i think never reach to $300 again, maybe under $100

'four punch raiders'...   where's billyjoe ??

How can you say that?

This is where I'm obtaining my next wife - http://www.theatlasphere.com/dating

Then we will have lots of heartless little children.

As promised, President Obama is using executive actions to impose gun control on the nation, targeting the top-selling rifle in the country, the AR-15 style semi-automatic, with a ban on one of the most-used AR bullets by sportsmen and target shooters.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives this month revealed that it is proposing to put the ban on 5.56 mm ammo on a fast track, immediately driving up the price of the bullets and prompting retailers, including the huge outdoors company Cabela’s, to urge sportsmen to urge Congress to stop the president.

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"The Obama administration was unable to ban America's most popular sporting rifle through the legislative process, so now it's trying to ban commonly owned and used ammunition through regulation," said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA-ILA, the group's policy and lobby shop. "The NRA and our tens of millions of supporters across the country will fight to stop President Obama's latest attack on our Second Amendment freedoms."

At issue is so-called “armor-piercing” ammunition, an exemption for those bullets mostly used for sport by AR-15 owners, and the recent popularity of pistol-style ARs that use the ammo.

The inexpensive 5.56 M885 ammo, commonly called green tips, have been exempt for years, as have higher-caliber ammunition that also easily pierces the type of soft armor worn by police, because it’s mostly used by target shooters, not criminals. The agency proposes to reclassify it as armor-piercing and not exempt.

Fifteen students are refusing to pay back federal student loans taken out to attend schools owned by Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a network of for-profit colleges located across the US and in Canada.

The students — who refer to themselves as the Corinthian 15 — created a website where they've published a letter they wrote to the Department of Education asking for loan forgiveness.

All 15 also tell their own personal stories on the website.

In the letter, the students identify themselves as "people living paycheck to paycheck, single mothers, and young people just starting out."

They tell the Department, "... We trusted you to ensure that the education system in this country would do so. But Corinthian took advantage of our dreams and targeted us to make a profit. You let it happen, and now you cash in."


Here's the full letter published on their website:

If Rand Paul were commander in chief, his strategy for fighting Islamic militants in the Middle East would start with the Kurds.

“I would arm the Kurds directly,” the Republican senator and potential presidential candidate told Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric. The two sat down in Washington on Wednesday, just hours after the FBI announced it had arrested three men charged with plotting to join the Islamic State, or ISIS, and stage attacks against the United States.

Despite urging Congress to make an official declaration of war — for the first time since World War II — against ISIS last November, the Kentucky senator’s reputation as an isolationist still precedes him. Dismissing that as a “mischaracterization,” Paul told Couric he’s not willing to send American troops to fight anywhere if the people who live there are not also willing to fight.

And he believes the Kurds — the disenfranchised ethnic groups whose Iraqi contingent has been fighting ISIS for months — are particularly up to the task.

“The only people over there that can fight and have been showing some ability to fight are the Kurds,” Paul said. “The president has been sending weapons to Baghdad. They’re not adequately getting to Kurdistan. I would fund them directly. I would take some of the weaponry that we have left over in Afghanistan and I would send that directly to the Kurds.”

Let me know when the end of the Internet officially starts. I'm still connected and my rates haven't even doubled yet.

Though they seem really awesome but can't find anything on bitcoin with them

Smoking, growing and owning small amounts of marijuana became legal in Alaska on Tuesday, as a growing decriminalization movement reached the United States' wild northwest frontier.

The Republican-leaning state, which narrowly passed the measure in November, followed Colorado and Washington states in allowing recreational use, reflecting a rapidly shifting legal landscape for the drug, which remains illegal under federal law.

Anyone aged 21 or older can now possess up to an ounce of marijuana in Alaska and can grow up to six marijuana plants, three of which can be flowering.

Smoking in public and buying and selling the drug remains illegal -- though private exchanges are allowed if money is not involved.

President Barack Obama's Justice Department has cautiously allowed the experiments to proceed, saying it would look to prosecute a narrower range of marijuana-related crimes, such as sales to children.

But that could change if a more conservative president is elected in 2016, when Alaska's first pot shops are likely to open.

