Homeless in Arizona

Kern County pigs videotaped beating man to death!!!

Kern County is just north of Los Angeles county, and Bakersfield is it's biggest city.

Sadly I suspect this happens much more frequently, but the cops always cover up their crimes. Well except in cases like this and the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles when the public accidentally video tapes the police crime.

If you remember the Rodney King beating the piggies lied and claimed that Rodney King was superhuman who was going to kill all the pigs that beat him up with his bare hands.

Source

Videotaped sheriff's beating prompts charges of coverup after death

By Paul Pringle and Richard Winton

May 13, 2013, 3:45 p.m.

The sharp cracks echoing from the East Bakersfield street were loud enough to jolt Ruben Ceballos from a midnight slumber. Then he heard screams.

The 19-year-old jumped from his living room sofa and hurried to the kitchen door, which offered a view of the violent scene unfolding outside. It was then, Ceballos said in an interview Monday, that he realized the sounds that woke him were the reports of batons striking a man’s head.

“I saw two sheriff’s deputies on top of this guy, just beating him,” Ceballos said. “He was screaming in pain … asking for help. He was incapable of fighting back – he was outnumbered, on the ground. They just beat him up.”

The man was David Silva, 33, a father of four, and he was pronounced dead less than an hour later. The incident last Wednesday and the actions of Kern County sheriff’s deputies in its aftermath have led to claims of police brutality and an attempted coverup.

According to witnesses like Ceballos and lawyers for them and the dead man’s family, the deputies hit Silva repeatedly in the head even though he was prone on the pavement and posed no threat.

Sheriff’s officials later seized cellphones from people who used them to shoot video of the altercation. In two cases, deputies detained the witnesses for hours until they agreed to hand over their phones, attorneys say.

“It makes it look like a coverup,” said David Cohn, a lawyer for Silva’s children and parents. “What we’re all concerned about is, ‘Are these videos going to be altered? Are they going to be deleted?’”

A witness identified in news accounts as Sulina Quair, 34, made a 911 call to the Sheriff’s Department and is heard on the recording saying, "I got it all on video camera and I'm sending it to the news. These cops have no reason to do this to this man."

"You’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 sheriffs," she said to the dispatcher. "The guy was laying on the floor and eight sheriffs ran up and started beating him up with sticks. The man is dead, laying here right here, right now."

Sheriff Donny Youngblood said it was too early in the investigation to reach any conclusions about Silva’s death, but he defended the decision to confiscate the phones as a way of preserving possible evidence.”

“We still have to secure the evidence, especially when the evidence can tell us whether we did it right or wrong,” Youngblood told The Times on Monday.

The Silva episode follows a number of brutality cases involving the Kern County Sheriffs’ Department in recent years. One led to criminal convictions of three deputies in the 2005 death of a jail inmate and another resulted in a $4.5-million court award for the family of a man who died in 2010 after being struck 33 times with batons and Tasered. A deputy named in civil lawsuit over the 2010 death was among those who confronted Silva, a laborer who previously had a couple of minor run-ins with authorities.

According to Cohn, Silva went to Kern County Medical Center late Wednesday night to seek counseling for some sort of emotional trouble, then left after a staffer told him he could not sleep there. He was sleeping on the street across from the hospital when the sheriff’s deputies arrived, Cohn said.

A sheriff’s statement said Silva resisted when the deputies tried to restrain him, and they were forced to use their batons. Silva stopped breathing and was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the statement said.

I am going to put putting all the future articles I collect on the murder of David Silva by the Kern County Sheriff's office into this URL.

Controversial Arizona laws rack up big legal fees

And that is a problem at all levels of government from cities and school districts to the Federal government.

Personally I suspect that at the Federal level almost all of the laws passed are unconstitutional based on the US Constitution's concept of a very limited Federal government.

We are told that Constitutions are there to limit the power of government, but when elected officials ignore the Constitution and pass these blatantly unconstitutional laws they don't even get a slap on the wrist for violating the Constitution. And as long as that is true I suspect the practice of routinely passing unconstitutional laws will continue.

Source

Controversial Arizona laws rack up big legal fees

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Mon May 13, 2013 11:26 PM

Arizona has led the nation in recent years with laws targeting illegal immigrants, abortions and school choice.

But being the first comes with a cost.

Lawsuits defending some of the state’s most controversial laws have cost millions of dollars and thousands of hours of state employee time, diverting them from other important work.

And with some lawsuits ongoing — and state lawmakers continuing to test the legal boundaries — costs will continue to climb.

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne blames the number of lawsuits in recent years, at least partly, on what he said appears to be the Obama administration’s agenda against Arizona. Gov. Jan Brewer’s office says such lawsuits are sometimes the cost of doing the right thing. The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which has challenged the state in several of the cases, blames a Legislature and governor that it says are too willing to ignore the U.S. Constitution.

But some of these cases precede the current Republican state leadership and go back to the days of Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Terry Goddard.

The Attorney General’s Office is obligated to defend legal challenges to any state law or voter-approved measure, either with in-house attorneys or by hiring outside legal firms to help.

“There would be no one else to defend it,” Horne said. “It’s our responsibility.”

Most often, state attorneys handle the cases themselves. Private firms often bill hundreds of dollars an hour, and all sides agree that doing it in-house tends to be significantly cheaper.

The Attorney General’s Office was unable to determine the value of the hours spent on key cases in recent years.

Employees are paid regardless of which cases arise, and the hours spent on each case include staff at all salary levels, from legal secretaries to Horne himself.

In Horne’s office, the median salary, according to 2012 salary data of 580 Attorney General’s Office employees, comes out to about $55 an hour. [About $110,000 a year] Using that number, the state has spent more than $300,000 in the 21/2 years since Horne took office defending a voter-approved law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and nearly $176,000 defending the state’s Clean Elections public-funding program for candidates.

Occasionally, the state does hire outside law firms, as has been the case with the controversial immigration law Senate Bill 1070, the state’s education standards for students learning English, and a legal challenge over requiring Medicaid co-pays.

The state paid more than $5 million to defend education requirements for students who are not proficient in English, according to the private attorneys’ billing data obtained via public-records request by The Arizona Republic.

The state paid $34,549 to defend a 2003 state law making co-pays mandatory for Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System patients.

Brewer has paid $3.2 million in private contributions to the Governor’s Border Security and Immigration Legal Defense Fund to defend SB 1070.

Brewer spokesman Matthew Benson said $530,500 remains in the legal-defense fund, which Brewer established in 2010 via executive order when she elected to hire a private attorney to represent her in the lawsuits instead of Goddard, who at the time was running against her for governor.

The case is still tied up in court, and the legal battle will likely continue for several years.

Horne said many of the lawsuits, such as SB 1070 and the law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, have arisen because Arizona was among the first to do something.

“Especially on the immigration issues, being on the border, it’s natural for us to deal with the issues earlier than other states,” he said.

Others, he said, seem to indicate the federal government is targeting Arizona. Arizona was among four states to pass a law requiring unions to allow secret ballots.

“The federal government wrote to all four states saying they would sue us. Four attorneys general wrote back saying we weren’t going to be intimidated,” Horne said. “They sued only one, us.”

ACLU of Arizona Executive Director Alessandra Soler said Brewer and the Legislature, not the federal government, are to blame for many of the lawsuits and associated costs in recent years. [Well to be honest it is the elected officials at all level of government that are the blame. There is no penalty to them if they pass blatantly unconstitutional laws, so they routinely pass unconstitutional laws for the special interest groups that helped get them into power.]

The ACLU and its clients have challenged the state in five of the 10 lawsuits over the most controversial laws in recent years: SB 1070, abortion laws, voter IDs, employer sanctions and school tax credits.

“We live in a state where our leaders have been ignoring the Constitution in favor of playing politics,” Soler said. “On too many occasions, this Legislature and Governor Brewer have approved bills that were clearly going to be struck down by the courts, and the taxpayers end up paying the price every time.” [And of course the problem also routinely happens at the Federal level because there is no penalty to member of the Congress and Senate who pass unconstitutional laws.]

She said the state should have known many of these laws were unconstitutional before they even passed them. [And I am sure that the folks who introduced and voted for these laws know that they were unconstitutional 99.9 percent of the time.]

“These laws got through because of the influence of these extremists in the Arizona Legislature, and the governor refused to take them on,” she said.

Particularly with SB 1070, Soler said, the state spent millions defending a law that may soon be moot.

“It’s unfortunate that the people of Arizona had to suffer through costly litigation before realizing that laws like SB 1070 have no place in this country,” she said. “Five out of the six challenged provisions have been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. And we are now creating a path to citizenship for millions in this country.”

Benson said Brewer does what she believes is best for Arizona and will not be deterred by threats of legal action.

“You set policy based on what you think is the right thing to do,” he said. “You don’t set policy based on threats from groups like the ACLU who say they might sue.”

Benson said that is simply one of the costs of doing business as a state.

“I’m quite certain the Attorney General’s Office was busy under Terry Goddard and Governor Napolitano, as well,” he said.

Kansas has followed Arizona in passing several controversial laws. This year, its attorney general asked the Legislature for an additional $1.2 million to cover anticipated legal costs to defend some of these laws.

Horne said he has balanced the cost of defending state laws in a couple of ways.

“Generally, we don’t ask the Legislature for an increase in our budget,” he said. “I was in the Legislature myself, and I understand the pressure they are under with the budget.”

Instead, Horne juggles the resources he has. Money spent on these cases means less money spent investigating and litigating cases of fraud against the public, he said.

But last year, Horne did ask the Legislature for more money indirectly.

The Attorney General’s Office pursues collection cases for other state departments and gets 30 percent of the revenue, up to a certain amount.

Horne said that, last year, the Legislature expanded the cap from $3.4 million to $5.2 million.

“I told them we would put more resources into collections, and it would pay off,” Horne said. “We benefited to the tune of about $2 million, and the general fund benefited to the tune of about $4 million, enabling me to put more money toward my priorities, like work against drug traffickers.”

Horne said he may ask next year to raise the limit further.

COST OF ARIZONA LAWS

Arizona has defended a number of controversial state laws in court over the past decade.

Here are some of those lawsuits and the costs in hours and/or dollars:

Senate Bill 1070

In 2010, the Legislature passed and Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070. Several individuals and organizations filed lawsuits challenging the law, including the federal government. The Department of Justice effort to halt the law from going into effect went to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the high court declaring part of the law unconstitutional and allowing part of it to go into effect. The underlying case and another case filed by immigrants and advocacy groups are still moving through the legal process and will likely be in the courts for years.

Attorney: Three private firms, paid for by the Governor’s Office with the Border Security Fund; Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

Hours: N/A for private firms; 1,830 AG hours.

Cost: $3.23 million for private firms; $69 in messenger-service fees for the Attorney General’s Office.

Employer sanctions

The Legal Arizona Workers Act, often called the employer-sanctions law, went into effect in 2008 and gives prosecutors the power to revoke the business license of an employer found to have knowingly hired an illegal immigrant. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 upheld the law as constitutional.

Attorney: Attorney General’s Office, with assistance from outside attorneys.

Hours: 2,134 AG hours.

Cost: $2,950 for outside attorneys; $16,424 for messenger service, shipping, court transcripts, travel to out-of-state court hearings and copies.

English-language learners

Since 1992, proponents and opponents of the state’s requirements for students learning to speak English have battled in the court system. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 largely sided with the state, but the battle continued. Earlier this year, the U.S. District Court in Arizona ruled that the programs do not violate federal civil-rights laws. That ruling is now being appealed.

Attorney: Four private law firms, paid out of the Arizona Department of Administration.

Hours: N/A.

Cost: $5,029,973.

Clean Elections

In 2008, a handful of current and former lawmakers filed a federal lawsuit challenging the legality of the state’s public-elections funding system. It went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the program’s matching-funds portion was unconstitutional.

Attorney: Attorney General’s Office.

Hours: 3,199 AG hours.

Cost: $22,253 for court transcripts, court-reporting fees, messenger service, shipping, travel and printing.

AHCCCS co-pays

Lawmakers made co-payments for patients in the state’s Medicaid program, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, mandatory in 2003. Two federal lawsuits have been filed challenging the law over the years. U.S. District Court judges in both cases, one this past February, rejected the co-pays.

Attorney: Johnston Law Office, paid for by AHCCCS.

Hours: 157 AG hours.

Cost: $34,549.

Voter IDs

Arizona voters in 2004 passed a measure requiring voters to show identification at the polls and proof of citizenship to register to vote. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2012 ruled that the state could not require proof of citizenship for voters registering with the federal forms. The U.S. Supreme Court heard the case in March and is expected to rule later this summer.

Attorney: Attorney General’s Office, with some assistance from outside attorneys.

Hours: 5,645 AG hours.

Cost: $25,000 for outside attorneys; $95,102 for court transcripts, court reporting, court filing fees, messenger service, printing, expert witnesses, shipping and travel.

Osaka mayor: Wartime sex slaves were necessary

Source

Osaka mayor: Wartime sex slaves were necessary

Associated Press Mon May 13, 2013 10:11 PM

TOKYO — An outspoken nationalist mayor said the Japanese military’s forced prostitution of Asian women before and during World War II was necessary to “maintain discipline” in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle.

The comments made Monday are already raising ire in neighboring countries that bore the brunt of Japan’s wartime aggression and that have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone for wartime atrocities.

Toru Hashimoto, the young, brash mayor of Osaka who is also co-leader of an emerging conservative political party, also told reporters that there wasn’t clear evidence that the Japanese military coerced women to become what are euphemistically called “comfort women.”

“To maintain discipline in the military, it must have been necessary at that time,” said Hashimoto. “For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That’s clear to anyone.”

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels.

An unidentified South Korean government official told Yonhap news agency it was disappointing that a senior Japanese official “made comments supportive of crimes against humanity and revealed a serious lack of a historical understanding and respect for women’s rights.”

Hashimoto’s comments come amid mounting criticism at the prospect of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative government revising Japan’s past apologies for wartime atrocities. Before he took office in December, Abe had advocated revising a 1993 statement by then-Prime Minister Yohei Kono acknowledging and expressing remorse for the suffering caused to the sexual slaves of Japanese troops.

Abe has acknowledged “comfort women” existed but has denied they were coerced into prostitution, citing a lack of official evidence.

Recently, top officials in Abe’s government have appeared to backpedal on suggestions the government might revise past apologies, apparently to calm tensions with South Korea and China and address U.S. concerns about Abe’s nationalist agenda.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga repeated the previous government position and said that those women went through unbearable pain.

“The stance of the Japanese government on the comfort women issue is well known. They have suffered unspeakably painful experiences. The Abe Cabinet has the same sentiments as past Cabinets.”

Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura said Hashimoto’s remark doesn’t help as Japan has faced criticism from its neighboring countries and the U.S. over its interpretation of history.

“A series of remarks related to our interpretation of (wartime) history have been already misunderstood. In that sense, Mr. Hashimoto’s remark came at a bad time,” Shimomura told reporters. “I wonder if there is any positive meaning to intentionally make such remarks at this particular moment.”

Hashimoto, 43, is co-head of the newly formed Japan Restoration Party with former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who is a strident nationalist.

Sakihito Ozawa, the party’s parliamentary affairs chairman, said he believed Hashimoto’s remarks reflected his personal view but expressed concerns about repercussions.

“We should ask his real intentions and stop this at some point,” he said.

IRS officials in Washington were involved in targeting of conservative groups

Source

IRS officials in Washington were involved in targeting of conservative groups

By Juliet Eilperin and Zachary A. Goldfarb, Published: May 13 E-mail the writers

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea-party-affiliated groups, the documents show.

IRS employees in Cincinnati told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare” groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists.

Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters Friday that the “absolutely inappropriate” actions were undertaken by “front-line people” working in Cincinnati to target groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names.

In one instance, however, Ron Bell, an IRS employee, informed a lawyer representing a conservative group focused on voter fraud that the application was under review in Washington. On several other occasions, IRS officials in Washington and California sent conservative groups detailed questionnaires about their voter outreach and other activities, according to the documents.

“For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote.

Moreover, details of the IRS’s efforts to target conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012, far earlier than has been disclosed, according to Republican congressional aides briefed by the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration ­(TIGTA) on the details of their reviews.

Then-Commissioner Douglas Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee who stepped down in November, received a briefing from the TIGTA about what was happening in the Cincinnati office in May 2012, the aides said. His deputy and the agency’s current acting commissioner, Steven T. Miller, also learned about the matter that month, the aides said.

The officials did not share details with Republican lawmakers who had been demanding to know whether the IRS was targeting conservative groups, Republicans said.

“I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement Monday. “In response to the first letter I sent with some of my colleagues, Steven Miller, the current Acting IRS Commissioner, responded that these groups weren’t being targeted.”

“Knowing what we know now,” he added, “the IRS was at best being far from forth coming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress.”

As new details emerged Monday, Democrats and Republicans alike decried the agency’s actions as an unacceptable abuse of power.

In a news conference Monday, President Obama said he learned of the investigating in media reports on Friday and has “no patience with it.”

“If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on, and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that’s outrageous,” Obama said. “And there’s no place for it. And they have to be held fully accountable.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Monday that the White House counsel’s office learned of an upcoming IRS inspector general’s report on April 22 as part of a routine notification but had not received access to the report.

On Capitol Hill, two Senate panels — the Finance Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — announced Monday that they will investigate. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Ways and Means Committee have been looking into reports of IRS attempts to single out organizations on the right for heightened scrutiny. Ways and Means has called IRS officials to testify Friday.

“These actions by the IRS are an outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public’s trust,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). “The IRS will now be the ones put under additional scrutiny.”

Separately, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) introduced companion bills Monday that would require the IRS to fire any employee found “willfully” violating “the constitutional rights of a taxpayer,” according to statements by both lawmakers. The bills also would make them criminally liable for their actions.

Even as Obama vowed that his administration “will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this,” however, the IRS offered no new information on how it selected which groups to single out for scrutiny.

The White House is legally barred from contacting the IRS about a tax matter, under a prohibition adopted after the Watergate scandal. And although it can contact the Treasury Department about tax issues, neither Treasury nor the IRS can disclose specific taxpayer information. The IRS can release information about a petition for tax- exempt status only after it has been approved.

Obama is not in a position to remove Lerner, a career official who can be terminated for cause only under normal civil service proceedings. The IRS has two political appointees: the commissioner, who serves a five-year term, and the chief counsel.

As the IRS came under broader political attack Monday, more details surfaced on how the exempt-organizations division struggled to determine which nonprofits should receive “social welfare” status after the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling. That decision, which allowed corporations and unions to raise and spend un­limited amounts of money on elections, opened the door for groups to accept undisclosed contributions as long as their “primary purpose” was not politics.

In a Jan. 9, 2012, letter to the Richmond Tea Party, IRS specialist Stephen Seok asked questions including “the names of the donors, contributors and grantors,” as well as the size of the contributions and grants, and when they were given.

Richmond Tea Party President Larry Nordvig, whose group applied for tax-exempt status in December 2009 and received it in July 2012, said the extended inquiry had “a very chilling effect” on how much money the group could raise because its donors preferred anonymity.

The Wetumpka Tea Party of Alabama experienced a two-year delay after submitting its initial application.

Becky Gerritson, a 44-year-old stay-at-home mother and the group’s president, said the IRS sent a questionnaire asking for the names of all volunteers, donor identification and contribution amounts, the names of any legislators its members had communicated with directly or indirectly, and the contents of all speeches its members had made, among a long list of other details.

“I was outraged,” Gerritson said. “Being an election year, I felt like it was intimidation.”

The group did not provide the information. Approval came only after the group sought help from the American Center for Law and Justice, which threatened a lawsuit against the IRS, Gerritson said.

Although some of the groups were explicitly labeled “tea party” or “patriot,” others that came under intense scrutiny were focused on challenging the Affordable Care Act — known by many as Obamacare — or the integrity of federal elections.

In a June 3, 2011, letter to the IRS, Mitchell questioned the agency’s motivations for delaying recognition of one of her clients who had filed nearly two years earlier, writing, “Is the [group’s] opposition to Obamacare and the takeover of America’s healthcare system by the government the reason that this application has been held up and not approved?”

