The server switch over the weekend went relatively well, although there was one hickup. If you tried to contact us via the feedback forms between Friday night and Monday at about 2PM EST then we probably did not get your submission. I had tested this functionality before the switch, but the new domain caused an issue that went unnoticed. Please contact us again if you submitted something that we might have missed.

Aside from that, you'll notice that there are a couple new features I turned on tonight.

One of them is blog entry rating. All blog entries now allow logged in users to rate a given entry, and will display the overall rating of the entry. Basically you choose between a 1 and 10 star rating based on the blog entry. Your rating should be some mixture of rating the quality of the post (profanity, spelling, well written, etc.) and your rating of the content itself. You should also note that you can go back and change your rating later. This would be useful if a user posts a great entry, but has bad spelling or grammer. In this example you could give it a mediocre rating and leave some helpful comments, and then later rate it higher once it is improved. This functionality eventually may be used to promote blog entries to the front page, or to a 'top rated' blog entries block, note exactly sure yet.

The other new thing that is added is the vote up/down abilities in the comments. At the moment this just shows the total number of points a comment has (+1 for positive, -1 for negative), but eventually this rating will be used to publish/un-publish comments so that the community as a whole can do the comment moderation and not rely on a Team Member catching the spam, trolls, etc. etc. I would ask that you not go through and vote up/down every single comment, that is NOT the point, and that may cause extra stress on the site. The point is to give credit for good comments with good sources and insight, and to moderate inappropriate comments.

Right now this new functionality is definitely just in test mode, it may turn out that we go with some other solution. Right now I am just trying to garner how it is used, and from there judge what actions should be associated with given votes/ratings.

If you have some comments on the new functionality feel free to post it here, but please keep in mind this is just a test, and we are somewhat limited with the currently available solutions. Likewise this functionality may be taken down if it doesn't work as desired.

(you'll note you can rate this entry since it is a blog entry, as I stated above news stories will not show rating stars)

Okay, I thought this was pretty cool.... After seeing all of the crap on "Enemy Combatant" and how we could all be labeled as that as of now. I took the advise of one of the blogs on here and downloaded FireFox and added the TOR program (Download TOR first then download TOR BUTTON) that hides your IP by routing through proxy servers. I had to see if this works...and it does. Today when I was on here earlier, I googled "MY IP ADDRESS" and the first time my IP came up from somewhere in Germany, and now as I am typing, I checked again and my IP address shows somewhere in France. Pretty cool if you want to be stealth. It is a hair slower then going through Explorer, but wow, talk about secure........ I just checked my IP again, and now my IP is routed through Stanford University. I am impressed.....good luck chasing my IP.

Just wanted to give you guys a heads-up on how good this works.

Is the Media REALLY Involved in the 9/11 Attacks?

It is the duty of the press and TV networks to report the news to the public. It is their job, their responsibility.

What does it tell us when certain stories are withheld? What does it tell us when CNN/FOX/et al report on nothing but Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, Terri Schiavo, and runaway brides, for hours on end? Surely there are more important issues to discuss. What are they hiding?

The mainstream media are part of the 9/11 cover-up and therefore complicit in the attacks. If they weren’t, they would have reported on this May 2006 Zogby poll revealing that about half of America wants a new investigation, including the investigation of government officials for possible involvement.

Source: McClatchy Newspapers

By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott
McClatchy Newspapers
10/2/2006

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Former CIA Director George Tenet gave the independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission the same briefing on Jan. 28, 2004, but the commission made no mention of the warning in its 428-page final report. According to three former senior intelligence officials, Tenet testified to commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste and to Philip Zelikow, the panel's executive director and the principal author of its report, who's now Rice's top adviser.

Don't get mad. Get even
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/84774-0/

The number of Americans who believe the 9/11 'terrorist' attacks were an inside demolition job is now rising to 50%. Many citizens are raising hell for a real investigation into what the 9/11 Commission refused to explore. Many maintain that the 9/11 events were planned by government as a protection racket to instill fear into the population so that the fed could invade Middle Eastern countries to control oil sales and to vastly decrease the rights of the citizens so that more tyrannical and confiscatory laws could be passed in the name of protecting Americans from the 'enemy.'

Many apathetic Americans have gone along with this massive sellout of their rights and children's futures by buying the government's fantastic conspiracy theory of boxcutter-wielding morons hijacking and then piloting sophisticated jumbo jets that few commercial airline pilots can handle. They are so misled that they won't even believe their own eyes when they saw the WTC Towers fall at the speed of gravity, supposedly by two small fires. Never before in the history of the world has any skyscraper collapsed because of any fire, even a big one. We are now just beginning to witness the outcome of believing the lies of government and its head-embedded media: the parasites in Congress, drunk with unprecedented power that they seized are totally ignoring the U.S. Constitution that they swore on a Bible to obey and defend.

Does anyone here subscribe to Counterpunch? They are advertising the following story for subscribers:

Special Investigation: Why Did the World Trade Towers Fall?

Would someone please post the story?

The Movie That Will Cause the Declaration of Worldwide Martial Law.

