Folks, I’m neither a Democrat, nor a Republican. But my mom asked me to give her an unbiased, factual rundown on the political platforms - so what my mother wants, my mother gets! Here you go Mom…

I’m making the presumption that the two candidates who are going to actually be running for President are Barack Obama, and John McCain. So, below I’ve taken the liberty of narrowing down all the data to these two guys. What you need to do is line up as many of your political ideal matches and then you can rationally choose who you are voting for.
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I was tipped off to this ACLU article by T-Critic, whom I have a daily subscription to and always enjoy seeing the new T-Shirt designs.

Did you know that wearing a t-shirt with Arabic writing to an airport is the equivalent of a “person wearing a t-shirt at a bank stating, ‘I am a robber’”? No? Then you clearly don’t work with the TSA, who barred Reed Jarrar over there from boarding his flight at JFK because his shirt had terrifying non-Roman characters on it.

The shirt did also have English characters under the Arabic script (it says “We will not be silent” — no, but you certainly will be delayed), but that could easily be a terrorist trick, trying to convince gullible American infidels that the shirt doesn’t actually say “If you can read this I am going to run this airplane into the Kennedy Center.”

The ACLU has taken Jarrar’s case and they encourage passengers across the nation to show up at airports in t-shirts with big cartoon bombs on them or that say “Big Johnson Says You Can Tell a Lot About a Man by the Size of His Shoe Bomb” because frankly donations have been way up over the last couple years.

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In the new era of citizen reporting there are a number of new questions regarding issues such as audio and video recording interactions with police officials. Add these to the traditional questions about what is required, or not, and you’ve got one very confused public.

After all the publicity about police abuse of power I decided to try to find some reputable advice on exactly what I can and can’t do if I’m ever involved in, or feel the need to play “big brother” during, a police incident.

On a side note, I’m a well-to-do white guy that’s never been involved in any criminal activity but even I’m afraid of the police. On a few occasions I’ve encountered unprofessional, undereducated and over-ego’ed officers. Even if 90% of encounters are pleasant, 10% can really ruin your day… or worse.

Anyway, I found the following information to be informative.
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A new site dreamt up by the rock star Peter Gabriel called Witness.org focuses on the noble, yet disturbing, concept of documenting human rights violations.

The site currently catalogs one of the largest collections of human rights violations in the world, and has gathered the data by training hundreds of people in over 80 countries to use video recording technology.
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