Catherine Engelbrecht, president of the Houston-based True the Vote, first filed for tax-exempt status in July 2010. At one point, Engelbrecht — who is still awaiting a determination from the IRS regarding her voting rights organization and a separate tea party group, King Street Patriots — said an IRS employee informed her: “I’m just doing what Washington is telling me to do. I’m just asking what they want me to ask.”

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Josh Hicks and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums.

Arizona Taxi drivers now subject to random drug testing

The way the law is written even if the taxi cab drivers flunk the tests they are not prevented from being hired by companies that operate taxi cabs.

The only requirements are that the taxi drivers take the stupid drug tests, which will cost around $100 each, and that the companies that hire them have the results on file.

The results of the drug tests are totally meaningless, and thus this silly law is nothing more then a government welfare program for corporations that give drug tests.

Source

Arizona Taxi drivers now subject to random drug testing

Posted: Wednesday, May 8, 2013 11:31 am

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

For the first time ever, drivers of taxi cabs and limousines in Arizona will soon be subject to random drug testing.

Gov. Jan Brewer on Tuesday signed legislation which will require those who own or lease out taxis and other vehicle for hire to screen applicants for drugs at the time they are hired or allowed to lease one of the vehicles. That is on top of an existing requirement for a criminal background check. And drivers also will be subject to random tests at least once a year.

The measure takes effect later this year.

Kevin Tyne, director of the Department of Weights and Measures, stressed this is not some new government program with the state going out and stopping drivers. Instead, he said it's designed to make the owners of these vehicles more responsible.

But he said it is up to them to decide what to do with that information: Nothing in the new law prohibits a company from hiring or refusing to fire a driver who tests positive. That mirrors the existing laws on background checks, with no prohibition against hiring certain felons.

Tyne said, though, this is a big step for Arizona.

"Nearly every other jurisdiction that regulates and oversees and licenses 'for hire' vehicles like taxis and liveries and limousines have some sort of a basic drug testing requirement,'' he said. "Arizona was noticeably absent in that regard.''

He said many people use taxis and limousines, both local residents and visitors.

"Patrons ought to have some basic sense that the driver has at least been drug tested,'' Tyne said.

The legislation is unrelated to the mishap Saturday where five people riding in a limousine on the San Mateo Bridge south of San Francisco were killed in a fire. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation and there has been no indication at this point that the driver, who also was burned, was in any way responsible.

California officials said it appears the vehicle, which was licensed for eight passengers, had one more than the permitted number. There appears to be no similar laws in Arizona governing how many passengers can be in any particular vehicle.

Arizona poll: Majority backs same-sex marriage, legalizing pot

Arizona poll: Majority backs same-sex marriage, legalizing pot

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Tue May 14, 2013 12:25 PM

A majority of Arizonans support same-sex marriage and decriminalizing marijuana use, a new poll has found.

The Behavior Research Center’s Rocky Mountain poll found most Arizonans — 56 percent — favor legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use, while 37 percent oppose such a move and 7 percent were unsure about the issue.

Voters in 2010 by a narrow margin legalized marijuana for medicinal use; more than 35,000 Arizonans participate in that program.

Independent voters were most supportive of legalization at 72 percent. While Republicans and conservatives were most likely to be opposed: 41 percent of Republicans said they favored legalization of marijuana while 56 percent of those who identified with the GOP said they were opposed to it.

The poll also found 55 percent of Arizonans favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry while 35 percent oppose same-sex marriage and 10 percent say they are unsure. Most women, Latinos, liberals, moderates, Independents, Democrats and voters younger than 55 say they supported such unions, according to the poll.

Since 1996, Arizona law has defined marriage as between one man and one woman. In 2008, voters approved adding that definition of marriage to the state Constitution. It says that “only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state.”

The poll found Republicans are divided on same-sex marriage with 53 percent opposed and 36 percent in favor. The poll also found that while 51 percent of political conservatives were opposed, 41 percent support same-sex unions.

The poll, released Tuesday, was conducted between April 3 and April 16, and is based on 700 telephone interviews statewide, including 438 registered voters.

The survey’s overall margin of error is plus or minus 3.8 percent.

Lower drunk-driving limit to .05, federal board says

Source

Lower drunk-driving limit to .05, federal board says

Associated Press Tue May 14, 2013 10:21 AM

WASHINGTON — Federal accident investigators recommended Tuesday that states cut their threshold for drunken driving by nearly half, matching a standard that has substantially reduced highway deaths in other countries.

The National Transportation Safety Board said states should shrink the standard from the current .08 blood alcohol content to .05 as part of a series of recommendations aimed at reducing alcohol-related highway deaths.

More than 100 countries have adopted the .05 alcohol content standard or lower, according to a report by the board’s staff. In Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped.

A woman weighing less than 120 pounds can reach .05 after just one drink, studies show. A man weighing up to 160 pounds reaches .05 after two drinks.

New approaches are needed to combat drunken driving, which claims the lives of more than a third of the 30,000 people killed each year on U.S highways — a level of carnage that that has remained stubbornly consistent for the past decade and a half, the board said.

“Our goal is to get to zero deaths because each alcohol-impaired death is preventable,” NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said. “Alcohol-impaired deaths are not accidents, they are crimes. They can and should be prevented. The tools exist. What is needed is the will.”

But the recommendation to lowering the alcohol content threshold to .05 is likely to meet strong resistance from states, said Jonathan Adkins, an official with the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway safety offices.

“It was very difficult to get .08 in most states so lowering it again won’t be popular,” Adkins said. “The focus in the states is on high (blood alcohol content) offenders as well as repeat offenders. We expect industry will also be very vocal about keeping the limit at .08.”

The lower alcohol content threshold was one of nearly 20 recommendations aimed at reducing drunken driving made by the board, including that states adopt measures to ensure more widespread use of use of alcohol ignition interlock devices. Those require a driver to breathe into a tube, much like the breathalyzers police ask suspected drunken drivers to use.

The board has previously recommended states require all convicted drunken drivers install the interlock devices in their vehicles as a condition to resume driving. Currently, 17 states and two California counties require all convicted drivers use the devices.

However, only about a quarter of drivers ordered to use the devices actually end up doing so, NTSB said. Drivers use a variety of ways to evade using the devices, including claiming they won’t drive at all or don’t own a vehicle and therefore don’t need the devices, staff said.

The board recommended the National Highway Safety Administration, which makes safety grants to states, [that is part of the "bribe" I mentioned before] develop a program to encourage states to ensure all convicted drivers actually use the devices. The board also recommended that all suspected drunken drivers whose licenses are confiscated by police be required to install interlocks as a condition of getting their licenses reinstated even though they haven’t yet been convicted of a crime. [Screw that little thing about the government being require to assume that you are innocent till proven guilty. They want to make it so you are guilty till you prove yourself innocent!!!]

Courts usually require drivers to pay for the devices, which cost about $50 to $100 to buy plus a $50 a month fee to operate, staff said.

The board has previously called on the safety administration and the auto industry to step up their research into technology for use in all vehicles that can detect whether a driver has elevated blood alcohol without the driver breathing into a tube or taking any other action. Drivers with elevated levels would be unable to start their cars.

But the technology is still years away.

Studies show more than 4 million people a year in the U.S. drive while intoxicated, but about half of the intoxicated drivers stopped by police escape detection, the NTSB report said. [Well, if they police can't detect that these 4 million or so folks are intoxicated, they probably are not too intoxicated to drive] The board made several recommendations aimed at increasing both the visibility and effectiveness of police enforcement, including expanded use of passive alcohol devices. The devices are often contained in real flash lights or shaped to look like a cellphone that officers wear on their shirt pockets or belts. If an officer points the flashlight at a driver or the cellphone-like device comes in close proximity to an intoxicated driver, the devices will alert police who may not have any other reason to suspected drunken driving.

The use of the devices currently is very limited, the report said.

Dramatic progress was made in the 1980s through the mid-1990s after the minimum drinking age was raised to 21 and the legally-allowable maximum level of drivers’ blood alcohol content was lowered to .08, the report said. Today, drunken driving claims about 10,000 lives a year, down from over 18,000 in 1982. At that time, alcohol-related fatalities accounted for about 40 percent of highway deaths.

Scottsdale Messy Yard cops condemn mans home!!!

Source

Condemnation a last-resort tool against Scottsdale hoarders

By Laurie Merrill The Republic | azcentral.com Tue May 14, 2013 2:37 PM

When authorities last week slapped a “condemned” notice on the home of a man known for hoarding, it was a rarity for Scottsdale.

Scottsdale condemns only about two houses a year, said Steve Gallant, the city’s building-inspection supervisor.

“Getting someone out of a house has never been our goal,” Gallant said. “Our goal is to keep them in the home. But the home has to be safe.” [Reminds me of how the American military would justify burning down villages in Vietnam, by saying to save the village they had to destroy it.]

Neighbors said the condemnation notice was more than a decade in the making.

On May 6, officials descended on the stench-filled home in the 8700 block of Sage Drive. They removed 13 large tortoises, 13 exotic birds and a dog. [If Howard Mitchell was living there it probably was perfectly OK for him!!! Who cares if these jackbooted messy yard cops don't like the condition of his home. F*** em!!!!]

Howard Mitchell, 70, a former doctor, had been hospitalized and wasn’t there to keep officials out. For the first time, authorities saw the way the recluse lived.

“The house was uninhabitable,” Gallant said.

Officials found no running water, piles of hoarded debris, animal excrement, distressed animals and exposed wires, Gallant said. [Hey, if they are going to seize the guys home for messy yard crimes, they have to demonize him with statements like these, so they don't look like the jackbooted government thugs they are]

While officials were there, they smelled smoke in the kitchen, which firefighters quelled. Had no one been inside that day, firefighters would likely have later battled a dangerous blaze, police said.

During a recent interview, Gallant and other city officials discussed the difficult decisions officials face when residents complain about neighbors. As a philosophy, the city would rather offer residents social services than oust them from homes. [How sweet! The messy yard cops would rather see him on the dole then condemn his home for messy yard crimes!!! Yea, sure!!!]

On a practical level, hoarding is not illegal, so homeowners must violate other codes for the city to cite them. Officials also can’t enter homes without permission and often can’t judge the full extent of problems by viewing the front and back yards. [That's not what they said to me when they broke into my home. It was something like "Look mother f*cker" I got a gun and badge and can do anything I want!!!]

Like any homeowner, hoarders have a right to privacy, said Mike Phillips, Scottsdale public-affairs director. If no one answers a knock on a door, officials don’t go in.

“As long as they are not hurting themselves or others, we are not going inside,” Phillips said.

Inspectors can view properties from public rights of way or the yards of consenting neighbors.

Condemning a property is a last resort. [Government tyrants always say that when they terrorize the people they rule]

But neighbors, who complained for more than decade about Mitchell, said they were stunned that it took city officials so long to take significant action.

“Various members of our family have contacted the city over the years,” neighbor Rich Cleary and his parents said in a March e-mail to a Scottsdale City Council member.

Hoarder cited

At least once a year, the Cleary family contacted city officials, describing conditions outside Mitchell’s home. Like the rest of the neighbors, they had never been invited inside.

At least twice a year, city officials responded to complaints about Mitchell, said Ruan Keagy, the Planning, Neighborhood and Transportation director.

“Every time, we went out there and observed a violation,” Keagy said.

In 2005, the city cited him for his overgrown front yard. In 2007, officials cited him for overgrowth and for having an inoperable vehicle in his driveway.

Both times, Mitchell paid his fines and brought his property up to compliance, said Keagy, describing Mitchell’s problems as “cyclical.”

Neighbors said any fixes were temporary at best. Lately, they said, the reeking had gotten worse.

“It was the smell of death,” neighbor Ann Sespico said. “You couldn’t be in your backyard.”

Scottsdale often refers cases to social-service groups, such as the Police Crisis Intervention Team.

Police, Fire and Human Services departments had discussed the Mitchell case, Keagy said.

“The bottom line,” Phillips said, “is we want to help people. [Didn't Hitler say the same thing about the Jews???]

---------

Hoarder’s pets show signs of neglect

The dog, 13 macaws and African greys, and 13 African tortoises the Arizona Humane Society removed from Howard Mitchell’s home show signs of lack of care, spokeswoman Britta Nelson said.

The exotic birds were distressed, she said, and the discarded food in their cages was an inappropriate diet.

Most of the tortoises are older and huge, she said. They “are not well socialized ... and will hiss at you.”

Mitchell faces cruelty-to-animal charges when released from the hospital. He had 10 days to try to reclaim his pets from the Humane Society. As of Monday, he had not done so.

[If you ask me the Scottsdale Messy Yard Cops don't want to help this man, but really want to put him in prison for the rest of his life and seize his home for trivial messy yard violations.]

Kern County asks FBI to investigate police murder

This case may be slightly different because it was a high profile police murder, that was video taped by the public, just like the Rodney King beating.

Of course the cops in the Rodney King crime got off pretty easy, even if they did a few months of time in a country club prison.

If normal White folks who were not had committed that crime they would have done some serious time compared to what the cops got.

Arizona could deny resources for federal laws under bill

And of course this would apply to stuff like the insane and unconstitutional "war on drugs" which is clearly unconstitutional per the 10th Amendment, despite the Supreme Courts ruling that the "war on drugs" is Constitutional per the "interstate commerce" clause.

Source

Arizona could deny resources for federal laws under bill

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Tue May 14, 2013 9:59 PM

Arizona voters in 2014 will decide whether the state can deny resources to federal laws or programs it deems unconstitutional.

The Legislature on Tuesday gave final approval to Senate Concurrent Resolution 1016, its latest effort to flex state muscle against the federal government. The measure will go on the November 2014 ballot. It proposes to allow either the governor and state Legislature or voters to refuse to use state personnel and resources on any federal law or action deemed to be inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution.

Sen. Chester Crandell, R-Heber, sponsored the bill.

“We need to stand up and use our sovereign rights and this is another tool in the toolbox to be able to do that,” he said in a public hearing on the bill.

Former state lawmaker and unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Jonathan Paton and Phoenix businessman Jack Biltis are behind the resolution.

This is a second attempt at passing such a measure by Biltis, who runs an employer-services firm. He spent more than $1 million of his money on an unsuccessful 2012 effort to put a similar measure on the ballot. The Checks and Balances in Government initiative lacked enough valid signatures to qualify, elections officials said.

Biltis said in committee hearings on SCR 1016 that he would again invest his own money in campaigns for the measure.

Paton told lawmakers during a committee hearing that he believed the measure is constitutional based on Supreme Court rulings. He said the court clearly ruled the federal government cannot “commandeer” a state to act in support of a federal law. [Again, I think comments by the Founders in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers support this.]

“We can’t stop the federal government directly ... but we can say how we are going to use our resources within the environs of our own state,” he said. “We have the power as a state to decide what’s right for our state.”

States, including Arizona, have pushed for measures in recent years to ignore certain federal laws, such as “Obamacare” or proposed gun restrictions. Paton said this is not “nullification” — a state refusing to enforce a federal law — but rather a broad solution that can be used whenever a situation arises.

“I don’t envision this as a left or right issue,” he said. “I envision this as a checks and balances issue.” [Again, I think the statements by the Founders in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers agree with this.]

House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, D-Phoenix, said he envisions the bill as “a complete waste of time.” [Chad Campbell is a "complete waste of time"]

“It’s talking about not wasting money on things we feel are unconstitutional at the state, but the referendum itself is unconstitutional,” he said. “You can’t supersede federal authority.” [True, but 99.9 percent of the laws passed by the US Congress are unconstitutional and this bill simply allows Arizona to ignore those unconstitutional laws]

He said there are already checks and balances against the federal government overstepping its bounds — the courts. [Sadly the checks and balances and the courts don't work. The insane and unconstitutional "war on drugs" is clearly unconstitutional per the 10th Amendment, but the Supremes have allowed it to continue for 100 years.]

And that, he said, is exactly where this would end up. He said if voters or the Legislature decide to deny services for a certain federal action, the federal government will likely sue and the courts will still be the deciding factor in the end. [True, but for the wrong reason. The Feds would certainly sue, but the royals rulers have grown too big for their britches and they have said that the "interstate commerce" clause in the Constitution gives them the power to do anything they damn well feel like, and sadly the Supreme Court has agreed with them!]

“This is just another example of the figurative finger-pointing we’ve been doing at the federal government ... and in some cases, the literal finger-pointing,” he said.

Tempe cops want to arrest students who took drunk to hospital???

Source

Drunk ASU student left at Tempe hospital with Post-it

Posted: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 4:09 pm

Associated Press

An Arizona State University student who passed out from drinking tequila was left in wheelchair in a hospital lobby with a Post-it note saying he took part in a drinking competition.

Tempe police say the 19-year-old student was found early Saturday morning in the emergency room lobby of St. Luke’s Hospital.

Police say a sticky note on the student’s body gave his name and said he’d been drinking and needed help. Hospital staff noticed the student and helped him.

Sgt. Michael Pooley says the student consumed about 20 shots of tequila and had a blood-alcohol level of 0.47 percent, nearly six times the legal limit for driving.

Police say criminal charges could be filed against the friends who left the student.

Obama, the uninterested president

Obama, the uninterested president

By Dana Milbank, Published: May 14

President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency.

Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters.

And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their ideology: He responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news.

In the phone-snooping case, Obama didn’t even stir from his stool. Instead, he had his press secretary, former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney, go before an incensed press corps Tuesday afternoon and explain why the president will not be involving himself in his Justice Department’s trampling of press freedoms.

“Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the Associated Press,” Carney announced.

The president “found out about the news reports yesterday on the road,” he added.

And now that Obama has learned about this extraordinary abuse of power, he’s not doing a thing about it. “We are not involved at the White House in any decisions made in connection with ongoing criminal investigations,” Carney argued.

Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason asked how Obama felt about “being compared to President Nixon on this.”

The press secretary laughed. “People who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history,” he said.

Carney had a point there. Nixon was a control freak. Obama seems to be the opposite: He wants no control over the actions of his administration. As the president distances himself from the actions of “independent” figures within his administration, he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes. Certainly, a president can’t know what everybody in his administration is up to — but he can take responsibility, he can fire people and he can call a stop to foolish actions such as wholesale snooping into reporters’ phone calls.

At the start of Tuesday’s briefing, the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn pointed out that in all the controversies of the moment — the Benghazi “talking points,” the IRS targeting and the journalists’ phone records — “you have placed the burden of responsibility someplace else. . . . But it is the president’s administration.”

President Passerby, however, was not joining the fray. Carney repeated Obama’s assertion that the IRS’s actions would be outrageous only “if” they are true. Never mind that the IRS has already admitted the violations and apologized.

The press secretary said repeatedly that “we have to wait” for a formal report by the agency’s inspector general before the most powerful man in the world could take action. By contrast, Carney didn’t think it necessary to wait to assert that nobody in the White House knew about the IRS activities until “a few weeks ago.” (They apparently didn’t tell the boss about the matter until Friday.) Tuesday night, Obama issued a statement saying he had seen the I.G. report and directed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew “to hold those responsible for these failures accountable.”

The response to the deep-dive into AP phone records — more than 20 work, home and mobile phone lines in three cities over two months — also got the President Passerby response: “He cannot comment specifically on an ongoing criminal investigation or actions that investigators at the Department of Justice may or may not have taken.”

It didn’t matter to Carney that the Justice Department had already admitted the actions in a letter to the AP. “But we know it happened, just as the IRS admitted what it had done,” Fox News’s Wendell Goler protested.

“Again, it would be inappropriate to comment,” said Carney, one of the 42 times he used the words “appropriate” or “inappropriate” in his hour-long briefing. One of the few things Carney thought it appropriate to say was that Obama thinks the press should be “unfettered.”

NPR’s Ari Shapiro asked Carney to square Obama’s belief in an unfettered press with the fact that he has prosecuted twice as many leakers as all previous administrations combined.

Carney said Obama’s love of press freedom “is backed up by his support for a media shield law.” This would be the shield law that died in Congress in 2010 because of Obama’s objections.

Alexis Simendinger, from RealClearPolitics, challenged Carney to harmonize his refusal to meddle in an “ongoing investigation” with Obama’s comments on the Trayvon Martin case last year, when a Justice Department investigation was ongoing.

“Come on,” Carney replied with scorn, repeating the excuse that “we have no knowledge” of the phone snooping “beyond the press reports that we’ve read.”

And that’s just the problem.