Supporters of the measure say it reflects a sense of personal freedom that resonates with residents in Alaska, a state with a libertarian streak. They also argue that legal sales will generate income and jobs.

"Alaska now has some of the most sensible marijuana laws in the nation," said Dr. Tim Hinterberger, chair of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in a statement.

A senior State Department official was arrested on Tuesday on charges of soliciting sex from a minor, according to the AP. Director of Counterterrorism Daniel Rosen was busted in a sting operation by a detective posing as a child online, because life imitates To Catch a Predator.

Rosen was charged with use of a communications device to solicit a juvenile, and shuttled off to jail in D.C.; it's unclear if he's still there or if he's posted bail.

The State Department is already working hard to distance itself from him, with a Department spokeswoman telling Fox News, "His security clearance will be suspended and he will be put on administrative leave while this proceeds to its end through any judicial process." According to what appears to be his LinkedIn profile, Rosen has worked at the State Department since 2008 and is "responsible for all CT Bureau strategic planning, policy planning, program and budget planning and oversight, and legislative relations and interaction."

His professional skills include "foreign policy," "strategic planning" and ..."human rights." Awkward.

In a 3-2 vote today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to radically overhaul the way Internet service is provided. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and the commission’s two Democratic commissioners voted to move forward with the rules. The agency’s two GOP-appointed commissioners opposed them.

Under the new rules, broadband providers, long classified by the agency as Title I information services, will now be regulated as Title II telecommunications services—essentially making them public utilities, like the phone system. The move is designed to allow the FCC to implement strict net neutrality rules limiting how much control Internet service providers (ISPs) can exert over what passes over their networks.
[...]
Today’s vote will mean that Wheeler’s proposal, which has been kept secret up until now, will finally be released to the public. And it likely means that the FCC will push forward with clarifying and implementing the as-of-yet-unknown-details of Wheeler’s proposal.

In part that's because much remains uncertain about exactly how the proposal will be implemented. Wheeler's plan promises to use the FCC's forebearance authority to hold off on some of the more onerous parts of Title II regulation, like rate regulation, but this amounts to little more than an unenforceable promise not to regulate ISPs quite as strictly as Title II allows. There will also be fights over which taxes and fees may apply to Internet service under the new regulatory regime. Proponents of the Title II switch say that Internet service won't be subject to new fees under the proposal, but in today's meeting, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, a Republican appointee who opposes the Wheeler plan, warned that new taxes and fees on Internet service were sure to come.

It is also virtually certain to result in another court battle—one that the FCC may well lose, as Berin Szoka of Tech Freedom, which opposes Wheeler’s plan, has argued. At minimum, the proposal will be challenged and, over time, probably redefined.

In the meantime, though, it means that the FCC has taken an unprecedented and fear-reaching step in order to make good on one of the Obama administration’s long-running political priorities—a step that solves no significant existing problem, but is instead designed largely to fend off hypothetical harms, and give the agency far more power over the Internet in the process.

As FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, a Republican appointee who opposes the Wheeler plan, told ReasonTV, the move is a “solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.” It is a solution, however, that is now in place, and is sure to create some problems of its own.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cellphones didn’t just arrive in Pakistan. But someone could be fooled into thinking otherwise, considering the tens of millions of Pakistanis pouring into mobile phone stores these days.

In one of the world’s largest — and fastest — efforts to collect biometric information, Pakistan has ordered cellphone users to verify their identities through fingerprints for a national database being compiled to curb terrorism. If they don’t, their service will be shut off, an unthinkable option for many after a dozen years of explosive growth in cellphone usage here.

...

But the effort to match one person to each cellphone number involves a jaw-dropping amount of work. At the start of this year, there were 103 million SIM cards in Pakistan — roughly the number of the adult population — that officials were not sure were valid or properly registered. And mobile companies have until April 15 to verify the owners of all of the cards, which are tiny chips in cellphones that carry a subscriber’s personal security and identity information.

In the past six weeks, 53 million SIMs belonging to 38 million residents have been verified through biometric screening, officials said.

...

Ramped up surveillance in Britain against a backdrop of dwindling legal protection has contributed to the most rattling assault on human rights in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, human rights experts warn.

