Be INFORMED

Friday, July 29, 2011

Government Wants More Of Your Info…

    …from your ISP.  Just say no.

   I am passing along this email to all of my visitors as it is important for you to stand up to the United States government and their continued invasion of your privacy.

Friends,

"A direct assault on Internet users" is what the ACLU is calling it.

Yesterday a U.S. House committee approved HR 1981, a broad new Internet snooping bill. They want to force Internet service providers to keep track of and retain their customers' information -- including your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, and 25 other civil liberties and privacy groups have expressed our opposition to this legislation. Will you join us, by emailing your lawmakers today? Just click here:

http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/snooping_bill/?referring_akid=a1891894.349350.aZlJcw&source=auto-taf

They've shamelessly dubbed it the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act." But our staunchest allies in Congress are calling it what it is -- an all-encompassing Internet snooping bill.

CNet Reports: Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill said, ""It represents a data bank of every digital act by every American' that would 'let us find out where every single American visited Web sites."

"The bill is mislabeled," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. "This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes."

Please join the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Demand Progress, and 25 other civil liberties and privacy groups in opposing this legislation. Just click here:

http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/snooping_bill/?referring_akid=a1891894.349350.aZlJcw&source=auto-taf

Thanks!

Oil Companies Post Big Profits…

    … and still the Republican Party insists on letting them keep their subsidies. Does one need further proof that the Teapot Party/Republican Party doesn’t give a rats ass about you?

   Second-quarter profits for ExxonMobile are up 41% to $10.7 billion thanks in part to the rise of the cost of oil and higher gas prices over the last few months. They still need government subsidies be cause as you and I know, $10 billion is not nearly enough to keep them going.

So who else did well? No company lost any money, that’s for sure.

Royal Dutch Shell took in $8.66 billion while ConocoPhillips made $3.4 billion, slightly down from a year ago but they still beat Wall Street expectations.  BP? $5.6 trillion and suffering (?) a loss at the same time last year. Remember the Gulf spill?

  Wonder if all of that political cash to President Obama helped the company stay out of some major crap?

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.