Welcome to your Monday edition of The Morning Roar!Apple In Talks With Comcast About Streaming TV ServiceAs more and more people cut the cord to traditional pay-TV cable services, the big players are positioning themselves to best meet the demand in the growing broadband market. Last month in our weekly Mondays With Murray feature we discussed the Comcast and Time Warner merger. Many pundits were crying about the formation of a monopoly and resulting rising prices, but I gathered that the merger seemed to be more about surviving the drastic drop in pay-TV subscribers.Fast forward and now we are seeing the second shoe begin to drop as news of Apple entering into talks with Comcast made headlines over the weekend. The Wall Street Journal Reports.

Apple Inc.  AAPL +0.79% is in talks with  Comcast Corp.  CMCSA -1.20% about teaming up for a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast's cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web, people familiar with the matter say.The discussions between the world's most valuable company and the nation's largest cable provider are still in early stages and many hurdles remain. But the deal, if sealed, would mark a new level of cooperation and integration between a technology company and a cable provider to modernize TV viewing.Apple's intention is to allow users to stream live and on-demand TV programming and digital-video recordings stored in the "cloud," effectively taking the place of a traditional cable set-top box.

Over the past few years the demands of TV users has changed faster than service providers have been able to keep up. A rapidly growing number of TV viewers do not see the value in predetermined programming and would much rather watch their favorite shows on-demand at their convenience. People do not see the value in a $150 cable package when they truly only watch a handful of channels. This has led to an increase in households procuring their chosen entertainment utilizing products or services such as Roku, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Apple TV.As the market changes and the major players align themselves to reap the benefits, lovers of free markets need to keep an eye peeled for government cronyism in the streaming TV market place. Additionally, the State could potentially use new entertainment delivery services as a means to grow the surveillance state.Jimmy Carter Fear Communications Are MonitoredNSA surveillance stops for no man, even former Presidents of the United States are subject to snooping. Politico reports that former President Jimmy Carter communicates with world leaders via snail mail in order to avoid surveillance.

Former President Jimmy Carter says he corresponds with foreign leaders the old-fashioned way – through snail mail – because he suspects his communications are watched by intelligence agencies.“I have felt that my own communications are probably monitored,” Carter said in an interview with Andrea Mitchell that was aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”“And when I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write the letter myself, put it in the Post Office and mail it, because I believe if I send an email, it will be monitored,” Carter said.

This serves to further enforce how out of control the intelligence agencies in this country have become. We now know that the NSA collects word for word every communication of U.S. citizens and can reach into the past to retrieve previous conversation. We learned this month that not even the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, is exempt from surveillance. She accused the CIA of searching the aforementioned panel's computers and claimed the search may have violated the Constitution. Now, we have a revelation by former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, stating that he feels his correspondence is being monitored. Without question we can now say that intelligence agencies sit above all three branches of government. A free society cannot operate in this manner.As a libertarian I advocate for abolishing the NSA and CIA. These agencies engage in nothing but right-violations, and would never exist in a free society.In the coming months and years politicians will probably offer sweeping reforms that claim to rein these agencies in. We have to be realistic and ask how these agencies can be brought under control if they have dirt on every person of influence?Police Taser Elderly Man That They Mistook For His BrotherThis story comes to us from Allentown, PA where police in 2012 allegedly zapped a seventy-sex-year-old man with a taser six times. His crime being that he looked like another man the police were looking for, his brother. The man, Robert Gross, has now filed suit over the incidents. Police State USA reports on the details of the police aggression.

Robert Gross, age 76 at the time, had driven his brother, Carl Gross Sr., to see Carl’s granddaughter at a hair cutting salon inside a Walmart shopping center.  Robert waited outside, and walked across the parking lot to a phone store to shop for a new cell phone.For reasons unclear, police were dispatched to the hair salon because Carl — who suffers from dementia — was causing a problem inside the store.  However, when police got to the scene, they set their sights on Robert, who was innocently walking in the parking lot.Two Berks-Lehigh Regional Police officers became aggressive and shouted at Robert.  They allegedly threw the septuagenarian to the ground on his chest.   When he asked why they were hurting him, the police replied, “You know.”Of course, Robert Gross didn’t know.  He had done nothing wrong.  The bullies proceeded with the attack, firing Tasers repeatedly into Robert Gross.  Gross said the pain felt during and after the assault was so extraordinary that he  felt like he was going to die, according to Lehigh Valley News.  Gross experienced “pain, extreme shock, and alarm” from the electrifying zaps.

Several questions come to mind after reading this story. Why on earth would you need to taser a seventy-six-year-old man in order to subdue him? Most people of that age that I come across in life are generally already quite subdued. Another question, if the police did not have a taser handy, would they have beat the man with a club or shot him with a gun? We are inundated with stories of officers using tasers with such regularity that it is difficult to remember how cops handled crimes before being able to zap people repeatedly.This story should give everyone pause. Police officers are using tasers with increasing frequency. This article enforces that age does not act a deterrent for officers to use these potentially deadly compliance tools. A case of mistaken identity, similar to the one in this article, followed by a taser attack could happen at any time.Read The Morning Roar every weekday Monday-Friday!The Lions of Liberty are on Twitter, Facebook & Google+Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!