Vows to take responsibility for BP oil spill
Vows to defend the “assault” on US shores, as he visits Louisiana for the second time to inspect the worst oil spill in American history.
“I ultimately take responsibility for solving this crisis,” Mr Obama said during the visit to inspect oil spill damage. “I am the president and the buck stops with me.””
original: May 28, 2010 1:30 PM EDT
May 28, 2010
Replay: Obama on the Gulf Coast
May 27, 2010
Re-play: Press Conference: Obama Faces the Music on BP Oil Spill
original: May 27, 2010 12:45 PM EDT
Some oil spill events from Thursday, May 27, 2010
A summary of events on Thursday, May 27, Day 36 of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that began with the April 20 explosion and fire on the drilling rig: click here
May 26, 2010
Drill Baby Drill becomes Spill Baby Spill becomes “Kill Baby Kill”… Live Stream
BP Says Gulf Well Pressure Rising, No Sign of Leak – BusinessWeek
LiveStream of BP spill site and efforts to “kill the spill”
(click play arrow on bottom toolbar)
Here is a local Louisiana company with a solution, let’s put them to work.
SSI – Solutions to Save the Gulf Coast SSI is the only Louisiana company that develops, manufactures and offers its own patented bacterial digestion products suitable for helping save our marshes and coastal wetlands from the BP oil spill.
May 25, 2010
House approves repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
UPDATE: 27 MAY 2010
WASHINGTON (AP) – The House on Thursday delivered a victory to President Barack Obama and gay rights groups by approving a proposal to repeal the law that allows gays to serve in the military only if they don’t disclose their sexual orientation. The 234-194 vote to overturn the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy reflected a view among many in Congress that America was ready for a military in which gays and straights can stand side by side in the trenches.
more here: AP
DEAL COULD END “DON’T ASK,DON’T TELL”
WASHINGTON (AP News) — A White House-approved proposal to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban against gays serving openly in the military is expected to face a vote in Congress as early as this week.
Gay rights groups are urging quick congressional approval of the legislation, which would repeal the ban but also allow the Pentagon to continue its review of how to implement the new policy.
The White House had hoped lawmakers would delay action until Pentagon officials had completed their study so fellow Democrats would not face criticism that they moved too quickly or too far ahead of public opinion in this election year. When administration officials recognized they could not stop Congress in its effort to repeal the ban, they invited gay rights activists to the White House to work on a compromise Monday.
“Without a repeal vote by Congress this year, the Pentagon’s hands are tied and the armed forces will be forced to continue adhering to the discriminatory ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law,” says Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., an Iraq war veteran, is expected to introduce the legislative proposal Tuesday, with a vote possible as early as Thursday. Republicans say they’ll fight the proposal.
Implementation of new policy on gays serving openly would still require the approval of President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. How long implementation might take is not known.
more here: AP News
read: Aaron Belkin: ‘I’m So Glad I Was Wrong…’
May 23, 2010
Cop killer Jerry Kane Jr.’s friends promise: “It will happen again”
UPDATE: (CLICK TO VIEW)
Video released of the deadly shooting of West Memphis Police Officers by Cop killer’s Jerry Kane and his son Joseph
“I just know this will happen again, we already know it will happen elsewhere. Americans have a right to carry guns, but police don’t.” William Ligiu Ionescu
From: My Eyewitness News MEMPHIS, TN – Memphis Police officers are on high alert right now after this week’s cop killings in West Memphis, Arkansas.Sgt. Brandon Paudert, 39, left, and Sgt. Bill Evans, 38, examine bags during a traffic stop in West Memphis, Ark. in this April 8, 2010 file photo
Sgt. Brandon Paudert and Officer Bill Evans with the West Memphis Police Department were shot to death during a traffic stop on I-40 on Thursday, May 20th. The two men accused of shooting them, an Ohio father and son linked to a radical anti-government group, were also killed during a subsequent shootout in the Walmart parking lot.
The top brass at the MPD is now concerned about possible retaliation in the wake of those shootings. The Bluff City’s finest are being reminded during every roll call to be very careful out on the street.
Meanwhile, a friend of accused cop killers Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph, tells myEyewitnessNews.com that he has no doubt other police officers will face the same fate as Paudert and Evans.
“I just know this will happen again,” says William Ligiu Ionescu. “Literally, it will happen again. We already know it will happen elsewhere, but not in that department.”
Ionescu is a California blogger and former host on the now defunct “We The People Radio Network”. He predicts another shootout between police and other believers of the anti-government movement is inevitable.
