Thursday, September 3, 2009

FTC orders Daniel Chapter One to lie to customers about cancer remedies; ministry defends health freedom

by Mike Adams
the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is at war with online retailers of nutritional supplements and natural remedies, but it recently lost a major battle: Lane Labs, which has suffered under FTC and FDA tyranny for years, recently won a significant battle against the corrupt agency. After the FTC tried to sue Lane Labs for $24 million, claiming "contempt of court" for the company telling the truth about the efficacy of its products, a federal judge ruled against the FTC, explaining that Lane Labs was telling the scientifically-validated truth about its products when it described their health benefits.

This defeat of the FTC's latest attempt to censor the truth about nutritional supplements is making waves in the nutrition industry. It signals a crack in the wall of FTC tyranny and a possible route for establishing Free Speech for nutritional supplement companies that only seek to tell the truth about their products.

In the world of truth-telling, no one speaks the truth about natural remedies more openly and honorably than a small company called Daniel Chapter One (www.DanielChapterOne.com), a religious ministry that also sells anti-cancer herbs, many of which are advocated in the Bible and other religious writings. Supported by a radio show and a website, Daniel Chapter One dares to tell people the truth about its natural remedies, even in the face of extreme intimidation and threats from the FTC.

The FTC is demanding that Daniel Chapter One lie to all its customers by signing and distributing a document claiming their natural cancer remedies do not work. That same document would also direct customers to the National Cancer Institute -- a pro-Pharma government group engaged in widespread scientific fraud and public disinformation campaigns (the NCI runs ads warning people to avoid all sunlight, for example, promoting widespread vitamin D deficiencies).

Daniel Chapter One needs your support, and it's an organization worth fighting for. They are, in essence, taking point position on a very dangerous mission, working to break the FTC's iron grip and restore Free Speech rights to the entire industry. Although Jim and Trish have been threatened with imprisonment, having their products confiscated, having their ministry raided and shut down and being fined millions of dollars, they have held firm in their belief that telling the truth about medicinal herbs is their God-given right.

Today, Daniel Chapter One finds itself embattled against the federal government, standing virtually alone in an industry where most companies are too intimidated to stand up for their own rights. To help promote health freedom, they've launched another website called Daniel Chapter One Freedom (http://danielchapteronefreedom.com), and I encourage you to join their email newsletter on that site. Write your representatives in Washington, too, to insist that the FTC end their attempts to silence and intimidate not just Daniel Chapter One but other nutritional supplement companies as well.

The FTC's attack on Daniel Chapter One is more than just an assault on Free Speech, by the way: It's also an assault on religious freedom. The organization is a ministry, after all, but that hasn't stopped the FTC from threatening to imprison its founders.

On Facebook, MySpace? Obama's got your e-mail

WND Exclusive

LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER


White House spammer-in-chief wants contractor to track critics


By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

The White House is hiring a contractor to harvest information about Americans from its pages on social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

The National Legal and Policy Center, or NLPC, revealed the White House New Media team is seeking to hire a technology vendor to collect data such as comments, tag lines, e-mail, audio and video from any place where the White House "maintains a presence" – for a period of up to eight years.

"The contractor shall provide the necessary services to capture, store, extract to approved formats, and transfer content published by EOP (Executive Office of the President) on publicly-accessible web sites, along with information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP offices under PRA (Presidential Records Act) maintains a presence," the posting states.

Excerpt from White House New Media solicitation of bids

According to the 51-page solicitation of bids posted Aug. 21, the purpose of the mining and archiving project is to "comply with the Presidential Records Act," though the listing does not specify how the information will be used. It states that the government is currently collecting data from social networks both programmatically and by use of daily screenshots.

White HouseTwitter page

The program is expected to be fully operational within 30 days after the contract is awarded to a vendor.

The White House pages at Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr contain thousands of comments from Americans – both supportive and critical of the administration and its policies.

WHite House Facebook page

Contractors must agree to keep information disclosed by the EOP in the "strictest confidence" and restrict access "to those employees who must have the information to perform the work provided herein on a 'need-to-know' basis."

Get the book that exposes the secret blueprint for ending free speech: "Shut Up, America!"

NLPC warns, "[V]irtually any communication mentioning the president or the administration could become subject to collection and archiving under the act. This is not out of an 'abundance of caution,' but out of an over-abundance of power. President Obama should make sure that this plan goes no further."

'Fishy' info on health care

As WND reported, the Obama administration has made several efforts to collect information about citizens in the past. The White House announced a program Aug. 4, pleading with people around the nation to forward to a White House e-mail address anything they see "about health insurance reform that seems fishy."

Scary chain e-mails and videos are starting to percolate on the Internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to 'uncover' the truth about the president's health insurance reform positions.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, demanded that President Obama either halt the "snitch" program or define how he would protect the privacy of those who send or are the subject of e-mails to the flag@whitehouse.gov e-mail address.

