School Cuts Off Class Valedictorian’s Mic When He Starts Talking About Constitution (+video)

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A North Texas high school silenced its Valedictorian’s microphone during his speech, prompting questions over his free speech rights.

Students attending the Joshua High School graduation say Remington Reimer’s microphone was cut off, right when he began to talk about the Constitution.

“He just said, he was talking about getting constitutional rights getting taken away from him,” Colin Radford, a Joshua H.S. graduate, said. “And then he said, just yesterday they threatened to turn my microphone off, and then his microphone went off.”

Reimer, who was accepted into the Naval Academy, had his speech pre-approved by the school district.

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Sources Now Confirm NSA is Gathering Information About Americans from 50 Phone, Credit and Internet Companies

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Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.

Several of the companies have provided records continuously since 2006, while others have given the agency sporadic access, these officials said. These officials disclosed the number of participating companies in order to provide context for a series of disclosures about the NSA’s domestic collection policies. The officials, contacted independently, repeatedly said that “domestic collection” does not mean that the target is based in the U.S. or is a U.S. citizen; rather, it refers only to the origin of the data.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that U.S. credit card companies had also provided customer information. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies because, they said, doing so would provide U.S. enemies with a list of companies to avoid. They declined to confirm the list of participants in an internet monitoring program revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, but both confirmed that the program existed.

“The idea is to create a mosaic. We get a tip. We vet it. Then we mine the data for intelligence,” one of the officials said.

In a statement, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that programs collect communications “pursuant to section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, ” and “cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S person, or anyone within the United States.”

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Leno: “We Wanted a President That Listens to All Americans. Now We Have One” (+video)

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Jay Leno is continuing his unrelenting, hilarious attacks on the Obama administration.

He hammers the White House for listening to phone calls, going through computer records, and basically acting like a “psycho ex-girlfriend.”

Leno rejects Obama’s statement yesterday that the feds “aren’t listening to your phone calls.”

He also suggests that Obama put his aggressive surveillance program to good use in watching the IRS.

Leno criticizes the IRS’s multi-million dollar conferences and wasteful spending on art, like paying an artist $17,000 to paint pictures of Lincoln to inspire agents. He suggests saving $16,995 by using a $5 bill.

Finally, Leon concludes his monologue suggesting one IRS party taxpayers would be happy to pay for: a “going away party.”

NSA Whistleblower: What Was Leaked Last Week is Just “the Tip of the Iceberg”

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The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens.

William Binney, an award-winning mathematician and noted NSA whistleblower, says the collection dates back to when the super-secret agency began domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I believe they’ve been collecting data about all domestic calls since October 2001,” said Mr. Binney, who worked at NSA for more than 30 years. “That’s more than a billion calls a day.”

He called his figures “back of the envelope” estimates, adding that they include emails as well as telephone calls.

Mr. Binney, who left the agency in October 2001, said the data were collected under a highly classified NSA program code-named “Stellar Wind,” which was part of the warrantless domestic wiretapping effort — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — launched on orders from President George W. Bush.

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False: NY Times Says that NSA’s Surveillance Foiled Terror Plot Against NY Subways

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Yesterday both the NY Times and Reuters claimed the Zazi terror plot against New York subways was foiled by an NSA email collection program called PRISM. That was not the case. The key to stopping the Zazi plot was an arrest and investigation by British authorities.

Breitbart News reported the claim, made yesterday in a widely circulated Reuters story, that NSA’s PRISM program had helped foil the Zazi terror plot (including an expression of skepticism that PRISM was necessary to foil the plot). The claim that PRISM was responsible was also made by the New York Times. In a A1 story the Times claimed, “To defenders of the N.S.A., the Zazi case underscores how the agency’s Internet surveillance system, called Prism, which was set up over the past decade to collect data from online providers of e-mail and chat services, has yielded concrete results.”

But the mass collection of emails under PRISM apparently had little to do with stopping the Zazi plot. A blogger at a site called emptywheel raised questions about the Reuters story yesterday. Ben Smith built upon that in a piece at Buzzfeed. As Smith reports, already public information on the Zazi case shows the email account in question was flagged on a tip from British authorities following an arrest.

