Posts Tagged ‘internet’

Let’s assume you live in Utah, Hawaii or South Carolina, and you go to Nevada for a vacation. While in Las Vegas, you spend some money in the casinos.

Gambling is illegal in the state where you live, so should the cops in your home state be able to track your activities and arrest you for what happened in Nevada?

The answer, needless to say, is no. Or at least it should be no. Common sense tells us that state laws should only apply to things that happen inside a state’s borders.

But this sensible principle is being tossed out the window by the U.S. Senate, which has approved a proposal that would give states the ability to impose their taxes on out-of-state sellers.

Read more by Daniel Mitchell at Cato.org

When you’ve got a guy like Senator John McCain who says “The battlefield is the United States of America,” it tells you that almost nothing is safe in the Land of the Free.

Whatever remains of civil liberties is going to feel the full brunt of the state’s boot heel.

They’re already regulating some of the most fundamental aspects of life, from how we are allowed to educate our children to what we can / cannot put in our bodies to the very nature of money.

Read more by Simon Black at SovereignMan.com

An attempt to ban US bosses from asking employees to hand over their Facebook login details has been blocked by Congress.

A last minute alteration to the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that would have prevented employers demanding that prospective employees disclose social media passwords as a condition of employment was voted down in the house of representatives.

Read more by Steve Nolan at Daily Mail

Through four weeks, prosecutors have laid out evidence against Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion provider on trial on charges of killing seven viable fetuses by “snipping” their necks with scissors and of causing the death of a pregnant 41-year-old woman during a procedure.

The grisly details drew mainly local attention. But after an online furor that the case was being ignored by the national news media because of troubling accounts of late-term abortions, reporters from major newspapers and television networks descended Monday on the Court of Common Pleas. It was the latest example of the power of social media to drive a wide debate, similar to the attention paid to a rape trial last month in Steubenville, Ohio, that resulted in the conviction of two teenage football players.

Read more by TRIP GABRIEL at NY Times

It’s been a staple of science fiction at least since George Orwell’s “1984″ that a day may come when a government bureaucracy will grow so huge and unaccountable that it simply intervenes in people’s lives and privacy at will, with no limits.

Sadly, that day may already be here.

The ACLU, in one of its rare showings of true civic responsibility, has divulged information it obtained from the IRS through a Freedom of Information Act request, showing the IRS teaches its employees that they can traipse in and out of Americans’ emails, text messages and other electronic communications without a warrant.

Read more by Tad Cronn at PatriotUpdate.com

Major Zane Purdy’s life imploded in just three months…

Purdy, a defense contractor and Air National Guard officer, used to earn a six-figure salary. Then, according to the Montgomery Advertiser, thieves stole his identity. They decimated his credit rating.

Bad credit or excessive debts flag someone as a national security risk. Purdy had his top-secret security clearance revoked. His company was forced to fire him. Even the Air National Guard couldn’t bring the 18-year veteran back onto active duty.

Now, the father of two is waiting tables for $7.25 an hour… he has tax liens levied against his property… and the IRS is claiming he owes them more than $10,000 in back taxes.

He’s not the only one whose life was turned upside down…

Read more by Dr. David Eifrig at StansberryResearch.com

How the party fell behind

These days, Republican political professionals seem to feel rather like Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1983 when he toured farms in Canada two years before he would become premier of the Soviet Union. Stunned by how productive a certain agribusiness was, Gorbachev asked how many farmhands had brought in the crop. “None,” came the answer; the farm was entirely mechanized.

From this one conversation, Gorbachev instantly understood the depths of the Soviet crisis and the desperate need for a new approach. For Republicans, the November 2012 election proved their technical inferiority in exactly the same way — it all came home to them in one day, Nov. 6, as President Obama’s campaign demonstrated a degree of technological superiority above the GOP’s efforts as shocking in its way as the mechanized agribusiness was to the hidebound ways of Soviet agriculture.

Read more by John Podhoretz at NY Post

As soon as tonight’s presidential debate was underway, unhinged Obama supporters took to Twitter to make threats on Mitt Romney’s life:

Read more at Twitchy.com

EXCLUSIVE from NY Post

The Obama re-election campaign has accepted at least one foreign donation in violation of the law — and does nothing to check on the provenance of millions of dollars in other contributions, a watchdog group alleges.

