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TOKYO — Overwhelmed by a still-growing catastrophe, Japanese authorities struggled Monday to reach buried survivors and the missing, faced roadblocks in delivering aid and raced to contain an expanding nuclear emergency.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan called the crisis the country’s toughest challenge since World War II and said that decimated towns along the northeastern coastline were not yet getting the food and supplies they needed.

A series of unstable nuclear plants across the country threatened to compound the nation’s difficulties, which started with Friday’s double-barreled disasters: first an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, then a tsunami. At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, one containment building housing an overheated reactor had already exploded. A second explosion, about noon local time Monday, destroyed an outer building at another of the plant’s reactors.

Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes will be speaking at the Nullify Now event in Austin, TX on April 16th, 2011. For tickets and event info: Click Here

Stewart Rhodes of Oath Keepers speakers at Nullify Now! Phoenix on 01-29-11.

topics -- oaths to the constitution, habeas corpus, treason, trial by jury, executive power, war powers, and more…

Thomas Paine: “If there is to be trouble, let it be in my day, so that my child may have peace.”

“Oath Keepers and Tenth Amendment Center are two peas in a pod -- working to restore the republic from the bottom up.”

I’ll never forget the day I took the Oath to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic it sent shivers down my spine and to this day I will fight and defend our Constitution!!

In America today our freedoms are being lost at an alarming rate and its time to make that stand for freedom and say no more !!

Semper Fidelis, Mike

My new tattoo, it’s still healing. The band will be gold in color (because I believe that the band around my ring finger is also an oath). My husband and I are vet’s, that believe in the oath we took when we entered the Army… Quartermaster delivers.

The Nebraska Oath Keepers President, Mike Lemieux and Oath Keepers founder , Stewart Rhodes , will be on the Restore the Republic’s “Mad As Hell” webethon tomorrow night . Mike is on at 9 PM and Stewart is on at 10PM.

Go to: http://madashellmoneybomb.com/ for complete details, speaker list, and to tune in on Saturday March 12th, 2011.

Please check the site as a good many other well known speakers are involved with this.

Oath Keepers would like to take a moment to express our profound sadness to learn of the suffering and massive loss of life resulting from the earthquake and following tsunami that recently devastated Japan. In addition to many civilians, America has approximately 28,000 of our troops and an estimated 40,000 of their family members stationed there.

At the time of this writing we have no word of any casualties or injuries among them, but we are certainly concerned for their well being and that of the Japanese people.

In the wake of such a tragedy, it is a source of pride to know with certainty that our finest will be on the front lines of assistance to all effected, providing the best of the best in assistance and technology. No matter what our personal differences might be here at home, whether or not we all agree that our troops should be stationed around the world, or kept here at home – we can all come together in the knowledge that when the chips are down and someone is in need, Americans can and will get the job done!

Today, the Utah Senate passed HB317, a bill which will legalize gold and silver as tender within the state of Utah and exempt the exchange (purchase) of such specie from sales and capital gains taxes. Having already passed the House, the bill will now be sent to Governor Herbert to be signed into law, should he so decide.

This type of bill is one that is becoming increasingly popular throughout the country, with multiple states introducing and considering such legislation. Though Utah is now the first state to have a legislature approve of the idea, the sustained momentum of getting other states to review the proposal demonstrates the resiliency of the campaign for sound money. With the U.S. Dollar plummeting in value, this is an issue that will become more popular as time goes on.

As the author of the bill noted in a Fox News article on the subject, this bill will allow Utahns to better prepare for financial turmoil ahead, more easily diversifying into currency with a long history of stability.

This bill, however, is a watered down version of the original submission by the author, Larry Hilton. As we reported previously, the goals of this effort are far more comprehensive and specific. The limited provisions included in this final bill, while certainly welcome, are merely a first step. Expect to see successive legislation in upcoming sessions to expand and broaden the scope of what the legislature passed today.

