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RE: The BUZZ2YA Presents Your Daily Dose Of Insanity USA Style
12/2/2013 11:22:42 PM

Grinch! Officials making an ENTIRE STREET take down its Christmas decorations

  • Orange county neighborhood have a Christmas tradition where the lights are strung from house to house
  • Local officials say the lights are an 'obstruction' and a 'violation of code'
  • Residents ordered to remove lights that stretch across the street by Wednesday

By JAMES GORDON

|

The Grinch appears to be alive and well in one Californian neighborhood.

Residents living in a neighborhood in Orange County are trying to fight off mean-spirited local officials who have demanded they remove their Christmas lights.

Trabuco Canyon glistens in the darkness as the street is bound together by a colorful display of interlocking display of Christmas lights that have been hung from house to house.

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Spirit of Christmas: California residents in an Orange County neighborhood say they've been ordered by local officials to take down an interlocking display of Christmas lights that hang from house to house

Spirit of Christmas: California residents in an Orange County neighborhood say they've been ordered by local officials to take down an interlocking display of Christmas lights that hang from house to house

Community spirit: Around 15-20 homeowners have been told to remove their lights by this Wednesday or face the consequences

Community spirit: Around 15-20 homeowners have been told to remove their lights by this Wednesday or face the consequences

Vague: County officials have not explained exactly what 'codes' are being violated and it appears the lights are going to stay put - for now

Vague: County officials have not explained exactly what 'codes' are being violated and it appears the lights are going to stay put - for now

But Orange County officials have reportedly ordered homeowners in Trabuco Canyon to remove the elaborate display.

Some 15-20 homeowners have received a letters from informing the residents that the lights which are anchored on multiple houses and suspended overhead, are an obstruction and a violation of the county code.

Jean Pasco from Orange County council explained to MailOnline that the concern was with the lights that had been strung up over the streets and not the individual displays on people's houses.

'The light that hang over the strret could be a hazard. Residents know that they're not supposed to hang lights over a public road. At some point they are dangling dangerously low.'

Essentially, officials are worried that the lights are strung up in a flimsy manner and that a storm could potentially bring them down and electrocute someone.


Interconnecting: The lights are strung from house to house and create a unique feel to the neighborhood

Interconnecting: The lights are strung from house to house and create a unique feel to the neighborhood

Lights out: Orange County officials have reportedly ordered homeowners in a Trabuco Canyon neighborhood to remove an elaborate display of Christmas lights

Lights out: Orange County officials have reportedly ordered homeowners in a Trabuco Canyon neighborhood to remove an elaborate display of Christmas lights

Light fight: The lights are strung from house to house and the country says this is causing an obstruction and is a violation of codes

Light fight: The lights are strung from house to house and the country says this is causing an obstruction and is a violation of codes

Bonds: The entire neighborhood come together at holiday time and feel the lights spread the spirit of Christmas around

Bonds: The entire neighborhood come together at holiday time and feel the lights spread the spirit of Christmas around

The intricate display of lights has been a tradition in the neighborhood for at least five years, residents said.

'We’re in violation of a county ordinance that we’re not quite sure of,' said Brian Kopiec to KTLA, who lives in Wagon Wheel.

'When we bought the house, the people that sold it to us told us what a great neighborhood it was, and they actually warned us that this neighborhood goes great at Christmas,' he said.

Mr Kopiec says he is unsure if he will take the order to remove the lights seriously.

'I think it’s actually horrible, what they’re doing to us. All the poor kids — they love the lighting display, and it really brings the neighborhood together.'

The Christmas crackdown has some saying that Orange County is playing the Grinch to an ongoing ‘War on Christmas.’

Others say the neighbors went several light strings too far in decorating for the holidays.

Notice: Brian Kopiec has been given a notice by the county that instructs him to remove his lights by the middle of this week

Notice: Brian Kopiec has been given a notice by the county that instructs him to remove his lights by the middle of this week

Lighting-up time: The demand by the county to remove the lights comes three weeks before Christmas Day

Lighting-up time: The demand by the county to remove the lights comes three weeks before Christmas Day



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2516883/Grinch-Officials-making-entire-street-Christmas-decorations.html#ixzz2mMX22Xua
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2516883/Grinch-Officials-making-entire-street-Christmas-decorations.html#ixzz2mMWnSxhR
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Jim Allen III
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RE: The BUZZ2YA Presents Your Daily Dose Of Insanity USA Style
12/3/2013 6:30:54 PM
From and outside source that has become an inside source, with news and facts all its own, on a topic I am interested in.