"I am not aware of any precedent for a president asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White house for pure political speech that is deemed 'fishy' or otherwise inimical to the White House's political interests," the Texas senator wrote in a letter to Obama.

"By requesting that citizens send 'fishy' e-mails to the White House, it is inevitable that the names, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported… You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection system."

'Compelling need' for cookies

WND has also reported that the Obama administration has announced plans to lift a government ban on tracking visitors to government websites, and potentially, collect their personal data through the use of "cookies" – an effort some suspect may already be in place on White House sites.

A ban on such tracking by the federal government on Internet users has been in place since 2000, however, the White House Office of Management and Budget now wants to lift the ban citing a "compelling need."

This screenshot shows computer cookies collected on WhiteHouse.gov and Recovery.gov

In fact, according to the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, federal agencies have negotiated agreements and contracts with social networking sites like Google, YouTube, SlideShare, Facebook, AddThis, Blist, Flickr and VIMEO to collect information on visitors for federal websites. All of these private companies are known to have agreements with federal agencies, but the public has never seen them.

In public comments submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, EPIC notes it has obtained documents that show federal agencies have negotiated these contracts with the private sector in violation of "existing statutory privacy rights." Those agencies include: Department of Defense, Department of the Treasury, and the National Security Agency.

There are suspicions the White House is already involved.

According to Obama "technology czar" Vivek Kundra, the "compelling need" driving this major policy reversal is the administration's desire to create "more open" government and to "enhance citizen participation in government."

Hurtling Towards a Train Wreck

Real Clear Politics

By Ed Feulner
President of the Heritage Foundation

Nobody could have been happier to see August end than the liberals pushing government-run health care. The month, to put it mildly, was not kind to President Obama and his allies. Their worst nightmares were realized -- Americans examined the bills being proposed and turned out in great numbers to voice their opposition.

What we can expect in September is another matter. Desperate times call for desperate means -- or so liberals will think. Those who oppose this hostile takeover of one-sixth of our economy must be ready.

Proponents of Obamacare will not succeed, however, if everyone understands what unfolded last month. Simply put, the American people took matters into their own hands before the politicians could have their way.

Let's be very clear about what happened here. Your leaders did not want you to scrutinize the profound changes they were proposing, and the best excuse they offered was that you, the American people, were too stupid to understand it.

This isn't mere hyperbole. Politicians pushing for an overhaul of our health care system sat down with people from the Heritage Foundation and actually said, many times, such things as: "We have to pass this before the American people can read it. They will not understand it, and people will tell them bad things about it."

But the American people did understand. They realized that the overhaul the left proposes threatens the good quality care that most receive. They sensed, moreover, that their leaders were trying to rush through complex and far-reaching changes that would have unforeseen cultural and economic consequences.

The health care industry is worth $2.5 trillion a year, comparable with Britain's entire gross domestic product and larger than that of most European countries. Can you imagine Britain's entire economy being reordered by a few people working secretly in backrooms in a matter of weeks? What are the chances they could ever get that right?

But the American people cannot take all the credit for slowing down this train wreck. Some of it should go to White House communicators who came up with arguments that were ludicrous on their face, such as insisting that a public option would introduce "competition" into the health insurance market.

Thank God we commissioned a Lewin Group study that made it clear that more than 88 million Americans would lose their private insurance if a government competitor were created. These numbers made it abundantly clear that the "government option" would quickly become the only option. And as a Heritage study just showed Friday, Obamacare will cost U.S. businesses up to $49 billion a year and will mean that as many as 5.5 million Americans could lose their job.

The Congressional Budget Office, with its numbers showing that the plans being proposed wouldn't lower costs but raise them, drove in another valuable nail.

So this is where we are, and where we have been. But where are we going? One thing is clear: The president obviously plans to take a more active role in promoting his version of reform. A major address to both houses of Congress is planned for Sept. 9.

Those tempted to invoke the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's name to pass health care bills should remember that he was not revered in all quarters. Doing so would be a tactical error on their part.

So would using reconciliation to ram through a bill, as Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York and former Democratic Party leader Howard Dean are advocating. Reconciliation -- a legislative process that requires only a 51-vote majority in the 100-seat Senate, rather than the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster -- is expressly meant only for budgetary matters. Its use would divide the country further and reduce the U.S. Senate to being no more deliberative than the House of Representatives.

Nor should the president and his allies try to disguise the same rejected "reform" under a different name. Renaming the public option a "co-op" is disingenuous, for example. It all amounts to the same thing: a single-payer system, which means the only choice Americans would have is a government package.

We also must anticipate the protests that the president's supporters expect to mount over the coming weeks. These protests are facilitated by the White House campaign apparatus Organizing for America and the same people who called those who turned out in August "astroturf."