"Bullet Riddled Van"
Pictures of the Kanes’ bullet-riddled white minivan, says Ionescu, are proof that America’s police officers, who he calls para-military, must be stopped. Jerry Kane, he says, was ready and willing to do that.
“Jerry was the best friend I had on this planet,” he says. “He could understand everything I speak, the way I articulate myself, the things that I know…he could understand. His boy could, too. Joe was a brilliant boy. These were intellectuals.”
But everything 16-year-old Joe Kane knew, he learned from his father. Jerry Kane boasted in videos posted on his website that his son had never been enrolled in school.
An Ohio sheriff who encountered the Kanes when Joe was just 9-years-old said the boy carried a toy gun with him at all times and was a virtual “mini-me” of his father: anti-authority, anti-rules.
Ionsecu says Jerry was prepared to use his AK-47 if he thought a police officer crossed the line with him.
“Absolutely,” says Ionescu, “absolutely he was, yes. And Joseph, too. He would follow in his father’s footsteps. If his dad fired at someone, Joseph would pick up the nearest weapon and fire, too. That was natural.”
Turns out, the younger Kane may have fired the first shots in the West Memphis tragedy. Early on in the investigation, myEyewitnessNews.com learned that the teenager was the one who took aim at Officers Paudert and Evans.
And friends of the Kanes predict more violence will be aimed at our country’s law enforcement officers.
“Americans have a right to carry guns,” says Ionsecu, “but police don’t. Having a gun is a privilege for the police. And these officers have not bee properly trained on how to handle people like Jerry who did everything by the book. He knew more about being a police officer than police officers did.”
It still hasn’t been revealed why West Memphis Police pulled the Kane’s minivan over on Interstate 40. Arkansas State Police are handling the investigation.
West Memphis Outraged Over Cop Shooting Deaths
As City Comes to Grips With Police Deaths, Info About Suspects’ Alleged Mortgage Scam Comes Out
CBS News: Law enforcement in West Memphis, Ark., is still in a state of shock today after a traffic stop led to the brutal killings of two police officers.
West Memphis police shootout. (KTHV)
According to CBS affiliate WREG in Memphis, police say Officer Bill Evans stopped a white van with Ohio plates along I-40 and called for his backup, Sgt. Brandon Paudert. Within minutes, reports indicate Evans had been wrestled to the ground by one of the suspects and gunfire from a “long gun” and a handgun targeted both policemen.
At 11:50 a.m. CDT a call rang out, “Officer down.” Paudert was pronounced dead at the scene. Evans died at a nearby hospital.
A massive hunt ended in a nearby Wal-Mart parking lot with another shootout. It hasn’t been determined who fired first, but the gunfire left two more law enforcement officers injured and resulted in the deaths of two suspects. They have been identified by friends and relatives as 45-year-old Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph Kane. They were from Springfield, Ohio, near Cincinnati, but according to family had recently relocated to Florida to live with Kane’s new wife Donna Lee.
Initial reports suggested the van carried drug dealers because I-40 is a well-traveled corridor for drug runners. That was followed by reports the van was registered to a church in New Vienna, Ohio, a place called House of God’s Prayer, which was once home to a white supremacy movement.
Jerry Kane Jr. giving "mortgage seminar" in Fontana Cal. 2009
While ties to the church are still being investigated, CBS affiliate WREG has found links to something a bit less familiar, that this man and his son may have had ties to a fringe sovereignty movement. Jerry Kane and his son apparently traveled the country giving seminars with Jerry in a revivalist preacher-style white suit, offering to help people who were having trouble paying their mortgage.
But law enforcement investigators say the pitch offered by Kane and his colleagues was likely a scam, one that ended up costing frightened homeowners more than just their houses. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Kane specialized in “Redemption,” a sovereign citizen “theory” that applied special formulas promising to resolve financial problems for people.
One of Kane’s colleagues, Karen Taggert, has been accused in several states of pretending to do mortgage rescues while in reality doing nothing more than telling homeowners she will take care of their foreclosure and then proceeding to print a false deed which is filed under the name of a made up company or corporation.
She would then, investigators say, rent the home back to the owners or sell it to them at a reduced price. Needless to say when the bank or mortgage company catches up to the scam, Taggert and her team are, law enforcement says, long gone.
Members of these sovereignty factions encompass people from all races and all walks of life. What they have in common is a firm belief that government has no hold on them. As their own entities, members determine their own value in society. Some even file legal papers declaring their value to be millions of dollars. Since they don’t believe in the government, who is there to challenge them?
