THE HEADLINES

(Graphic via Discovery News)

MERRY CHRISTMAS! WHILE YOU WERE UNWRAPPING GIFTS, CONGRESS GAVE THE GREEN LIGHT TO WARRANTLESS EMAIL SNOOPING.

Federal agencies will be allowed to continue spying on the private emails of Americans after the Senate mysteriously dropped a key amendment to legislation that had been advertised as a way to protect the rights and privacy of citizens. After a public outcry over a proposed bill that would have given unprecedented powers to the federal government for digital surveillance on every Americans, lawmakers announced new provisions that would have maintained at least a nominal level of privacy protection against unchecked email snooping. Now, as the bill heads to President Obama’s desk where he has promised to sign it into law, it is revealed that senators eliminated all privacy provisions from the finished legislation, opening every form of data remotely stored by Americans to secret monitoring by the government.

(AllGov)

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SANDY HOOK IS FAR FROM THE ONLY LANDMARK IN AMERICAN GUN VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC.

Overwhelming media coverage of the mass shooting in Newtown has dulled the more pervasive and infinitely more tragic reality of daily murder and mayhem caused by guns on obscure streets in Chicago or your own hometown. A “perfect storm” of young, white, affluent victims coupled with the endless political drama over gun control mad the Sandy Hook massacre the American media’s star attraction while the more than 100 gun-related deaths in the US since Newtown have passed with little publicity. Random shootings of largely minority victims doesn’t pass for a story of interest in the modern press.

(Huffington Post)

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IS THIS SMART “GUN CONTROL?”

Newspaper in White Plains, New York obtains, by Freedom of Information request, the names and addresses of people who had been issued handgun ownership permits, and publishes these in the paper. Much of its readership is outraged, citing their own privacy rights and claiming that criminals are give valuable information about victims who do NOT possess handguns. The editors say that they thought it was a good idea in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting and offer the information that the reporter who wrote the article himself holds a handgun permit.

(Christian Science Monitor)

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FRUSTRATED WITH WAITING FOR OAKLAND POLICE TO ARRIVE AFTER YOUR FAMILY MEMBER WAS SHOT? BLAME THE RAIDERS…

What is $17 million worth to a city? For Oakland, California that money could have meant an extra 200 officers that did not receive layoff notices despite the crime-ridden city being engulfed in a wave of gun violence. That $17 million represents what the city spends for security, operations and other items related to the 10 home games of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. Alameda County kicks in another $13 million to cover costs the Raiders won’t, combining to leave the local governments with strained resources and mounting law enforcement response times even as they subsidize the most profitable sport in the country. Oakland’s contributions are just a small chunk of nearly $20 billion in subsidies that taxpayers and state and local governments fund to placate the NFL and franchises that are not shy about threatening to move.

(Bloomberg News)

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“IT’S NOT ABOUT COMPLIANCE. IT’S ABOUT MAKING THINGS LOOK LIKE THEY’RE COMPLIANT.”

Several long-time employees of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection get a lump of coal in their holiday stocking in the form of pink slips from department head Herschel Vinyard. The DEP employees selected for the unannounced round of layoffs were all veterans of the agency with notable achievements on their resume, including saving Tampa Bay from the ecological disaster of unfettered phosphate runoff polluting the water. Replacements for the dismissed regulators have two things in common; they have no experience in environmental protection and all of them were hired to DEP directly from the industries and corporations the state agency is charged with regulating. Many of the new hires were actually in positions where they actively worked to find loopholes around the regulations they will now be “enforcing.”. The fired employees and other critics of the state’s decision say this is no accident, but rather a component of Gov. Rick Scott’s push to make government “friendly” towards business interests

(Tampa Bay Times)

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Quote of the day…

We have yet to see any evidence supporting the claim that Interior has upgraded the lax enforcement enabling the BP Gulf spill. In fact, what few records we have been able to pry loose suggest just the opposite. This material on operational safety should be on the World Wide Web, not locked away in a proprietary safe.

Jeff Ruch, Executive Director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsility, as PEER files lawsuit to force federal regulatory agency charged with monitoring Arctic oil spills to release information about its activities.

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