Chris Walker, a British citizen who lives outside London, told The Post he was able to make two $5 donations to President Obama’s campaign this month through its Web site while a similar attempt to give Mitt Romney cash was rejected. It is illegal to knowingly solicit or accept money from foreign citizens.

Walker said he used his actual street address in England but entered Arkansas as his state with the Schenectady, NY, ZIP code of 12345.

“When I did Romney’s, the payment got rejected on the grounds that the address on the card did not match the address that I entered,” he said. “Romney’s Web site wanted the code from the back of card. Barack Obama’s didn’t.”

Read more By ISABEL VINCENT and MELISSA KLEIN at NY Post

If you are an elected official in China, would you want President Obama, who seems to apologize for America’s exceptionalism, or Mitt Romney, who just declared the era of American weakness abroad is over, to win the presidential election?

That is the question historian Arthur Herman posed in the New York Post on Wednesday.

Herman writes that if you are a Chinese official rooting for Obama, “well, you can do something about it.”

“Feel free to get out your credit card, pull up Obama’s fund-raising Web site, barackobama.com, and give to the campaign — along with a few thousand of your closest friends,” Herman writes. “As long as your donation is less than $200, no questions will be asked about whether you’re even a US citizen. If it’s under $50, there won’t even be a record of it.”

Read more by Tony Lee at Breitbart.com

The giant gap in our campaign-finance system that makes foreign and fraudulent donations possible.

There has been no shortage of media attention paid to the role of money in the current presidential contest. Super PACs, bundlers, 527s, and mega-donors have attracted abundant notice. But there has been surprisingly little focus on perhaps the most secretive and influential financial force in politics today: the wide-open coffers of the Internet.

With millions of online campaign donations ricocheting through cyberspace, one might think the Federal Election Commission would have erected serious walls to guard federal elections from foreign or fraudulent Internet contributions. But that’s far from true. In fact, campaigns are largely expected to police these matters themselves.

Read more by Peter Schweizer and Peter J. Boyer at The Daily Beast

The Obama campaign released news on Saturday morning of a holiday weekend, that it had raised a massive $181 million in September. It’s a staggering sum heading into the final month of campaigning. It almost equals his fundraising for July and August combined. But details about Obama’s fundraising windfall and a new report this morning from the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) raise troubling questions. Specifically, how much of this fundraising was illegal?

–SNIP– Potentially, hundreds of thousands of individual donations are lost to any kind of security or verification. A “person” could make 1,000 donations of $49 and never be recorded on campaign finance disclosure forms. Their “name” wouldn’t even be recorded anywhere.

Shockingly, almost half the traffic to the Obama campaign website is from foreign sources. More amazingly, Obama.com which simply redirects to the Obama donation page, gets almost 70% of its traffic from foreign sources.

Read more by Mike Flynn at Breitbart.com

Enrollment in online schools has increased twelvefold in Ohio since the first internet-based school was created in the state in 2000, The Gazette Medina reports.

More than 30,000 students are currently enrolled, most of them concentrated in seven statewide cyber schools. Only Arizona had more students in online schools, according to the news report.

Online schools, and other forms of digital learning, are an inevitable and promising form of education for the 21st Century, unless special interest forces are able to keep technology from becoming more integrated into everyday education.

Read more by Kyle Olson at Townhall.com

Noam Neusner, a former White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush, thought he had given $250 to Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel.

He hadn’t.

Instead, Neusner was one of nearly 3,000 donors who stumbled onto a network of look-alike campaign websites that have netted more than $570,000 this year in what some are calling a sophisticated political phishing scheme.

The websites have the trappings of official campaign pages: smiling candidate photos and videos, issue pages, and a large, red “donate” button at the top. Except that proceeds from the shadow sites go not to the candidates pictured, but to an obscure conservative group run by an Arizona activist.

Read more by Shane Goldmacher at National Journal

Just when you thought the Obama campaign couldn’t get any weirder, along comes its latest high-tech gift. Meet the Obama for America app for iPhone, a tool that allows you to spy on your neighbors to determine which of them are naughty (read: not Obama supporters) and which are nice. What you do with that information is entirely up to you.

Read more by Howard Portnoy at HotAir.com