http://www.slate.com/id/2245188

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Today the US government continues to kill tens of thousands less directly through the so called war on drugs. From raids to bad black market heroin those in power systematically place those people in danger who they swore an oath to protect.

http://news.yahoo.com/

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of an additional 13,000 US troops to Afghanistan beyond the 21,000 he announced publicly in March, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The additional troops are primarily support forces — such as engineers, medical specialists, intelligence experts and military police — the paper said, bringing the total build-up approved by Obama to 34,000.

“Obama authorized the whole thing. The only thing you saw announced in a press release was the 21,000,” an unnamed defense official familiar told the paper.

The maximum number of US forces expected in Afghanistan by year’s end — 68,000 — would remain the same, the paper said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates had said previously he would be sending more support troops or “enablers” to Afghanistan even as Obama weighs the best war strategy going forward, amid an appeal for tens of thousands of additional combat forces from the commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

The Pentagon had said at least 4,000 support troops were heading to Afghanistan, including experts to help counter the threat from improvised explosives.

The report came as Obama faces a crucial decision on McChrystal’s request for more combat, training and support troops, including one reported option of an additional 40,000 forces.

Yep.

Oh, and this (FTA):

When former president George W. Bush announced a US troop “surge” in Iraq, he only mentioned 20,000 combat troops and not the accompanying 8,000 support troops.

The troop increase approved by Obama means that there are more US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan than during the peak of the surge in Iraq in late 2007 and early 2008.

Nobel. Peace. Prize.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

The Obama administration has for the first time set out its views on the controversial USA Patriot Act, telling lawmakers this week that legal approval of government surveillance methods scheduled to expire in December should be renewed, but leaving room to tweak the law to protect Americans’ privacy.

In a letter from Justice Department officials to key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the administration recommended that Congress move swiftly with legislation that would protect the government’s ability to collect a variety of business and credit card records and to monitor terrorism suspects with roving wiretaps.

Three cheers for change! Three jeers for privacy!

The article does go on to talk about how Durbin and Feingold want to put some slight restrictions on the ability to do these types of things but I have no reason to believe even with such legal barriers  that the government agencies won’t just ignore them.

http://online.wsj.com/

The White House is facing mounting pressure from lawmakers to work harder to rally flagging public support for the war in Afghanistan.

With casualties rising, the administration is struggling to persuade voters that the war can be won or is worth the human and financial costs. Afghanistan is President Barack Obama’s top foreign-policy priority, but recent polls show that a majority of voters oppose the war for the first time since the conflict began eight years ago.

The Afghan war’s shifting political fortunes could make it harder for the administration to sell the public on the need for further expanding the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama has already agreed to send 21,000 American reinforcements, pushing U.S. troop levels there to a record 68,000, and the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is expected to ask for tens of thousands of additional troops later this month.

Putting to bed the lie that internal Border Patrol checkpoints are immigration checkpoints, this video clearly shows that the Department of Homeland Security routinely uses so-called immigration checkpoints as a pretext to look for contraband including drugs, guns and currency.

In this video, I’m initially greeted by the stopping Border Patrol agent by name. The agent never asks my immigration status. Additionally, other Border Patrol agents on the South side of the checkpoint yell out my name as well.

While I’m being detained at primary by an agent who knows who I am along with my immigration status, a Customs & Border Protection K9 team is going to work on the passenger side of my vehicle sniffing for illegal contraband. The K9 handler isn’t a Border Patrol agent. Rather, he’s a Customs and Border Protection agent normally assigned to Ports of Entry where dogs are trained to search for drugs, guns and currency either entering or leaving the country at the actual border.

Why was this Customs unit being used at a so-called immigration checkpoint over 40 miles North of the border?

To make the legal issues clear, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled Border Patrol checkpoints inside the country must be limited in scope to brief immigration queries with any further detention or searching requiring consent or probable cause. Since there was obviously no question regarding my immigration status in the video, the sole purpose for the detention was clearly contraband interdiction.

This removes any ambiguity regarding the primary purpose of the stop and detention.

One possible explanation as to why a CBP K9 team was being utilized at an internal immigration checkpoint well inside the country along a road that never intersects the border, instead of a port of entry, is an expansion of the program discussed in this blog entry: https://www.checkpointusa.org/blog/in…

For more information regarding suspicionless checkpoints in America, see: https://www.checkpointusa.org

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…

The American Jewish Committee said on Friday it was suing the German branch of online retailer Amazon for selling books which it said questioned the Holocaust and “trivialised” the Nazis.

According to AJC research, around 50 works including “Der Auschwitz-Mythos – Legende oder Wirklichkeit (“The Auschwitz Myth – Legend or Reality”) by Wilhelm Staglich were on sale on Amazon.de this month.

Some of these books, the AJC said, were classified by the German authorities as being unsuitable for under-18s.

“It is unacceptable that books are for sale on Amazon.de that normally are only available under the counter in far-right extremist shops,” the AJC said in a statement.

“We cannot let the spread of internet sales erode laws that ban Holocaust denial and incitement to hatred of minorities in Germany,” it added.

A spokeswoman for Amazon Germany said that “of course” it did not sell any books that were banned or classified as unsuitable for under-18s.

She added that in the interests of freedom of speech, it was not keen on stopping selling certain titles.

“We think that the best response to questionable literature is not removing them but more discussion,” a spokeswoman told AFP.

She added that the company had recently tightened up its rules regarding books that glorify or trivialise the Nazis and that certain books had been withdrawn from sale as a result.

Ironic.