Dare to get the federal government off weed

by December 3, 2013
America's 40-year war on marijuana was known to be a mistake when Nixon first declared it
Topics:
U.S.
Drugs
Marijuana
marijuana protest
Medical marijuana advocates hold signs as they stage a demonstration in front of the Phillip Burton Federal Building on October 14, 2011 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Smoking marijuana is going to be legal in the United States. Maybe not tomorrow but definitely in Colorado and Washington come January, and as the movement builds, it's only a matter of time before the rest of the nation follows suit.

The federal government knows legalization in two states will have an effect nationally, but for the first time, Americans don't seem to mind. In October, Gallup reported that a majority — 58 percent — of Americans surveyed favor legalization, a dramatic 27 percentage-point increase since 2000 and 9 times the increase in the preceding 23 years combined. It looks more or less like the trend in support for gay marriage. By 2020, I'm optimistic we'll have seen the last arrest for marijuana use in the United States, bringing to an end a 50-year mistake that never had to be made in the first place.

The year was 1970, and Congress had just passed and President Richard Nixon just signed the Controlled Substances Act, in what would become the first shot of a long and bloody drug war. The act created the five-level schedule of controlled substances, but it didn't decide which drugs would go where right away. Instead, it called into being the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, which went about developing a policy.

What the commission came back with in 1972 sounds uncanny to anyone who grew up in America in the last 40 years. Its report, "Marihuana, a Signal of Misunderstanding," didn't advocate a different approach to prohibition, but instead mused on the limits of human understanding, the rise of leisure time and the future of surveillance. The report is modest and sympathetic to everyone involved, with an acute focus on the consequences of its recommendations. In short, it's everything U.S. marijuana policy hasn't been since.

With sections like The Need for Perspective, Drugs in a Free Society and Marihuana and the Dominant Social Order, "A Signal of Misunderstanding" is the cool uncle of government reports. After a thorough review, the commission decided that marijuana was mostly a symbolic problem rather than a real public-health crisis. The proper role of the federal government, it wrote, was to lower the emotional stakes of the debate so that they match the drug's actual risks. The commission concluded that the criminal-justice system was the wrong way to address personal use. "The existing social and legal policy (i.e., prohibition) is out of proportion to the individual and social harm engendered by the use of the drug," a group of adults reasonably concluded. Yes, more than 40 years ago, a government commission headed by a Republican, reporting to Nixon, tasked with developing what would become marijuana policy for much of the world, told the feds to chill out. The whole story sounds like stoner apocrypha, but it's true.

The report was not, however, to become policy. Nixon wasn't about to extend understanding to the yippie radicals who were the face of marijuana use as well as his extraparliamentary opposition, so the Department of Health's temporary — and wholly arbitrary — classification of weed as a Schedule I narcotic would stand.

Since then, marijuana prohibition has been the kind of unmitigated disaster that makes America's ill-fated dalliance with alcohol prohibition look like responsible lawmaking in comparison. Law professor Michelle Alexander went so far as to call the drug war — and in particular the war on black marijuana users and their communities — "the new Jim Crow" in her hit book of the same title. Drugs arrests, she writes, increased over 1,000 percent in the 1990s, and 80 percent of that increase was for marijuana possession. She describes in detail a system of incentives in which local law-enforcement agencies were seduced by federal anti-drug money and changed their policing practices to meet crude progress metrics. It's not the American people who got addicted to weed — it's their cops.

The fathers of our contemporary drug policy were paranoid fools who were already caught in the past 40 years ago.

How did this reversal happen? Back in the '70s, it was Sen. James O. Eastland's subcommittee that suppressed the Marihuana Commission's report and held the line on prohibition. Eastland was such a virulent racist that Malcolm X used his name in speeches to stand generally for Southern white supremacists. Eastland was so bigoted, he made Strom Thurmond the second most hateful member of the subcommittee. For Eastland and his cohort, marijuana was associated inextricably with the new left and black radicals. Here's how the senator imagined the drug's spread, in direct contrast to the commission's studied findings of widespread use across ethnic and class groupings:

From Berkeley, the marihuana epidemic spread rapidly throughout the American campus community. Then it spread down into the high schools and junior high schools — and within the last year or two it has begun to invade the grade schools. It has also spread into the ranks of professional society and of the bluecollar workers, so that all sectors of our society are today affected by the epidemic.

