of small government to the party of slightly smaller than the Democrats. No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, the General Motors bailout, and so much more happened on their watch.

But they remain and voters who vote party and not person keep supporting them. But they are not indispensable. No man is indispensable. The longer one stays in Washington though, the more desperate one becomes to stay in Washington. They collaborate in a system of arrangements whereby they get more power and more influence. Their staff leaves to K Street creating a feedback loop. They and their Democratic counterparts reward friends and steer policy not toward ideas and ideology, but toward power with themselves in the center of it.

No man is indispensable. Mike Enzi (R-WY) is right there with them.

Mike Enzi is a fine Republican, but he is not putting points on the board for conservatives. We need more like Ted Cruz and less like . . . well . . . Mike Enzi. We need less rudderless Republicans who shuffle around at the direction of their leadership and lobbyist friends.

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Race Industry Leeches

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Photo Credit: frontpagemagThe trial of George Zimmerman is over, but the persecution of him by the race industry isn’t. The Department of Justice is currently combing through the case to find some pretext, no matter how specious, for charging Zimmerman with a violation of civil-rights laws. No matter that the FBI investigation has eliminated race as a factor in Zimmerman’s actions, or that the prosecutors in Florida studiously ignored race as a motive. Under Attorney General Eric Holder, the DOJ has become the Luca Brasi of the race industry, enforcing the self-serving, racialist narrative that in part propelled Holder’s boss into the White House. So don’t be surprised if the DOJ seizes the opportunity.

Indeed, the specter of a DOJ trial is just the latest in a series of events, from the Duke lacrosse team prosecution to Holder’s abuse of the Voting Rights Act, that demonstrate the mendacious, hypocritical racial ideology that permeates our politics and institutions. The central theme of this narrative is the endemic, eternal white racism that accounts for every dysfunction in the black community. No amount of progress, from the remarkable expansion of the black middle class to the utter discrediting of old-school racists like the Ku Klux Klan, can alter this narrative, for the simple reason that a significant number of black politicians, professors, federal and state employees, and activists gain power and money by exploiting the “racism” meme.

Consider the reaction to the trial from the usual race-hack subjects. Hilary Shelton, head of the NAACP Washington Bureau, said, “Those of us who are fathers, particularly of African-American boys, find it [the acquittal] shockingly frightening.” The message, he says, is “Not only can we do this, we can get away with it.”

Well, what should be “shockingly frightening” is the fact that 64% of black children live in homes without a father. Huge numbers of black men are siring children they do not take responsibility for, and are getting away with it. This means that Shelton is speaking about a minority of black men when he evokes “those of us who are fathers,” a minority that no doubt comprises those blacks who are better educated and better employed than the other two-thirds. In other words, Shelton is exploiting the social and economic dysfunctions of under-educated, under-employed clients of the welfare state in order to justify the power and influence of the NAACP.

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Rand Paul, Ted Cruz Set Off GOP Scramble on Military Sex Assault

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Photo Credit: APSenate Republicans scrambled for cover Tuesday after Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz partnered with a budding bipartisan coalition pushing the Pentagon to overhaul how it handles military sexual assault cases.

GOP lawmakers said they planned to quickly schedule a closed-door conference meeting to hear out the two tea party firebrands on their decision to cosponsor legislation removing the chain of command from military prosecutions, a measure the Pentagon opposes.

Republican leaders also will give Sen. Kelly Ayotte the floor at the meeting to explain an alternative approach adopted last month by the Armed Services Committee. The alternative also aims to reduce the number of unreported sexual assault cases – estimated around 23,000 last year – without stripping commanders of their authority to convene a court martial.

Several Republican lawmakers, including the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee Sen. Jim Inhofe and the panel’s former chairman, Sen. John McCain, are supporting the bill that passed out of committee…

Paul and Cruz are no strangers in pushing their Republican colleagues into uncomfortable terrain. Just look at what the Kentucky freshman did in March in staging a 13-hour filibuster over drone strikes on U.S. soil.

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Horrified British Woman Discovers that Headaches and Scratching Sounds Inside Her Head are FLESH-EATING MAGGOTS After Trip to Peru (+video)

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Photo Credit: Discovery A woman has spoken of her terror at discovering that she harboured flesh-eating maggots inside her ear.

When Rochelle Harris, 27, from Derby, returned from the holiday of a lifetime in Peru, she thought little of the headaches that she had started to develop on the flight back to the UK.

But within hours she had developed excruciating shooting pains down one side of her face and had started to hear strange scratching sounds in her head. The next morning she woke to a pillow soaked with fluid from her ear.

Rochelle’s ordeal features in a new Discovery Channel documentary, called ‘Bugs, Bites and Parasites’ that follows the work of specialists who are faced with patients exhibiting a variety of mysterious symptoms – more often than not from people who have traveled abroad.

On her arrival back in the UK, Rochelle became increasingly concerned there may be something seriously wrong, so she visited her local Accident and Emergency department at the Royal Derby Hospital.

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China Naval Fleet Seen Off Northern Japan

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Photo Credit: Silly Little ManA Chinese naval fleet was Sunday spotted sailing for the first time through an international strait between northern Japan and Russia’s far east, the Japanese defence ministry said.

The two missile destroyers, two frigates and a supply ship passed through the Soya Strait from the Sea of Japan to the Sea of Okhotsk early Sunday, the ministry said.

The channel, also known as La Perouse, separates the Russian island of Sakhalin and the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido.

The five ships took part in joint naval exercises with Russia from July 5-12 off Vladivostok.

Two other Chinese naval ships which also took part in the drills were seen moving into the East China Sea on Saturday.

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Mark Levin Proposes Article V Constitutional Convention, Intended as End-Run Around Federal Tyranny

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[On his radio show this week, Mark] Levin previewed an argument under Article Five of the United States Constitution which expresses how the Constitution can be changed through the amendment process by using the traditional passage of a proposed amendment by two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate; then on to the several states for ratification. Once three-fourths of the states have ratified the proposed amendment, the approved Amendment becomes part of our United States Constitution.

What Levin also said was that the States could also propose a convention to add a specific amendment or reject a current amendment by calling an Amendment Convention. This convention would have no bearing on the existing framework of the Constitution, but would only affect the addition or subtraction of an amendment at hand.

Levin reported that under Article V of the Constitution, two-thirds of the several states could form a convention on their own through actions initiated through their own state legislatures. Once an amendment is successfully proposed, it could be ratified by approval of three-fourths of the legislatures of the several states, and then imparted into the Constitution.

The Founders placed this alternative method of amending the Constitution as an end-around the possible tyranny of an all-powerful federal government. The Founders knew the federal leviathan could never be completely trusted with policing itself and therefore gave ultimate authority to the states to make changes when they deemed it necessary.

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