8/6/2008

Pregnant and new mothers may be required to submit to government screening and treatment for depression if Democrats in Congress have their way.

The Melanie Blocker Stokes Mother's Act, or S. 1375, is named after a pharmaceutical sales manager who killed herself by jumping out of a window after receiving four cocktails of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and antipsychotic drugs and electroshock therapy following the birth of her child.

Parenthetically, for those of you who are interested, it was the authorsof “A Nation at Risk” who convinced Reagan NOT to shut down the Departmentof Education…

I gave a talk this weekend (1/26/07) at the EPIC Privacy Conference on 'national security' and civil liberty related issues. I suggested during my talk that we need to reclaim our language from the state who has used it to distort the truth, misrepresent the facts and pollute the mental environment with toxic memes...

In Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire, former Reagan aide Doug Bandow makes the conservative case against the disaster known as the Bush foreign policy. He pulls apart the Bush program rotten plank by rotten plank. After reading Foreign Follies, it is obvious why the American people repudiated the Republican Party on November 7. Although regularly assaulted by the left, until recently President George W. Bush was handled gently by conservative critics. Even now most complaints focus on the president's extravagant spending. Virtually all conservatives have marched lock-step behind his war in Iraq. Bandow forthrightly challenges the Bush foreign policy of promiscuous war-making. In a book featuring a foreward by Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.)--one of four Republican congressmen who voted against the Iraq war--Bandow points out that Iraq never posed a serious danger to America and could have been deterred, as were Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China. Bandow also cites the uncertain aftermath of any invasion--and the likely increase in terrorism that a war would spark.

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

On 24 February, Sandy Gonzalez, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA office in El Paso, one of the most senior and highly decorated Hispanic law enforcement officers in America, wrote to his Ice counterpart, John Gaudioso:

'I am writing to express to you my frustration and outrage at the mishandling of investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of human life,' he began, 'and endangered the lives of special agents of the DEA and their immediate families. There is no excuse for the events that culminated during the evening of 14 January... and I have no choice but to hold you responsible.' Ice, Gonzalez wrote, had gone to 'extreme lengths' to protect an informant who was, in reality, a 'homicidal maniac... this situation is so bizarre that, even as I'm writing to you, it is difficult for me to believe it'.

NAACP Calls for End of Foster Care Drugging