Twitter: @Milbank

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Obama’s second term clouded by controversies

Obama’s second term clouded by controversies

By Dan Balz, Published: May 14

After answering questions Monday morning about two of the controversies that have undermined his administration, President Obama flew off to New York to raise money for the Democratic Party. There, before partisan donors, he reflected on his second term and said he will continue to reach out to Republicans. “I sure want to do some governing,” he explained.

Obama’s words suggest that he believes there is a way to compartmentalize the business of his second term: legislative and other business here, scandals over there. But things are too messy for that right now. A politician who has counted good luck as part of his skill set will need all the breaks he can muster to pull off that bit of political jujitsu.

Even in the best of times, Obama’s outreach to Republicans produced little in return — and these are no longer close to the best of times. The question is whether the barely civil relationship between the White House and the opposition party has been irreparably damaged. A related question is how much the controversies will weaken Obama’s standing with the public. Together, the answers will decide how effectively he can govern.

It is too early to draw any broad conclusions about the long-term damage to Obama’s presidency from the news that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups and that the Justice Department collected two months of phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors. But in the moment, these controversies — along with the ongoing congressional investigation of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya — have created major challenges for the administration.

The president and his advisers have tried to insulate the White House from the actions of the IRS and the Justice Department, claiming ignorance. The IRS, officials argued Friday, is quasi-independent. It took the president three days to express his outrage at the agency’s actions. As for the Justice Department’s leak investigation, White House officials said Monday night that it was a department decision that was not forwarded to the president.

Those are temporary responses that probably will not be sufficient over time. The White House may have known nothing about either, but both are now the president’s problem. And both reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days.

The tea party movement has been a political nemesis for Obama since the first year of his presidency. The movement helped turn the battle over health care into one of the most divisive fights of his presidency. The political potency of the grass-roots activists who rallied behind tea party banners helped deliver the worst midterm-election defeat to a party holding the White House in 70 years.

The president and his advisers may not have known anything about IRS targeting of tea party groups for greater scrutiny, but the abuse of power confirmed complaints by conservatives and GOP lawmakers that the practice was taking place and impressions among conservatives that the administration is truly hostile to the tea party movement. Holding those responsible accountable will be only part of Obama’s challenge in responding.

Less is known about the Justice Department’s leak investigation. It was carried out by an administration that came into office talking about the importance of civil liberties, but whose record has been a disappointment to civil libertarians. No one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists.

Obama showed his greatest passion Monday when he denounced the GOP-led inquiry of the killing of four Americans in a terrorist attack in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. That partisan politics are involved in the congressional investigation is certainly the case. In addition to whatever enmity is felt toward the Obama administration over its handling of the aftermath, GOP leaders see former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton for what she is, which is a potentially formidable presidential candidate in 2016.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says the president had "no knowledge" of a Department of Justice probe into AP phone records, but says Obama also believes "classified information needs to remain classified."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says the president had "no knowledge" of a Department of Justice probe into AP phone records, but says Obama also believes "classified information needs to remain classified."

Obama argued that the current focus on administration talking points is a political sideshow. As others, including The Post’s Glenn Kessler, have noted, the multiple alterations in those talking points appeared to reflect an internal turf war between the State Department and the CIA. Obama argued that it was hardly a coverup.

Given the timing of the attack in Benghazi, which occurred in the heat of a presidential race, White House officials worked to keep the issue from becoming part of the campaign debate — and GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s maladroit handling of it at the start provided convenient cover for the White House. Obama’s campaign put Romney on the defensive, rather than the opposite, although the deaths of the four Americans — and the subsequent security lapses that were enumerated — were a major stain on the administration.

As questions were raised, White House officials avoided drawing conclusions about the origins of the attacks. Even as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center testified that what happened at the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi was a terrorist attack, the president continued to resist labeling it as such. For whatever reason, the administration’s semantic gamesmanship contributed to what the president now dismisses as a sideshow.

Obama is early into his second term, but it has not gone as planned. His gun-control initiative was blocked. Prospects for a grand bargain on the budget are problematic. Immigration reform is moving forward slowly in the Senate and faces uncertainty in the House, although administration officials remain optimistic that Congress eventually will approve a bill.

On Monday night in New York, the president said, “I’m going to do everything I can over the next 31 / 2 years to continue to reach out to my Republican friends on the other side of the aisle. . . . I want to get some stuff done. I don’t have a lot of time.”

He will have to spend some of that precious time trying to clean up unexpected messes that have landed on his desk. How seriously off track his administration is will depend in large part on how skillfully Obama handles what is before him.

balzd@washpost.com

IRS, AP scandals bring tea partyers, ‘lamestream media’ together

IRS, AP scandals bring tea partyers, ‘lamestream media’ together

By Kathleen Parker, Published: May 14 E-mail the writer

Breaking news: Conservative organizations suddenly have found common cause with one of their favorite objects of contempt — the benighted Mainstream Media.

Or as the tea party queen and former Alaska governor likes to put it, the “lamestream media.”

In a twist of irony, the two groups have coalesced around a common enemy: the U.S. government.

Revelations the past few days that the Internal Revenue Service has been giving special attention to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status have converged with the news that the Justice Department has been seizing phone recordsfrom the Associated Press. Reaction from both camps has been outrage seasoned with constitutional fervor.

Not to overstate it, but nothing less than free speech is at stake, about which no one should be confused.

Briefly, the IRS singled out specific groups with words such as “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names for special scrutiny, including asking for donor lists. Needless to say, this could have a chilling effect on donors who prefer anonymity, but it also smacks of intimidation. The implication: Criticize the government and you will pay. Literally. The targeting, moreover, was not a rogue operation by some random field agents in Cincinnati, as originally claimed, but, according to The Post, involved IRS officials in Washington.

“Outrageous” was the term President Obama used Monday during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Obama promised to get to the bottom of it even though, as president, he can’t directly contact the IRS about a tax matter. This is owing to the legacy of Watergate, when then-President Richard Nixon used the IRS to intimidate his perceived enemies. The unavoidable comparison is, well, unavoidable.

Obama can rattle some cages, though, and given his administration’s almost daily scandal production, he’s going to be a busy zookeeper for the foreseeable future. No sooner had the Benghazi, Libya, hearing concluded than the IRS story broke, followed by reports of the Justice Department probe. The latter’s investigation pertained to reporters’ phone records over a two-month period affecting four bureaus, including the AP’s congressional office, and more than 20 lines potentially used by hundreds of reporters and, significantly, their sources.

Americans accustomed to hating the media — a popular pastime of self-proclaimed “new media,” often meaning someone with an iPhone and a laptop — should stop hitting “snooze” on their wake-up call right about now. When the choice is between distrusting reporters and distrusting the government, there’s no contest, especially when the aggrieved are groups of people (tea partyers and self-proclaimed patriots) whose chief organizing principle is distrust of government.

Reporters, though they are merely human with all the attendant imperfections, are fundamentally on the patriot team. They’re sort of like cops: You hate them when their blue lights appear in the rear view, but you love them when something goes bump in the night.

Though some journalists and even some institutions can be politically biased, a news organization exists for the purpose of reporting on organized power, especially the government. If tea party people worry that government is bearing down on them through its confiscatory powers via the IRS, then they have double reason for concern when the media are threatened.

Who in the White House or Congress will be willing to speak off the record if they fear being exposed to or by the Justice Department? This isn’t only outrageous; it is dangerous.

The government can legitimately investigate journalists in the interest of national security, as has been claimed here. Officials say that an AP story last May about a failed al-Qaeda plot raised flags about potentially dangerous leaks. But there is a serious question whether the AP situation warranted such a massive and covert search.

Out of fairness (or fear of punitive repercussions?), early reaction to these revelations has focused on the incompetence of the Obama administration rather than any sinister intent. Similarly, the administration’s incorrect reporting of events in Benghazi are claimed to have been the product of miscommunication and inter-agency turf squabbles rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public heading into the presidential election.

Whatever.

Pending a verdict from investigators investigating investigators, it is abundantly clear that something is awry at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., not least of which is an apparent failure to understand the basic principles of American governance. Incompetence may be an explanation, but it is hardly reassuring.

Photo radar - it's all about revenue, not safety!!!!

Source

City Hall can't prove red light cameras make streets safer, watchdog says

By Hal Dardick, Chicago Tribune reporter

May 15, 2013

City Hall cannot back up claims that its controversial red-light camera program is designed to make intersections safer, according to a watchdog's report released Tuesday.

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson said the city cannot provide documents to prove that the cameras went up at intersections with the most side-impact crashes. He also questioned why cameras remain at intersections with no recent history of such crashes, which the $100 ticket-issuing "cops-in-a-box" are designed to prevent.

"We found a lack of basic record keeping and an alarming lack of analysis for an ongoing program that costs tens of millions of dollars a year and generates tens of millions more in revenue," Ferguson wrote in a letter addressed to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city officials.

The conclusions are the result of an audit of the red light camera program, which was launched under former Mayor Richard Daley in 2003 and now makes more than $70 million a year for the city.

Ferguson also faults Emanuel, noting that the mayor has continued the program during his first two years in office despite the Chicago Department of Transportation's inability to demonstrate "how each camera location was chosen, or why cameras in locations with no recent angle crashes have not been relocated."

Emanuel is in the process of ending the current red light camera contract with Redflex after the Tribune exposed a potential $2 million bribery scheme involving the company's deal with the city. The mayor is seeking bids for a new vendor even as he looks to install new speed cameras near schools and parks across the city, in part to generate at least $20 million.

There are now 384 red light cameras at 190 intersections, according to Ferguson's audit. In 2012 the city issued 612,278 red light camera tickets, and it collected nearly $72 million from drivers ticketed that year and in previous years, plus any fines owed, the audit states. Last year, the city paid more than $19 million to Redflex to run the program. During the past 11 years, it has paid Redflex more than $106 million.

Even if the goal of the program really is to generate city revenue, it's not clear that goal is being met, Ferguson also concluded. "We found no evidence of this program being managed in a manner designed specifically to maximize revenue," he wrote.

And the city is spending $13,800 a year to maintain each camera, which cost $25,000 apiece. "We question whether the city or contract personnel have undertaken any meaningful effort to limit unnecessary costs," Ferguson wrote.

Ferguson recommended "that the city establish and follow clear criteria for its decisions on where to locate automated traffic law enforcement systems and retain verifiable documentation of the process for each location decision."

In response to the audit, CDOT officials noted that no red light cameras have been installed during Emanuel's two years in office. They also said angle crashes were reduced by nearly a third at intersections where the cameras were installed.

"As part of our commitment to integrity and transparency, CDOT will review the red light camera installation and removal criteria and determine what, if any, modifications should be made," CDOT spokesman Pete Scales said in a statement.

hdardick@tribune.com

Richard Milhous Obama????

Source

Obama and overreach

May 15, 2013

•Multiple White House claims about Washington's handling of the murderous raid in Benghazi stand exposed as false.

•Internal Revenue Service officials admit a worse-by-the-day scandal that appalls fair-minded Americans.

•The U.S. Department of Justice scrambles to explain its clandestine collection of records on work and personal telephone lines that The Associated Press says are used by more than 100 of its journalists.

In reaction, the White House blames political opponents, disavows ownership or pleads ignorance.

Hard as it may be, then, set aside your own politics and ask yourself which of these Monday statements rings truer:

"The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow. ... And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there's something new to the story. There's no 'there' there."

— President Barack Obama, dismissing congressional scrutiny of his and his subordinates' statements about Benghazi as a "political circus"

"Americans should take notice that top Obama administration officials increasingly see themselves as above the law and emboldened by the belief that they don't have to answer to anyone."

— House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa

For now, many among us would take Option 2. With each of these troubling disclosures, the Obama administration finds itself reacting to appearances of overreach, of arrogance, of determination to dodge its embarrassments rather than to take ownership of them.

We don't expect unanimity of agreement on this. On each of these controversies, though, even some of the president's most loyal supporters — from Capitol Hill to the liberal commentariat to Main Streets across the land — are questioning the government's conduct on his watch. That turnabout either angers or amuses opponents inclined to ask the supporters, "Where have you been?"

At each of these turns, the Obama administration has looked manipulative, defensive and peevish. In one sense those aren't startling reactions; they're vulnerabilities for any White House that, like this one, wants an image of moral righteousness, honesty and transparency.

Taken together, though, these controversies project a less flattering image of truth-shading, hubris and intrusion. In the week of humiliating disclosures that started with last Wednesday's congressional hearing on Benghazi, Americans haven't seen the administration exhibit ... one shred of humility:

•The White House and State Department have taken vague responsibility for Benghazi mistakes, but neither has produced answers to the most crucial questions, starting with:

Who, exactly, had rejected repeated requests for security upgrades from U.S. officials in Libya? Who, exactly, decided not to attempt a military rescue, an F-16 flyover, a NATO or other allied reaction, something, during the eight-hour assault? Who, exactly, let the task of informing the American people deteriorate into an orgy of tail-covering and lies? And why, exactly, does the president's spokesman still mislead Americans by suggesting that the Central Intelligence Agency, rather than the State Department or White House, drove that process — essentially blaming CIA staffers who did the typing rather than blaming administration officials who told them what to type?

•The IRS' disclosure that it had inordinately targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status was astonishing. No more astonishing, though, than Tuesday's news that the IRS allegedly gave nonpublic information about nine of those groups to ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization.

Obama called the early disclosures outrageous and vowed to learn "exactly what happened on this." The president would have better served himself and his administration, though, by acknowledging the shriekingly obvious: If IRS officials were trying to hinder conservative groups that opposed Obama, that means high-level federal officials were trying to steer the Nov. 6 election to the president. There was no such candor from the president or, Tuesday, from his spokesman.

•Americans thus far know less about the Justice Department's grab of AP staffers' phone records. But here, too, many of those Americans can't help but ask if all the president's men and women stay up late, trying to look intrusive.

By the AP's account, Justice subjected the organization to an unprecedented invasion of its news-gathering operations. The evident goal: to identify the government source(s) of a May 2012 AP story about a CIA operation in Yemen that had stopped an al-Qaida plot to bomb a U.S.-bound airplane.

Once again, a question raised by the Benghazi debacle resonates loudly: As the 2012 presidential election approached, were some federal officials overstepping bounds to shore up the president's campaign claim that, as he said at the Democratic National Convention, "al-Qaida is on the path to defeat"?

The easiest way for the president and his White House to further that rising suspicion — we emphasize that it's thus far unproven — is to demonstrate three things to his newly energized foes and to his friends who didn't expect this sort of conduct: that his subordinates will end their egregious stonewalling on Benghazi, will pursue the IRS scandal as high as it goes and will demand full disclosure of whether his Justice Department scrupulously followed the law in its pursuit of journalists' phone records.

Until the president makes and keeps those three assurances, he'll continue to make Issa's accusation ring true: This administration looks guilty of overreach — of believing it is above the law.

Pima County Supervisors order $135,000 guesthouse torn down???

Brand new $135,000 guesthouse near Gates Pass Road must go

Joe Ferguson Arizona Daily Star

The Pima County Board of Supervisors wants a west-side resident to tear down his $135,000 guesthouse, which was erected too close to Gates Pass Road.

The board on Tuesday unanimously rejected a variance request by the Paseo Montana neighborhood homeowner to let the home he built for his visiting family members and close friends in 2010 stand, even though it is too close to the scenic route.

An attorney representing homeowner William Timmins said the decision will be appealed. He said he believes that board made the decision based on factually incorrect information.

At the heart of the neighborhood fight is precisely where the home was built, with the southern edge of the box-shaped home just 19 feet away from the edge of Gates Pass Road. This violates a 1984 subdivision condition requiring all structures be at least 85 feet north of the scenic route.

Attorney Jesse Callahan pointed out that county officials initially approved the construction three years ago after reviewing the plans and making an on-site inspection.

County officials acknowledge they approved the building plans, but learned from an anonymous tip after construction had already started that the home was being built on a bluff too close to the road.

According to county documents, a portion of Timmins' guest home would have been in a flood plain had he complied with the 85-foot setback requirement.

The anonymous complaint in July 2010 forced Timmins to seek a number of variances from the county for building code violations unrelated to being too close to the road.

Although the Board of Adjustment denied those variance requests, they were overturned by a Pima County Superior Court ruling.

But Timmins still needed Board of Supervisors approval to encroach on the 85-foot scenic road buffer, since the structure was never issued a permit for that.

The board voted unanimously to deny his request.

Supervisor Richard Elías, who represents the area, said he doubts the home will be torn down anytime soon, assuming Timmins would file another lawsuit.

"It probably will take some more time," Elías said.

He dismissed arguments from Callahan that the judge in the previous suit said it would be "a waste" to tear down the structure.

He said that ruling "was very limited in scope, and generally it wasn't addressing what the people were complaining about," Elías said.

Supervisor Ray Carroll said given the three decades of experience Timmins says he has working with GPS systems in an online profile, he should not have made - or at least caught - the mistake in the first place.

"He had every available technology ... but he decided to eyeball it," Carroll said.

Carroll worried about the precedent the board would set if it had sided with the homeowner.

"Scenic roads will mean nothing in Pima County," he said. "Scenic roads are what tourists aim their cars toward because they lead to destinations we treasure."

A number of neighbors came to the morning meeting, with most opposed to the variance request.

Donald Faulkner said he was relieved that the board rejected the request but concedes the battle over the guest house is far from over.

Like the board members, Faulkner said he anticipates another legal battle. "He could build another home if he wanted to (instead of fighting)," Faulkner said.

Arguments between Timmins and some of his neighbors became heated after the board's decision, requiring a county security guard to step in to break up the argument.

County officials will begin the process to force Timmins to tear down the structure, but concede a legal fight could delay any action for months or even years.

Contact reporter Joe Ferguson at jferguson@azstarnet.com or 573-4346.

Tucson cops get big pay raises!!!!

City pay raises balloon to $11M

Darren DaRonco Arizona Daily Star

Pay raises the City Council thought would total $5.3 million when it approved them last month are now going to cost taxpayers $11 million a year.

Despite the higher cost estimates, the council voted 6-1 to scrap the previously approved 55-cent-an-hour across-the-board increase. In its place, the council approved a proposal by City Manager Richard Miranda that retains the 55-cent-an-hour raise for most workers but provides significantly larger raises for most public safety dispatchers and commissioned officers.

When the council first approved raises, the cost was estimated at $5.3 million a year. But that didn't include Tucson Water, city golf and environmental services, which are funded with their own fees, raising the total to $8 million.

While Miranda's plan pushes costs up another $3 million, it contains a provision for the council to come back in the fall and rescind the raises if the city can't find money to pay for them. Most of the increases won't take effect until Jan. 1, which will lessen the first-year financial impact.

The major exception is 911 dispatchers, who will see a dollar an hour increase beginning July 1.

Commissioned police and firefighters hired before January 2011 will receive step increases of 5 percent or 2.5 percent at the start of next year, which for most is more than 55 cents an hour. Those hired after January 2011 or who are at the top of the pay scale will receive a 55-cent-an-hour raise.

Police lieutenants and fire battalion chiefs get a percentage increase based on the closest non-exempt rank in their departments.

Miranda said these adjustments reward employees who suffered through years of stagnating wages and help retain workers thinking about fleeing the city for better opportunities.

"It is imperative to recognize our employees are our greatest asset and must provide an investment in them," Miranda said during the meeting.

A spokesman for the police union said it's not everything they were looking for, but it's a start.

"We were asking for the step system be restored," said Richard Radinsky, Tucson Police Officers' Association grievance chairman. "It seems like it's an open-ended promise, and we hope that it follows through. I don't want to be told in October or November that we're going to end up with nothing. We hope the promise pans out. It's a beginning. By no means is it an end. … It begins to take some of the pressure off those officers from leaving this department for better-paying jobs."

The lone dissenting vote, Councilman Steve Kozachik, said the city is already staring at huge deficits for next year, and this additional burden only hastens the likelihood of the council making "unpalatable" decisions such as furloughs or layoffs to balance the budget next year.

Councilman Paul Cunningham, who voted against previous pay raises, said he supported this proposal because it provides an option for the city to pull the plug if the money's not there.

"I wish I could have chopped it up and voted on the parts separately," Cunningham said. "Even though it was an all-or-nothing proposal, it left a trap door for us to escape if we need to."

However, other council members believe the raises are long overdue.

