Poll finding: Fewer prisoners, Lower taxes

USC College, July 20, 2011

For the second year in a row, USC (University of Southern California) Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences is partnering with the Los Angeles Times for a public opinion poll about the state of California.

• Poll finds shift in attitudes toward release of prisoners
  

The poll finds Californians would rather release prisoners than pay for more prisons or have their taxes misappropriated, reversing a trend promising to get "tough on crime" that has bankrupted the state without making it any safer. In fact, politicians, the private prison industry, and the prison guard's union have been enriched at staggering taxpayer expense. Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, and Evan Halper, Sacramento Bureau Chief from the Los Angeles Times, discuss how the public feels about what to do about the current prison system. Visit USC Dornsife Web site for more info: dornsife.usc.edu/poll

• VIDEO: USC putting artifacts in students' hands
  

Madame President: Bachmann vs. Palin

Ashley Wells (Wisdom Quarterly)

Hopeful Michele Bachmann vs. has-been Sarah Palin, it's no comparison (latimes.com)

Whether it's narcissism, megalomania, or delusion, somewhere Donald Trump is combing his hair, and elsewhere Sarah Palin is telling Newsweek she can win the presidency. However the Tea Party, which is not a grassroots movement but an AstroTurfed one, is backing Michele Bachmann. After all of Palin's emails were released, embarrassing a misled and heavily manipulated mainstream media, who would be willing to back Caribou Barbie? And good ol' Hillary, who is probably not running, says she'll quit if Obama is re-[s]elected. Most people would sooner vote for the more honest, more endearing Bristol Palin, even if she drank during pregnancy while looking after her Downs Syndrome sibling. Oh that Sarah Palin, fighting Bristol on who she dates. If she's [s]elected to the White House, Washington will be business-as-usual, but reality TV will never be the same! I guess that leaves the US with a simple choice: more debt and war with Barack Obama...or even more debt and war with Herman Cain. In that case, maybe Palin wouldn't be so bad? It might seem that way, but according to the Los Angeles Times:

• "The [Newsweek] article, which revisits Palin’s political career in Alaska in some detail, appears to be part of a strategy in Palin’s close-knit camp to frame the potential contender within her more populist, independent political roots, as opposed to her more recent fire-breathing, Mama Grizzly, Christian conservative persona."
  
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• VIDEO: Michele Bachmann converting gays?
• More AIDS patients drugged for Big Pharma profits
• Political renaissance for Strauss-Kahn looks dim
• Mila Kunis dates Marines...if they ask nicely
• Digging up artifacts and re-inventing Jewish history
• Egypt's military warns protesters against violence
• Obama's risky challenge to Congress on debt ceiling
• Debt crisis spreads to shake Europe's core
• McConnell, Boehner criticize Obama

Bigfoot was here maybe (Giants for certain)

Michele Bigley (Special to the Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2011)

Reports of giant ogres date back thousands of years. Who's hiding the hominid* skeletons and cave evidence? (popfi.com)

HAPPY CAMP, California - I knew that lots of honest folks did believe that Bigfoot (Sasquatch or as crypto-zoologists call him, Gigantopithecus) not only exists but also thrives in Klamath River country between the Humboldt County coast and the Shasta Cascade.

That was enough to pique my curiosity. In Willow Creek, we headed to the China Flat Museum to meet the curator of its Bigfoot exhibit, Al Hodgson.

Now 87, Hodgson carries his adoration for all things Sasquatch on his sleeve, showing me around the vast collection of unreasonably large casts of footprints (one of which Hodgson made in nearby Bluff Creek, site of the only known filmed Bigfoot "sighting"), as well as schooling me on the history of "sightings" in and around Willow Creek and the hoaxes.

Yes, tricksters have strapped on giant wooden feet and traipsed around the mountains in them.

Levelheaded Hodgson explained the main signs of the big guy's existence: a woven nest of sticks and leaves, an amazingly horrid stench, piled rocks, twisted tree limbs, and massive tracks.

Itching to get into nature, we drove along the aptly named Bigfoot Scenic Byway, which meanders along the Trinity and Klamath rivers, sinuously inching past peaks blanketed with verdant trees, yellow fields, and dramatic lupines. For nearly 80 miles this byway took us as far from civilization as you can get in California without hiking into the backcountry.

We continued through the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, the largest in California, and home to people who believe the high country is sacred and should not be entered by anyone but the most revered [shamanistic California] medicine men. More

• Bigfoot country information
• Walking in the Footsteps of Human Giants!
  
• Otherworldmystery.com
• Giant Archeology: "Lovelock Cave" (UC Berkeley)
• Man-eating giants discovered in Nevada cave
• North American giants
• Analyzing Bigfoot sightings and stories
• Giants described in the Dead Sea Scrolls
  

*The Hominid Red-Haired Giants
Otherworldmystery.com.jpg

HUMBOLDT RIVER, Lovelock, Nevada - The Paiute Indians [who inhabited a range from Yosemite, California to Nevada] have a legend about their ancestors and red-haired giants. These giants, known as Si-Te-Cah, used to kill and eat the Paiute tribes. Though the Si-Te-Cah were small in numbers, they posed a dire threat to the Paiute, who were beginning to settle the area.... [This means they would literally be the yakkhas (rakshasas) of Buddhist lore. Far from animals, these cannibals are sophisticated albeit brutal hominids, like Alavaka. They live and have lived in many mountainous parts of the world, including Afghanistan: Steve Quayle wrote about the American military killing and transporting one enormous specimen in LongWalkers.] Could there really have been a race of Caucasoid giants that inhabited North America before the Native Americans? Are the artifacts discovered in Lovelock Cave proof that history is wrong? More

Giant artifact compared with normal jaw