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Homeschooling Growing Seven Times Faster than Public School Enrollment

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As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling. Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools.

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

As homeschooling has become increasingly popular, common myths that have long been associated with the practice of homeschooling have been debunked.

Any concerns about the quality of education children receive by their parents can be put to rest by the consistently high placement of homeschooled students on standardized assessment exams. Data demonstrates that those who are independently educated generally score between the 65th and 89th percentile on these measures, while those in traditional academic settings average at around the 50th percentile. In addition, achievement gaps between sexes, income levels, or ethnicity—all of which have plagued public schools around the country—do not exist in homeschooling environments.

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GOP Congressmen: EPA Biased Against Conservatives, not Objective (+video)

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Dozens of Republican lawmakers have joined in accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of “apparent bias” against conservative groups following a claim that it routinely showed favoritism to liberal organizations.

The allegations were first made by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank. It claimed the EPA was not being fair as it weighed whether to charge fees to groups seeking information via Freedom of Information Act requests.

Its research showed liberal groups have their fees for documents waived about 90 percent of the time, while conservative groups are denied fee waivers about 90 percent of the time.

“This activity calls into question the objectivity of the FOIA employees at EPA and undermines public confidence in an agency that is charged with protecting our air and water,” a group of nearly three dozen House Republicans wrote in a letter to EPA Acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said in a separate statement that the findings are “not a coincidence” and track with the kind of targeting conducted by the IRS against conservative groups.

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Russia Nuclear Subs Exploiting Lack of US ABM Defenses in the South

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Russia’s decision to resume nuclear missile-equipped submarine patrols in southern seas following a 20-year lapse could exploit the lack of a viable U.S. missile defense against attacks from the vicinity of the South Pole, according to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

The plan to place submarines in the southern seas will enable the Russians to increase their own deterrence as well.

“The revival of nuclear submarine patrols will allow us to fulfill the tasks of strategic deterrence not only across the North Pole but also the South Pole,” according to a Russian General Staff announcement.

The submarines – which can carry 16 long-range nuclear missiles – can take advantage of a lack of U.S. defenses against missiles coming over the South Pole.

Most U.S. anti-ballistic missile Aegis defense systems are located primarily in a northerly position to defend against missile attacks to the West Coast.

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Houston Community’s Gun Giveaway Begins

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Strain’s northwest Houston community of Oak Forest is the first neighborhood in the country being trained and equipped by the Armed Citizen Project, a Houston nonprofit that is giving away free shotguns to single women and residents of neighborhoods with high crime rates.

While many cities have tried gun buy-backs and other tactics in the ongoing national debate on gun control, the nonprofit and its supporters say gun giveaways to responsible owners are actually a better way to deter crime. The organization, which plans to offer training classes in Dallas, San Antonio, and Tucson, Ariz., in the next few weeks, is working to expand its giveaways to 15 cities by the end of the year, including Chicago and New York…

Residents of Oak Forest say their neighborhood, made up of older one-story houses and a growing number of new townhomes, has experienced a recent rash of driveway robberies and home burglaries. On a recent Sunday afternoon, a group of 10 residents, including Strain, went through training at Shiloh Shooting, a northwest Houston gun range.

Kyle Coplen, the project’s 29-year-old founder said his group expects to train at least 50 Oak Forest residents and put up signs saying the neighborhood is armed.

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School Bribes Kids to Stop Playing with Toy Guns by Offering Chance at Free Bicycle

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An elementary school in Hayward, Calif. will sponsor a toy gun trade-in, encouraging kids to swap their harmless toy weapons for a chance to win a new bicycle.

The purpose of the trade-in is to stop children from playing with toy guns, which may make them more likely to commit violence with real guns, said Strobridge Elementary principal Chris Hill.

“Playing with toys guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” Hill said in a statement to Mercury News.

The trade-in will take place on Saturday during the school’s “Safety Day,” which will also feature talks on safety tips from police officers and firefighters. Authorities will offer to take pictures and fingerprints of children to be used to help locate them in case they go missing.

Any child who hands over his toy gun will receive a raffle ticket. The school will raffle off four bicycles, and also hand out books in exchange for the tickets.

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