In hearings on the "marihuana-hashish epidemic and its impact on United States security" they dove into Maoist and Trotskyist lines on getting stoned. To distract from the commission’s findings, they paraded tall tales about hyperpotent strains of marijuana from Asia. These are the fathers of our contemporary drug policy: the worst that postwar America had to offer, paranoid fools, men who were already caught in the past 40 years ago.

After a big historical loop, there is renewed hope that the president and Congress might leave behind the prejudices of Nixon, Eastland, Thurmond and the like. There's even a bipartisan bill in the House to allow states to develop their own marijuana policies, in spite of court rulings that give Congress broad powers under the commerce clause to regulate all drugs.

But despite the national mood change, federal drug policy is hard to shift. Even though President Barack Obama has never tried to hide his past marijuana use, he hasn't been eager to attach his name to major drug reform. Marijuana's unjustified placement on the schedule of controlled substances is a serious stumbling block, and it's not going to disappear without the president's support. Here's where the lessons of the past come in: Resurrect the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse.

There's no reason to believe a renewed commission, composed in good faith, would come to conclusions any different from the original’s. Perhaps Sen. John McCain would be willing to provide rare bipartisan cover; he told a reporter in September, "Maybe we should legalize. We’re certainly moving that way, as far as marijuana is concerned." Maybe Obama could appoint Dr. Sanjay Gupta, his 2009 nominee for surgeon general and an out weed-reform supporter since August, to chair. It would be a golden opportunity to present the facts and demythologize marijuana, stem the flow of anti-drug weapons to the nation's streets, as well as set the stage for localities to experiment with their own regulatory schemes. It's not just time to get the government off weed; we're generations late.

Malcolm Harris is an editor at The New Inquiry and a writer based in Brooklyn.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/marijuana-weed-legalizationwardrugsnixon.html

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Jim Allen III
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RE: The BUZZ2YA Presents Your Daily Dose Of Insanity USA Style
12/4/2013 10:30:57 PM

Rush Limbaugh: Obama is ‘having an orgasm’ because the pope is ‘ripping America’

By David Edwards

Wednesday, December 4, 2013 16:08 EST
Radio host Rush Limbaugh
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After the president mentioned the pope’s condemnation of economic inequality on Wednesday, Limbaugh said Obama “just can’t wait to rip this country apart.”Rush Limbaugh suggested on Wednesday that President Barack Obama was “having an orgasm” after Pope Francis called unfettered capitalism the “new tyranny,” which the radio host said was the same as “ripping America.”

“This is the president citing the pope, his new best friend, because the pope is ripping America, the pope ripping capitalism,” the radio host explained. “And Obama’s having an orgasm. Jeremiah Wright is beside himself. Jeremiah Wright thought he was Obama’s preacher, now pope somehow has co-opted Obama.”

“This guy can’t wait to rip this country apart, every day, whenever there’s an opportunity to criticize this country, he’s the first in line,” Limbaugh said of the president. “And that is just an outright falsehood that the increasing inequality — income, wealth, whatever — is most pronounced in our country.”

“And I tell you the way he means that, ‘We’ve got too many rich people, we need more people who are poor and lower middle class, that’s the only way we can have equality and fairness.’ This is just — people have got to be cringing that they ever voted for this guy.”

Limbaugh also noted that the pope had asked why it was “not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

“How could it not be a news item when four people die in Benghazi?” Limbaugh quipped. “How did that not end up being a news item? Four people!”

Watch this video from the Rush Limbaugh Program, broadcast Dec. 4, 2013.

See video by following link

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Jim Allen III
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RE: The BUZZ2YA Presents Your Daily Dose Of Insanity USA Style
12/5/2013 12:07:22 AM

Expert warns Congress that Obama’s behavior could lead to armed rebellion

Barack Obama is so divorced from reality and surrounded by “yes men” inside his White House cocoon that he doesn’t seem to grasp the consequences of his Administration’s capricious and constant disregard for the laws of the United States.