"We're rebounding. The city's moving forward ... and we have to send a message to our employees about how much we value them," Councilman Richard Fimbres said.

Mayor Jonathan Rothschild compared the compensation plan to what any good business would do.

"You're not committed to salaries forever," Rothschild said. "From the world I come from, if you have a decent year, and the truth of the matter is the city did have a decent year, you reward your employees. If you don't have a decent year, then ... we're all in this together. That's the philosophy I'm going to use. And that's why I very much appreciate the kind of nuanced approach that staff took on this."

On StarNet: To read more local government news, go to azstarnet.com/politics

Contact reporter Darren DaRonco at 573-4243 or ddaronco@azstarnet.com

Cops erase video of police murder in Bakersfield.

Based on my experience with crooked cops this doesn't surprise me the least bit. Every time I am stopped the police I take the 5th and refuse to answer any police questions.

Of course the cops always lie and tell me I don't have any 5th Amendment right to remain silent. And almost always the cops make up threats that bad, bad, bad things will happen to me if I don't answer their questions.

And most of the time the cops illegally search me looking for an ID, since I always refuse to them them my name.

The good news, is that even if the piggies erased the video of the Kern County sheriff's officers beating David Silva to death, frequently the file can be recovered.

Last if the police are so corrupt that they will erase the evidence that is needed to convict the 10 are so cops who beat David Silva to death, don't you think these crooked cops will also commit perjury and lie in court to convict people??? Or plant evidence to frame people???

Cops who murdered David Silva are the victims????

Well at least in this article it sounds like that is what the cops want us to believe!!!

This is typical when cops are caught committing crimes, they frequently paint themselves as the victim, not the criminal.

The murder of David Silva by the Kern County Sheriff's Office isn't any different. And sadly people frequently believe these fantastic big lies made up the the police.

Kern County makes lame excuses to justify the murder of David Sal Silva

• "I cannot speculate whether they acted appropriately or not"
• "Baton strikes were used, but what I don't know ... if they ... caused death"
• Youngblood said the baton is a less lethal weapon
• Youngblood noted that no cause of death has been determined

I wonder if Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood would be making these same lame excuses if we had a video of 10 Black men beating up a cop with billy clubs???

Obama used IRS to terrorize conservative groups???

Source

Groups that sought tax-exempt status say IRS dealings were a nightmare

By Josh Hicks and Kimberly Kindy, Published: May 15 E-mail the writers

The Common Sense Campaign, a self-described constitutionalist group based in Montgomery, Ala., aspired to be a smaller version of the National Rifle Association — powerful and influential, without having to pay federal income taxes.

“We wanted to have a voice too,” said the group’s chairman, Pete Riehm. “The biggest difference between us and them is money.”

But Common Sense never reached the nonprofit stage. The organization gave up seeking tax-exempt status after two years of Internal Revenue Service demands for everything from the group’s blog posts to the names of “anyone who gave you so much as a dollar,” according to its officials.

“We were spending thousands of dollars between the filing fees and attorney fees,” Riehm said. “We realized that just paying the taxes would cost a whole lot less.”

Common Sense was one of scores of groups that faced months and even years of delays in seeking tax exemptions after the IRS started targeting groups with names containing “tea party,” “patriot” and other terms associated with conservatives. The practice, which appears to have lasted for about 18 months until early 2012, has set off a political firestorm in Washington and a criminal investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department.

Not only did IRS employees improperly target groups based on politics, but they also improperly demanded a host of details about the groups’ activities, according to a report on the abuses by a Treasury Department inspector general.

Some groups, including several interviewed by The Washington Post, were asked to provide names of donors or membership lists, which experts say the IRS cannot legally do. The agency also demanded names of board members, copies of meeting minutes and résumés, details of community organizing efforts and numerous other details, according to questionnaires obtained by The Post.

“It was pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe,” said Karen L. Kenney, the coordinator for the San Fernando Valley Patriots, a tea party group in Southern California that was sent an IRS questionnaire with more than 100 questions on it.

The San Fernando group first submitted its application for nonprofit status in the fall of 2010, which was after the IRS’s Cincinnati-based “determination unit” had implemented its politically charged screening criteria. The group wrote the agency a $400 check to fast-track the process, but 19 months went by before the group heard anything, Kenney said.

That’s when the long list of questions arrived. Kenney said the group sent back a four-inch, seven-pound stack of documents before deciding that enough was enough. The group decided the questions were far too intrusive and could result in individual supporters being targeted.

“We couldn’t sic the IRS on our members,” Kenney said.

The delays were rampant. The inspector general found that “no work was completed on the majority of these applications for 13 months” while the “inappropriate criteria” were in place.

By 2011, after the criteria were put into effect, nonprofit approvals stopped entirely for groups whose names included “tea party” or “9/12,” a movement associated with conservative commentator Glenn Beck, according to a Post analysis of IRS data. After the criteria were revised in 2012, the backlog was broken and 27 groups with those names were approved, mostly in the second half of the year.

Groups with the word “progressive” in their names suffered no similar slowdown. The number of approvals for those groups increased each year, from 17 in 2009 to 30 in 2012, the data show.

Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS’s tax-exemption division, described the targeting campaign as a misguided attempt to deal with a wave of applications after the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited sums on politics. That decision and others led to a frenzy of spending by independent groups, surpassing $1 billion in 2012.

IRS standards are vague regarding how much political activity is allowed for nonprofit groups. They are generally not allowed to endorse candidates or directly participate in political campaigns, although they may influence elections through limited issue advertising and other efforts.

The case of Alabama’s Common Sense Campaign illustrates the challenges. Riehm, the group’s chairman, acknowledged that his organization has had favorite candidates, but it has not endorsed anyone directly.

The group felt strongly, for example, about Constitution Party candidate Bill Atkinson, who was defeated in a 2011 special election for a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives. Some of the group’s members worked on Atkinson’s campaign, Riehm said.

“He was very conservative, and the right kind of guy we wanted,” Riehm said.

Riehm said the group’s interaction with the IRS was filled with difficulties. Group officials said they first got the runaround and then were told that their file had been misplaced.

“The lady I spoke with was very rude and said they would get in touch when they’re ready,” said Callie Goodrum, an administrator for the group. “Two or three months later I called again, and she said our file had been totally lost and we would have to refile.”

Another IRS representative contacted Common Sense Campaign officials, telling them they would have to provide more information about the group’s activities: any candidate endorsements or comparisons, details of mobilization efforts, how much time was devoted to such activities and who would benefit from them.

The case handler also asked about the group’s political affiliations, Goodrum said. “He asked point-blank if we were a tea party group,” she said. “He said he saw on our Web site that we teach about the Constitution, and that’s when he asked.”

Many conservative groups say they refrained from applying for tax-exempt status because they had heard similar accounts from like-minded organizations.

“It was just horror story after horror story,” said Jeff Reuer, former chairman of South Carolina’s Goose Creek 9-12 Project. “People told us, if we weren’t on the IRS’s radar, we should hold off applying.”

The South Carolina group has yet to decide whether it will apply for tax-exempt status, Reuer said. He said the group focuses on voter registration efforts and state and local issues and does not support or endorse candidates.

Not all the groups caught up in the targeting campaign were clearly conservative. Several journalism-related groups, including one based in San Francisco and another that produced stories for the New York Times, said they experienced delays and scrutiny from 2010 to 2012.

James O’Shea, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, applied in 2010 for nonprofit status for the Chicago News Cooperative. He said he waited about a year before the agency sent a series of questionnaires asking the group to document its activities. He sent stacks of documents to the IRS and waited again.

After a long delay, O’Shea said, he received a series of questionnaires asking the group to document and describe all of its activities.

But then the donations began to dry up. “Donors want you to get your nonprofit status at some point,” he said. “We never got approval because we got caught up in that same kind of scrutiny. It didn’t really have much to do with liberal or conservative, it seems.”

The cooperative shut down in 2012.

Juliet Eilperin and Dan Keating contributed to this report.

Obama administration sounds like Sgt Schultz - "We know nothing"

Eric Holder’s abdication

By Dana Milbank, Published: May 15

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”

Holder seemed to regard this ignorance as a shield protecting him and the Justice Department from all criticism of the Obama administration’s assault on press freedoms. But his claim that his “recusal” from the case exempted him from all discussion of the matter didn’t fly with Republicans or Democrats on the committee, who justifiably saw his recusal as more of an abdication.

“There doesn’t seem to be any acceptance of responsibility in the Justice Department for things that have gone wrong,” said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), after Holder placed the AP matter in the lap of his deputy. “We don’t know where the buck stops.”

The best Holder could do was offer an “after-action analysis” of the matter and pledge the administration’s renewed support for a media shield law (the same proposed law the Obama administration undermined three years ago). But that does nothing to reverse the damage the administration has already done with its wholesale snooping into reporters’ phone records and its unprecedented number of leak prosecutions.

“I realize there are exceptions and that you have recused yourself, but it seems to me clear that the actions of the department have, in fact, impaired the First Amendment,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told Holder. “Reporters who might have previously believed that a confidential source would speak to them would no longer have that level of confidence, because those confidential sources are now going to be chilled in their relationship with the press.”

In a sense, the two topics that dogged Holder most on Wednesday — the AP phone records and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups — were one and the same. In both cases, Americans are being punished and intimidated for exercising their right of free expression — by the taxing authorities, in the conservatives’ case, and by federal prosecutors, in the reporters’ case.

But Holder cared so little about those two issues that he said not a peep about either the IRS or the AP in his opening statement. When he was questioned about the AP case, his first response was to suggest the criticism of him was political. “I mean, there’s been a lot of criticism,” Holder said. “In fact, the head of the RNC called for my resignation, in spite of the fact that I was not the person involved in that decision.”

Republicans on the House committee had voted previously to hold Holder in contempt of Congress, and Holder made clear the feeling was mutual; he informed Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that his line of questioning was “too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It’s unacceptable, and it’s shameful.” Some of the Republicans provided Holder justification for his disdain. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), defying the chairman’s gavel, shouted a stream of exotic accusations at Holder, closing with the complaint that Holder was casting “aspersions on my asparagus.”

But there would be more sympathy, and support, for Holder if he took seriously the lawmakers’ legitimate questions about his department’s abuse of power in the AP case. He may have recused himself from the leak probe that led to the searches of reporters’ phone records (a decision he took so lightly that he didn’t put it in writing), but he isn’t recused from defending the First Amendment.

Didn’t the deputy attorney general who approved the subpoenas have the same potential conflict of interest that Holder claimed?

“I don’t know.”

When did Holder recuse himself?

“I’m not sure.”

How much time was spent exploring alternatives to the subpoenas?

“I don’t know, because, as I said, I recused myself.”

But when the Justice Department undermines the Constitution, recusal is no excuse.

Phones to be further examined for video of Bakersfield man's fatal beating

Normally this is a trivial task, but the cops probably also know how to make it a lot harder to recover the files, since they do this stuff all the time.

Using treaties to flush the Constitution down the toilet???

Source

Nick Dranias

Cheaters Revenge Meets the New World Order

Posted on May 15, 2013 | Author: Nick Dranias

What does poisoning a goldfish to get revenge on a cheating spouse have to do with the President’s power to make treaties? The constitutionally correct answer is: Nothing at all. Unfortunately, that’s not how the Obama Administration sees it. The Administration is claiming power to get into a domestic dispute under the authority of a chemical weapons treaty. And it is aggressively advancing the proposition that Congress’s power is essentially unlimited when based on the treaty power.

The federal government has been prosecuting Carol Anne Bond for causing minor burns to the fingers of her husband’s girlfriend after spreading a caustic chemical used in developing photographs around her home. Ms. Bond has fought the prosecution by arguing that the Constitution gives power over such domestic disputes to the States. According to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Congress implemented a chemical weapons treaty by enacting a law that expands the treaty’s purpose and turns “each kitchen cupboard and cleaning cabinet in America into a potential chemical weapons cache.” In an earlier phase of the litigation, Justice Samuel Alito asked, “Suppose that the Petitioner in this case decided to retaliate against her former friend by pouring a bottle of vinegar in the friend's goldfish bowl. As I read this statute, that would be a violation of this statute, potentially punishable by life imprisonment, wouldn't it?”

In support of Ms. Bond’s argument that the federal government has overstepped its constitutional powers, the Goldwater Institute today filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in Bond v. United States of America. Our brief warns that if courts allow Congress to implement treaties without respecting the Tenth Amendment’s limitation on federal power, there is nothing to stop the federal government from using international agreements and legislation to displace other constitutional guarantees. This is because the vertical separation of powers between the states and the federal government is not a second-class constitutional protection. Allowing a treaty to undermine the Tenth Amendment opens the door to Congress enacting treaties that violate all constitutional protections – including the freedom of the press and the right to due process. That is why the Court must draw a bright line at kitchen cupboards and cleaning cabinets.

Ms. Bond won the first round when the Supreme Court reinstated her Tenth Amendment defense after the lower court rejected it on procedural grounds. Her case then returned to the lower courts, only to result in the Third Circuit rejecting her defense on the merits. Now the Supreme Court gets the last word. Hopefully, the Court will hold the line.

Phoenix, Tucson elections "rigged" for special interest groups???

Source

Phoenix, Tucson fight change in election calendar

By Dustin Gardiner The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 16, 2013 10:42 PM

Tucson and Phoenix are waging a legal fight to overturn a state law that would require local governments to move their elections to even-numbered years to coincide with statewide contests for president and governor.

If the law takes effect in 2014, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton and other municipal elected officials could have their terms extended by several months or even a year.

A Pima County Superior Court judge on Monday denied the cities’ request for summary judgment in the case, saying that he needs to get more information than already submitted in court filings. A hearing will likely be scheduled in the next month, so the parties can debate the facts further.

City leaders had sought a decision on the law’s validity and an injunction to prevent it from taking effect while they argue the issue in court. They said the law interferes with a matter of purely local concern: their authority to determine how to conduct elections.

Cities and towns across Arizona have objected to the law and cite a long list of potential consequences, including that local elections would become fiercely partisan or draw little attention at the bottom of a more crowded ballot. The law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer in 2012, will impact roughly half of the state’s 70 municipalities.

Supporters of the move have said it will increase voter turnout and help some cities and towns save money because they could utilize county elections resources, instead of paying the cost of printing ballots and staffing elections on their own.

In Phoenix, Stanton and four council members — Bill Gates, Thelda Williams, Michael Nowakowski and Daniel Valenzuela — could potentially serve a year beyond their elected terms, which expire in 2015, assuming they stay in office for that long. Each council member represents about 180,000 residents who would have to wait longer to elect their representative.

Tucson filed its lawsuit against the state in October after several months of cities grappling over how they might respond. A few months later, Phoenix joined the case as an intervenor, meaning the city can argue the case, which will impact all Arizona charter municipalities.

Phoenix City Clerk Cris Meyer said the law would require sweeping changes to the city’s election system and do away with the city-focused process voters have requested over the years, particularly the emphasis on a nonpartisan election cycle.

“Commingling of the state’s and Phoenix’s processes, including potentially commingled ballots, diminishes Phoenix’s ability to ensure a pristine process, free of party politics and state or federal issues typically associated with party platforms,” attorneys for Phoenix argued in court documents.

Phoenix voters decided in the 1970s to permanently hold their elections on the opposite years as presidential and gubernatorial contests. Changing that would require voters to approve amendments to the City Charter. The new law also conflicts with charter language that governs the mayor and council’s term limits and salary changes, among other issues.

The city would likely have to abandon its voting-center system, which allows residents to cast an in-person ballot at more than 20 locations starting several days before the election. Arizona holds elections on a single day, and voters have assigned precincts.

However, attorneys for the state have argued the law seeks to preserve democracy, suggesting off-year elections depress voter turnout and make the process vulnerable to special-interest influence. They said any burdens to Phoenix or Tucson are “slight and incidental.”

The state Attorney General’s Office contends election alignment has led to a massive increase in voter turnout in Chandler, Scottsdale and Gilbert, which moved their elections from the spring to fall of even-numbered years. For example, 14 percent of Scottsdale registered voters turned out for the city’s March 2006 election, compared with 85 percent in fall 2008, according to court documents.

“The record is clear that election alignment causes dramatic increases in voter turnout and dramatic reductions in overall election costs and cost per vote,” the Attorney General’s Office wrote.

Pima County Superior Court Judge James Marner also denied a motion by the state for a summary judgment to dismiss the case. But Marner said conflicting evidence presented by the state and cities regarding voter turnout and cost savings needs to be heard in court.

Feds declare 3 versions of synthetic pot illegal

And of course as usual the government is the cause of the problem, not the solution to the problem.

Source

Feds declare 3 versions of synthetic pot illegal

By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 16, 2013 10:11 PM

The federal government has temporarily outlawed three substances marketed as an alternative to marijuana, the move coming within weeks of Arizona adding to its banned-substances list certain chemical compounds typically found in “spice” and “bath salts.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced Thursday that three iterations of “fake pot” are now considered to be Schedule 1 substances, a class of drugs the government deems to have high potential for abuse and no recognized medicinal use. When ingested, designer drugs can mimic the effects of banned substances, such as methamphetamine and cocaine, and are known to trigger violence and paranoia, among other behaviors.

The classification will remain in effect for two years while the DEA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study whether the chemicals — synthetic cannabinoids UR-144, XLR11 and AKB48 — should be made permanently illegal. Meanwhile, anyone found to possess, manufacture or distribute these synthetic cannabinoids will be subject to prosecution.

“DEA is sounding the alarm once more to emphasize the severity of these drugs,” said Special Agent Ramona Sanchez, spokeswoman for the DEA in Arizona. “People don’t understand that just because these were legal, that doesn’t mean they’re safe.” [And just because marijuana is illegal doesn't mean it is a dangerous drug like our government masters tell us.]

The DEA’s latest effort adds to a growing list of federally banned substances meant to mimic the effects of illicit drugs. A federal law passed in July 2012 banned the sale, production and possession of 31 chemicals used to make some of the synthetic drugs, including two of the most popular ones used in hallucinogenic drugs marketed as bath salts.

Authorities say it has been difficult to attack the problem of novelty-powder use because manufacturers modify their formulas to stay ahead of bans.

In Arizona, a measure signed by Gov. Jan Brewer in April targeted the chemical backbone of more than 1,000 known types of synthetic drugs. During legislative testimony, the husband of a smoke-shop owner told lawmakers that his wife would be forced to remove all “spice” and “potpourri” products from the shelves due to the impracticality and expense of having each product chemically analyzed to ensure compliance with state law. Which, according to a prosecuting attorneys lobby, was precisely the point of the legislation.

“A teenage kid had a harder time buying cigarettes” before Arizona’s recent ban, said Stephanie Siete, education director at Community Bridges, a substance-abuse treatment facility. “It’s a big deal to be able to stop people from getting these substances in their hands, substances that are untested. No one knows long-term effects.”

But lawmakers say they are hard-pressed to keep up with the latest developments in synthetic-drug manufacturing. Local police and physicians have warned that a new synthetic hallucinogen known as “n-bomb,” which is marketed as an alternative to LSD or mescaline, could be among the most powerful and potentially deadly of the synthetic drugs that have inundated the market in recent years.

Rep. Eddie Farnsworth, R-Gilbert, who sponsored the dangerous-drug bill Brewer signed in April, said in committee that his legislation would not be a cure-all and that amendments would be needed as new synthetic drugs hit the market.

“This is a problem we’re going to deal with and we’re going to continue to deal with, just like we did with meth,” Farnsworth said.

Sanchez said the DEA will continue to “aggressively target” synthetic drugs in Arizona, as it did last year with Operation Logjam. DEA agents arrested more than 90 people and seized the equivalent of 18 million synthetic-drug packets during raids across the country, including in Arizona. Authorities estimated the local network produced tens of millions of dollars worth of bath salts.

Past presidents have sent IRS after critics

Source

Past presidents have sent IRS after critics

By Tom Raum Associated Press Fri May 17, 2013 12:22 AM

WASHINGTON The Internal Revenue Service controversy dogging President Barack Obama is hardly the first time a White House and the tax agency have been accused of political meddling and bias.

Over the past week, Republicans have been trying to link Obama to what the IRS has acknowledged was improper extra scrutiny of conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status. That’s despite the fact that little — if anything — has surfaced to suggest White House officials had advance knowledge of the IRS actions.

