September 06, 2008
Who are these people? In light of the incident in Quebec in which police agents were caught by actual peaceful protestors trying to incite crowd violence, some people are curious. The question is asked: I cannot help but remember some...
September 02, 2008
There are several stories within the general view of the ineptitude of the coordinated "security" forces outside the RNC. One is about the harassment and abuse of the press. Another the apparent inability of the authorities to discern the difference...
September 01, 2008
And their bosses need to be fired, and their budgets cut, and the culture that leads to this kind of vicious and unprovoked attack on a young woman needs to be rooted out. Outrageous. What cowards, craven, impotent thugs hiding...
August 31, 2008
Harassment of people who might have been potential protesters at the RNC. In these preemptive police/fed sweeps, also detained were journalists covering the events and lawyers who were there to provide counsel....
August 30, 2008
Cheeky of people, thinking they have rights....
June 12, 2008
From the NYT story on the Supreme Court rulings that struck down most of the Bush Administration's attempts to keep Al Qaeda out of our courts, comes this wonderful quote by our fearless Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: And...
May 02, 2008
Well, at least according to the Oklahoma Statutes on forcible sodomy, and forcible sodomy being what they have legislated. And given that they have just proposed to "[force] another person to engage in the detestable and abominable crime against nature"...
February 08, 2008
In a little-reported story yesterday, the Attorney General of the United States argued that if the Justice Department declares something to be legal, it cannot (later) be investigated to see if it is (in fact) legal or not: Testifying before...
January 18, 2008
Just when I think he can't say something that would surprise me ... But Padilla and his Yale Law School attorneys think that these decisions are better second-guessed by plaintiffs' lawyers and judges rather than our elected leaders. They challenged...
That's one way to cover-up misdeeds and excesses associated with the Vice President. The agent who made the arrest, Virgil D. Reichle Jr., said in a deposition that he was left hanging with an untenable arrest because two agents assigned...
January 03, 2008
But it turns out, the country that made me carry that thing around only scores as systemic failure to uphold safeguards, not "endemic surveillance society" like the US....
August 14, 2007
Well, isn't that special: The Justice Department is putting the final touches on regulations that could give Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales important new sway over death penalty cases in California and other states, including the power to shorten the...
August 07, 2007
Re: FISA etc, Atrios wants someone who can to ask: Have the phone and email conversations of any American journalists, US federal officeholders, or federal campaign workers ever been intercepted without a warrant?...
July 27, 2007
In today's New York Times: WASHINGTON, July 26 - Three years after President Bush urged global rules to stop additional nations from making nuclear fuel, the White House will announce on Friday that it is carving out an exception for...
July 13, 2007
Michael Dorf argues that those who disrupted a Hindu's attempt to offer the daily prayer in the Senate likely have more than one Supreme Court justice on their side: So fear not, you monotheists who worry that Hinduism may become...
July 10, 2007
As they say, it's funny because it's true....
July 03, 2007
Has anyone noticed that Britain's response to the round/wave of bombings is to use the law, arrest people according to the law (technically, they can "hold" them for 28 days before arresting them or letting them go, but the law...
June 15, 2007
...or maybe not: An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than...
April 17, 2007
I think Charlie Savage's work on the use (and abuse) of presidential signing statements was a most worthy choice. I might assign one or more of his pieces (in addition to other work on the topic by Charles Tiefer and...
April 08, 2007
And he's a retired Marine too: "On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published...
April 04, 2007
...they really are out to get you (emphasis mine): A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political...
March 22, 2007
Somehow skimming over the disregard for the constitution, the false promises to actually produce subpoenas, and the lickspittle phone companies' rush to comply, my tired eyes hit and fixated upon the language used by AT&T t o defend their behavior....
February 08, 2007
A report of air marshalls bring required to submit a quota of suspects whether they suspect them or not: The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month....
January 17, 2007
Spying goes under FISA: The Justice Department announced today that the National Security Agency's controversial warrantless surveillance program has been placed under the authority of a secret surveillance court, marking an abrupt change in approach by the Bush administration after...
January 16, 2007
Armand mentioned the Lam case a couple of days ago, but I just saw via Balloon Juice that the number is possibly up to seven fired prosecutors. As Tim F. says, TPM is doing the work: Okay, so we already...
