Oregon Couple Told They Have No Water Rights, Forced to Destroy Their Own Pond. Remember the Oregon ‘Rain Man’ or Gary Harrington — who was sent to 30 days in Jackson County Jail and slapped with a $1,500 fine for collecting rainwater on his 170-acre property?
He was ordered to breach his dams and drain his ponds that held more than 13 million gallons of water, enough to fill 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Now, an Oregon couple faces a similar fate as Gary Harrington because the rain belongs to the overbearing government, because corporate greed claims water is not a human right, and because Americans are not entitled to do what they please on their private property. The Jackson County Watermaster’s office has told Jon and Sabrina Carey to destroy their 2-acre pond — built 40 years ago, long before they bought the 10-acre property off Butte Falls Highway two and a half years ago — as they don’t have any water rights.
When you finally get tired of that one super right-wing uncle posting stupid sh*t on Facebook... FBI axes FOIA requests by email, so dust off your fax machine. As tech-savvy government efforts like 18F and the USDS take technological strides forward, other parts of the government are abandoning modern technology altogether.
U.S. Foreign Military Support. Republican Donald Trump criticized U.S. military support for several countries — Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany and South Korea — during a discussion on nuclear proliferation at a CNN town hall in late March, saying “we can’t afford it.”
We’ll answer the question: What exactly does the U.S. provide in terms of military support to these countries? The United States gives very little monetary military aid to those countries — about $10,000 to Saudi Arabia in fiscal year 2014. And Saudi Arabia purchased more than $2 billion of military equipment and construction services that year.
It's not just the Oregon militia: Why many Westerners get angry about federal land rights. When Big Guns Go Down. The Fourth of July 2010 was blood and pain for Sean McMahon.
On Independence Day, five years ago, US Army Specialist McMahon was appointed to test a new M2 .50 caliber machine gun recently delivered to his unit a couple hundred yards outside Forward Operating Base Kunduz, Afghanistan, at the firing range. After McMahon fired his original weapon, his staff sergeant had him swap it out for the new one. As McMahon pressed the trigger, the turret-mounted weapon wouldn’t fire. Selling Off Apache Holy Land. Photo.
Armed Services chair: ‘Things have to change’ at Defense Department. The new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee says Congress has the right to reverse Defense Department policy decisions if members believes the Pentagon’s choices weaken U.S. national security.
Spread Laughter and Cure Boredom. GOP looks at big cuts for Labor, Education, HHS - David Rogers. House Republicans late Thursday began circulating new spending targets for appropriations bills for the coming year with Labor, Education and Health and Human Services facing a nearly 20 percent reduction on top of the cuts already made in the March 1 sequestration order.
Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) appears to be backloading the larger reductions in order to salvage a few of the 12 annual bills this summer. Story Continued Below He is putting a priority on what he sees as security items, including law enforcement and homeland security as well as the military.
But the numbers are a prescription for more stalemate unless the House and Senate leadership begin to get more serious about budget negotiations with one another and President Barack Obama. 10 Insanely Overpaid Public Employees. New York Fed Refuses To Disclose Data On "The Largest Theft Of Funds In National History" Which Could Be Three Times Larger Than Expected. Congressional Budget Office warns of debt explosion. Over the long term, the CBO said, a projected explosion in government spending outside interest on the debt is “attributable entirely” to the ballooning cost of “Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and (to a lesser extent) insurance subsidies” intended to help finance coverage for the uninsured under President Obama’s new health-care law.
“The health care programs are the main drivers of that growth,” the CBO said, responsible for 80 percent of the projected rise in spending on those programs over the next 25 years. Tax collections could keep pace with those costs if Congress permitted the George W. Bush tax cuts to expire on schedule in 2012 and allowed the alternative minimum tax to hit millions of additional households, the CBO said. Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Private Contractors. Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Private Contractors Posted on Sep 13, 2011 A study conducted by the Project for Government Oversight (POGO) found that on average the U.S. government pays private contractors more than twice what it pays federal workers for a number of public services.
The disparity amounts to billions of dollars in overpayment each year. “Our findings were shocking,” researchers wrote. “POGO estimates the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services.” The findings seem to refute an argument dear to political conservatives: that commissioning the private sector to perform essential public work saves taxpayer money. Guard choppers from Illinois to assist Vermont recovery effort. U.S. can't account for $8.7 billion of Iraq's money: audit. Why the US won't leave Afghanistan. Among multiple layers of deception and newspeak, the official Washington spin on the strategic quagmire in Afghanistan simply does not hold.
No more than "50-75 'al-Qaeda types' in Afghanistan", according to the CIA, have been responsible for draining the US government by no less than US $10 billion a month, or $120 billion a year. At the same time, outgoing US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been adamant that withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is "premature". The Pentagon wants the White House to "hold off on ending the Afghanistan troop surge until the fall of 2012. " Legal Bills for Fannie and Freddie Abuses Cost Taxpayers $160 Million. Iraq: Missing Iraq money may have been stolen, auditors say. Reporting from Washington — After the U.S. -led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.
Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time. Evangelical Liberty University received half a billion dollars in federal aid money - War Room. Liberty University, the evangelical private Christian school founded by dead apartheid-supporting bigot Jerry Falwell, received $445 million in federal financial aid last year. Bond Market Shows Why Boehner Saying We're Broke Is Only Figure of Speech. House Speaker John Boehner routinely offers this diagnosis of the U.S.’s fiscal condition: “We’re broke; Broke going on bankrupt,” he said in a Feb. 28 speech in Nashville.
Boehner’s assessment dominates a debate over the federal budget that could lead to a government shutdown. It is a widely shared view with just one flaw: It’s wrong. “The U.S. government is not broke,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “There’s no evidence that the market is treating the U.S. government like it’s broke.” Study: Public Sees Both Parties Cutting Deficits The Wrong Way. 9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon.
9 TRILLION Dollars Missing from Federal Reserve,Fed Inspector General Can't Explain. Misguided outrage. Barney Frank, Ron Paul and 55 others advocate for defense cuts. Later today, Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. Ron Paul and 55 congressional co-signers are sending a letter to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform advocating defense cuts.