The line between IRS misconduct and the Oval Office appears less fuzzy in IRS political incidents in previous administrations.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s frequent use of the IRS as a weapon of political retribution is well-documented. He reportedly had the IRS scrutinize tax returns of his harshest critics, including Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana and Hoover Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

And President Richard Nixon famously subjected those on his “enemies list” to tax audits and was even caught on Watergate tapes boasting of it to aides in the Oval Office.

President Dwight Eisenhower used federal tax collectors to go after members of the Communist Party. President John F. Kennedy set up an IRS program to “explore the political activities” of conservative nonprofits. President Jimmy Carter’s IRS director, Jerome Kurtz, ended the tax-exempt status of private Christian schools out of compliance with federal anti-discrimination policies.

Recent administrations

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the IRS audited the conservative Heritage Foundation and the National Rifle Association.

And during President George W. Bush’s tenure, the agency audited the NAACP for remarks its leaders made during the 2004 election urging Bush’s defeat. The IRS alleged it amounted to improper political activity. The civil-rights organization argued it was the victim of political bias. The case dragged on for two years.

“It is true that, in the past, presidents going back as far as at least Franklin Roosevelt used — or attempted to use — the IRS to intimidate or go after their political opponents. So it’s a bipartisan thing,” said economist Bruce Bartlett, a tax-policy official in the administrations of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“But this one seems to have been driven more from the bottom up rather than the top down, promoted by lower-level IRS officials,” Bartlett said.

Tea party focus now

In the latest flare-up over political interference with the tax system, the IRS acknowledged that organizations applying for tax-exempt status during the 2012 election season were singled out for extra scrutiny if they had “tea party” or “patriot” in their titles. In some cases, groups were asked for names of donors. The agency apologized and insisted the practice was not politically motivated.

But it touched off anger on Capitol Hill, coming at the same time as controversies over the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records of The Associated Press and lingering questions over the administration’s handling of September’s deadly terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.

“They finally messed with an agency everybody fully understands,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., among Republicans complaining the loudest about the IRS transgressions and seeking to tie them to the president.

Several days after IRS acknowledged its improper actions, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that his agency would investigate whether laws were broken as a Justice Department inspector general’s report blamed “ineffective management” at the IRS.

Investigation, resignation

Trying to control the fallout, Obama forced the resignation of Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller. “Americans are right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” the president said of the IRS targeting. “The IRS has to operate with absolute integrity.”

The IRS is charged with weeding out the social-welfare and educational organizations that qualify as fully tax exempt — designated in the federal tax code as 501(c)(4) groups — from ones that are primarily political and generally not tax-exempt. The difference is that the tax-exempt groups cannot advocate on behalf of individual candidates or parties, even though many groups come close to crossing the line.

The workload became even more intensive for the IRS as the number of groups registering for tax-exempt status roughly doubled in the aftermath of a series of campaign finance rulings ahead of the 2012 elections.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision in particular helped move the debate over distinguishing between political and social welfare groups “into the realm of regulation and bureaucrats protecting themselves and tax lawyers paid to find loopholes,” said presidential historian Stephen Hess.

IRS-style abuses endemic to Obama’s view of government

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IRS-style abuses endemic to Obama’s view of government

In response to the IRS targeting tea party organizations for special scrutiny, President Barack Obama said: “The good news is it’s fixable.”

Actually, in the context of Obama’s view of government, it isn’t fixable. Such abuses are endemic.

Obama believes in the good will of a government managed by liberals. He believes in entrusting such a government with enormous and wide-reaching discretionary authority.

In Obama’s view of government, it decides which businesses get subsidies, tax preferences and loan guarantees, and which do not. Which banks are deemed systemic risks and subject to different regulatory treatment than other banks, and even to each other. Which local government projects get federal assistance, and which do not.

And which organizations get tax-exempt status, and which do not.

Governments, however, are not staffed by angels. They are staffed by human beings. And if human beings are given vast discretionary powers, they will be routinely abused.

Some will abuse them for personal gain or to reward friends. Some will abuse them simply because they enjoy the exercise of authority over others. And some will abuse them to favor political allies and punish political opponents.

To the extent governmental power is abused for political reasons, conservatives will most often be on the receiving end. Liberals believe government is a force for good so are attracted to work within it. Conservatives fear the destructive power of government and tend to shy away from working for it. So, regardless of who is in charge at the top, the people who do the work in government will list to the liberal side.

The bias can be instinctive and not conscious. The IRS decided that conservative organizations were to be automatically flagged for extra scrutiny when filing for tax-exempt status. Yet, in its response to a damning inspector general report, the agency claims that “the front line career employees that made the decisions acted out of a desire for efficiency and not out of any political or partisan viewpoint.”

That claim can only be made by people who believe that it is self-evident that conservatives are significantly more likely to cheat on such applications and are unaware of their bias.

The IRS has no objective criteria to determine which applicants get greater scrutiny. For social welfare organizations, some campaign involvement is permitted but it cannot be the “primary activity.” The IRS has no objective criteria to determine what the “primary activity” is. The IRS has no objective criteria regarding what constitutes campaign activities as opposed to issue advocacy or public education.

In other words, those who work for the IRS can just make it up as they go along.

The left is being hypocritical in this scandal. The left was howling for the IRS to put the screws to conservative tax-exempt organizations engaging in political activity. The IRS response clearly indicates that the heightened scrutiny was in part a reaction to such howls. And when it turns out that the IRS was indeed putting the screws to conservative applicants, the left has turned against it.

In the Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek illuminated a different view of good government, one bound by what Hayek called the rule of law. According to Hayek, the essence of the rule of law is that “government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand.” He quoted favorably A.V. Dicey that the rule of law “excludes the existence of arbitrariness, of prerogative, or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of government.”

A government of arbitrary powers distorts and diminishes productive enterprise. The people who live under such a government are less free.

Earlier in the month, Obama delivered one of his periodic odes to government in a commencement address to Ohio State University. Shortly after saying he wasn’t going to get partisan, Obama told the graduates to ignore those who “warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner.”

Well, tyranny may not be lurking just around the corner. But with a government of enormous and wide-reaching discretionary authority, you don’t have to turn the corner to run into arbitrary, abusive and prejudicial exercises of that power.

It's a waste of time calling the police???

Source

Letter: I've made my last call to Mesa PD for help

Posted: Thursday, May 16, 2013 12:04 pm

Letter to the Editor

We had a shoplifter at our store just waltz out with a bag of chips, a peach (that he was eating) and a bottle of whiskey. I demanded the items back, he raised the bottle with “come and get it”. Now, my work has a strict no-physical-confrontation policy and I don’t want to risk getting fired. I told him that I just wanted the items back or I’d call the police. “Go ahead and call the police”, he said, and continued walking away. So I called Mesa’s non-emergency number and explained what was going on.

He asked where the thief was, which I replied that he was just getting to the street. “How much was the merchandise”, I said about $25. “Well our call policy has changed. If they are no longer on the property, and the amount is under $30, you need to file a report online. Do you need the info?”

“Nope”, and hung up promptly. I suspect the thief knew about Mesa’s new policy, considering how smug he was. He was less than 70 yards away, threatened to commit aggravated assault, stealing, and the police sub-station is 90 seconds away.

I think I’ll forego calling from now on, take care of it myself outside camera range, since Mesa is a fend-for-yourself city now.

K. Andrew Bedwell

Mesa

500+ years of screwing the Indians

Phoenix-area casino bill denounced as biased

By Caitlin McGlade The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 16, 2013 10:56 PM

The Bureau of Indian Affairs director on Wednesday condemned a bill that would prohibit more casinos from opening in metro Phoenix, saying that the measure singled out one tribe.

Director Michael Black told members of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs that the legislation would bar the Tohono O’odhams from using reservation land for a casino like other tribes.

The non-voting hearing was about a bill that Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., introduced in April to ban gaming on newly acquired reservation land until 2027. The measure would stop the Tohono O’odhams from building a planned casino at 95th and Northern avenues because the land has not yet been designated a reservation.

Franks last year sponsored a similar bill that passed in the House but never got a vote in the Senate.

Franks called this bill the “Keep the Promise Act of 2013,” a label Tohono O’odham Chairman Ned Norris deemed “deeply offensive.”

“The title of this legislation suggests that I and my people are liars and cheats,” Norris said.

Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community President Diane Enos spoke in support of the bill, because her tribe, as well as others, oppose another Valley casino.

Norris, Enos and lawmakers argued for nearly an hour over whether the Tohono O’odhams’ casino plans were fair and legal, and whether the “Promise Act” would actually break a promise Congress made to the Tohono O’odhams.

That promise, Norris said, was bound by a 1986 law that gave the tribe money to buy land after a federal dam flooded some of the tribe’s reservation. The law stated the replacement land would become reservation land.

Under that law, the tribe purchased unincorporated land surrounded on three sides by Glendale with a shell corporation. In 2009, the tribe announced its plans and sought to have the land taken into the reservation system.

However, Valley tribes and the state say the casino would violate a 2002 voter-approved compact they say capped the number of casinos in the Valley. Enos said the proposal breaks a trust among tribes. Hence, the name of the bill.

The compact contains no such language, but the Valley tribes and the state point to campaign rhetoric that the compact would bar more Phoenix-area casinos.

Franks’ bill says as much, too, stating that Arizona tribes agreed to limit casinos around the state and “in particular within the Phoenix metropolitan area.”

There seemed to be confusion on the panel as to what exactly the compact contains.

“How do you arbitrarily break the compact?” asked Subcommittee Chairman Don Young of Alaska.

Maria Wiseman, representing the Department of the Interior, answered. The Phoenix-area limitations were not in writing, she said. A recent U.S. District Court decision pointed to that omission during a ruling that largely favored the Tohono O’odhams.

“Well, that’s not what they sold to the public,” Young responded.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva asked Enos why the limit wasn’t spelled out in the compact.

She said it wasn’t necessary because of the trust the tribes had for one another.

“I remember of the campaigns around (Proposition) 202, all of the advertising ... there was a leaflet that said no gaming in the Phoenix area. I mean, that’s like some of my colleagues who run on ‘I will never cut benefits for Social Security’ and then, two weeks later, they’re voting for a chained CPI or something else,” Grijalva said. “It’s just things that happen.”

He questioned why Congress should pass a law when several lawsuits that challenge the Tohono O’odham plans are moving through the courts.

Enos had early said the tribes had no other venue because the court could not hear their “claims of deception and fraud.”

She and Rep. Paul Gosar said the bill was crucial to protect the compact, which would dissolve if Arizona were to ever allow casinos off reservations. The compact limits casinos to tribal lands, but she said non-tribal interests would pursue casinos if they saw another casino open.

Rep. David Schweikert noted “Arizona is a very easy initiative referendum state” and asked Enos how long she had been hearing non-tribal casino advocates saying they would seek to open casinos if the Tohono O’odham plans moved forward.

“For years,” Enos said. “Those non-Indian interests have already started to say, ‘Look, you cannot trust the tribes,’ and they will demand that the exclusivity for tribes be broken.”

Grijalva dismissed the argument as the U.S. District Court ruled the Tohono O’odham plans do not violate the compact.

“And Chicken Little will rule the world, and the sky will fall,” he said.

The bill now heads to the House Committee on Natural Resources, where the panel may make changes and vote to send it to the full House.

Mesa Mayor Scott Smith a financial conservative???

But when you read articles like this it sounds like Mesa Mayor Scott Smith spends your tax dollars like a drunken sailor.

Mesa Mayor Scott Smith is responsible for bringing the super expensive light rail pork to Mesa.

Mesa Mayor Scott Smith has shoveled millions?? in corporate welfare to several Christian Universities which he has brought to downtown Mesa. All of that corporate welfare to religious entities is almost certainly unconstitutional.

Source

Mesa considers raising utility, property taxes as budget fix

By Gary Nelson The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 17, 2013 9:09 AM

Mesa residents are facing increases in their utility and property-tax bills to help keep the city’s budget in the black.

The City Council began mulling those prospects Thursday as City Manager Chris Brady and Budget Director Candace Cannistraro outlined their strategies for dealing with a projected $8.5 million shortfall for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Cannistraro in February forecast a $9 million shortfall. But it’s the first time Mesa residents have been told their wallets will be affected as a direct result of the city’s latest bout with its all-but-chronic budget problems.

“The recommended solution package provides for a balanced budget while maintaining the targeted reserve-fund balance,” Cannistraro said.

It was only last year that Mesa, for the first time in more than half a decade, went through a budget cycle without facing a major shortfall. The city had hoped for that again this year, but Brady said the economic recovery hasn’t unfolded fast enough to keep Mesa out of pain.

The utility-rate hikes, affecting water, sewer and residential trash pickup, are a surprise because a year ago, residents were told that probably wouldn’t happen.

Mesa had saved so much money from refinancing previous bond issues that the city could afford to leave utility rates flat not only for this fiscal year but also for 2013-14, Brady said at the time.

Now, the council is being asked to approve 2 percent hikes for water, sewer and garbage service in the new fiscal year. Electric and gas rates would remain steady, but rates for all city utilities are scheduled to climb more steeply in fiscal 2014-15 and beyond.

The council, short on time Thursday, truncated its budget talks before the utility-rate hikes could be discussed. They will be on the agenda for Monday’s study session.

Mesa property owners also face a property-tax increase beyond what had been expected after voters approved a $70 million parks-bond package last November.

The reason for that is rooted in Mesa’s past policies for paying off general-obligation bond debt. Those are the kinds of bonds issued for streets, public-safety projects, parks and other non-utility infrastructure.

Before 2008, Mesa’s policy was to pay general-obligation debt from general city revenues instead of levying a secondary property tax for that purpose. Mesa is believed to be the only large U.S. city to have handled bond debt that way, and over the years that practice put enormous pressure on the general fund, which covers day-to-day city operations.

In 2008, the City Council told voters that general-obligation bonds approved that year and thereafter would be paid with a secondary property tax. The city also imposed small levies on some pre-2008 debt to pay for operating infrastructure approved by voters that year — fire crews, for example, to staff new stations.

That was legal because although Mesa had not previously imposed a secondary property tax, pre-2008 bond elections had authorized such a tax should it ever be needed.

Now, the city is proposing a larger property-tax levy to cover more of that old debt — $2.2 million for fiscal 2013-14. Brady said it would add about $10 to the tax bill levied on an average Mesa home.

That will still leave $8.6 million in old bond debt to be paid from sales taxes and other kinds of revenue.

In addition to the property-tax boost, Brady and Cannistraro want to bolster the general fund with $6.4 million a year from the so-called enterprise fund.

That basically is the account sustained by the city’s business activities — utilities for the most part.

For years, Mesa has funneled money from the enterprise fund into the general fund. The practice reflects a decision made by city leaders in 1945 to eliminate city property taxes and use utility income for the general fund. But it also has drawn the ire of residents who asserted over the years that utility-rate increases were tax increases in disguise.

The city decided several years ago to freeze the enterprise-fund transfer at $83.6 million a year. Subsequent utility-rate increases, therefore, went directly into supporting the utilities rather than other city operations.

The adjustment, if approved by the City Council, means that Mesa’s business operations will be supporting the general fund at about $90 million a year.

Brady said it might have been possible to eliminate employees and programs in order to cover the 2013-14 shortfall. But he said residents and council members have indicated in recent years they want a robust array of services to maintain Mesa’s quality of life.

He said the strategies outlined to the council this week are important to maintaining the city’s fund balances into future years.

----

By the numbers

Some key numbers from Mesa’s latest budget forecast:

$8.5 million: Projected general-fund shortfall for fiscal 2013-14, which begins July 1.

$6 million: Total that department heads are being asked to shave from their spending during fiscal 2013-14 by, for example, holding positions vacant longer than normal.

$3.5 million: Projected cost of “step” pay increases for city employees in fiscal 2013-14. Such raises had been on hold during the worst of Mesa’s budget crises.

$3.4 million: Additional departmental budget requests approved by City Manager Chris Brady to cover what are viewed as essential operations.

$1.1 million: Projected increase in construction sales tax for fiscal 2013-14, most of which will be applied to those department budget requests.

$90 million: If approved by council, the amount that Mesa will transfer per year to its general fund from utility and other business operations. The current transfer is $83.6 million.

$2.2 million: Proposed increase in total secondary property tax levy to cover pre-2008 general-obligation bond debt.

$8.6 million: The amount of pre-2008 general-obligation bond debt that would still be paid out of the general fund.

$900,000: Projected proceeds from a new technology and sustainability fee to be imposed by the city court.

$3.6 million: Total savings from a proposed “premium holiday” that would reduce city’s contribution to an employee benefit trust fund. Employees themselves would save $1.1 million.

2 percent: Projected increase in water, sewer and residential garbage-collection rates in fiscal 2013-14.

4.9 percent: Projected rate increases for those three utilities in fiscal 2014-15 and fiscal 2015-16.

2 percent, 3 percent: Projected increases for gas and electric rates, respectively, each year from fiscal 2014-15 through fiscal 2017-18.

Ex-Compton fire official charged with arson, theft

Ex-Compton fire official charged with arson, theft

By Abby Sewell, Angel Jennings and Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times

May 17, 2013, 5:56 p.m.

Marcel Melanson was a hero in Compton.

The fire battalion chief led teams that raced to help victims of car crashes and street violence. Three years ago, he got national exposure as a star of a BET reality TV program that followed Compton firefighters on emergency calls.

"We're constantly battling the perception of the city," he told the Los Angeles Times when the show premiered. "It's constantly thought of as this bad place."

On Friday, he was back in the public eye, but under very different circumstances. Melanson, 37, appeared in court to face charges that he set a fire at the Compton Fire Department headquarters as part of an elaborate scheme to steal communications equipment from the cash-strapped city.

Law enforcement sources said investigators were able to track the equipment because they were sold piecemeal on Internet sites, including EBay. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department eventually recovered more than 50 of the radios, worth about $2,500 each, "from around the world," said spokesman Steve Whitmore.

The allegations left Compton city officials and Melanson's co-workers stunned. Melanson was a well-known figure in the city. Young, handsome and charismatic, he was described by colleagues as a self-made man who became an expert in emergency communication systems.

He also cut an unusual figure for a firefighter. He was featured in the tattoo magazine Inked for the elaborate pieces covering his back, arms and neck, including a tableau on his back of a firefighter facing a raging inferno.

"He was a very talented employee, very sharp, moved up through the ranks very quickly," Compton Fire Department Deputy Chief Bryan Batiste said. "… We're all praying for him."

"I always thought he was the smartest guy up there," added another city official, who asked not to be named. "I thought he should've been chief."

The shock was mixed with bitterness. The radio equipment that Melanson allegedly stole was purchased by the city for more than $1 million as part of an ill-fated attempt to revive its police department.

The city came close to insolvency in 2011, and officials hoped to sell the equipment to recoup some much-needed cash. Authorities allege that Melanson stole much of the equipment and set the rest on fire, hoping the missing radios would not be detected.

Melanson was charged Friday with arson, grand theft and embezzlement. He pleaded not guilty and remained jailed, with bail set at $350,000. If convicted, he would face a maximum of 10 years and eight months in state prison, said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Renee Rose.

Melanson's defense attorney, Robert Rico, said that he is still reviewing the case but that a Long Beach Fire Department investigator being used as an expert initially determined the fire was not an arson. The investigator recently changed his mind, Rico added.

"I don't believe my client committed this crime, and I'm concerned about an alleged expert changing his opinion," Rico said.

The criminal complaint filed against Melanson showed the theft and embezzlement allegations dating back to 2008, well before the December 2011 fire. Those earlier charges relate to other equipment stolen from the city.

City officials said Melanson was known as a communications wiz and an expert in emergency radio systems.

He sat on a three-person technology committee that was instrumental in the purchase of the police radios he is now accused of stealing.

The City Council voted in June 2010 to bring back the Compton Police Department, using bond funds reallocated from other projects. The city spent at least $1.7 million on preparations to set up a department, including more than $1 million on Motorola communications equipment. But the police department was never established, and the city was stuck with the radios.

The fire broke out at a racquetball court at the city's Fire Department headquarters, where the radio equipment was stored. Authorities allege Melanson stole many of the radios and then burned the rest. The city eventually got about $300,000 back through insurance.

