The Hollywood Liberal

Pentagon bans US troops from using YouTube

Telegraph UK
Excerpt
The Pentagon will from today ban soldiers serving overseas from using popular video-sharing and social networking websites, claiming they are a security risk.

US soldier in Iraq; Pentagon bans US soldiers from sharing messages on YouTube and MySpace
The Pentagon will continue to post its own videos on networking websites

The US defence department said videos, recordings and messages uploaded by troops in the field on to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other websites posed a “significant operational security challenge”, and a drag on the military’s computer network. …
The US army, meanwhile, will continue to post videos on YouTube showing soldiers defeating insurgents and befriending Iraqis.

HL’s Take
“significant operational security challenge”, they call it. Yeah right. How can they lie about how good things are over there, when we can see the videos and know they are lying.
They don’t want the truth to get out about how inept they are, remember this one for example.

Or how about this one.

Here is a map of all the wildfires currently burning in Florida. I found this on What Really Happened.com Notice how all the areas where wildfires are burning are where the Republicans live, and all the areas that are not burning. (Southeast part of the state, like Miami) are where the Democrats mostly live. More bad Karma for foisting the Bush nightmare on us all. Actually California has already had a few fires and it’s only May. The fire season doesn’t usually start until late August. That’s because we had no rain this winter. The driest Winter ever in L.A. which means that we will be having lots of fires all summer long. One more sign of the global warming catastrophe coming our way.

Two Immigrants Say U.S. Agents Drugged Them

NPR
Excerpt
In Los Angeles, the unusual case of two immigrants whose deportations were botched by U.S. immigration officials has allowed a rare glimpse into internal proceedings within the Department of Homeland Security.

The men say that U.S. immigration officials drugged them in order to ease their removal from the country — but airline officials ultimately put a stop to the deportations.

Both immigrants are back in Los Angeles, appealing their deportations. And they’ve now obtained government medical records that seem to confirm their accounts.

One of the men, Raymond Soeoth, is a Christian minister from Indonesia who came to the United States in 1999 to flee religious persecution. But on Dec. 7, 2004, immigration agents told him he was going to be deported.

Soeoth says that an agent asked him if he needed medication to relax him for the trip. He replied that he did not. But a few hours later, says Soeoth, several agents came into his cell. One of them, he says, was a medic. He was holding a syringe.

“Two officers grabbed my legs, two officers grabbed my hands. Then they opened my pants. And then I said, ‘Why are you guys doing this to me?’ and I was crying and crying, and I said ‘Why? I’m not animal.'”

Church’s Sign Against Islam Sparks Controversy

WRAL Raliegh
Excerpt
Spring Hope — Words like “bomb” and “die” draw attention to the small sign in front of Good News Independent Baptist Church.

Rev. Gary Murrell put up the sign, which on one side claims the message of Islam is “submit, convert or die.”

The other side reads: “When is the last time you heard of a Jew or Christian with a bomb strapped to their body?”

Despite some in the Islamic community who claim the sign is offensive, Murrell says it is not a hate sign.

“It was not put up there with the purpose of showing that we hate those people,” he said. “It’s not the people, it’s the religion.”

Murrell says it is a violent religion compared to Christianity. But not everyone agrees.

“I would really say that the actions of one individual really do not represent the Islamic faith,” said Debbie Jaunich, with the Islamic Center of Raleigh. “The Islamic faith really calls for peace.”

“It’s sad to see that we still have this kind of ignorance in the community about the Islamic faith,” she added.

Murrell says he is trying to make people think but Jaunich said she thinks it breeds discrimination and bigotry

Karl Rove Directed DOJ Voter Suppression Project

True Blue Liberal
Excerpt
The McClatchy Newspapers report today that in the final weeks before the midterm Congressional elections of November 2006, presidential political advisor Karl Rove orchestrated a large-scale effort to suppress voter turnout among potentially Democratic constituencies, leveraging Department of Justice resources in the process. Key to the project were P. Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff, and Matthew Friedrich, then chief of staff in the Department’s Criminal Division.

Friedrich’s testimony and statements to Congressional investigators made clear that the decision to proceed with “voter fraud” charges in a series of dubious cases resulted from direction from partisan political operatives in the White House, including Rove.

McClatchy writes:

Only weeks before last year’s pivotal midterm elections, the White House urged the Justice Department to pursue voter-fraud allegations against Democrats in three battleground states, a high-ranking Justice official has told congressional investigators.