The mortgage help believed to be offered by Jerry Kane and his group appears to be based on a belief that because mortgages these days are bundled and banks likely no longer have possession of your individual mortgage, they don’t legally own your home any more than you do and therefore have no claim to your mortgage payments. Officials say this type of mortgage relief advice is part of a huge scam with tentacles in every state, with hundreds of operators preying on frightened homeowners.
The still unanswered question in West Memphis is, how did a man who seems to have been involved in shady business practices make the leap to killing police officers along a stretch of Arkansas interstate?
Law enforcement working the case still refuses to talk about what evidence they have turned up but officials who understand the fringe sovereignty movement say that sometimes antipathy toward government and law enforcement can lead to violence.
Whatever the cause, two police officers, Bill Evans and Brandon Paudert, are dead.
UPDATE:
Funeral for Cops Slain by Man and Teen Son
ABC News – Ray Sanchez – Steven Portnoy – 16 hours ago
Kane had given a two-day seminar in Las Vegas that ended May 16. Included in the portrait is a disturbing view of his son. “Jerry raised a time bomb,”
May 22, 2010
Arkansas Cop Killer Linked to ‘Patriot’ Movement
Anti-Government Zealot and Mortgage Cheat Icon Jerry Kane Jr., Teenage Son Reportedly Killed Police In Deadly Shootout
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. AP — An Ohio man’s resentment of authority and run-ins with the law was enough for a local sheriff to warn that he could be dangerous if confronted by law enforcement. Years later, the sheriff appears right: The man and his teenage son are suspected of fatally shooting two Arkansas police officers during a traffic stop before they died in a shootout.
Left: Joseph Kane Right: Jerry Kane Jr.
Jerry Kane Jr., 45, of Forest, Ohio, and his son Joseph Kane, believed to be 16, were killed during an exchange of gunfire with officers in a Walmart parking lot, Arkansas State Police said Friday.
The shootings came about 90 minutes after West Memphis police Sgt. Brandon Paudert, 39, and Officer Bill Evans, 38, were attacked with AK-47 assault rifles after they stopped a minivan on Interstate 40 in West Memphis on Thursday, authorities said.
Jerry Kane, who had a long history with police, used the Internet to question federal and local governments’ authority over him and held debt-elimination seminars around the country. He recently complained about being busted at a “Nazi checkpoint” near Carrizozo, N.M., where court records show he spent three days in jail before posting a $1,500 bond on charges of driving without a license and concealing his identity.
Sheriff Gene Kelly in Clark County, Ohio, said he issued a warning to law enforcement about Kane in July 2004, after Kane said a judge tried to “enslave” him when he was sentenced to six days of community service for driving with an expired license plate and no seat belt. Kane claimed he was a “free man” and asked for $100,000 per day in gold or silver, Kelly said.
Sheriff Gene A. Kelly, Clark County Ohio
“After listening to this man for almost 30 minutes, I feel that he is expecting and prepared for confrontations with any law enforcement officer that may come in contact with him,” Kelly wrote in his warning to officers.
Kelly told The Associated Press on Friday that he had been “very concerned about a potential confrontation and about his resentment of authority.”
On an Internet radio show, hosted on a website that lets amateurs create their own shows and live discussions, Kane expressed outrage about his New Mexico arrest.
“I ran into a Nazi checkpoint in the middle of New Mexico where they were demanding papers or jail,” he said. “That was the option. Either produce your papers or go to jail. So I entered into commerce with them under threat, duress and coercion, and spent 47 hours in there.”
Kane said he planned to file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion against those involved in his arrest and detention. Kane also said he had an officer sign a document that said the officer must pay for using Kane’s name.
“I am now putting together an invoice for him for approximately $80,000 in gold for the eight times he used my name,” Kane said on the radio show. “I already have done a background check on him. I found out where he lives, his address, his wife’s name.”
Mark Potok, who directs hate-group research at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Kane had not been in the group’s database before Thursday. But he said that was not surprising, given the “explosive growth” in the anti-government movement in recent years. With 363 new groups in 2009, there are now 512, Potok said.
Members of so-called patriot groups don’t recognize the authority of the U.S. government and consider themselves sovereign citizens.
What is: The Patriot Movement?
Jerry Kane Jr. giving Debt Avoidance Seminar August 2, 2009, Fontana, California
JJ MacNab, a Maryland-based insurance analyst who has testified before Congress on tax and financial scams, said she had been tracking Kane for about two years and that his business centered on debt-avoidance scams.
Potok said such scams are common in the sovereign citizen movement.
“He basically promised them they would never have to repay their mortgage or credit card debt,” MacNab said.
