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MEXICO CITY – U.S. and Mexican officials are just now fully employing a gun-tracing program touted as a key deterrent to weapons-smuggling, nearly three years after it was first announced in Mexico and weeks after an inspector general's preliminary report called it underused and unsuccessful. Not enough Mexican investigators had been trained on or had access to the electronic database designed to trace illegally seized weapons to origins in the U.S., a top official at Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Wednesday. "It doesn't mean the system is not working. It's not working as well as it can,"...

     EL CENTRO, Calif. (CN) - Federal prosecutors charged two 21-year-old men with trying to buy grenade launchers, 40mm grenades and an M-4 rifle and export them to Mexico. Yoahjan Lara Flores, of Heber, Calif., and Arturo Lara, of El Centro, were arrested last week and pleaded not guilty. 
     Lara Flores also was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was convicted in 2009 of importing marijuana and was on supervised release when he was arrested, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
     Mexico has complained - to little effect - that many of the guns used in the...

A story hot on the internet today regards concerns that Federal authorties have been exposing US citizens to possibly dangerous radiation at x-ray machines placed at the entrance on airports through which one must pass before entering the facility, with the #1 Google Search today "Feds radiating Americans"- hard to conclude they're happy about it, lol. Now the rampant rumor is that the US government has purchase X-ray machines that can peer inside homes, cars, and clothing... And it's not optional of course, all air travelers must pass though the current machines- so besides the civil liberties issues at stake,...

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration's repeated low estimates of the BP oil spill undermined public confidence in the government's entire cleanup effort, leaders of a White House-appointed commission declared at an investigatory hearing yesterday. One likened the mistakes to Custer's disastrous decisions at Little Big Horn. Federal officials botched the government's response, a local official and government and university scientists contended as the commission focused on the questions of who was in charge and how much oil spewed out of the well. Eventually, U.S. officials said the spill was about 60times bigger than originally estimated. Instead of 42,000 gallons a...

GULF ISLAND NATIONAL SEASHORE, FL - If you're going to the Gulf Islands National Seashore this weekend... You might want to leave the shovel and sand pale at home. The fed says B-P workers can't dig more than 6 inches in the sand to look for oil.... and as Channel 3's Dan Thomas found out... You can't dig at all. Dan Thomas/dthomas@weartv.com: "We had come out here to the National Park to show you just what exactly is in the sand, lower than 6 inches. We wanted to use the shovel and give you a look but apparently, that's illegal."...

Otter shifts stand on 17th Amendment repeal; The Spokesman-Review Idaho Gov. Butch Otter declared during a political debate today that he doesn’t favor repeal of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - though he’s been sharply critical of the amendment for the past year, including in his keynote speech at a Tea Party rally in Spokane in April. The amendment shifted selection of U.S. senators from state Legislatures to a vote of the people, and repealing it is a plank in Idaho’s Republican Party platform. The governor’s comments came as he and Democratic challenger Keith Allred sparred over everything...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As recently as two months ago, the Federal Reserve sounded optimistic about the economic recovery. Now the central bank is clearly more worried, and economists say there's not much more it can do to help. The Fed said Tuesday that it would spend a relatively small amount of money -- about $10 billion a month, economists estimate -- buying government debt. The move is designed to drive interest rates on mortgages and corporate borrowing at least a little lower and help the economy grow faster. In a statement after a one-day meeting, the Fed said the pace...

Deutsche Bank: The Fed Is Going To Deliver A Giant Goose-Egg To The Market This Week Joe Weisenthal Aug. 9, 2010, 2:28 PM | Add Deutsche Bank to the chorus of folks who think the Fed is NOT about to make some major dovish shift. Here's the latest: History strongly suggests we are on the cusp of a dramatic slowdown in productivity growth. Over the four quarters ending Q1 2010, productivity grew 6.1%, the largest gain in six decades. In the past, productivity has almost always slowed quite dramatically at this point in the economic cycle. Our forecast of a...

Is Bernanke About To Start Playing Head Games With The Market? Joe Weisenthal Aug. 3, 2010, 9:28 PM Arguably the big history of the day was the report in the Wall Street Journal that the Fed had begun to "mull" the idea of rolling over its MBS portfolio, rather than letting it burn off, which would represent a modest tightening? Obviously this was a deliberate leak on the part of the Fed -- a signal that the Fed is taking seriously the idea that it will need to act to counteract slowing or deflation -- though the move itself is...