January 04, 2007
Found via Atrios, this from the NYDN: President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned. The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform...
December 17, 2006
Those are what we need to take to the Department of Homeland Security. Is it really possible that a bureaucracy this young can already stink this much? the Department of Homeland Security, which has opted to bar access to detainees...
December 16, 2006
Right now, where are the legal immigrants that were rounded up in Homeland Security operations this week? Where are they? What's next? Maybe we should start a letter writing campaign, since trying to engage habeus corpus isn't necessarily going to...
November 18, 2006
He was speaking at the Air Force Academy about the August ruling against domestic spying: Gonzales, in remarks prepared for delivery at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said that some see the program as on the...
November 16, 2006
Just yesterday there was a news story about how a camera phone recording of abuse inside Malaysian jails sparked an outcry. Today it's abuse inside the UCLA library. The Crooks and Liars video is shocking. The campus police repeatedly shocked...
October 29, 2006
Just for amusement value, play this in the background while you are surfing the web (yes, it's a video; no, that's not important - the audio track is the important part). Remember, this was 1986. While this is "Crossfire" (CNN's...
October 20, 2006
The attack on Habeus Corpus begins: Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has...
October 18, 2006
Sigh: FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record their customers' online activities, a move that anticipates a fierce debate over privacy and law enforcement in Washington next year. "Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in...
September 29, 2006
In case you wanted to keep track of who voted how.Every Republican voted for this monstrosity, except for Chafee (Olympia Snowe - the gutless wonder from Maine - didn't vote). All but twelve Democrats voted against it. So who are...
September 28, 2006
And so, it becomes official: The United States Senate voted the "compromise" detainee bill out this evening. The House of Representatives voted it out previously. It will become law within a matter of days. The bill establishes a legal foundation...
Can we please stop calling them that now? Pro-choice doesn't equal "moderate", and except for that issue, how reliably moderate are they? Today Specter and Leahy proposed an amendment to strip the Detainee bill of its provisions that strip away...
No? So then why is the left fringe, but not right, mentioned specifically in the NIE? The recently declassified NIE report on terrorism contains an interesting paragraph:"Anti-U.S. and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies. This...
September 22, 2006
Agree or disagree? It does appear that the supposed Republican rebels folded without being all that rebelious - at least on some supposedly key points.And on the first point highlighted in the Publius post, well I've got to say I...
September 18, 2006
Since I know a lot of people on the Right seem to have no love for Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and since I'm guessing some of them are thinking John Warner is showing senility instead of backbone (and class...
Indeed - Yoo's latest is simply pathetic, on its "ahistorical truthiness" alone.And it's another example of why I think the administration's best friends, not matter what they might say about them, are the mainstream media. Their firm belief in presenting...
September 13, 2006
...Congress is busy working to protect our rights. While refusing to give the president a blank check to prosecute the war on terrorism, Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee kept to the White House's condition that a bill giving legal...
August 23, 2006
Is this an accurate representation of what happened with the the recent decision? That is, is it accurate to suggest that because the US government didn't offer a rebuttal of certain points that they conceded them? And while we can't...
August 17, 2006
UPDATE II: The (PDF) decision, via Feministe. From the conclusion (read through the argument citing separation of powers, first amendment and fourth, as well as other grounds). For all of the reasons outlined above, this court is constrained to grant...
August 02, 2006
How many times have we used that word in recent months? In the last six years? Are we stupid? Naive? Hopelessly optimistic to think that calling attention to this shameful disregard, this soiling of a democratic system, will have any...
July 30, 2006
No really. Bush administration asks for US citizens to be denied citizenship rights. U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts...
July 20, 2006
First it was Quakers, now, college students: A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism, according...
July 18, 2006
CNN (emphasis mine): President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the anti-terror eavesdropping program that intercepts Americans' international calls and e-mails, administration officials said Tuesday. Bush refused to grant security clearances for department investigators who were looking into...
July 17, 2006
If you don't know, Epstein is one of the most highly respected law professors of the last few decades. As his approach tends to run toward (I mean race toward at the speed of light) an economic libertarianism that would...