Kane’s website showed he held one of his seminars in Las Vegas 15-16 and that he was due to appear in Safety Harbor, Fla., May 28-29. His website Friday asked that donations be sent to an address in Clearwater, Fla., to help his family.
At that Florida address, a woman, speaking through the front door, told an AP reporter to leave the property when he knocked and identified himself. Two bicycles were in front of the unkempt, single-story home and exercise equipment was on the porch. A sign on the front door read: “No visitors. This means you. Thank you for understanding.”
A woman who answered the door at the home of Kane’s mother, Patricia Holt of Marysville, Ohio, also told an AP reporter to leave and said she had no comment. She did not identify herself.
related stories:
Arkansas Cop Killer Linked to ‘Patriot’ Movement
Lies,’ baby’s death pushed Kane
from: WDTN-TV:
Video: Jerry Kane Jr. “Debt Avoidance” Seminar (NSFW)
May 21, 2010
Replay: President Obama Delivers Commencement Address at West Point
Original: May 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT
United States Military Academy at West Point
Academic Award Ceremonies Graduation Ceremony Graduation Week Photos Graduation Week Guide
Rand Paul calls Pat Buchanan “Uncle Pat” too
Ironically, the man Rachael Madow (whose interview started the recent controversy) refers to as “Uncle Pat” is a key character in the “Paul Revolution” and in the belief system of Rand Paul….
The roots of Rand Paul’s civil rights resentment
Lurking beneath the Paul family’s libertarian politics is a strategy of pandering to “populists” like Pat Buchanan
By Joe Conason– To understand Rand Paul‘s agonized contortions over America’s civil rights consensus, let’s review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as “paleolibertarian,” led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the “paleoconservatives” behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism.
Repeatedly during Ron Paul’s political career, his associates used the same kinds of inflammatory rhetoric used by Buchanan in order to attract support and raise money, all while Paul himself pretended not to know what they were doing and saying in his name. Paul could always cover himself by saying, just as Rand Paul says now, that his opposition to civil rights statutes is purely constitutional and has nothing to do with bigotry.
The last time that anyone examined the details of the Paul family’s gamy history was back in 2008, when the New Republic dug up copies of newsletters sent out under Ron’s name to raise money, and found that they were replete with ugly references to blacks, Martin Luther King, homosexuals and other targets of the racist far right. At the time, Reason magazine, a libertarian magazine that opposed the “paleo” deviation, gave the most revealing account of its movement’s degenerate element in a long article by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel.
read the full text: HERE
related:
Rand Paul ducks question about minimum wage –
After Explaining a Provocative Remark, Paul Makes AnotherBill Maher Describes Rand Paul: It’s As If Sarah Palin Made It Through Med School
BP spill becoming Obama’s political quicksand
BP stalls and sidesteps while Obama dithers, goes along with the “plan”
“I’m as good a Democrat as most people, and I think this administration has done some good things… but they are risking everything by this ‘go along with BP’ strategy” –James Carville
From Huffington Post: Democratic strategist James Carville and MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews, two reliable supporters of President Barack Obama, have issued withering critiques of the administration’s handling of the Gulf oil spill.
Carville, the famously outspoken Louisianian who was a chief political aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday that the administration’s response to the spill has been “lackadaisical” and that Obama was “naive” to trust BP to manage the massive clean-up effort.
“I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here,” he said. “They’re naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can… They won’t tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it! Somebody has got to, like shake them and say, ‘These people don’t wish you well! They’re going to take you down!’”
Carville also accused the White House of going along with what he called the “let BP handle it” strategy. “They seem like they’re inconvenienced by this, this is some giant thing getting in their way and somehow or another, if you let BP handle it, it’ll all go away. It’s not going away. It’s growing out there. It is a disaster of the first magnitude, and they’ve got to go to Plan B.”
read more: HP
related:Month after oil spill, why is BP still in charge?
WASHINGTON (AP) – Days after the Gulf Coast oil spill, the Obama administration pledged to keep its “boot on the throat” of BP to make sure the company did all it could to cap the gushing leak and clean up the spill. But a month after the April 20 explosion, anger is growing about why BP PLC is still in charge of the response.
BP May Be Barred From US Contracts Under Plan Weighed by EPA
Oil Spill Tests Obama Vow To Use Scientific Approach
BP oil spill reaches delicate wetlands of Louisiana
Bob Graham, William Reilly to head independent probe of Gulf oil spill
Replay: President Obama Speaks and Signs Presidential Memorandum for Cleaner, More Efficient Vehicles
original: May 21, 2010 10:45 AM EDT
