The George Zimmerman trial began this week, jury selection and whatnot underway. Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17 year old Trayvon Martin last year in Florida. The tragic event aggravated all the usual national divisive emotions of the American people surrounding guns (stand your ground) and race. Corporate media, as expected, helped to stoke those divisions.

Hopefully the precise truth about what happened the night Trayvon Martin was walking home from a convenience store, stalked by Zimmerman, and eventually shot and killed by the "community watchman".....will come out in the trial.

Recently, I blogged about the Ohio GOP's spring offensive in their war on women throughout the state. As part of the GOP's two year budget plan, Ohio Republicans proposed defunding Planned Parenthood, redirecting funding to right wing "crisis pregnancy centers", and eliminating abortion clinics in Ohio through a Catch 22 provision in emergency transfer agreements with hospitals. Review it all here.

But remember....this is a war on women's autonomy in the state of Ohio....and war means war, not some half-hearted peckering along the margins. So, Ohio Republicans couldn't let it go at just defunding PP and closing abortion clinics in the state through legalese.

Yearly U.S. deaths from firearms has held steady for the last 30+ years at 30,000 gun-deaths per year. Total yearly suicides in the U.S. comes in around 38,000, 19,000 of those from firearms. Yearly traffic fatalities in the U.S., as of 2010, totaled approximately 32,000.

Total deaths in the U.S. from terrorist related activities? 3400 total since 1970. Let me repeat that. Terrorist related deaths in the United States......combined every year since 1970....add up to 3400 total deaths from terrorist related activity. 3400 total deaths inside the U.S. attributed to "terrorism" in the last 40+ years.

I started reading Glenn Greenwald in 2005, the year he started his Unclaimed Territory blog. Glenn is a nerdy, smallish fellow who just so happens to be the most surgically-precise writer I've ever read.

You may have seen him on teevee for the first time this week in the wake of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. Greenwald is the person to whom Snowden leaked classified NSA documents. Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer turned foreign/military/security policy activist writer. I have read his columns regularly for the last 8 years, first at Unclaimed Territory, then at Salon.com and now with the Guardian.

“He’s a traitor,” Boehner said in an interview with ABC. “The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it’s a giant violation of the law.”

Mike Rogers (R-MI), Steve King (R-IA), and Peter King (R-NY) agree with Boehner. They want Edward Snowden arrested and disappeared.

On June 2nd, House Oversight Committee Chairman, Darrell Issa (R-CA), demonstrated why his investigation and hearings into an alleged IRS scandal are not on the level...

“The whole transcript will be put out. We understand - these are in real time. And the administration is still - their paid liar, their spokesperson, picture behind, he's still making up things about what happens in calling this local rogue. There's no indication - the reason that Lois Lerner tried to take the Fifth... is not because there’s a rogue in Cincinnati, it’s because this is a problem that was coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters And we’re getting to proving it."

Should U.S. workers work for less? Does the path to renewed national prosperity depend on American workers being paid less than they are today? If American workers work for even less, will U.S. corporate conglomerates be satisfied.....or will more concessions by workers be continually necessary to prevent the John Galt Incorporated-groups from taking their moneyballs and fleeing to other nations for good?

Hourly pay for nonfarm workers fell at a 3.8 percent annualized rate in the first quarter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday. This was the biggest quarterly decline since the BLS started keeping track in 1947.

If you don't read Glenn Greenwald regularly, then perhaps yesterday's news about the NSA collecting the phone records of millions of Americans came as a shock.  Not to this blogger. If I wasn't so lazy I would comb through my previous years blog postings and give you numerous examples of what, over two administrations, has become common knowledge to those paying close attention.

The 4th amendment, no matter what you think or how you feel about it, has been all but nullified in the aftermath of 9-11....here's a few bullet points....

What really offends Republican voters and conservatives in general is the claim by Democrats and liberals that the GOP is fighting a war against women. Personally, I don't care that they are offended......because the accusation is 100% true.

Although the U.S. code grants women the full right to make their own reproductive choices, Republican officials in 25 states enacted 42 anti-choice measures in 2012 alone.

The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision Monday that police may take a DNA cheek swab from people arrested for crimes without first getting a warrant to do so.

Controversial? Probably.....but the interesting part of yesterday's ruling was this....

The way you know for sure that alleged scandals are not really scandals at all is how the "investigation" of those alleged scandals progresses.

If the heart of the alleged scandal involving the IRS is "unfairly targeting conservative groups, Teas, Patriots, etc for extra scrutiny of tax exempt applications".....then why is Darrell Issa now talking about how many trips the IRS Commissioner made to the White House? Why is Issa now raising the issue of tax training conference excesses?

During those great Confederate-pride days of the summer of 2011 newly elected TeaHouse members were damn determined to wreck the U.S. economy through refusing to increase the nation's debt limit. In all of U.S. history, the debt ceiling had never been held hostage.....but then the House had never had so many delusional and nihilistic GOP members before either.

The haughty cockiness exuded by these newly minted TeaHouse members was as nauseating as it was insincere.....

If you type the words "IRS targeted conservatives" into the Google search box....you get 87 million results. Eighty-seven million.

In the same way that Shirley Sherrod was not approaching her job at Agriculture as an open racist even though L'il Jim O'Keefe purposely edited a video to make it look so ....... the IRS did NOT "target conservatives."