Flight for survival
Toxic emissions force family to leave home
by Brandon Evans

Flight for survivalToxic emissions force family to leave homeBy Brandon Evans | Published Thursday, September 23, 2010

They call her the canary.

For more than a year, a range of random illnesses plagued Lisa Parr.

“I started to get a little sick,” she said. “I thought I was getting the flu. I was just tired and achy and started going through some little problems.

Read more.

Food Safety Bills in Congress

September 17, 2010:

Although it has been delayed many times, the Food Safety Modernization Act (S.510) continues to be a threat to both farmers and consumers who care about local foods.  This bill greatly expands FDA’s authority over both processed foods and fresh fruits and vegetables, and would give FDA authority to impose extensive, burdensome requirements on even the smallest processing facilities and farms who sell to local consumers.

While the latest version of the bill included some provisions for flexibility and scale-sensitivity, the provisions do not go far enough to protect the small-scale local food businesses that could be destroyed by the new federal regulations.

Read more: http://farmandranchfreedom.org/food_safety_bills_09

From John Wellington Ennis:

My video about L.A. artist Alec Monopoly has now spread from the West Hollywood street scene to SoHo art circles.  If you haven’t seen this profile of the elusive artist, one of the many intriguing characters you’ll meet in PAY 2 PLAY, check it out!  Featuring music by up and coming Hip Hop producer Oddisee.

Alec’s original artwork and stickers are available exclusively to donors!

See the video at the site.

MCM

http://www.weartv.com/newsroom/top_stories/videos/wear_vid_10993.shtml

PENSACOLA BEACH – The head of the Gulf Islands National Seashore wants to set the record straight about whether you can bring a shovel and pail to the beach.

Last week an officer stopped a Channel Three News crew from getting video of the oil under the sand.

Once again we’re out here on the Gulf Islands National Seashore. I wanted to show you this sand castle out here that some one had abandoned and you can see that while they were building it, they encountered this, quite a few gooey tarballs out here on the Gulf Side Beach. We were told last week, that doing something like this, building a sand castle, was illegal.

Pat Gonzales/ US Fish and Wildlife: “You can not come out here and do your own investigation if you’re looking for oil product.”
That’s the greeting we got from US Fish and Wildlife:

Pat Gonzales/ US Fish and Wildlife: “Are you digging for oil product?” Thomas: “Not necessarily I just want to see what’s there.” Pat Gonzales/ US Fish and Wildlife: “Okay, I’ll tell you what. If you’re not going to cooperate with me I’m going to get a National Parks Service Officer out here. I’ll get a law enforcement guy out here to talk to you.”

Officer A. Negron/National Parks Service: “It’s a National Park. You can’t dig.” Thomas: “So no sand castles, none of that huh?” Officer A. Negron/National Parks Service: “That’s correct.”

Mark Scarbrough/Tourist: “Sounds like they got something to hide, doesn’t it.”
Cindy Scarbrough/Tourist: “I guess they’re trying to hide it.”

These tourists have that opinion after they heard we were told it’s illegal to dig at the beach.

Dan Brown/Gulf Islands Superintendent: “Well, that’s true and not true.”

Park Superintendent Dan Brown says you can’t dig in areas where you’re likely to find artifacts, like the Fort Pickens compound.

He doesn’t know why we were stopped on the beach.

Dan Brown/Gulf Islands Superintendent: “There’s no regulation or anything that would prohibit people from digging other than for the things already mentioned that would disturb natural and cultural features.”

Dan Thomas/dthomas@weartv.com: “So then, what happened last week when they told us that?”

Dan Brown/Gulf Islands Superintendent: “Um, well, probably some incomplete information on the part of those field staff.”

Dan Thomas/dthomas@weartv.com: “Were they told to stop people from digging by anyone in the Federal Government?”

Dan Brown/Gulf Islands Superintendent: “I don’t have any knowledge of that. No.”

Dan Thomas/dthomas@weartv.com: “So they weren’t ordered to go out and stop a news crew from trying to get a story out.”

Dan Brown/Gulf Islands Superintendent: “I’m not aware of that, no.”

Dan Thomas/dthomas@weartv.com: “And once again, just to be clear the Superintendent of the park says people are welcome to come out here and build a sand castle on the beach.

http://www.weartv.com/newsroom/top_stories/videos/wear_vid_10993.shtml

2010 Midterm House and Senate Forecast Models: RV/LV Polls, Undecided Voters and Election Fraud
Richard Charnin (TruthIsAll)

Once again, as in every election cycle, the media avoids the real issues. Like Martha Coakley winning the hand-counts in the Massachusetts primary; Vic Rawl easily winning the absentees but losing to unknown
Alvin Greene in the South Carolina primary; Mike Castle beating Christine O’Donnell by over 10 points in the absentees but losing by six in Delaware. But there was hardly a peep about all this in the mainstream media. Apparently, we must just accept that the votes which vanished in cyberspace and can never be verified were not tampered with.

