If you liked the government’s “free cell phones for the poor scam,” you’re going to love the new “free high-speed internet access for the poor” program. Or as we like to call it, the precursor to free internet radio, free internet TV, and free internet movies for all.

Unfortunately, that free internet service isn’t coming from companies like NetZero.com or Google TiSP. It’s coming from the government. Which means you, the American taxpayer, will be paying for someone else’s free internet.

Arstechnica.com tells the tale of our new free broadband Big Brother:

Former FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate is back with a vague plan to get Big Government away from “dictating what Americans ‘should’ get or what is ‘best for them’” when it comes to broadband. Forget setting mediocre targets, like the “4Mbps for all Americans by 2010″ goal of the National Broadband Plan. Instead, just give people vouchers for really crappy broadband service and the problem will take care of itself.”

Tate actually thinks it’s good sales technique to describe the program as food stamps for broadband or “broadband stamps.” Great.

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Great. first step in being able to control the internet is to take over the ISPs. Bill of Rights. The Constitution. What an inconvenient document.

Welfare: Because everyone has the right to what you worked hard for.

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Over the past two decades, as drug after drug has been recalled after winning FDA approval, it has been hard not to wonder if FDA regulators have been captured by the drug industry.

FDA critics and industry monitors charge that the drug-approval process is too easy for pharmaceutical companies to game. It is in some ways an unsurprising development.

The FDA serves a public insatiably hungry for new medicines. Yet the agency does not have responsibility for performing safety testing. It relies on drug companies to perform all premarket testing on drugs for safety and efficacy.

And it relies on industry “user fees” for 65% of its budget for postmarket monitoring of the drugs it approves, thanks to a 1992 law designed to speed treatments to patients. “The FDA’s relationship with the drug industry [is] too cozy,” says Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

Full report – TIME

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Unmanned Drones are expected to hit the Rio Grande Valley and other areas of the Texas-Mexico border this week.

Starting September 1, 2010, the unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) will patrol along the Rio Grande between El Paso and Brownsville in an effort to help deter illegal activity.

This UAS will be housed out of the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, TX, which Congressman Cuellar visited last week.

“Today marks a critical next step in securing the Texas-Mexico border. By positioning this aircraft in Texas, CBP can further combat illegal activity along our southern border,” said Congressman Cuellar, Chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counter Terrorism.

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You would think while viewing this video, that LAPD was making a drug bust. The event is far from a drug bust, but a ‘Food Bust’!

LAPD along with Federal Agents raided the Rawsome Foods organic grocery store with guns drawn in search of “raw-foods”. George Hemminger said the battle over organic foods is heating up because large agricultural businesses and corporations feel threatened by local co-ops and have hijacked the FDA and other government regulatory agencies.

Report from LA Times

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Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go.

This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

Full report: TIME

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