RSN: Republicans Deserve Credit for Creating a Budget This Cruel, Bill Gates' "Charity" Org Holds $1.4 Billion in Fossil Fuel Investments

Watch out for the POTHOLES, FROST HEAVES, COLLAPSING BRIDGES and CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE!

The GOP is now in CHARGE and it's time to WAGE WAR....AGAIN!


The US bullies an Ally, Germany, because of the US War on Whistleblowers, Netanyahu's killing and bombing of innocent civilians [because of Israel's land grab] has caused international outrage and condemnation that the US endorses, US NeoCons march to War over Diplomacy, the GOP budget is a MORAL DOCUMENT that defines the WEALTHY are more important than the nation!

Instead of amending Tax Policy, the GOP is slashing FOOD STAMPS? Huh?

Please carefully re-think your votes and party affiliation. Please consider your news source.   
 

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Glenn Greenwald | US Threatened Germany for Considering Snowden Asylum

Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
Greenwald writes: "German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (above) said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country."
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Netanyahu Now Says He Was Only Kidding About No Palestinian State, Obama Unimpressed
ABC
Excerpt: "On the eve of this week's general election, Mr. Netanyahu ruled out the establishment of the Palestinian state if he was re-elected."
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Republicans Deserve Credit for Creating a Budget This Cruel
Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
Waldman writes: "Everyone condemns politicians for being too quick to pander, too concerned with doing the popular thing, too willing to hide what they really believe in order to curry favor with an unmerciful electorate."
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UN Slams US Failure to Prosecute Racist Murders of Civil Rights Era
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes: "A 2008 law ordered the Department of Justice to investigate pre-1970 unsolved cases but campaigners will tell the Human Rights Council it has not done enough."
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How US Customs Is About to Experiment With Your Body
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Vice
Franceschi-Bicchierai writes: "The facial recognition pilot program launched last week by US Customs and Border Protection, which civil liberties advocates say could lead to new potentially privacy-invading programs, is just the first of three biometric experiments that the feds are getting ready to launch."
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Protesting Homan Square. (photo: Jocelyn Walker)

Chicago Police Commander Resigns After Black Site Revelations

By Spencer Ackerman, Guardian UK

20 March 15

Resignation of Nicholas Roti, a veteran police officer who operated over the controversial police warehouse, comes as attorneys announce civil rights lawsuit

senior Chicago police commander in charge of a major unit operating out of the controversial Homan Square police warehouse has resigned, the Guardian has confirmed.

The news came as attorneys for three Homan Square victims announced that they would file the first civil rights lawsuit over the facility with the aim of shutting down the complex likened by attorneys and activists to the domestic law enforcement equivalent of a CIA “black site.”

 

Nicholas Roti, the chief of the bureau of organized crime, resigned from the Chicago police department last week, Chicago police public affairs officer Mike Sullivan told the Guardian.

 

In an emailed reply to the Guardian on Thursday night, Martin Maloney of the Chicago police said:

Chief Roti left CPD to become the chief of staff for the Illinois state police [ISP], where he will work for another recently departed senior CPD official who was appointed to be the director of ISP. It’s been in the works for some time.

The organized crime unit, according to its website, is tasked with confronting illegal narcotics, gang activity and vice in Chicago, operations that numerous people formerly held at Homan Square believe led to their incommunicado detentions there.

 

Roti took charge of the organized crime division in 2010, the Chicago Sun-Times reported; and led the bureau through a command reorganization in 2011. Published reports indicate Roti is a 27-year veteran police officer.

 

The Guardian exposed a series of incommunicado detention and abuse at the Chicago police facility, including people being held for extensive periods of time without public notifications to their families or access to attorneys.

 

Sullivan said that Roti himself did not operate out of Homan Square, but out of police headquarters.

Yet the organized crime bureau was cited by the Chicago police “fact sheet” released on 1 March, attempting to refute the Guardian’s reporting about a complex where 11 people thus far have told the Guardian they were effectively disappeared.

 

“[S]ensitive units housed at the [Homan Square] facility include the Bureau of Organized Crime (including the narcotics unit),” the fact sheet reads.

 

Eleven people, seven of them black and Hispanic Chicagoans, have thus far told the Guardian that they have been held at Homan Square. Their detentions most often concerned drug suspicions. On several occasions, while in custody, police interrogators attempted to get detained men and women to either inform on others or deliver guns to the police, sometimes using the prospect of freedom as an enticement. The Chicago police say there is nothing untoward about Homan Square.

 

According to Chicago city data, Roti’s annual salary was $176,532. A local website cited Roti in 2014 as the 16th highest-paid public official in Chicago. The superintendent of police, cited as the highest paid Chicago public servant, is listed as making $260,000 annually. Mayor Rahm Emanuel makes $216, 210.

 

The civil rights lawsuit, expected to be filed on Thursday evening in the US district court for the northern district of Illinois, comes on behalf of two Homan Square victims the Guardian wrote about on 4 March: John Vergara and Jose Garcia. They are joined by another man held at Homan Square with them in the same September 2011 incident, Carlos Ruiz, whom the Guardian did not interview.

 

Vergara and Garcia told the Guardian that masked police police officers “kidnapped” them from a Humboldt Park deli; held them and three others in a Homan Square “cage” without booking or access to counsel for eight to nine hours; and released four of them that evening without charge after Vergara threatened to tell a civil rights attorney what the police had done.

 

“The plaintiffs would like the facility to be shut down,” said attorney Blake Horwitz, who is representing Vergara, Garcia and Ruiz.

 

“They’ll be seeking compensation for their injuries, and they’ll be asking that the officers be held liable and responsible for their actions, and for the officers to be punished.”

 

The lawsuit comes a day after US congressman Danny Davis and Cook County commissioner Richard Boykin hand delivered a letter to US attorney general Eric Holder requesting a Justice Department investigation into Homan Square.

Bill Gates' "Charity" Org Holds $1.4 Billion in Fossil Fuel Investments
Damian Carrington and Karl Mathiesen, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Analysis of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's most recent tax filing reveals huge investments in the world's biggest fossil fuel companies."
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