(Reuters) – Wyoming state lawmakers on Wednesday approved a proposal to allow residents to carry concealed guns or other deadly weapons without a permit.

The proposal already cleared the state Senate, and the vote of 48-8 in the House virtually assures that the measure will get final approval after two more readings this week. It will then go to Republican Gov. Matt Mead for his signature.

If signed into law, Wyoming would follow Alaska, Arizona and Vermont with very permissive gun laws allowing residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

Mead, a former U.S. Attorney for Wyoming who has prosecuted federal firearms cases, has said he supports gun rights but will wait until the bill reaches his desk before deciding whether to sign it, spokesman Renny MacKay said.

Some in law enforcement had opposed the bill, saying the state’s existing permit system worked well by allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons after they prove proficiency in using firearms and pass a background check.

Representative Jonathan Botten, a Republican, had proposed amending the bill to prevent residents from carrying concealed guns while drunk. The House rejected that amendment.

“If you’re too drunk to hurtle your 3-ton car down the interstate at 75 miles per hour, I submit to you that you’re too drunk to be safely carrying a firearm,” Botten said.

“We have a very strong sense of protecting individual rights, and in particular, the Second Amendment rights,” said Representative Lorraine Quarberg, a Republican who supported the bill but opposed Botten’s amendment. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution preserves the right to bear arms.

“‘Project Gunrunner,’ the controversial operation in which U.S. agents may
have been ordered not to intervene as American guns flowed to Mexican
gangs, may have been going on for years. Sharyl Attkisson reports.”

“A controversial operation in which U.S. agents were allegedly ordered not to intervene as American guns flowed to Mexican gangs may have been going on for many years,” Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News reports.

Multiple sources now tell CBS News the questionable tactics were used in more than one operation, and date back as far as 2008 in the Tucson area. One case was called “Wide Receiver.”

See the above video player for this latest report.

“Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanded Tuesday that an independent watchdog be used to investigate the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives decision to let hundreds of guns fall into the hands of straw buyers for suspected Mexican weapons traffickers in hopes of making a bigger criminal case,” Rick Solomon of the Center for Public integrity reports.

Grassley’s press release states:

Senator Chuck Grassley today said that he did not have confidence that the Justice Department Inspector General’s office could produce a report that the public would view as frank and unbiased in its investigation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) policy of letting guns “walk” along the Southwest border—a policy that may have contributed to the death of a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent.

In a letter written to Kevin L. Perkins, Chair Integrity Committee Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, and citing perceived conflicts of interest as well as past disinterest in the allegations, Grassley requests “that the Acting Inspector General recuse her office and that a disinterested inspector general’s office be selected to conduct the review,” and makes two profound charges:

(NaturalNews) Newly-released documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reveal that the US Depart of Homeland Security has been working on plans to roll out a new wave of mobile surveillance technologies at train stations, stadiums and streets. These new technologies will track your eye movements, capture and record your facial dimensions for face-recognition processing, bathe you in X-rays to look under your clothes, and even image your naked body using whole-body infrared images that were banned from consumer video cameras because they allowed the camera owners to take “nude” videos of people at the beach.

Most importantly, many of these technologies are designed to be completely hidden, allowing the government to implement “covert inspection of moving subjects.” You could be walking down a hallway at a sports stadium, in other words, never knowing that you’re being bathed in X-rays from the Department of Homeland Security, whose operators are covertly looking under your clothes to see if you’re carrying any weapons.

The Homeland Security Department paid contractors millions of dollars to develop and study surveillance systems that could covertly track pedestrians and check under people’s clothing with airport-style body scanners as they enter train stations, bus depots or major events, newly released documents show.

Two contracts the department signed in 2005 and 2006 were part of its effort to acquire technology to find suicide bombers in a crowd of moving people, according to documents given to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy-rights group that is suing Homeland Security.

The department dropped the projects in a “very early” phase after testing showed flaws, Homeland Security spokesman Bobby Whithorne says.