Batiste said Melanson was the only firefighter at the station when the blaze broke out, and his co-workers wondered how someone with his training could have allowed the fire to get so far out of hand.

Melanson was placed on administrative leave shortly after the blaze and was fired in February 2013. City Manager Harold Duffey said that as far as he was aware, no other city employees had been disciplined in connection with the incident.

Fire officials from Long Beach and Montebello investigated the potential arson, while the Sheriff's Department looked into the embezzlement allegations.

Melanson was known to have financial problems.

In July 2007, the IRS filed a $80,240 lien against Melanson, records show. That lien was released in April 2011. Before that, the state of California filed a $29,000 tax lien against him in 2005 that was released in 2007.

Melanson had worked for the department for about 15 years, rising to the rank of interim deputy chief when still in his early 30s.

On the BET reality series "First In," Melanson emerged as a star. In one episode, he and his team respond to a plane crash in the city. Clad in full firefighter gear, Melanson calmly directs crew members as they pull residents out of a home hit by the small plane. With a gas leak threatening to blow up the house, Melanson is shown pushing past debris to get inside the home and look for a missing woman.

Councilwoman Yvonne Arceneaux said it's hard to reconcile that man with the allegations he is now facing.

"I'm hurt for him. I'm hurt for his family, and I'm hurt for the city of Compton for losing such an upstanding role model," she said.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

angel.jennings@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com

OAS - Time to legalize drugs????

OAS study says countries should consider decriminalizing drug use

By Chris Kraul

May 17, 2013, 2:30 p.m.

BOGOTA, Colombia — The Organization of American States said Friday that countries should consider decriminalizing drug use, a shift backed by several Latin American leaders but opposed by the United States. [Of course the war on drugs in the USA is a huge jobs program for cops, judges, prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers and prison guards. They would hate to see their high paying jobs go down the drain by legalizing the victimless crimes of drug use and drug sales. Kind of like the Inquisition was a jobs program for priests and religious cops in the middle ages.]

Decriminalization could be one of many “transitional methods” in a public health strategy that could include “drug courts, substantive reduction in sentences and rehabilitation,” according to a report released by the OAS on the possible liberalization of drug polices.

The report, presented by OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza in Bogota, was commissioned during the April 2012 Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, in response to many leaders’ complaints that U.S.-driven drug prohibition policies of recent decades had failed to stem the illicit drug business.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said he favored discussion of the decriminalization or legalization of drugs as a way to try to curb illicit drug use and trafficking.

Officials in countries known as drug production and transit locations, such as Colombia and Guatemala, have said they were paying intolerable costs in violence and corruption while consumer nations such as the U.S. and those in Europe were getting off relatively easy as the drugs keep flowing.

“All of us who hold public responsibilities owe it to the millions of women and men, young and old, mothers and fathers, girls and boys who today feel threatened, to find clear answers and effective public policies to confront this scourge,” Insulza said.

The proposal by three former Latin American leaders -- Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia -- that drugs be decriminalized or legalized has had a ripple effect among Latin American opinion leaders, said Bruce Bagley of the University of Miami, an expert on drug trafficking and policy.

Some specialists said the OAS report could have urged more specific changes to government policies.

Mark Kleiman, a UCLA public policy professor, said policies should be retooled to focus on alleviating the violence and health damage caused by drug use, not on the flow of drugs.

“We’re in a completely unsustainable situation,” Kleiman said. “The strategy is not working.”

John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank that supports decriminalization of drugs, said the OAS report was valuable in part because “it recognizes that one-size-fits-all responses won’t work for complex problems that affect countries differently.”

Illinois Senate approves bill to legalize medical marijuana

Source

Illinois Senate approves bill to legalize medical marijuana

By Michael Mello

May 17, 2013, 6:38 p.m.

Illinois has come within a signature of becoming the 19th state to allow marijuana use for medical purposes.

On Friday, the state Senate voted 35-21 to approve a medical marijuana measure, which now will head for Gov. Pat Quinn’s desk. The governor has not said whether he will sign it.

Democratic Sen. Bill Haine, one of the bill’s sponsors, told the Los Angeles Times that House Bill 1 has a very narrow scope and was crafted with law enforcement officials at the table to avoid the mistakes and pitfalls of medical marijuana programs in other states.

Eighteen states and Washington, D.C., have decriminalized marijuana use for medicinal purposes. California did so in 1996, when the state’s voters approved Proposition 215.

If it becomes law, the Illinois bill will prohibit patients from growing their own pot; instead, plants will be raised at “grow centers” overseen by authorities and the state Department of Agriculture.

Only doctors that have established relationships with patients will be able to dispense the drug to help with pain or side effects associated with treating serious illnesses, such as AIDS or cancer.

“It can’t be consumed in public. It can’t be displayed in public,” Haine said.

The bill would allow medical marijuana use for just four years, essentially creating a pilot program on the drug's use. If it’s not renewed by the state’s General Assembly, the medical pot effort will die.

A former chief prosecutor for Madison County in southwestern Illinois, Haine said he pushed for the legislation because he believes marijuana, despite its reputation, can do good.

“People have found that this substance relieves pain for people in terrible circumstances. To deny that would be unreasonable,” Haines said. “Marijuana is arguably more benign than Oxycontin … or many of the other prescription drugs.”

Nonetheless, the legislation was opposed by the Illinois Sheriffs’ Assn. and the Illinois Assn. of Chiefs of Police.

Then there’s the fact that any sort of marijuana use is outlawed by federal statues.

Haine isn’t worried.

“My old friend and colleague, the president of the United States, has said if it’s truly … for medical use, it’s not going to attract the attention of the federal government,” the senator said. “We’re going to show the federal government that this is a model.”

David Blanchette, spokesman for Quinn, said the Democratic governor wants to examine the bill closely before deciding whether to sign or veto it.

“In the past, he has said he has an open mind” to the issue, Blanchette told The Times. v The governor has 60 days from the time the bill hits his desk to take action on the bill. The legislation is likely to reach the governor sometime next week, Blanchette said.

Drug war police corruption in Utah???

A ‘Pandora’s Box of Problems’ From a Police Shooting and Drugs in a Utah Town

By JACK HEALY

Published: May 17, 2013

WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah — It began with bullets and bloodshed one November afternoon. A 21-year-old woman was dead. Two undercover officers had opened fire on her car. The police began asking the usual questions about what had happened, and why.

Danielle Willard was killed in the parking lot of a rundown apartment complex after officers from the West Valley City Police Department opened fire on her car.

Their investigation cracked open what one prosecutor called a “Pandora’s box of problems” here in Utah’s second-largest city, where Mormon pioneers once raised milk cows and sugar beets. There have been accusations of stolen drugs and missing money, abuses of police power and a cloud of corruption that defies Utah’s reputation for sunny optimism.

Over the past few months, accusations of bad police work in the narcotics squad of the West Valley City Police Department have engulfed the town and sent shock waves through Utah’s justice system. Prosecutors have tossed out 125 criminal cases. Dozens of convictions may have to be re-examined. The F.B.I. is investigating the Police Department and several officers.

Officials in Utah say they have never seen anything like it.

“Chaos,” said Sim Gill, the district attorney for Salt Lake County.

And West Valley City, a diverse blue-collar suburb of about 132,000 people that has tried to overcome its image as the state capital’s scraggly stepchild, has been knocked on its heels. Instead of discussing new office parks and glimmering shopping malls, city officials are facing a drumbeat of negative news coverage. The city is now likely to face lawsuits from people whose drug arrests have been undermined by accusations of police misconduct.

“As you start to put these things together, each one individually is concerning,” Mr. Gill said. “Collectively, they are devastating.”

The uproar began with the killing on Nov. 2 of Danielle Willard in the parking lot of a run-down apartment complex.

Ms. Willard, who had struggled with drug addiction for much of her life, was shot and killed by undercover officers from the West Valley City Police Department’s neighborhood narcotics unit. The police say that Ms. Willard had been seen buying drugs, and that when officers approached her silver Subaru Forester, she backed up in their direction, striking one officer. They opened fire, hitting her in the head. She was unarmed.

As police investigators combed through the crime scene, they popped opened the trunk of the car belonging to Detective Shaun Cowley — one of two narcotics officers who had been on the scene of the shooting. Inside, they found drug paraphernalia and items linked to previous drug cases. The discovery touched off an investigation into the actions of Detective Cowley and the other officers in the unit.

Lindsay Jarvis, a lawyer for Detective Cowley, said that the evidence found in his car was in sealed, marked bags in a lockbox. “Was there something criminal about it? Absolutely not,” she said. “Shaun is being used as a scapegoat for all of the activities going on in the narcotics unit.”

In a department with about 180 officers, the neighborhood narcotics unit was a squad of seven officers, one sergeant and one lieutenant that focused on smaller-scale dealers and users, according to Anita Schwemmer, the acting police chief. The unit handled hundreds of cases each year.

As weeks passed with little information about Ms. Willard’s killing, questions multiplied. Ms. Willard’s family seethed, publicly calling West Valley City’s silence a cover-up. Articles in The Salt Lake Tribune raised questions about the department’s policies, and people started asking whether West Valley City’s residents could still trust its police force.

“It really heated up,” said Wayne Pyle, the city manager.

Over the winter, West Valley City’s retiring police chief shut down the narcotics unit, leaving drug arrests to patrol officers and other departments. The unit’s nine officers were put on administrative leave. And last month, West Valley City officials offered a few details from their investigation into the drug squad.

They found that officers had mishandled evidence and had placed tracking devices on suspects’ cars without getting necessary warrants. Confidential informers had been misused. In some cases, officers had removed trinkets like necklaces or candles from the scene of drug arrests as “trophies.” In a few instances, drugs and money were missing.

City and police officials say the problems appear to be confined to the narcotics unit, and said most of the missteps were relatively minor, like taking change or DVDs from seized cars that were bound for the auction block. Officials said that only a few officers appeared to have a hand in the most serious breaches.

“Do I believe it’s widespread corruption up and down the department?” asked Mr. Pyle, the city manager. “No, I do not.”

Whatever its scale, the revelations upended scores of criminal cases. v After Joseph Hu, a network engineer and part-time student, was arrested on charges of drug distribution and weapons possession last September, his lawyer filed a request for West Valley City to test the $40 in heroin they claimed to have seized. A few weeks later, the city dismissed the case with no explanation and let Mr. Hu out of jail.

“All we knew was something was wrong,” said Mr. Hu’s lawyer, Kelly Ann Booth. “But we didn’t know what.”

The pattern was repeated in case after case, defense lawyers said: When they decided to challenge drug charges rather than accept a quick guilty plea, West Valley City folded up the cases. Then the district attorney, after reviewing hundreds of cases, began dismissing them by the dozen, saying he could not successfully prosecute them.

“There was not a single case I wanted to dismiss,” said Mr. Gill, the district attorney. “We had no choice.”

Advocates for Hispanic residents were jarred by one detail: In 93 of 114 cases dismissed by the district attorney, the defendants had Latino last names. City officials say that reflected a reality of how drugs are traded and trafficked in central Utah; activists said it indicated bias.

“This is racial profiling all the way,” said Tony Yapias of Proyecto Latino de Utah. The group has been meeting with city officials as they try to rebuild bridges in the community.

So far, no criminal charges have been filed against anyone in the department, and no officers have been fired.

In Washington State, Ms. Willard’s mother, Melissa Kennedy, said that she is getting tired of waiting. Her daughter, she said, was a goofy and bubbly girl who was falling into a heroin addiction by the time she was a high school senior. Her parents had sent her to Utah to a rehab program near Salt Lake City. It seemed to work for a while, but Ms. Willard fell back with friends who were drug users.

Ms. Kennedy said that she does not know whether her daughter had started doing drugs again, but she said she was a 21-year-old who should still be alive. Ms. Kennedy has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city.

“I’ve been lied to, my daughter has been murdered and I don’t know why,” she said. “There is not one thing they could say to me that I would believe.”

Trust us, we are no longer corrupt!!! Arizona National Guard

Arizona Guard chief unveils discipline, anti-corruption reforms

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 17, 2013 11:22 PM

Arizona’s top National Guard officer on Friday released a package of reforms and training protocols designed to improve discipline and combat corruption documented by a Pentagon agency’s investigation.

At the direction of Gov. Jan Brewer, Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar announced more than two dozen new initiatives that he described as “catalysts for broad, systemic program change.”

The reforms were drafted in response to recommendations made by the National Guard Bureau, a national umbrella agency for state military organizations. Earlier this month, bureau investigators released a 107-page report that said Arizona’s Guard suffers from unethical leadership, lax discipline, rogue conduct and a failure to protect abuse victims.

Those conclusions mirrored findings in an Arizona Republic series last fall that focused on sexual harassment, fraud, fraternization and other wrongdoing.

In a letter to Brewer, Salazar said the Guard remains “prepared, equipped, manned and ready to respond to local, state or federal missions” but is making changes “to remedy the (problem) areas identified in the NGB report.”

“A key priority of effort for the organization targets the serious issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault,” he added.

The Arizona Army and Air Guard serve under Salazar, who reports to Brewer as commander in chief. The organization has about 8,000 personnel.

Wrongdoing prevailed among the 1,400 soldiers and airmen who work full time. The remainder serve one weekend per month.

Among the new programs and procedures, some of which already have been implemented:

Mandatory reporting of alleged misconduct by leadership personnel.

Revisions of the Arizona Code of Military Justice and court-martial policies to enable appropriate disciplinary actions.

Regular personnel surveys on integrity, leadership and morale issues.

Development of a tracking system for investigations of misconduct.

Enhanced training and response to sexual harassment and abuse.

Creation of a provost marshal to coordinate with civilian law enforcement.

Brewer did not immediately comment on the action plan.

Salazar, who has announced that he will retire as adjutant general later this year, described the reforms as “deliberate steps to demonstrate our commitment to corrective action.”

The Republic began investigating National Guard culture last year at the request of numerous soldiers and airmen who complained of cronyism, fraternization and failed leadership.

Using military records, The Republic documented illicit relations with teenage recruits, paintball attacks on homeless people, fraudulent expenses, sexual harassment, drug dealing, drunken driving and other crimes. Personnel who committed offenses in many instances were not held accountable, while victims and whistle-blowers became targets for reprisal.

National Guard Bureau investigators, led by Maj. Gen. Ricky Adams, found that misconduct by command officers, especially sexual fraternization, sabotaged respect and discipline. They said that serious wrongdoing went unpunished and that those who complained of abuse were “victimized twice: once by the perpetrator and once by the leadership that was unable to address their needs.”

Brewer reacted to those findings by declaring that Arizona’s National Guard is “not broken.” She said she would rely on Salazar’s “steady hand and wise counsel” to address shortcomings identified in the report.

Rep. Debbie McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, on Friday renewed her call for public hearings in the Arizona Legislature and said the action plan fails to address overarching command-ethics issues.

She also complained that it lacks a system whereby Guard personnel can file complaints directly with the Governor’s Office for independent review.

“I think the fundamental problem in the Guard is the lack of leadership at the top,” McCune Davis said. “Who actually will implement this plan, and do they have a reputation for ethical behavior as an example? ... The governor has to be vigilant in selecting somebody with the highest standards.”

Yavapai sheriff’s deputy loses job over Prescott bar brawl

Source

Yavapai sheriff’s deputy loses job over Prescott bar brawl

Associated Press Fri May 17, 2013 10:16 PM

PRESCOTT -- A Yavapai County sheriff’s deputy whose actions were investigated following a brawl involving a motorcycle club at a Prescott bar has been fired.

The Sheriff’s Office announced Friday that a personnel review board recommended that Deputy Mark Boan be terminated.

That recommendation was upheld during a hearing in front of the county’s human-resources department. Boan has indicated that he plans to appeal.

The board also recommended termination for sheriff’s Capt. Marc Schmidt and Sgt. Bill Suttle. However, the two have already resigned.

An investigative report released last month alleged that members of a law-enforcement motorcycle club assaulted patrons at the Prescott bar last December, and high-ranking officers tried to cover up the bikers’ involvement.

The brawl sent a man to the hospital with a bloodied and swollen nose and left another with minor injuries.

Gun control: Cartridge ID law to take effect

Gun control: Cartridge ID law to take effect

Bob Egelko

Updated 8:39 pm, Friday, May 17, 2013

A hotly contested gun-control law that was passed in 2007 is finally ready to be implemented, Attorney General Kamala Harris said Friday: a requirement that every new semiautomatic handgun contain "micro-stamping" technology that would allow police to trace a weapon from cartridges found at a crime scene.

The law, signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, made California the first state to require micro-stamping, which engraves the gun's serial number on each cartridge. But the legislation specified that it would take effect only when the technology was available and all private patents had expired.

The gun owners' group Calguns Foundation tried to forestall the law at one point by paying a $555 fee in an attempt to extend a patent held by the inventor, who wanted it to lapse. Gun manufacturers said the technology was expensive and ineffective, and a National Rifle Association lawyer has threatened a lawsuit.

But at a Los Angeles news conference Friday, Harris announced that micro-stamping had cleared all technological and patenting hurdles and would be required on newly sold semiautomatics, effective immediately.

"The patents have been cleared, which means that this very important technology will help us as law enforcement in identifying and locating people who have illegally used firearms," Harris said.

Attorney Benjamin Van Houten of San Francisco's Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence said the announcement should send a message to other states, the Obama administration and the gun industry that "this is the future and it's really critical to helping law enforcement solve gun crimes."

Implementation of micro-stamping "moves California to the forefront of the nation in combatting gun crime," said the law's author, former Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, who attended the news conference and is running for city attorney.

C.D. Michel, the NRA's West Coast regional attorney, had a much grimmer prediction.

"This is not going to help solve crimes," he said. "It's easily defeated, easily wears out and can be used to lead police down false alleys" if the serial numbers are altered.

Worse yet, Michel said, manufacturers will be unwilling to add this expensive feature to guns sold in a single state, and will instead keep manufacturing weapons for the other states, where demand already far exceeds supply. The effect, he said, would be a ban on new semiautomatic handguns in California, which the NRA will challenge in court.

Van Houten, in response, said, "The gun lobby makes wild claims about the impact on the California gun market" every time the state enacts a new gun-safety requirement.

The technology was invented in the 1990s by Todd Lizotte, an engineer and NRA member, who has said for more than a year that he no longer claimed patent rights and wanted California to implement micro-stamping.

But Harris' office said the state had to wait until it was no longer legally possible for Lizotte to renew his patents.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com

Egyptians targeted with blasphemy charges

Egyptians targeted with blasphemy charges

By MAGGIE MICHAEL | Associated Press

CAIRO (AP) — The pale, young Christian woman sat handcuffed in the courtroom, accused of insulting Islam while teaching history of religions to fourth-graders. A team of Islamist lawyers with long beards sang in unison, "All except the Prophet Muhammad."

The case against Dimyana Abdel-Nour in southern Egypt's ancient city of Luxor began when parents of three of her pupils claimed that their children, aged 10, complained their teacher showed disgust when she spoke of Islam in class. According to the parents, Abdel-Nour, 24, told the children that Pope Shenouda, who led the Egyptian Coptic Church until his death last year, was better than the Prophet Muhammad.

Blasphemy charges were not uncommon in Egypt under the now-ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak's regime, but there has been a surge in such cases in recent months, according to rights activists. The trend is widely seen as a reflection of the growing power and confidence of Islamists, particularly the ultraconservative Salafis.

"Salafis are the engineers of these stories," said Abdel-Hamid Hassan, a Muslim and the head of the parents' council at the primary school where Abdel-Nour teaches. Hassan's daughter was among several students who denied any wrongdoing by Abdel-Nour.

"If the pope himself came here from the Vatican and tried to spread Christianity among us, he would fail. We learn about our religion starting from the age of 5," he said, alluding to the allegation against Abdel-Nour, since withdrawn, of "spreading Christianity."

Criminalizing blasphemy was enshrined in the country's Islamist-backed constitution that was adopted in December.

Writers, activists and even a famous television comedian have been accused of blasphemy since then. But Christians seem to be the favorite target of Islamist prosecutors. Their fragile cases — the main basis of the case against Abdel-Nour's case the testimony of children — are greeted with sympathy from courtroom judges with their own religious bias or who fear the wrath of Islamists, according to activists.

The result is a growing number of Egyptians, including many Christians, who have been convicted and sent to prison for blasphemy.