That's my review of Aaron Russo's Masterpiece of Rights. I cannot put it more strongly or simply. One way or the other, this is the movie of your life. The movie will make you sick to your stomach and aware of what the US government is doing by documented evidence of Both Political Parties' activity. We must act now or forever live in fear.
''America: Freedom to Fascism''' (A:FtF) is an extremely needed exceptional movie for the exposure and reform of this government's abuse of America. As one of the many activists that try to stay current with all areas of the Constitutional abuses of this government, enthusiastic surprise and relief overtook me as a post revealed "Aaron Russo's -'' America: Freedom to Fascism - Full Version - For movie screening only" on google video. Finally, here was the movie in which many are placing their hopes for release and discovery of much needed information available for mass consumption.

My anticipation was gleefully rewarded as the illegal IRS government scam was thoroughly shown as the defrauding of US citizens by the un-Constitutional and illegal actions of both parties, the judiciary of this current government and all past 'representatives' of the People since 1913. The IRS aspect consumes about 2/3rds of the movie time. In the remaining time it progresses to the private bankers that set the stage for the IRS deception via the private Federal Reserve Bank corporatists.

source ... more evidence .. US torture google images

History of the above victim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manadel_al-Jamadi

(As you all know, this is but the tip of the iceberg)

A Question of 'Compromise'

McCain's deal on prisoners means White House lawlessness rolls on

by Nat Hentoff October 1st, 2006 9:18 PM

Our government is the potent, omnipresent teacher of the whole people by its example. . . . If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law. —Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, dissenting in the first wiretap case, Olmstead v. U.S., 1928

The civil war between three Republican senators and the president over his treatment of imprisoned suspected terrorists has resulted in a public break with George W. Bush's own former secretary of state, Colin Powell. But in all these stories about Powell's mutiny, I've seen no mention of an angry, prophetic memorandum he wrote on January 25, 2002, protesting the administration's pending decision to scrap the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan.

Real Player
Click Here

Tony Snow skirts around the issues. As you would expect a "Press Secretary" of this Administration to do.

Pledge of Allegiance

Here are excerpts from an essay on the new torture legislation and how it affects people who claim that the government has engaged in conspiracies (such as 9/11):

"I have learned the entire history of the U.S., both good and bad. I have learned of her honorable and selfless actions. I have also learned about her brutally deceitful and murderous actions, including the frequent use by our government of false flag terror.

But even after learning of all of the deceit and murder committed by our government, I still have strong positive feelings for the United States. My forefathers fought and died for liberty. My ancestors struggled to deliver a nation ruled by laws and justice, instead of by the whims of men. My people gave their blood, sweat and tears to throw off the yoke of the British monarchy and to defeat the ambitions of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito in World War II.

And so – even after the Iraq war, and the destruction of New Orleans, and the spying and torture scandals, and the vote fraud, and 9/11 and all of the other false flag attacks carried out by by the government over the years - I am willing to pledge my allegiance to the United States of America. Because - as sick and twisted and amoral as she may have become in recent years - I still hold out hope that we may again decide to get back to the great work at hand, the “grand experiment” of self-government and democracy.

Click Image to Download the VIDEO 66 mgs 19.11 minutes

Video coverage of the 5th anniversary of the 911 terrorist attacks. Featuring Alex Jones, Immortal Technique, Mumia Abu Jamal, Korey Rowe and Random Americans.

5 years ago I went from totally apathetic average Amer'can to guerilla video activist in a matter of weeks .. because of 911. After 5 years of struggling to expose the repression inherit in the system and gain underground media expose for the various causes that have sprung up since 9.11.01 .. I'm amazed at how stubborn people can be when it comes to defending their opinions.. especially when they have no facts to back those opinions. If I thought I'd still need to be doing this 5 years later.. I'm not sure I would have begun.

It's perplexing the way people hold tight to their views even when they hold views that might be considered exclusive to each other. The American mind is quite baffling. It seems that if any 2 people talk and hear each other long enough, they will find things that they agree upon and things they disagree upon. Why do we always focus on the disagreable part?

Related Links ::: 911 Video collection, more september 11th video, 911 Truth, Conspiracy Theory

Given the bombshell revelations in Bob Woodward's new book, "State of Denial" and Condi's weak and unconvincing "denials" and "deflections", we have more than enough reason to call for a completely new investigation of the events surrounding September 11, 2001.

Here are some of Condi's verbatim statements about the allegations that she was strongly warned by George Tenet of an impending attack on America:

"What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.

"I don't know that this meeting took place, but what I really don't know, what I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond," Rice said.

Rice referred to the session as "the supposed meeting" and noted that it is not part of the independent Sept. 11 Commission's report.

"I remember that George was very worried and he expressed that," Rice told reporters. "We were all very worried because the threat reporting was quite intense. The problem was that it was also quite nebulous."

Members of the NC 9/11 Truth group (http://nc911truth.blogspot.com) met yesterday and we were throwing around ideas, and thought a good campaign would be to promote people doing youtube videos of 9/11 truth activism related to V for Vendetta, and possibly doing something on the mall on 11/5 with 9/11 truth activists dressed up as V.

The 5th of november is 2 days before election, and right after halloween, so people could get the masks/costumes for Halloween anyway.

The V for Vendetta 9/11 video clip is very popular and widespread throughout the 'net.

We have talked to the DC 9/11 Truth group and they are very interested.

Thoughts?