EPIC lawyer Ginger McCall says the project is disturbing nonetheless because it shows the department “obviously believed that this level of surveillance is acceptable when in fact it is not at all acceptable.”

A $1.9 million contract with Rapiscan Systems, which makes airport body scanners, asked the company to develop similar machines for “covert inspection of moving subjects” and to find explosives on suicide bombers “through clothing, backpacks and other packages.” The contract was signed in 2005.

Rapiscan’s airport body scanners require subjects to stand still while the machines create an image of passengers underneath their clothing to reveal hidden weapons. EPIC has sued the department to stop their use, saying the machines violate privacy.

Now that CBS News has delivered its second definitive report on the scope of “Project Gunwalker”* and Senator Grassley has expressed his determination to not allow the Department of Justice to stonewall his investigations, the damage control at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have begun in earnest.

From one of the behind-the-scenes confidential sources advising Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars and this correspondent, someone who has been instrumental in bringing this story to light from long before major media became involved:

This just hit minutes ago. Panic and chaos are taking place at ATF headquarters in advance of the anticipated media releases today and tomorrow. Below is a message just sent from the subordinate of Jim McDermond from the ATF Office of Public and Governmental Affairs. An emergency request is being issued to all ATF Public Information Officers to find ATF stories with a positive spin to counter-influence was is expected today. Very insulting and very much the character of ATF management. Please respond to me that you received this. I think it will be critical to your stories and for Senator Grassley to further see demonstrated ATF’s continued desire to spin and cover up.

March 3, 2011. CBS Evening News. Gun Walking. Interview with ATF Federal agent John Dodson. ATF was intentionally sending heavy weaponry to Mexican drug cartels. The secret operation was called Fast and Furious.

It’s been nearly 80 years since the U.S. stopped using gold coins as legal currency, and nearly 40 since the world abandoned the gold standard, but the precious metal could be making a comeback in the United States — beginning in Utah.

The Utah House was to vote as early as Thursday on legislation that would recognize gold and silver coins issued by the federal government as legal currency in the state. The coins would not replace the current paper currency but would be used and accepted voluntarily as an alternative.

The legislation, which has 12 co-sponsors, would let Utahans pay their taxes with gold and also calls for a committee to study alternative currencies for the state. It would also exempt the sale of gold from the state capital gains tax.

The bill cleared a state legislative committee on Wednesday, the first of 13 similar bills in statehouses across the country to do so. If the bill clears the House, it would have to pass the Senate before the governor could sign it into law.

Attorney and Tea Party activist Larry Hilton, author of the original bill, said he doesn’t foresee any roadblocks.

“There’s enough uneasiness going on in the economy to trigger people to feel that, hey, having a little Plan B, kind of a backup system, is not a bad idea,” he told FoxNews.com.

If you’re a resident of one of at least 24 states including Arizona, Georgia, and Washington, your driver’s license may no longer be valid for boarding an airplane or entering federal buildings as of May 11, 2011.

That’s the deadline that senior House Republicans are calling on the Obama administration to impose, saying states must be required to comply with so-called Real ID rules creating a standardized digital identity card that critics have likened to a national ID.

The political problem for the GOP committee chairmen is that the 2005 Real ID Act has proven to be anything but popular: legislatures of two dozen states have voted to reject its requirements, and in the Michigan and Pennsylvania legislatures one chamber has done so.

That didn’t stop the House Republicans from saying in a letter this week to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “any further extension of Real ID threatens the security of the United States.” Unless Homeland Security grants an extension, the law’s requirements take effect on May 11.

“If they don’t, people won’t be able to use their driver’s licenses to get on airplanes,” says Molly Ramsdell, who oversees state-federal affairs for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “They can use a military ID. They can use some other federal ID. But they won’t be able to use a driver’s license.” (See CNET’s FAQ.)

Sen. Rand Paul’s bold and honest address to the largest annual gathering of conservatives.