Plot to get Obama to kill feds' investigation wrecks testimony July 20, 2010 BY MARK BROWN Sun-Times Columnist Everything had gone so well on the witness stand Monday for Robert Blagojevich, the former governor's brother and co-defendant. Finally, after all these months, he'd gotten the chance to tell his story and to tell it his way, coming across as every bit the solid former military officer and successful businessman that his lawyer Michael Ettinger had portrayed in opening statements.

A George Soros-funded, Marxist-founded organization with close ties to the White House has urged the Federal Communications Commission to investigate talk radio and cable news for "hate speech."

WASHINGTON – Oil and gas are leaking from the cap on BP's ruptured oil well, but .. Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen says .. leaks are so far not a major concern. .. seepage about two miles away .. likely not related to the ruptured well.

A growing number of Americans are thought to be getting involved in moonshining - distilling illegal liquor. Traditionally hidden in the backwoods, stills are now going into production in cities across the nation, as Claire Prentice reports from New York.

Missouri Governor Matt Blunt signed into law today legislation that will make it harder for illegal aliens living in the state to receive benefits and harder to find jobs. The new legislations requires all public employers to use the E-Verify system to verify the legality of a potential employee and requires and individual to prove their citizenship status before receiving state benefits such as food stamps and housing. The bill also punishes those localities that adopt policies to not cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Missouri joins Arizona, Oklahoma, and Georgia in instituting state-wide anti-illegal immigration laws. So far, the laws...

The group that uncovered evidence of large-scale illegal voting by felons in Minnesota's contested 2008 Senate race says the whole mess might have been prevented if the federal government had just done its job.

The federal government needs to be consistent in order to not be hypocritical and also adhere to the constitutional republic (rule of law). We have Eric Holder, our black racist DOJ head, whose department has been told not to prosecute any blacks or minorities, going after Arizona on the basis states' LEOs cannot enforce/apprehend illegals because that is federal law. Yet look at the multiple hypocrises: 1. Holder's DOJ, unhappy with the Oakland officer case ruling will now look at the case. Any doubt they will file federal charges against the white officer given their current policies? Damn straight, I'd...

The gaggle of folks gathered in a conference room at the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center on St. Paul's West Side peppered Thomas Perez, and rightfully so, with questions surrounding some really pressing and thorny social issues of the day. The group — including a county commissioner, a handful of city- and county-prosecutor types and Jose Santos, head of the local La Familia nonprofit and longtime West Side resident — on Wednesday queried the man who heads the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division about racial disparities or inequities in education and mental health services. They also asked him about...

Anyway, if enforcing immigration law is a bad thing for local cops to do, as Holder claims, why pick on Arizona? If he’s really upset that the same laws he has taken an oath to enforce might actually get (gulp!) enforced, why isn’t he suing Providence instead of Phoenix? They’ve been doing local immigration enforcement for years now. As The Boston Globe-Democrat reported yesterday, “From Woonsocket to Westerly, the troopers patrolling the nation’s smallest state are reporting all illegal immigrants they encounter, even on routine stops such as speeding, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” Even liberal Providence, where politicians...

In just another fine example of our outstanding and well oiled machine called “big government” (yes, that was sarcasm) it has been brought to the public’s attention that the feds have wasted more than $100 million of your hard earned tax payer dollars on waste and fraud. Big government and their programs always start out with bleeding heart ideas that rot quicker than opened milk on a hot and sweltering day. Someone had the idea that the government (really meaning you and me) ought to pay the light bills for “impoverished families.” This brilliant idea has led to the more...

MOBILE, Ala. -- A month ago, as BP struggled to contain an oil spill that it estimated at 200,000 gallons a day, the Press-Register reported that the company's federal permit documents stated that it could handle a spill of 12.6 million gallons a day. BP's documents also said that it could skim 17 million gallons of oil a day; thus far it has skimmed just 2 million gallons in seven weeks. The documents -- BP's Regional Oil Spill Response Plan -- are riddled with inaccurate claims and errors, including an online address for an equipment supplier that instead links to...