Perhaps Michael Cannon’s testimony in front of a congressional committee today will be sufficiently jarring to make him realize his potentially precarious position… but I doubt it.

During a congressional committee hearing about the constitutional limits imposed on the presidency and the implications of President Barack Obama’s disregard for implementing the Affordable Care Act as written, one expert testified that the consequences of the president’s behavior were potentially grave. He said that the precedent set by Obama could eventually lead to an revolt against the federal government.

On Tuesday, Michael Cannon, Cato Institute’s Director of Health Policy Studies, testified before a congressional committee about the dangers of the president’s legal behavior.

“There is one last thing to which the people can resort if the government does not respect the restrains that the constitution places on the government,” Cannon said. “Abraham Lincoln talked about our right to alter our government or our revolutionary right to overthrow it.”

The Founder’s Constitution—found online at the University of Chicago where Obama wasn’t a law professor (he was a mere lecturer, and an undistinguished one at that)—speaks quite clearly about our Right of Revolution.

What others called the right of resistance or the right of revolution is at bottom the natural right of preservation. The supporting case was developed with bold thought and cautious speech by John Locke, whose Second Treatise (no. 2) rightly was regarded by many of the Founders as a fit and necessary text for a self-governing people. An executive’s use of force without right left a suffering people with no choice: “cry up their Gouvernours, as much as you will for Sons of Jupiter . . .; give them out for whom or what you please, the same will happen. The People generally ill treated, and contrary to right, will be ready upon any occasion to ease themselves of a burden that sits heavy upon them.” Far from instigating “Civil Wars, or Intestine Broils,” his doctrine (Locke insisted) would have an opposite effect. The mischiefs concocted by “a busie head, or turbulent spirit” would not succeed in the absence of a general sense of being wronged. In fact the people were, if anything, too slow to resent transgressions. Moreover, a people well instructed in their rights would reduce the likelihood of civil commotions by disabusing would-be tyrants of their wicked fancies.

The American experience shows the colonials to have been quicker learners of Locke’s lessons than the ministers of George III. The complex of grievances and restless stirrings that agitated the Americans in the 1760s and beyond had sent their ablest men to their libraries and their writing desks. But by the mid-seventies events had reached a point where entreaties were futile and researches “among old parchments, or musty records” superfluous. “When the first principles of civil society are violated, and the rights of a whole people are invaded, the common forms of municipal law are not to be regarded” (Hamilton, no. 5).

No one with the least understanding of the horrors of an armed rebellion has any desire to engage in one. That fact stated, Americans have not purchased tens of millions of firearms and an estimated 50-60 billion rounds of ammunition in recent years because they intend to submit quietly to creeping government tyranny. http://bearingarms.com/expert-warns-congress-that-obamas-behavior-could-lead-to-armed-rebellion/

May Wisdom and the knowledge you gained go with you,



Jim Allen III
Skype: JAllen3D
Everything You Need For Online Success


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RE: The BUZZ2YA Presents Your Daily Dose Of Insanity USA Style
12/5/2013 1:45:04 PM

JPMorgan Chase admits network hack; 465,000 card users' data stolen

Summary: The banking giant suffered a network breach this year that resulted in a large data breach — though, funds or critical personal information are not thought to have been stolen.

JPMorgan Chase has warned some 465,000 prepaid cash card customers that their personal information may be at risk after unknown hackers attacked its network earlier this year.

First reported by Reuters, nearly half-a-million cards were issued for companies and businesses to pay employees and for the federal government to issue tax refunds and other welfare benefits.

The banking giant said on Wednesday its online UCard portal had suffered a breach in mid-September, which allowed an unknown number of hackers to access vast amounts of customer prepaid cash card data.

The issue was subsequently fixed and the breach reported to the FBI and Secret Service. No funds are thought to have been stolen.

It's not yet clear how hackers were able to breach the bank's network, or what information was specifically taken. But the concern is that though card data is encrypted, personal data may have been stored in plain text files.

Social security data and birth dates are not understood to have been taken, but a "small amount" of other data may have been. The bank did not elaborate.

The total number of affected account for about 2 percent of its near-25 million UCard users.

Topic: Security http://www.zdnet.com/jpmorgan-chase-admits-network-hack-465000-card-users-data-stolen-7000023974/

May Wisdom and the knowledge you gained go with you,



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Everything You Need For Online Success


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