Cops felt it necassary to drag a 77 year old lady from her car because she didnt hand over her id and insurance card.

SACRAMENTO — The days of most tax-free Internet shopping in California are over.

After years of controversy, the world's largest online retailer, Amazon.com Inc., was set to begin collecting state and local sales taxes on California purchases at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Depending on where you live, sales taxes in the state range from 7.25% to 9.75%.

Note: If you go to the linked story, search for "Jaws" to cut to the chase.

When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.

Stereotypes aside, there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.

Harry Potter is now the most banned book in America, according to the American Library Association. It is undeniable that themes of death and resurrection abound in the stories, as well as detailed depictions of potions and other hocus pocus. But while there are Christians who decry the celebration of witchcraft, there are other Christians who consider Harry’s journey an edifying allegory for Jesus Christ. That is another problem with banning books: it obscures the diversity of viewpoints within its potential readership.

A new patent, granted to Apple, could prevent academic cheating, cinema interruptions, but also see areas of political protest activity 'ring-fenced' disabling phone and tablet cameras.

The U.S. is now on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive and accept transfer benefits from the government. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

The endless war: the “war on terror” without any geographic boundaries, time frame or even the necessity to have a well defined enemy. The blood thirsty machine that is the US industrial-military complex makes billion at all three phases of the war industry process: the manufacturing of ever more lethal and complex weapon systems, the destruction stage, and then finally the occupation and rebuilding phase in countries such as Germany, Japan, Korea, and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan. This war machine and its political associates always needs new conflicts.

An under-reported development of this campaign season is the Republican Party's decision this week to send Gov. Mitt Romney into the presidential race on a platform effectively calling for a new gold commission. The realization that America's system of fiat money is part of its economic problem is moving from the fringes of political discussion to the center.

In Kansas City, Missouri, the police department’s military auxiliary, the “Tactical Response Team,” produced a propaganda video intended to placate public concerns aroused by the increasingly common spectacle of armed raids in residential neighborhoods. Members of Kansas City Tactical Response Team — like their comrades across the country — have been trained by the Pentagon to follow the standard model of military occupation: Use overwhelming force to “pacify” a targeted neighborhood, then try to win the “hearts and minds” of residents to consolidate control.

Every so often, a kernel of truth manages to squeak past the spin.

That's the case in Fort Lee, where Mayor Mark Sokolich told his constituents that, yes, he wants to install red-light cameras in town – and, yes, it’s about the money.