In its annual ‘State of the World’s Human Rights’ report, Amnesty International heavily criticized the British government’s record at home.

The NGO condemned the coalition government for rushing counter-terror and surveillance legislation through parliament without reasonable time for debate.

It also criticized the coalition for passing laws that erode fundamental civil liberties, and stressed continued cuts to legal aid in Britain is a recipe for injustice.

‘A recipe for injustice’
In 2014, David Cameron pledged a re-elected Tory government would scrap the Human Rights Act and replace it with a home-grown British Bill of Rights. He also vowed to limit the power of the European Court of Human Rights if the Conservatives win May’s general election.

Amnesty’s report, published on Wednesday, said the Tory’s proposals are an attack on the European Convention on Human Rights. The group accused Prime Minister Cameron of leading this assault.

Amnesty also noted the rise of discriminatory, nationalistic policies in Britain. It warned “nationalist, thinly veiled xenophobic attitudes” were instrumental in an increasingly restrictive migration policy and anti-EU rhetoric, which targets human rights.

Defense News, a defense industry trade publication, just released a report entitled, Ukraine Signs Defense Deal with UAE. It led with:
ABU DHABI — Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced a deal for unspecified military and technical cooperation with the UAE on Tuesday, and said negotiations are ongoing with the United States and unspecified European nations.

Poroshenko told reporters at the IDEX show here that he hoped talks with the US would yield an agreement to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. Poroshenko reportedly planned to meet with chief Pentagon weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, at the show.
An arms deal between Ukraine and the UAE — what gives?

The UAE is not a major producer of high technology weapons, but it is a big buyer of U.S. weapons, including missile defense systems, ground vehicles and rockets, and F-16s and Apache Helicopters, etc. Nicknamed by some as Little Sparta, the UAE has been and is a major ally of the US in most of the US wars since 1991. Today, the UAE is home to some of the most important US military facilities in the Middle East, including its only overseas F-22 base. More US strikes on ISIS come from the UAE than any other source. The UAE also is home to a spooky private mercenary army run by the secretive billionaire founder of infamous Blackwater Worldwide, Erik Prince, who now lives part time in Abu Dhabi.

Note the pregnant suggestion of some kind of involvement by the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition czar in the second paragraph of the Defense News report. Is there a possibility that the UAE will end up being a back door for funneling arms and military assistance to the Ukraine?

No one can say, but all of this is very mysterious.

...

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William Temple, a member of the Golden Isle Tea Party, told The Washington Times that the party’s doesn’t need another Bush in office and said that the party should listen to the grassroots activists that helped fuel their gains in the 2014 election.

“A lot of peoples were not going to come here because they heard Jeb Bush was speaking,” Mr. Temple said, before laying out his plan at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“We are going to get up in mass, and we are going to walk out on him,” the 64-year-old said. “We are not going to interrupt anyone’s speech, but we are all going to exercise our right to the bathroom at the same time.”
...

Sen. Rand Paul will beseech conservatives to follow “a new way” as he takes the podium of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday and tries for a triple crown — a third consecutive win in the annual straw poll that reflects the young, libertarian crowd of raucous activists.

The Kentucky Republican will spend parts of two days at the convention center in National Harbor, Md., showing up late Thursday afternoon to sign books, drop by a College Republicans reception, then pose for hundreds of pictures at a “liberty reception” hosted by groups that include Young Americans for Liberty.
Story Continued Below

In an interview with POLITICO to preview his CPAC remarks, Paul offered backhanded advice to one of his GOP 2016 rivals, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush: “A lot of kids are concerned with privacy, and the fact that he’s come out to be a big advocate for the surveillance state and the dragnet, collecting all the phone records — if he’s smart, he won’t probably bring that up at CPAC.”
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Previewing his national message for the months ahead, Paul said his “new way” means that conservatives “take the defense of the Bill of Rights and instead of only sort of talking about the Second Amendment, we take the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment to all kinds of audiences who are ready and waiting to hear this.”

Paul said his mission is to “get these kids excited” and convince them “that you’re going to really do something to make their future better and brighter.”

“There’s probably no speech with more kids all in one room that you’ll have in almost any one season,” he said. “I see it as a way to try to pump up the next generation.”