ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) – The former neighborhood watch volunteer who killed Trayvon Martin told his wife to buy bulletproof vests for them and for his attorney, according to jailhouse calls released Monday.

“As uncomfortable as it is, I want you wearing one,” George Zimmerman told his wife. Zimmerman was wearing a bulletproof vest when he left jail after posting bond. His attorney, Mark O’Mara, has reported receiving threats.

The calls, released by prosecutors, also detail how Zimmerman instructed his wife to transfer money from bank accounts and could play a crucial role in his second bond hearing next week.

Zimmerman was released on $150,000 bond in April, several days after the calls took place. At his bond hearing, his wife, Shellie, testified that she didn’t know how much money had been raised from a website created for his legal defense. She also testified that they had limited funds because she was in nursing school full time and Zimmerman wasn’t working.

Prosecutors say the calls show George and Shellie Zimmerman knew that roughly $135,000 had been raised by the site. The judge in the case revoked George Zimmerman’s bond and ruled the couple had deceived the court. Zimmerman has been back in jail for almost a month.

Read More at wtop.com. By Mike Schneider.

Photo credit: ABC News

Google has released data from its latest Transparency Report covering censorship and content removal requests. The report features separate presentations of copyright-based removal requests and government requests. Google began publishing this data about two years go.

The report is updated regularly; however government censorship and removal requests are updated every six months. The number of copyright removal requests has grown dramatically over the past six months. Most of these requests involve file sharing domains.

Most of the takedown requests are coming from entertainment companies or trade groups representing them. However the top copyright owner requesting takedowns was Microsoft with more than 2 million URLs requested to be removed in the past year and almost 500,000 in the past month.

In the government requests category, Google said that the US is the country with the most activity. Some of these requests are in the form of court orders, while others from various government and law-enforcement entities. Overall there were more than 6,000 content items targeted in just under 200 removal requests in the US during the past six months.

Google actually complied with those requests a little over 40 percent of the time. That includes court orders, interestingly.

Read More at searchengineland.com. By Greg Stirling.

President Obama’s move to provide not only ipso facto amnesty to the children of illegal immigrants but work permits as well, signals that he has come to grips with the notion that he very well may not achieve re-election. It also signals that for the remainder of his tenure he will be pushing through as many Progressive and, essentially, ideological agenda items as he can. With hyper-partisans Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer in control of the Senate, the damage could be significant.

No one should be surprised that Mr. Obama acted – on a political level – to satisfy his 2008 campaign promise to do something in support of immigration reform. But his move to provide legal worker status to what some estimate to be 800,000 people is a provocative move, especially when the U-6 unemployment rate stands at 14.8 percent among legal US citizens. Further, with a solid 2-to-1 advantage among the Hispanic voter demographic, there really is no political advantage to the move sans, currying favor with politically Progressive big money donors.

There is also the very real possibility that this move will anger many naturalized American-Hispanics who came to the country through the legally established process, not to mention those of the same demographic who are currently unemployed or under-employed. Mr. Obama didn’t ingratiate himself to the socially Conservative American-Hispanic community with his embrace of gay marriage and his confrontation with the Catholic Church over the issue of religious freedom. So, there is a very real possibility that this is an attempt at damage control or at least minimizing the damage done to this voter demographic where his re-election is concerned.

The bigger side-effect of Mr. Obama’s decision to provide ipso facto amnesty and legal worker status will play out in the undecided and independent voter demographic, and especially the sub-group of voters that are unemployed or under-employed. Mr. Obama’s announcement laid heavily on emotions and “doing what is right”; social justice, and exhibited little regard for those who already possess citizenship and who are suffering the economy brought upon in large part by Mr. Obama’s economic policies. The bottom line here is that an infusion of 800,000 people into a workforce demographic that is experiencing not only a U-6 unemployment rate of 14.8 percent, but a downsizing of the actual number of jobs available, is a move that heaps more pain and uncertainty onto the unemployed and the economy.

Understanding all of this it is hard to say that Mr. Obama is exhibiting compassion for those in the Middle and Lower-Middle Classes who are desperately seeking employment while struggling to make ends meet (read: pay their mortgages, their household bills, buy food and clothing, the essentials). But those who have identified Mr. Obama and his crew as hardcore Progressive ideologues realize he is fulfilling his campaign promise of “change.” And this is why it is so incredibly important for the politically unengaged to take a crash course in Progressivism so that they can be educated about what drives Mr. Obama and his ilk, if in just a cursory manner.

Read More at gopusa.com. By Frank Salvato, GOPUSA.

Photo Credit: Dustin C. Oliver (Creative Commons)

Just days ago, House Speaker John Boehner shocked the conservative world by at last granting his long-awaited approval for next week’s contempt of Congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder. But it wasn’t the thought of doing what’s right for the family of Brian Terry, Jaime Zapata, or others killed in the Regime’s Fast and Furious scheme that prompted the Speaker’s decision.  After all, Mr. Boehner is hardly one to risk a loss of political advantage—or more importantly, anger the national media—just because a few hundred people have been killed by his Democrat friends.

No, the very cautious Congressman Boehner and other Republican leaders at last chose to take a stand because of reports that “…at least one and perhaps two sources within the Justice Department…have approached the Issa committee seeking whistle blower status.”

For weeks, it has been suggested that House and Senate committees investigating Eric Holder’s participation in Operation Fast and Furious were receiving vital information from a leak in the Department of Justice.  An example of said information is the collection of wiretap applications produced by the House Judiciary Committee last week—documents proving that Attorney General Holder and others at the Department had been lying to Congress in claiming no knowledge of ATF tactics in its scheme of smuggling guns to Mexico.

In a letter to Holder, Darrell Issa made it clear, “…the wiretap applications amply demonstrate the immense detail documenting gun walking tactics that should have prompted senior officials in the (DOJ) Criminal Division to shut down the program immediately.”  Yet for the past year, Holder and his DOJ minions had maintained that the Operation was not halted because the Department knew nothing of the ATF’s reckless and illegal tactics. That was a lie, and thanks to the DOJ employee or employees now seeking whistle blower protection, Holder and his colleagues are STUCK with it.

Read More at Western Journalism. By Doug Book.