Twitter This Commentary In The News: Thanks this morning to ChrisM, my MP3Angel, for supplying the news and commentary audio files. In regard to the commentary here's one perspective... a personal recollection of a discussion I had a number of years ago with my father on the issue: When World War II came along, my dad went down to the armory in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) where there was a colonel making a roll of all the volunteers. When he had enough on the roster to make an army size 'company', he sent all pertinent documents to the U.S. Army-Air Force, where they certified that roll and gave the enlistees a Company/Unit designation. THAT IS A "Well Ordered Militia". Fat boys with guns & beer coolers at the Mexican border ARE NOT THAT. It's also notable that there are documents showing the much quoted Bill of Rights statement asserting the right to keep and bear arms AND the statement about the 'well-ordered militia' connected by a SEMI-COLON, meaning those two concepts are inexorably attached to each other, and that brings us full circle to the invalidity of "Fat boys with guns & beer coolers at the Mexican border" either having the right to individual gun ownership OR the right to consider themselves a 'well-ordered militia'. Because they are quite simply "Vigilantes" AKA "Goon Squads", and are extra-legal, which means the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE are LEGALLY AND CONSTITUTIONALLY OUT OF LINE in their cooperation with those maroons unless they'd care to deputize them, which they never have done. See this letter from a ninth grade Florida student at the Orlando Sentinel: "Well-ordered is key"... He gets it right IMHO, Da' Buffalo Jerry Brown, Zen Governor of the state of California from 1975 to 1983 is planning to announce his candidacy once again. In Santa Cruz California, the "Darling" child of the Santa Cruz city council, conceptual artist and brother to the owner of a West Cliff seaside Victorian mansion converted to a bed-and-breakfast, Lowell Darling, has paid the requisite $3,500 fee and is planning on a gubernatorial bid as well.

Darling, 67, is the brother of well-known local Democratic activist Darrell Darling, and no stranger to politics. He was on the ballot as a California gubernatorial candidate in 1978, when he won 2 percent of the statewide vote, and has since spent time in Europe encouraging foreigners, who are affected by American policy, to run for U.S. president — which, by law, they can't do. [In Full]

Still fighting (over) the "Cold War" - The US and Russia are taking a week-long break (perhaps longer) in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty negotiations. The Sydney Morning-Herald says the negotiations may be "...stalled over a Russian demand for the option to withdraw unilaterally if Moscow determines that US missile defence would threaten its intercontinental nuclear missile force," The US Supreme Court will revisit their Second Amendment ruling limiting a municipality's right to severely limit or ban gun ownership on the behalf of a 76 year old black inner-city grandfather in Chicago. FWIW, President Obama has always supported the ban. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley explains why he supports the ban in this interview. More in the commentary But will the kids do more that 'Test Well'? The Obama administration is intending to release $900 million dollars in educational grants to school districts that fire under-performing teachers, close failing schools, fix 'chronically troubled classrooms', and manage to cut the student dropout rate.

He singled out Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, where last week the school board voted to dismiss the entire faculty as part of a turnaround plan for the school, which has a 48 percent graduation rate. At Central Falls High, he said, just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests. Mr. Obama said he supported the school board’s decision to dismiss the faculty and staff members. “Our kids get only one chance at an education and we need to get it right,” he said. The president’s comments incensed the leadership of the American Federation of Teachers, which criticized Mr. Obama for “condoning the mass firing” of teachers at the Rhode Island school. “We know it is tempting for people in Washington to score political points by scapegoating teachers, but it does nothing to give our students and teachers the tools they need to succeed,” the president of the union, Randi Weingarten, said in a statement. [In Full]

More on the "School Turnaround Grants", from ABC. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a six-nation Latin American tour, has just attended the Uruguayan presidential inauguration of Jose Mujica, former member of a guerrilla group who spent 14 years in prison, and has arrived in Chile with 25 satellite phones and a technician to set them up (no word on who is going to supply or finance the exorbitantly expensive service though) to assist the disaster relief after the days-ago 8.8 quake that left approximately 700 dead. Most of the dead were killed by tsunami related incidents, not structural failure of the buildings, due to strictly enforced building codes in place since the 60s when there was also a major earthquake in the country. Secretary of State Clinton will also "meet with conservative billionaire businessman Sebastian Pinera, who is to assume the office on March 11.". Clinton's itinerary also includes Brazil, Costa Rica and Guatemala In OTHER news: This is how Genocide is done:

Under a sea blockade, the coastal Gaza Strip has now become a seafood importer. Its desperate fishermen — cut off from plentiful fishing grounds by Israeli patrol boats — have turned to sneaking into Egyptian waters in tiny motorboats to buy their catch and bring it home. Others bring in fish by land, in ice-packed plastic foam boxes pulled through smuggling tunnels from Egypt. And even though the Mediterranean is right on Gaza's doorstep, locals are creating fish ponds to provide Gaza's 1.5 million people their key source of protein. [In Full]

Also see this article from Foreign Policy In Focus on the rape of continental Africa's Ag sector: Destroying African Agriculture by Walden Bello ...and finally, from Jim Kunstler @ ClusterFuck Nation... Let the Health Reform Games begin! Winter Mind Games Clusterfuck Nation James Howard Kunstler Does anyone know exactly how the Winter Olympics got hijacked by the Canadian Hotel Housekeeping Employees Union? Every time I turned the damn thing on, there were these ladies uniformed in manual labor casuals shoving teakettles across the floor while other ladies madly polished the forward path of said sliding kettles with Swiffer© sweepers. At least this was the first Olympiad to be dominated by Proctor & Gamble instead of some obnoxious Great Power nation with a political agenda. The NBC execs must have loved this weird new sport, because it was practically all they put on the air. My own interest in tea kettle shoving waned over the days, and a good thing too, because along came President Obama's Health Care Reform Summit Meeting on Thursday to engage the whole nation in a rousing Olympiad of mind games, including a round-robin version of The Spanish Prisoner, a mixed set of the Republican Pigeon Drop, and variations on the Nigerian Lottery scam, with touches of the Madoff Ponzi Gambit here and there. After a few hours of that, one longed for the simple mindless bliss of tea kettle shoving, if only to relieve the headache. I wish I could fetch up something like the glowing false authority of Paul Krugman to pronounce on the fantastic bundle of conundrums, riddles, and fathomless mysteries that is health care reform but I was left far more confused about it after the summit. All I can offer, really, are observations: for example, that Congressman John Boehner (R -Ohio) needs a set of steel ball bearings to roll around in his hand to perfect his otherwise dead-on impersonation of Captain Queeg, the paranoid villain of that 1950s movie The Caine Mutiny. I kept wishing that President Obama would reach under the table for a fungo bat every time the miserable Mr. Boehner opened his Midwestern pie-hole to drone out a new lie, and split his fucking head open like a Crenshaw melon -- but perhaps my fantasies are excessively baroque... In Full @ Clusterfuck Nation -30-
Creative Commons Copyright Courtesy of Cabale News Service, KPIG Radio, and KVMR Radio. Listen to KPIG, Listen to KVMR Recorded & transcribed by The Buffalo Amongst Wolves @ Razed By Wolves Da' Buffalo's Google Reader Shared Items Feed is [Here] View what's current without a feed reader [Here] In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 and The Berne Convention on Literary and Artistic Works, Article 10, the news clippings and images used in this posting are made available without profit for research and educational purposes.

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