July 10, 2006
Our knickers would be even more twisty if we had half a clue what was going on over there. Including blacklisting reporters who don't toe the government's line on what's happening in Iraq: But the military has started censoring many...
July 04, 2006
Ready and waiting for any excuse?. Emphasis mine. The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court...
June 29, 2006
Great news from the Supreme Court about Guantanamo and the limits on the Bush administration. Marginal news from Congress, where there are plenty of sheep who are willing to pander to the lowest common - and anti-American - denominator about...
June 27, 2006
I wake this morning to discover, via the New York Times that the august US Senate (the deliberative, thoughtful half of our legislative branch) is within a single vote of amending the US constitution to ban the burning of the...
June 13, 2006
The Department of Homeland Security - try to say that phrase without laughing after you read this....
June 02, 2006
This has John Cole outraged. And I have to agree with him - our rights to be secure in our homes seem to be weakening by the hour. Police may enter Californians' homes without warrants to arrest those suspected of...
May 20, 2006
I like this idea, in terms of a political movement. I think it's got a lot of potential. One of the most loathsome things about George W. Bush is that when he finds time to stop lifting weights or chopping...
May 15, 2006
Posted without comment, but what's your opinion? The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts. ......
May 13, 2006
Are we really surprised that the big phone companies (but not Qwest) meekly rolled over for the NSA database? Not even condsidering cynical thoughts like quid pro quo over ending Net Neutrality, can you imagine any major corporation that wouldn't...
May 11, 2006
Via Echidne, we find a link to an AP wire blurb indicating that the Justice Deparment has given up investigating the legality of the NSA wiretapping program. Why did Justice give up? "We have been unable to make any meaningful...
May 06, 2006
Via Digby, comes this story in today's WaPo (that I missed): The Air Force is investigating whether a two-star general violated military regulations by urging fellow Air Force Academy graduates to make campaign contributions to a Republican candidate for Congress...
May 03, 2006
I know ya'll know this, but I thought I'd just mention it again given this - I loathe the senior senator from Arizona (or, I loathe his unlimited daddy-state, regulations-for-everything politics)....
April 22, 2006
Showing that the president seems to only approve of leaks when one of his close aides is doing it the president's own political advantage - leaks that are to the president's political advantage are apparently very bad things (whether or...
April 17, 2006
While googling some of our recent visitors, up popped a website called Concealed Position. One thing I have found while keeping track of "interesting" visits is that other people do too. Anyway, from this find, more finds. Guess what? Corporate...
April 15, 2006
...Majikthise reminds us that there is still skulking going on: If you thought CIFA was scary, wait until you here what's up next. MSNBC reports that the Pentagon is trying to merge merge CIFA and the DSS to create a...
April 01, 2006
I didn't title this post "More Republican Insanity" mostly out of respect for the few (very few) moderate Republicans who continue to believe in the Constitution, checks and balances, and responsible government. I figure there have to be a few...
March 23, 2006
In Kansas, at roadside stops the police are going to start taking fingerprints? If you are stopped by police in Kansas, don’t be surprised if the officer pulls out a little black box and takes your fingerprints. !!!...
March 19, 2006
It's a few days old, but the first page of this New York Times story on anti-globalization protests in New York City in 2002 is worth reading. Long story short, the police arrested a number of people (the article says...
March 16, 2006
Been meaning to post this for a couple of days. The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office has seized four computer hard drives from a Lancaster newspaper, the Intelligencer Journal, as part of a grand-jury investigation into leaks to reporters. The state...
March 09, 2006
I realize I've had my head down recently (dissertation), but I surfaced just long enough to see this NYT story. Last I checked, the Administration was spying on Americans without even a FISA warrant. This violates both FISA and some...
March 08, 2006
Basically - the Senate Republicans are embarrassing themselves, and cutting the legs out from under the notion that Congress should have any say on the what the government does. But, really, it's arguably even worse than that. Read all of...
March 07, 2006
March 03, 2006
At least, that's what I expect next given the outcome of this case. A federal jury using an anti-terrorism law for the first time convicted six animal rights activists on Thursday for a campaign to drive a company out of...
February 28, 2006