Going forward, we do need to fix America's health system, but in a common-sense way that is in synch with our country's values. If we are going to redesign it, we will have to do it in stages, learning from our many mistakes. We are going to have to encourage states to take the lead in figuring out how to proceed. Mr. Obama could get broad support in town-hall meetings and across the aisle for this agenda if he is willing to embrace it.

What he needs to realize after his return from Martha's Vineyard is that -- as he has often said -- this isn't about him, it's about the country. And the country has rejected what he is proposing. The people have understood. As Ronald Reagan frequently reminded us: Trust the people.

The Not Ready for Prime Time President

Real Clear Politics

By Bruce Walker
American Thinker

Pundits, including perceptive conservative opponents like Charles Krauthammer, have noted the consummate political skill of Barack Obama. There is not much doubt that Obama was able to wage a very effective campaign for the Democratic nomination and then for the presidency in the general election.

Bill Clinton was a masterful campaigner too (I had the opportunity to watch some of that first hand.) Ronald Reagan, because in part of his long career in Hollywood, could give "The Speech" a thousand times and each time it was electrifying. The word "charisma" entered our popular political language to describe John Kennedy, whose beautiful wife and boyish good looks created the myth of Camelot. Franklin Roosevelt had the same gift for making people feeling comfortable and winning elections.

But there is a huge difference between Obama, on the one hand, those other presidents on the other hand - and the difference transcends ideology. The difference is that JFK, FDR, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton had the ability to govern once they had won their elections.

FDR, by the time he became president, he had served as Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New York, and Vice Presidential Candidate of his party in 1928. Forget the rightness or the wrongness of his policies: Franklin Roosevelt understood governance.

John Kennedy had been a war hero, a member of Congress, and the real author of some important books (like Why England Slept, in which JFK describes the dangers of appeasing evil.) The Roosevelt and Kennedy clans also grew up with a sense of aristocratic responsibility and a backdoors familiarity with power which may not have been moral, but certainly was valuable.

Ronald Reagan, in addition to being a movie star, a union president, and an ambassador for General Electric, served eight years as Governor of California and was twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination before finally winning the nomination in 1980.

Even Bill Clinton had been a congressional candidate, then attorney general of Arkansas, then for many years governor of Arkansas before he ran for president. Clinton served a term as Chair of the National Governors Association. He was a leading member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group considered to be moderate but which was influential.

Obama, while possessing many of the campaigning gifts of these presidents, has shown no ability to govern at all. This is a very dangerous situation for our nation. Our leader is a man whose ignorance, in many areas of history and policy, is simply appalling. He is rather like the "President in the Plastic Bubble." Obama's entire life has been insulated from any sense of reality of the nation he governs.

When a black Marxist professor obviously blinded by intense racial rage has to be taken to a police station by a police officer nursed in all the nuances of political correctness, Obama cannot see his friend as the wailing bigot and the white policemen as the reasonable figure. At best, Obama calls it a moral draw.

When millions of Americans spontaneously protest at Tea Parties and Town Meetings proposals for massive federal changes, Obama instructs his satrapies in government, the Democratic Party, and the media that the voters are simply uninformed. When citizens cite specific sections of federal bills, how serious does Obama expect to be taken?

When polls show his support dropping steadily as well as support for his specific policies and his party, Obama seems to think that his cronies and he have simply not repeated the same unbelievable statements often, clearly, or loudly enough. It is as if John Edwards had taken the position, when his infidelity was exposed, that he simply needed to get in front of the television camera as often as possible repeating his lies as persuasively as he could.

His pals from Chicago seem unable to help him. His partisan handlers fancy that they can simply ram whatever they want. Men like Axelrod and Emmanuel seem to think that it should be simple to push radical Leftist programs through a nation in which conservatives outnumber liberals in virtually all of the fifty states. Obama and his clique appear certain that in a modern culture in which celebrity means everything to many, that just remaining on the cover of glamour magazines will assure political support -- when actually the immature voter is the most feckless and unreliable source of muscle around.

President Obama seemingly has no clue about what he is doing, and, increasingly, it shows. What will happen when things start to go sour in Afghanistan? Our Commander-in-Chief simply will not be able to blame President Bush. After Obama has effectively destroyed the CIA, what will he do when terrorists strike? War is a nasty business in which lawyers should have little role. Has Obama noticed that Islamic terrorists are now threatening him? Does he understand that these vicious men are still threatening America?

Looking smooth on television and wowing those fawning socialites and film directors who want to be wowed brings a sort of ephemeral "popularity," but great nations are not governed on such spun sugar. Winning elections and running superpowers are very different tasks. Now, we have a president who is every second still just a candidate. As the world grows more dangerous by the day, we are "led" by the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-President.