AlterNet / By Rania Khalek  July 5, 2011

The federal government has supplied local police departments with military uniforms, weaponry, vehicles, and training.    

Just after midnight on May 16, 2010, a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of a 25-year-old man while his 7-year-old daughter slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. The grenade landed so close to the child that it burned her blanket. The SWAT team leader then burst into the house and fired a single shot which struck the child in the throat, killing her. The police were there to apprehend a man suspected of murdering a teenage boy days earlier. The man they were after lived in the unit above the girl's family.

Big Brother Obama: White House Plans Internet ID System

by Tom Burghardt

Urged by one and all to "tone down" what media pundits and political elites describe as "strident," even "violent" rhetoric that has "poisoned" our "national conversation" and "sharply polarized" the population, the shooting rampage in Tucson which claimed six lives, including that of a nine-year-old girl is, in fact, emblematic of the moral bankruptcy and utter hypocrisy of those selfsame capitalist elites.

No News is Not Good News: If Cops Tape Protests and Journalists and No One Reports It, Is It Intimidation?

Created 11/19/2010  by: Dave Lindorff

Is it news when police photograph and videotape demonstrations?

Apparently for American editors and reporters, making that news judgement depends on where the demonstration occurs and what nationality the police are.

When a hundred artists gathered outside a Beijing courtroom in mid-November to protest the jailing of artist Wu Yuren, who had earlier been beaten by police and jailed because he had gone to a police station to file a complaint against a landlord, the New York Times ran an article by reporter Andrew Jacobs which pointedly noted that police officers had videotaped the crowd, and then quoted a demonstrator, artist Dou Bu, as saying, “I was scared to come out here today, but you have to face your fears.”

Washington D.C. Rejects Secure Communities

Posted by Deport Nation on Sunday, June 13, 2010

http://www.deportationnation.org/2010/06/washington-d-c-bucks-the-trend-on-secure-communities-for-now/

Arlington opts out of 'Secure Communities' immigration enforcement program

Posted by TBD Neighborhoods (On the Ground of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia) on Sept. 28, 2010
http://www.tbd.com/blogs/tbd-neighborhoods/2010/09/arlington-opts-out-of-immigration-enforcement-program-2383.html

BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle

"They're not getting paid, it's part of their sentence"

Author Abe Louise Young: poet, activist, native to New Orleans, lives in Austin, TX   

July 21, 2010: In the first few days after BP's Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words "Inmate Labor" printed in large red block letters.

Monday, June 14, 2010    By Joan Lowy, Associated Press
Washington (AP) - Unmanned aircraft have proved their usefulness and reliability in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the pressure's on to allow them in the skies over the United States.
 
The Federal Aviation Administration has been asked to issue flying rights for a range of pilotless planes to carry out civilian and law-enforcement functions but has been hesitant to act. Officials are worried that they might plow into airliners, cargo planes and corporate jets that zoom around at high altitudes, or helicopters and hot air balloons that fly as low as a few hundred feet off the ground.
 
On top of that, these pilotless aircraft come in a variety of sizes. Some are as big as a small airliner, others the size of a backpack. The tiniest are small enough to fly through a house window.