Read more.

It is now it is now illegal to build sand castles or even dig into the beach deeper than 6 inches on Florida state public beaches, according to this report from WEAR-TV in Pensacola.

http://blog.locustfork.net/2010/09/tv-crew-stopped-from-digging-in-the-sand-on-florida-public-beach

TRAVIS COUNTY, TX VOTERS TO HAVE PAPER BALLOT OPTION THIS NOVEMBER!
Hand Count Coalition pushes for Pilot Hand Counts

According to a communication by Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe issued September 20, 2010, the Travis County Clerk’s goal at this time is “to recommend a hybrid electronic/paper ballot method of voting on Election Day” for Travis County voters.

Members of the Travis County “Hand Count Coalition”, consisting of the Gray Panthers of Austin, LULAC District 12, the Travis County Green Party, VoteRescue and others soon to announce, acknowledge that the Clerk is beginning the process of restoring fully transparent public elections to Travis County by at least offering voters a choice this election of voting on a paper ballot or voting electronically on the Hart eSlate, which has been the only way to vote in the county since 2002.  To find out  more about the Hand Count Coalition, please go to: http://handcountcoalition.blogspot.com.

“We are at least starting to head in the right direction “, says Karen Renick, Founder and Co-Director of VoteRescue, a non-partisan election integrity group based in Austin that has been working for years to get the county to stop counting the votes in total secrecy using machines and to bring full public access to all election procedures.  ”We must remember, however, that the scanners that will count these paper ballots this November are still counting our votes in secret. The key to getting full accountability from our elected officials is to regain 100% transparency through a publicly-observable count that begins immediately after the close of voting with no interruptions or moving of the ballots until the totals are publicly posted at every polling place.”

The Hand Count Coalition members will return to Commissioners Court again this Tuesday, September 21st, to request that a “Pilot Project” for hand-counting paper ballots in select precincts this November accompany the new paper ballot component just announced today.

“We consider this a significant victory,” said Gary Dugger, Co-Convenor of the Gray Panthers of Austin, a Hand Count Coalition member, ”but Travis County voters will never have complete confidence in the outcomes of our elections until full transparency is restored to the entire voting process.”

The Coalition will persist in their efforts to further educate the Commissioners and the public on the enormous fraud capability of optical scan counters, as demonstrated in the 2006 Emmy-award nominated HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy”, in which a real optical scan counter was hacked using the undisclosed software code found on the memory card, the small credit-card sized device that vendors falsely claim only stores the votes from each scanner and is later used to transfer the precinct totals to the central tabulators.”  The link to the hack from this documentary can be found on YouTube at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIAzCM3OYYc

Along with other Coalition members, speaking at this Tuesday’s Citizen Communication at the Court will be Allissa Chambers of “A.L.M.A.”:  Austinites Lobbying for Municipal Accountability.  She will be discussing the criminality of our public officials not properly addressing the mismanaged and fraud-ridden housing programs in Austin and how citizens must be able to hold them accountable.

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Movement harassed by the FBI
Students need to know of attempts to discredit civil rights leaders.

By Jonathan Zimmerman

So it turns out that Martin Luther King Jr.’s most trusted photographer was actually a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, passing along material about King and other civil rights leaders. Why did he do it?

That’s the wrong question. Nobody will ever know why Ernest C. Withers – who was in King’s motel room on the night of his murder – informed for the FBI, as a Memphis newspaper reported last week. Withers died in 2007, following a brilliant career that earned him the nickname of “Original Civil Rights Photographer.” He had secrets, and he took them to the grave.

Instead, we should be asking why the FBI was paying people to spy on King. And, most of all, we should be asking why our kids don’t know it.

Read more.

Did GOP Steal Ted Kennedy’s Senate Seat?
by PETER B. COLLINS on SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

PBC Podcast 175 [1:13:26m]

Jonathan D. Simon, Executive Director of Election Defense Alliance, presents his analysis of the special election in Massachusetts last January, which Scott Brown reportedly won. Simon compared the towns that used optical scanners with those that handcounted, and found a disparity of 8% in 2010, while there was little or no disparity in previous elections. The same case is being made by Brad Friedman of Bradblog.com in the Sept. 14 Senate primary in Delaware. You can read Simon’s report here. We also talk about the failure of the media and elected officials to challenge privately-run elections, the murky companies like LHS Corp that run elections without transparency, and the widespread sense that since Obama won in 2008, our election integrity problems are behind us. And PBC closes the show with a special dedication to Delaware Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell, the abstinence queen.

Read more.