skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Bill Requiring Warrants for Email Searches Nears Senate Vote - The Hill - The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pushing to fast-track legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before accessing emails and other private online messages.
Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) goal is for the Senate to unanimously approve his bill before the August recess, according to one of his committee aides. Any opposition could delay a vote until after Congress returns in the fall. He has secured unanimous support from his fellow Democrats and is in negotiations with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee's ranking member, and other Republicans to address their concerns.
Leahy's aide claimed that even if a floor vote is delayed until after the recess, they are already "way past" the 60 votes they would need to overcome a filibuster and approve the bill, which is co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah).
Gregory Nojeim, a senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology and a supporter of stronger privacy protections, said that the news of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs has given Leahy's bill a new boost of momentum.
"Revelations about NSA spying have made members of Congress very concerned about privacy," Nojeim said. "I think a lot of members are eager to vote for privacy legislation, and this provides that opportunity."Read more........
(2) Peggy Noonan: A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal - Wall Street Journal - The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.
That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.
Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency. Read more........
(3) Rise of the Warrior Cop - Wall Street Journal - On Jan. 4 of last year, a local narcotics strike force conducted a raid on the Ogden, Utah, home of Matthew David Stewart at 8:40 p.m. The 12 officers were acting on a tip from Mr. Stewart's former girlfriend, who said that he was growing marijuana in his basement. Mr. Stewart awoke, naked, to the sound of a battering ram taking down his door. Thinking that he was being invaded by criminals, as he later claimed, he grabbed his 9-millimeter Beretta pistol. The police say that they knocked and identified themselves, though Mr. Stewart and his neighbors said they heard no such announcement. Mr. Stewart fired 31 rounds, the police more than 250. Six of the officers were wounded, and Officer Jared Francom was killed. Mr. Stewart himself was shot twice before he was arrested. He was charged with several crimes, including the murder of Officer Francom. The police tactics at issue in the Stewart case are no anomaly. Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier. Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties. Read more.......
(4) The Democrat Party vs. the Republican Party: Who is the True Champion of Ending Slavery, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Community - Black Conservative Independent - ......... Our nation’s top historians reveal that the Democratic Party gave us the Ku Klux Klan, Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws and other repressive legislation which resulted in the multitude of murders, lynchings, mutilations, and intimidations (of thousands of black and white Republicans). On the issue of slavery: historians say the Democrats gave their lives to expand it, the Republicans gave their lives to ban it.
The Democrats: (1) Democrats fought to expand slavery while Republicans fought to end it. (2) Democrats passed those discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. (3) Democrats supported and passed the Missouri Compromise to protect slavery. (4) Democrats supported and passed the Kansas Nebraska Act to expand slavery. (5) Democrats supported and backed the Dred Scott Decision. (6) Democrats opposed educating blacks and murdered our teachers. (7) Democrats fought against anti-lynching laws. (8) Democrat Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, is well-known for having been a “Kleagle” in the Ku Klux Klan. (9) Democrat Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, personally filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 14 straight hours to keep it from passage. Read more history...... Article contributed by Steve Peters.
No comments:
Post a Comment