In at least one celebrated case, the offense was clearly provocative: Seven Coptic Christians living in the United States received death sentences in absentia for producing an anti-Islam film that sparked waves of protests by ultraconservative Islamists in front of U.S. embassies across the Arab world on Sept. 11, 2012.

But rights groups say the vast majority of blasphemy cases are merely attempts by Islamists to crack down on their opponents.

"Islamists are using the law to hunt down critics to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Christians are the weakest," said Medhat Klada, a Switzerland-based Coptic Christian activist whose organization Copts United tracks such cases. "The numbers of Christians implicated is unprecedented," he added.

Many believe that restrictions on freedoms are more severe under Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's first freely elected president, than during his predecessor's 29-year reign.

Under Mubarak, "you might have had 50 cases, which means a case or two a year on average, but now you have like 10 cases in a year," said Mamdouh Nakhla, who leads The Word Group for Human Rights and focuses on Christian-related persecution.

Freed Tuesday on nearly $3,000 bail after almost a week in detention, Abdel-Nour is due to stand trial on May 21. Her family refused several requests by The Associated Press to speak to her. Her father, Ebid Abdel-Nour, said: "She is innocent. God be with us. She can't talk because she is in very bad condition."

Emil Nazeer, a Christian activist who visited her, says she is suffering a "nervous breakdown."

Rights advocates see cases like Abdel-Nour's as politically motivated persecution. They say the verdicts tend to be harsher in southern Egypt, where Islamists are particularly powerful and Muslims are more conservative.

"Any move or word by a Christian is enough to get the rumor mill working," said Amr Ezzat, a prominent researcher in Islamic groups at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). "Rumors quickly spread in villages or the towns where the radar of Islamist activists detect them and turn them into a rallying cry under the pretext that Islam's supremacy is endangered."

Salafis advocate an uncompromising and literal interpretation of the Quran, believing society must mirror the way the prophet and his immediate successors ruled in the 7th century. Some Salafi-based political groups are at odds with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group from which Morsi hails, while others are avid supporters of his government.

Part of the Salafis' antagonism toward Christians is rooted in the belief that they were a protected group under Mubarak's regime while they, the Salafis, were persecuted. Now empowered, they may be out to exact revenge on the Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 90 million people.

The Egyptian Federation for Human Rights, led by former judge Naguib Gibrael, detects a trend in the number of lawsuits and court rulings leveled against Christians and school teachers in particular over the past year.

Gibrael, a lawyer who is representing Abdul-Nour, says it's his 18th case defending Christians — several of them teachers — detained over insulting Islam. He says his 17 other clients received three to six years in prison. They go to appeals courts, hoping for retrials or lighter sentences.

Another rights group, the EIPR, said it chronicled at least 36 blasphemy cases in 2011 and 2012, including more than 10 convictions, and that Christian school teachers were frequent targets.

"Teachers are an easy target," said Gibrael. "Any two students can say anything about their teachers. Islamist teachers collect signatures, and quickly Islamists move a case, then terrorize the court by holding protests and besieging the court building until the judge issues a verdict. I have seen it all," he said.

In Cairo, public figures who have lately faced blasphemy accusations or trials like movie star Adel Imam were all cleared, thanks to media attention, lobbying by rights groups and heavy police presence.

In rural areas, according to EIPR researcher Ishak Ibrahim, even those acquitted or otherwise cleared of blasphemy accusations face social or administrative punishment, with some forced by villagers to leave their homes, pay a fine or get demoted or suspended by their state employers.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood likes to project itself as a more moderate Islamist group when compared to the ultraconservative Salafis, but they still play a role in the blasphemy cases.

The top Brotherhood leader in Luxor, Abdel-Hamid el-Senoussi, is a lawmaker and the head of the legal team representing the families whose children testified against Abdel-Nour.

He acknowledged that two investigations by the school found no justification for the children's claims, but said he does not trust those findings.

"They just want to avoid discord. But we prefer to get to the bottom of it," he said. "Even if the court clears the teacher and rules that she is innocent, she must be fired from the school."

"There are people who want to mess up with the ship of the nation and this teacher is one of them," he said.

For him, the penalty for contempt of religion is not harsh enough. "I prefer 10 years imprisonment and, in case the judge clears the defendant, a fine that goes toward the upkeep of places of worship."

"Anyone who insults religions must be punished to deter further assaults," he said.

___

AP writer Haggag Salama contributed to this story from Luxor, Egypt

Andrew Walter wants to boot socialist Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema

Normally I would support an atheist running for Congress, but atheist Kyrsten Sinema is probably the worst Congressperson in Washington D.C if you ask me.

Kyrsten Sinema seems to be a socialist who never met a tax she didn't love.

While a member of the Arizona Legislator Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema seemed to be a big time supporter of the police state by introducing a law that would have gutted Arizona's medical marijuana law (Prop 203) by slapping a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Kyrsten Sinema is also a gun grabber.

Source

2 join 2014 race for Arizona Congress

By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 17, 2013 10:27 PM

Two Republican candidates for Congress are getting an early jump on the midterm election.

Andrew Walter, a former Arizona State University quarterback, and Gabriela Saucedo Mercer, a Tucson activist, have officially launched campaigns for 2014.

Walter, a native of Scottsdale and a political newcomer, is competing for the metro Phoenix district held by freshman Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema. The seat is considered a toss-up.

After college, Walter, 31, spent five years in the NFL, earned a master’s in business administration from ASU, founded a small lending company and worked for MidFirst Bank.

He said his time as a team captain at ASU taught him leadership and teamwork. “That’s exactly what we need today” in Congress, he told The Arizona Republic.

Walter said he is motivated by out-of-control federal spending, a sluggish economic recovery, a poor education system and looming problems associated with implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

“There’s no time to waste on solving any of these issues,” he said. “I don’t think we have that much longer to act.”

Walter doesn’t want to be a “career politician” influenced by “special interests,” he said. When pressed, he said he would term-limit himself and vote for term limits, though he hasn’t decided what length of time a politician should serve. Walter said as far as special-interest donations to political-action committees go, if “it’s individuals or institutions that embrace an economic-freedom agenda, we have a lot to talk about.”

Other Republicans who have filed paperwork to run in District 9 are Wendy Rogers, Vernon Parker and Martin Sepulveda, who all ran last year. Rogers is the only candidate in the race who has raised much campaign cash to date.

But Sinema’s $333,000 haul from January through March has far surpassed the field. [Yes, money is what government is all about!!! And it seems like Kyrsten Sinema will tell you anything to get your vote and your cash!!!]

In southern Arizona, Saucedo Mercer will make a second run at Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat, who defeated her last cycle.

Saucedo Mercer has criticized Grijalva for his 2010 call to boycott Arizona after the state passed the tough immigration-enforcement law known as Senate Bill 1070.

The district is heavily left-leaning, but Saucedo Mercer said in a written statement that Grijalva can be defeated.

“District 3 can elect a real representative to Congress who will work to bring back jobs, improve our education system, and defend our Constitutional rights,” she said. “Together, we can boycott this career politician, his fat cat political allies and special interest groups that are putting District 3 out of work.”

Kyrsten Sinema becomes a Republican???

Source

Salmon, Sinema agree on key elements of immigration reform

By Gary Nelson The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 3, 2013 10:45 AM

They come from different political perspectives and sit on opposite sides of the aisle, but the Southeast Valley’s two U.S. representatives are in sync on the need for immigration reform.

Matt Salmon, the Republican veteran, and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic freshman, shared the platform Tuesday at the 2013 East Valley Statesperson’s Luncheon in Mesa presented by the East Valley Partnership.

Salmon represents Congressional District 5, which includes east Mesa, Gilbert, Queen Creek and parts of Chandler. He was re-elected in November after a 12-year absence from the U.S. House, where he served three previous terms. Sinema’s District 9 cuts a swath from north-central Phoenix through Tempe, west Mesa and Chandler into Ahwatukee.

“I think something will happen” this year on immigration reform, Salmon said, agreeing with Sinema on key elements of a plan that would improve border security while providing legal ways for foreign nationals to work here.

Sinema said legislation is likely to emerge from the House this month, but the end product will have to mesh with a Senate bill being pushed by the so-called “Gang of Eight,” which includes Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

Salmon and Sinema both said reform will help the economy, and it’s vital to provide ways for highly educated people to stay.

“One of the worst things we’re doing right now is bringing those folks here, training them, educating them, and then sending them back to their country where they are going to compete with us,” Sinema said.

Salmon agreed. “I’d like to see us operate a little more like the National Basketball Association,” Salmon said: If you can play, you can stay.

The lawmakers also talked about federal budget issues, which continue to make headlines as the so-called sequestration budget cuts slice day-to-day federal operations.

Sinema lamented the lack of bipartisanship on budget issues, but Salmon said the problems are more profound than that. [I think Kyrsten Sinema view is a) if it moves tax it b) if it doesn't move tax it too. I don't think Kyrsten Sinema ever met a tax she didn't love. Kyrsten Sinema is famous in Arizona for that 300 percent tax she tried to slap on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush Arizona's medical marijuana law Prop 203 down the toilet!!!]

It’s vital, he said, to find ways to cut the mandatory portions of the budget — now amounting to 65 percent of all federal spending. Those programs include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and debt service.

Salmon advocates raising the retirement age and other measures to keep future spending in check. “If we don’t, a lot of people are going to get hurt — a lot more than we talk about on the sequestration side,” he said.

Salmon and Sinema also agreed on the need to promote Arizona’s place in the inernational marketplace; Sinema said she has joined a group called the New Democratic Coalition, which includes about a quarter of House Democrats and is specifically interested in promoting global trade. [That's odd, Kyrsten Sinema seems to be your typical Democrat is is back by labor unions and wants to keep foreign workers out of the country. I suspect Kyrsten Sinema plays both sides of this issue in an attempt to grab both the Democratic and Republican votes.]

The biggest threat to that, she said, is America’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks. [Wow!!! Kyrsten Sinema seems to have flipped from an anti-war person to a big fan of the American military. Again I suspect Kyrsten Sinema will say anything to get your vote and is playing both the Democratic and Republican sides of this issue in an attempt to get both the Republican and Democratic votes]

“This is an area that is not talked about very much,” Sinema said, mostly because much of the information is classified. She added:

“But, I will tell you that the threat that our country is facing as a result of cybersecurity breaches is significant. The amount of money that we already have lost as a result of our inability to protect ourselves effectively from cybersecurity threats is literally in the trillions of dollars.”

Hackers in Russia, China and Iran are busily swiping financial data, patents and other sensitive information, Sinema said, and Congress hasn’t done nearly enough to stop them.

Kevin Rogers, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau, asked the lawmakers to intervene in the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to force the Navajo Generating Station in northern Arizona to install expensive air scrubbers.

The resulting higher costs for electricity, he said, will hurt everyone in Arizona.

“I’m scared to death about the EPA proposals,” Salmon said. “It will dramatically increase the costs of water, and then the cost of everything. ...We’ve got to put our best foot forward to stop this from happening.”

Marijuana is NOT a significant factor crashes???

But this article points out that marijuana doesn't even come close to impairing your driving skills like liquor does.

Anybody that has smoked pot knows that pot doesn't mess up your bodies motor skills like booze does.

And I suspect that is one of the reasons why there are so few accidents caused by stoned people.

Source

Marijuana By Itself Not a Significant Factor in Fatal and Injury Crashes in 2012, DPS Data Shows

By Ray Stern Fri., May 17 2013 at 10:00 PM

Pot by itself was not much of a factor in injury and fatal crashes probed last year by the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Fewer than 1 percent of suspected impaired drivers involved in such crashes tested positive for nothing but marijuana.

New Times' findings, based on a records request satisfied by DPS this week, jibe with statistics we reported earlier this month in our feature article about Arizona's zero-tolerance marijuana-DUI law (link below). Drivers suspected of impairment in crashes that hurt or killed people in Phoenix, Chandler and Scottsdale were rarely found to be impaired by marijuana, our earlier research showed.

Alcohol is believed responsible for five-to-10 times the number of crashes caused by drivers impaired by all other illegal drugs combined, according to the annual "Crash Facts" report put out by the Arizona Department of Transportation.

With medicinal herb now legal under state law for more than 37,000 people, we figured we'd find out what fraction of those drug cases involved pot. Not many, it turns out.

Studies have shown that marijuana may increase the risk of a crash -- a point highlighted recently in a newspaper column by Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk and Valley-based anti-pot activist Carolyn Short warning of pot-caused carnage.

The concern seems rational. But data from the observations of state troopers and police don't seem to support fear of a looming disaster on the roadways.

In 2012, blood and urine tests ordered by DPS crash investigators prove that alcohol was the culprit in the vast majority of the 335 injury and fatal crashes involving impaired drivers.

Lab tests showed that only three of the 335 suspected impaired drivers had marijuana and nothing else in their bloodstreams.

(Quick caveat before we dump our numbers on you: Gleaned from the lab reports, they mix injury and fatal crashes -- we didn't see the entire crash reports -- just the drug and alcohol test results. The numbers don't include the fatal crashes in which the suspected impaired driver died. We omitted one report because, confusingly, it showed two suspects. In about 10 cases, two BAC readings were given, possibly taken from the suspect at different times -- we always picked the higher one.)

Here's what we found: * 335 -- total suspected impaired drivers. These are the folks busted by DPS statewide in 2012 for suspected impaired driving after an injury or fatal crash, and for which tests for drugs, alcohol or both were performed.

* 3 -- THC or THC metabolite only. The inert carboxy-THC metabolite, which can remain in the bodies of some users for weeks, was found in all three cases, at nanogram-per-milliliter levels of three, 39 and 42. The suspect with the 42 ngs of carboxy was also reported to have 2 ng/ml of active THC. The new legalization law in Washington sets an active THC limit of 5 ng/ml for drivers -- the same amount approved recently by Colorado lawmakers but not yet signed into law by Governor John Hickenlooper.

* 285 -- alcohol-only cases. If the observed level of impairment matches the BAC shown in a breath test, police don't typically order a more expensive blood test. It's a safe bet that some of those 285 drunk drivers also had drugs or drug metabolites in their bloodstreams, including pot.

* .173 -- average BAC of the alcohol-only cases. That's about halfway between an extreme and a super-extreme DUI in Arizona. Nothing higher than .382 and with a low of .01.

* 22 -- BACs below .08, of the alcohol-only cases. This week, the National Transportation Safety Board asked all 50 states to lower the legal limit to .05.

* 19 -- mixed THC with booze or other drugs. Meth shows up a few times here, but booze and tranquilizers are the most common.

* 6 - mixed alcohol and other drugs, but not THC.

* 15 -- drugged, but no THC or alcohol. Tranquilizers, sleeping pills, meth, morphine, pain pills.

* 7 -- negative drug and alcohol test results.

Notes in four of the cases suggested police believed impairment was caused by something the lab couldn't test for, such as spice, K2 and LSD.

Final word: All of the cases involved pain and suffering caused by a driver who was probably impaired by something.

Drive safely.

Politicians and cops are addicted to Federal pork???

Posted on May 17, 2013 11:27 am

First responders face cutbacks as federal funds dry up

My Turn by SCOTT SOMERS

Once again an American city has been the target of the brutality of terrorism. Our hearts go out to the victims and families affected by the Boston Marathon bombing. [If you ask me the police who flushed the Constitution rights of the people of Boston down the toilet to catch the two Boston bombers were bigger terrorists then the Boston Bombers were.]

Watching the news, we were witness to the value of a unified response by federal, state and local authorities. Videos document Boston firefighters, emergency medical personnel and local hospitals working together to treat the wounded. Pictures show FBI and ATF agents standing with Boston police to investigate the crime and apprehend those responsible.

Homeland security continues to be a highly visible, core responsibility for frontline first responders. [The only good thing about all this "homeland security" is that it make most people realized that America has turned into a police state!!!]

Federal, state and local agencies in the Valley have worked diligently to integrate communications and build regional preparedness capabilities. An example is the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. ACTIC was one of the first fusion centers to go into operation and is able to tie together intelligence agencies statewide. This partnership prepares the region to better respond to natural or human-caused disasters or terrorist events.

But critical programs face cuts amid a decline in federal preparedness efforts. [I disagree with that 100 percent. We don't need these wasteful police state pork programs any more then we need a hole in the head!!!]

Urban Area Security Initiative grants have been used by fire departments to improve capabilities to respond to hazardous-materials incidents. Some of these resources were used recently to respond to a suspicious letter containing an oily substance at the Phoenix office of Sen. Jeff Flake. [Yea, and I don't ever remember the cops using these megabucks of Federal pork to ever respond to any real threats. They usually end up blowing up a bag of dirty clothing that somebody forgot at a bus stop. And then claiming that they protected us from some imaginary terrorists]

Police have used UASI grants to increase explosive-ordinance disposal and SWAT and intelligence-analyzing capabilities. This equipment was on display when officers investigated a backpack left near 44th Street and McDowell Road. [I don't remember that incident, but if it was like all the others the cops probably ended up blowing up the backpack only to find out it wasn't a bomb, but a bag of dirty clothing.]

But Phoenix UASI decreased more than 50 percent between fiscal 2010 and 2012. [Thank God!!! We need a lot less of this wasteful government pork that has turned American into a police state]

The region is in jeopardy of losing its funding altogether as Congress continues to call for reductions in the number of regions receiving UASI grants. The president’s 2014 budget proposed consolidating state and local preparedness grants without adequate stakeholder input. [Yea, and lets hope they lose 100 percent of this wasteful police state pork!!!]

The Metropolitan Medical Response System grant was all but eliminated last year. MMRS helped strengthen medical surge capacity, mass vaccinations and treatment, decontamination capabilities and regional collaboration. [Translation, like the insane unconstitutional war on drugs, it's a jobs program for cops!!!]

In March, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell, along with council members Daniel Valenzuela of Phoenix and Sammy Chavira of Glendale and myself, met with representatives of the Department of Homeland Security to express concern about the decline in the region’s grant allocation. The issue is under review by DHS. [So it sounds like the author [Scott Sommers], along with Greg Stanton, Mark Mitchell, Daniel Valenzuela, and Sammy Chavira are part of the problem of this wasteful government spending on police state pork and all need to be booted out of office by the voters]

Homeland Security grants are needed to sustain critical capabilities, training and exercises for our first responders and community partners and to continue such successful programs as Terrorism Liaison Officers and Community Emergency Response Teams. These Phoenix regional programs were identified as “innovative best practices” in a 2009 DHS review. [Of course they were. The DHS wants as much government pork as it can get!!!]

Be assured that Valley first responders remain ever vigilant and prepared to prevent and respond to emergencies. But local responders need a committed federal partner to protect our homeland. [That's 100 percent BS. What we need to do is boot the police state politicians who are responsible for this wasteful government spending out of office!!!]

Scott Somers is a Mesa City Council member.

Emperor Obama knew the IRS was harassing his enemies????

Probe of IRS began last year

By Stephen Ohlemacher Associated Press Sat May 18, 2013 12:15 AM

WASHINGTON -- Senior Treasury officials were made aware in June 2012 that investigators were looking into complaints from “tea party” groups that they were being harassed by the Internal Revenue Service, a Treasury inspector general said Friday, disclosing that Obama administration officials knew there was a probe during the heat of the presidential campaign.

J. Russell George, Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified alongside ousted IRS head Steven Miller, who did little to subdue Republican outrage during hours of intense congressional questioning.

Both defiant and apologetic, Miller acknowledged agency mistakes in targeting tea-party groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status, but he insisted that agents broke no laws and that there was no effort to cover up their actions.

Miller only stoked the criticism of many Republicans, who are assailing the administration on a sudden spate of other controversies, even as some Democrats are trying to contain the political damage.

“I don’t know that I got any answers from you today,” Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., told Miller. “I am more concerned today than I was before.”

At one point in the day’s hearing, George said he had told the department’s general counsel about his investigation on June 4, 2012, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.” But, George cautioned, those discussions were “not to inform them of the results of the audit, it was to inform them of the fact that we were conducting the audit.”

After the hearing, inspector-general spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar said George “informed Department of Treasury officials that we were looking into the IRS’ handling of applications for tax-exempt status, partly due to allegations raised by conservative organizations.”

Kraushaar said the disclosure was part of a routine briefing about the office’s activities.

The Treasury Department issued a statement on Friday saying officials first became aware of the actual results of the investigation in March, when they were provided a draft of George’s report, a standard practice.

George’s disclosure came before the House Ways and Means Committee in the first of several congressional hearings on the matter. He was joined by Miller, who spoke publicly about the controversy for the first time.

Miller was contrite as he apologized for the actions of agents who singled out conservative political groups for additional, often burdensome scrutiny.

“First and foremost, as acting commissioner, I want to apologize on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service for the mistakes that we made and the poor service we provided,” he told the committee. “The affected organizations and the American public deserve better.”

But the hearing turned prickly when Miller insisted he did not deceive Congress, though he repeatedly failed to reveal the controversy last year when he was asked about it by lawmakers — even after he had been briefed.

“I did not mislead Congress or the American people,” Miller said.

The administration is on the defensive for a trio of issues that are threatening to derail the president’s second-term agenda. In addition to the IRS case, President Barack Obama and other officials are being pressed about last September’s terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and the government’s seizure of Associated Press telephone records as part of a leak investigation.

“Listening to the nightly news, this appears to be just the latest example of a culture of cover-ups and political intimidation in this administration,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Committee Democrats were also critical of the IRS, but several took offense at Camp’s assertion that this matter is part of a wider problem within the administration. They noted that there has been no evidence so far that anyone outside the IRS was involved in targeting conservative groups.

“If this hearing becomes essentially a bootstrap to continue the campaign of 2012 and to prepare for 2014, we will be making a very, very serious mistake,” said Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the panel.

Levin said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that makes decisions about tax-exempt groups, “should be relieved of her duties.” Lerner is the IRS official who made the scandal public on May 10 in what Miller said was a planned event at a legal conference.

Obama forced Miller to resign this week, though Miller will remain on the job for a few days until the new acting director takes over. Obama has named Daniel Werfel, a top White House budget officer, to replace him.

Miller is a 25-year IRS employee who was a deputy commissioner when the tea-party groups were being targeted. In that job, Miller was over the division that dealt with tax-exempt organizations.

He became acting head of the agency in November, when IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman’s five-year term expired. Shulman had been appointed by President George W. Bush, a fact highlighted by several Democrats at Friday’s hearing.

Camp said Miller’s departure wouldn’t be enough.

Two other committees have hearings scheduled for next week, and the Justice Department has launched its own criminal investigation. Miller is also scheduled to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Finance Committee. He will be joined by Shulman and George.

Underscoring the seriousness of his testimony on Friday, Miller was sworn in as a witness, an unusual step for the Ways and Means panel.

He told committee members that before the episode became public, he had no contact with the Treasury Department, the White House or Obama’s re-election campaign about targeting conservative groups.

“Absolutely not,” Miller said.

He surprised committee members when he said “it is absolutely not illegal” for IRS agents to single out conservative groups for additional scrutiny.

“Please don’t get me wrong,” he added. “It should not happen.”

George, the inspector general, backed up Miller’s assertion when he said the yearlong investigation did not uncover illegal activity.

George’s report concluded that an IRS office in Cincinnati, which screened applications for the tax exemptions, improperly singled out tea-party and other conservative groups for tougher treatment. The report says the practice began in March 2010 and lasted in various forms until May 2012.

Agents did not flag similar progressive or liberal labels, though some liberal groups did receive additional scrutiny because their applications were singled out for other reasons, the report said.

The inspector general’s report blamed ineffective management in Washington, D.C., for letting the inappropriate singling out occur for so long.

Miller said he was notified that conservative groups had been singled out for additional scrutiny on May 3, 2012.

But Miller was not forthcoming back then about groups being targeted in at least two letters to members of Congress and in testimony before a Ways and Means subcommittee.

Ron Paul slams Boston police in Marathon bombing

Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston

by Ron Paul

Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.

These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.

The “shelter in place” command imposed by the governor of Massachusetts was lifted before the suspect was caught. Only after this police state move was ended did the owner of the boat go outside to check on his property, and in so doing discover the suspect.

No, the suspect was not discovered by the paramilitary troops terrorizing the public. He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police. And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.

As journalist Tim Carney wrote last week:

“Law enforcement in Boston used cameras to ID the bombing suspects, but not police cameras. Instead, authorities asked the public to submit all photos and videos of the finish-line area to the FBI, just in case any of them had relevant images. The surveillance videos the FBI posted online of the suspects came from private businesses that use surveillance to punish and deter crime on their property.”

Sadly, we have been conditioned to believe that the job of the government is to keep us safe, but in reality the job of the government is to protect our liberties. Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties. That is what happened in Boston.

Three people were killed in Boston and that is tragic. But what of the fact that over 40 persons are killed in the United States each day, and sometimes ten persons can be killed in one city on any given weekend? These cities are not locked-down by paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.

This is unprecedented and is very dangerous. We must educate ourselves and others about our precious civil liberties to ensure that we never accept demands that we give up our Constitution so that the government can pretend to protect us.

Source

Ron Paul slams Boston police response to blasts

Catalina Camia, USA TODAY 3:47 p.m. EDT April 29, 2013

Former congressman Ron Paul was no fan of the police presence and manhunt tied to the Boston Marathon bombings.

The libertarian-thinking, former GOP presidential candidate slammed what he called the "military-style takeover" of Boston on April 19, the day Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick asked residents of Boston and its nearby suburbs to "shelter in place."

"The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city," Paul wrote on the website of Lew Rockwell, a libertarian writer. "This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged in connection with the blasts that left three people dead and more than 260 injured. His older brother, Tamerlan, died in a firefight with police hours before Dzhokhar was tracked down.

Paul served in Congress for 23 years, before retiring in January. The Texan was well known for criticizing what he believed was big government intrusion, in everything from tax and financial policy to national security. The scenes in Boston of police going door-to-door, closed businesses and public transportation shut down were more appropriate for "a military coup in a far off banana republic," Paul wrote.

Patrick last week defended the "shelter in place" decision. "I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time," he is quoted as saying in The Boston Globe.

Source

Ron Paul criticizes Marathon bombing response

Globe Staff

April 29, 2013

WASHINGTON — Former US representative Ron Paul has a warning for Americans after the Boston Marathon bombings, and it may come as a surprise.

The prominent libertarian says citizens should perhaps be more frightened by the police response to the attack — which killed three and injured scores more — than by the explosions themselves.

In an article called “Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston,” the former Republican representative and two-time presidential candidate compares the intense April 19 search for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to “scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic.”

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul writes. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”

Paul argues that the Boston case sets a dangerous precedent, recounting scenes of “paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.”

“Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties,” Paul writes. “That is what happened in Boston.”

During the search, authorities encouraged residents in the Boston area to stay inside their homes.

It created surreal scenes on the Friday after the attack, with eerily quiet streets.

Governor Deval Patrick last week defended the decision to shut down the Boston area.

“I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time,” Patrick said at a news conference Friday.

— MATT VISER

<SNIP>

The 10 most bizarre things about the IRS scandal

The 10 most bizarre things about the IRS scandal

By Jennifer Rubin, Published: May 17, 2013 at 3:56 pm

If you have been following the Internal Revenue Service scandal over the past 24 hours or so, you may be reeling, just a bit. And if you haven’t, you’ve missed an out-of-body experience in which the IRS, the administration and Democrats seem to think Americans are a bunch of dopes.

1. At his contentious hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee, Steven T. Miller, the IRS’s outgoing acting commissioner, denied anything illegal was done. He denied targeting groups. But yes, groups with “tea party” and other conservative flags got different treatment. It was bad, what they did, he allowed. No buzz word like “progressive” was used to flag liberal groups. And he wants a bigger IRS budget. (Honestly, you can’t make this up.)

2. The IRS did not reveal the scandal before the 2012 election. The IRS falsely informed Congress the targeting wasn’t going on. Even NBC’s Lisa Myers could figure out, “Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

3. Miller said this was a matter of “horrible customer service.”

4. Miller asserted that the woman who ran the group that engaged in this behavior and is now running the Obamacare unit is a “superb civil servant.” (Right about now, you might think he was pulling our leg, but he was sincere.)

5. Miller can’t identify who thought up the scheme.

6. Yesterday, the president, when asked if the White House knew about the scandal before it was revealed, would only say he didn’t know about what was in the Inspector General’s report until the report was released. If anyone in the White House was aware of the misconduct and kept it from coming out before the election, this will be one really big problem for them.

7. Some House Democrats on the committee repeatedly sought to blame the Citizens United case, which ruled about dollar limits on third-party groups, including those at issue in the IRS scandal. That is a bit like blaming the tax code for Al Capone’s tax evasion.

8. However, some Democrats, maybe sensing that this looks really, really bad, expressed outrage and agreed there needs to be more investigation. Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) said that when it turned out there had been targeting the IRS was obligated to inform Congress. Officials then did not do so.

9. Miller smirked, rolled his eyes and repeatedly refused to answer questions to the obvious dismay of Republicans trying to figure out what the heck went on.

10. The IRS may have leaked confidential tax information from one group to other, according to some of those singled out by the IRS. But it is not yet clear this occurred. (This would definitely be illegal, Mr. Miller.) Recall that during the campaign the Obama team referred to the Koch brothers tax returns. We don’t know if that is related to this scandal. Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Republicans raised an instances in which this was reported, including one involving the National Organization for Marriage.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the hearing, ““What we don’t know at this point is whether it jumped the fence from the IRS to the White House. But we do know this: We can’t count on the administration to be forthcoming about the details of this scandal — because so far they’ve been anything but.”

Those who imagine the federal government is both dishonest and incompetent had their worst suspicions confirmed over the last couple of days.

SF cops say f*ck the 4th and 5th Amendments!!!

Source

SFPD looks at easing camera requirements for liquor licenses

In a debate between security and civil liberties, the San Francisco Police Department is considering scaling down their electronic surveillance requirements for establishments seeking liquor licenses, but privacy advocates at City Hall aren’t satisfied yet.

Supervisors Scott Wiener and David Campos recently objected to liquor licenses requiring cameras at entry points and outside the premises, and ordering owners to retain the footage for 30 days to turn over the police if requested. The requirements were seen by some as a backhanded way to increase surveillance after a police proposal two years ago insisting that all entertainment venues have security cameras was derailed by privacy concerns.

New language drafted by police still requires that new liquor licenses in high-crime areas install cameras. The difference would be that recordings would only need to be turned over when “requested as evidence in a criminal investigation” instead of “upon demand.”

“We met with them and they agreed that they need to come up with a more case-specific approach instead of a broad policy of requiring electronic surveillance,” said Wiener, who has said he’s worried about cameras potentially outing patrons at gay bars.

But with almost half the city classified as a “high crime area,” Wiener is still not happy with police generally recommending cameras in all cases since their Alcoholic Beverage Control Liaison Unit was formed in 2010.

“I think it needs to be case by case, there needs to be a specific reason why cameras are needed there,” Wiener said. “We’ll just keep talking with them.”

Deputy Police Chief John Loftus said cameras, especially in nightclubs, are crucial for combating violence and keeping patrons safe, and noted that the state’s ABC has the final say on liquor license requirements.

“This is a process, we go back and forth,” he said. “Our primary issue all the time is public safety.”

It's illegal to ask a person if they can do the job????

Source

Off-base interview questions

By Jeanine “J.T.” O’Donnell and Dale Dauten King Features Sat May 18, 2013 4:07 PM

I went on an interview, and the male interviewer seemed more interested in my personal life than in my experience. He asked if I was married, how many kids did I have, my age, on and on. I felt he was screening more for a potential date than an employee. What’s the best way to deal with illegal questions?

J.T.: It’s unfortunate, but just because people own a business or run a department doesn’t mean they understand proper hiring practices, especially in small businesses, where there is no trained HR staff. Next time, follow your gut. I’m sure there was an alarm going off in your head, saying: “This isn’t right! Don’t work here!” Then, simply say, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure how my family status affects this job — could you explain why these questions are relevant to the position?” You should expect a surprised and possibly miffed reaction, but it will ensure that the interview will end quickly. You then have the option of filing a complaint with the EEOC.

Dale: It’s interesting to note that the questions about family would be quite acceptable in almost any other social situation. So I asked our favorite employment attorney, Scott Gordon of Rodey Law in Albuquerque, to look at Nikki’s question and help with the drawing of lines.

Scott: In this case, small talk can be big trouble. By now, most employers realize that they shouldn’t ask an applicant’s age during a job interview. Many employers don’t realize that asking about a job applicant’s marital status or caregiver obligations also can get them into trouble, particularly if they ask women only. The effect can be to suggest, “If you’re a single mom with school-age kids, you can’t do this job as well as a married man with a stay-at-home wife.”

J.T.: Is there a simple rule you suggest that employers follow?

Scott: If the question isn’t job-related, don’t ask it.

Dale: So an employer could ask, “This job requires loading 50-pound barrels onto trucks — will that be a problem?”

Scott: Yes, the interviewer is allowed to state the physical requirements of the job and ask whether the applicant can perform those duties. However, the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits an interviewer from asking an applicant disability-related questions. So, before a job offer is made, it would be illegal to ask an applicant if she has any medical conditions that might affect her ability to perform the job.

J.T.: The difference being that asking about medical conditions is asking personal questions. So the rule still applies: If it isn’t job-related, don’t ask. Thank you, Scott.

Contact J.T. and Dale at jtanddale.com.

Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor's biotech firm

Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor's biotech firm

By David Willman

Reporting from Washington

May 19, 2013

Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security.

Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.

U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat — and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it.

Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

By his own account, Danzig encouraged Human Genome Sciences Inc. to develop the compound, and from 2001 through 2012 he collected more than $1 million in director's fees and other compensation from the company, records show.

The drug, raxibacumab, or raxi, was the first product the company was able to sell, and the U.S. government remains the only customer, at a cost to date of about $5,100 per dose.

A number of senior federal officials whom Danzig advised on the threat of bioterrorism and what to do about it said they were unaware of his role at Human Genome.

Dr. Philip K. Russell, a biodefense official in the George W. Bush administration who attended invitation-only seminars on bioterrorism led by Danzig, said he did not know about Danzig's tie to the biotech company until The Times asked him about it.

"Holy smoke—that was a horrible conflict of interest," said Russell, a physician and retired Army major general who helped lead the government's efforts to prepare for biological attacks.

Federal law bars U.S. officials, including consultants, from giving advice on matters in which they or a company on whose board they serve have "a financial interest."

Danzig said in an interview that he believed his position at Human Genome posed no conflict.

He said he had tried to improve policymakers' understanding of biodefense issues, including the threat of antibiotic-resistant anthrax, but never lobbied the government to purchase raxi.

"My view was I'm not going to get involved in selling that," Danzig said. "But at the same time now, should I not say what I think is right in the government circles with regard to this? And my answer was, 'If I have occasion to comment on this, it ought to be in general, as a policy matter, not as a particular procurement.'

"I feel that I've acted very properly with regard to this," he said.

The government's purchases of raxi, which began in 2006 under the Bush administration, buoyed the Rockville, Md., company while it struggled to bring a conventional drug to market. The Obama administration has made additional purchases, more than doubling the government's supply.

Human Genome was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in August for $3.6 billion.

Because raxi loses its potency after three years in storage, the government's supply will expire as of 2015, according to federal documents and people familiar with the matter. Administration officials must decide whether to replenish the expiring inventory of raxi and a similar product made by a Canadian company.

Richard J. Danzig, 68, served as secretary of the Navy under President Clinton. He's since served as a presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and Homeland Security.

Danzig began warning about antibiotic-resistant anthrax after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the mailings of anthrax-laced letters that fall.

The powdered anthrax in the letters killed five people but was not resistant to common antibiotics. Asked what gave rise to his concern about resistant strains, Danzig cited conversations with "people whose technical skills exceed mine." One of them, Dr. Robert P. Kadlec, a bioterrorism advisor in the Bush White House, said he and others were concerned that terrorists could develop such a weapon.

Danzig has sounded the alarm in published papers and in private briefings and seminars for biodefense and intelligence officials.

In a 2003 report funded by the Pentagon, "Catastrophic Bioterrorism — What Is To Be Done?" he wrote that it would be "quite easy" for terrorists to produce antibiotic-resistant anthrax. He has expanded on that theme over the years, including in a 2009 paper for the Pentagon.

In the 2003 report, published while raxi was in development at Human Genome, Danzig said a drug to combat resistant strains of anthrax should be produced "as soon as possible" and that stockpiling such a treatment, "even if expensive and in limited supply," would deter an attack.

John Vitko Jr., a top Homeland Security official during the Bush and Obama administrations, said he turned frequently to Danzig for advice on biodefense matters — and read and "paid attention to" his "Catastrophic Bioterrorism" report.

The two have served for the last seven years on a government panel that provides confidential assessments of the nation's biodefense needs to the Homeland Security secretary, the National Security Council staff and other senior officials.

Vitko said he knew nothing of Danzig's involvement with Human Genome until a Times reporter asked him about it.

"I'm surprised I didn't," Vitko said. "I'm not aware of it."

Five other present or former biodefense officials who conferred with Danzig said they, too, had been unaware of his position with the company. Danzig, they said, made no mention of it in their presence during group discussions he led or in smaller meetings.

A seventh person, a former Bush administration official, said Danzig informed him during their first meeting that he was on Human Genome's board and that the company was developing "a treatment product for anthrax."

A Times search found seven papers Danzig had written on bioterrorism since 2001. In only one of those did he disclose his tie to Human Genome.

As an advisor to the federal government, Danzig is required to file confidential forms annually, revealing any outside affiliations but not his related compensation. Danzig said he had noted his position with the biotech firm on the forms.

Asked whether he mentioned his corporate role during contacts with government officials, Danzig replied: "If I thought any of it posed a potential conflict that might cause somebody who knew about it to discount my views, I would tell them."

Danzig, 68, is a Yale Law School graduate and Rhodes scholar who became a partner in Washington for the law firm Latham & Watkins.

He served as a Pentagon appointee during the Carter administration and as undersecretary and then secretary of the Navy under President Clinton. He has a long-standing interest in biowarfare.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Danzig advised then-Sen. Barack Obama on national security and bioterrorism. After Obama's election, Danzig was named to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, in addition to his consulting positions with the Defense Department and Homeland Security.

He has received the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award, the Pentagon's highest civilian honor, three times — in 1981, 1997 and 2001.

When Human Genome named Danzig to its board on May 24, 2001, the company's chief executive said his high-level federal experience would "serve us well."

Later that year, the anthrax letters were mailed to congressional leaders and news organizations, contaminating government buildings in Washington, disrupting mail delivery and causing widespread unease in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In response, Human Genome began examining experimental compounds under its control — including one to be used against antibiotic-resistant anthrax.

Called an antitoxin, the drug is intended to neutralize anthrax toxin circulating in an infected person's body. Antibiotics, by contrast, are designed to kill the anthrax bacterium itself. [That is wrong!!! Antibiotics don't kill ANYTHING. Antibiotics are basically birth control pills for bacteria and keep them from reproducing. If you take antibiotics for about a week all the bad bacteria in your body will naturally die out.]

Danzig recalled his reaction when he learned of the experimental drug, initially called ABthrax, in 2002:

"As a board member, I said, 'Hey, I think this is a good idea. I think that if you can do this, it will be beneficial both publicly — it's a good idea to have a drug that does this — and it'll be economically a good thing for the company.'"

He also began speaking out about the threat posed by anthrax and other biodefense matters.

With support from then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Danzig started conducting private briefings and seminars.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Reeves, who participated in the sessions while heading the Defense Department's preparations for biological and chemical warfare, said Danzig presented scenarios related to what he called "reload," the idea that terrorists might launch a series of anthrax attacks, one after another.

"Then you go around the room to the various people who have any responsibilities in those areas, and say, 'What are you going to do now, Coach?'" Reeves recalled. "He's been highly influential in this area, on multiple levels, and across the government."

Russell, the Bush-era biodefense official, said the sessions, held in 2002 and 2003, galvanized support for stockpiling biodefense drugs.

"Those seminars were attended by all the usual suspects and created a consensus in the thinking about the threat," Russell said, adding that Danzig "had a major position of influence. People respected his views. He's a smart guy."

The anthrax letter attacks, Danzig wrote in his "Catastrophic Bioterrorism" paper, exposed national security vulnerabilities "greater than those associated with 9/11." He argued that the country's defenses were inadequate.

Doses of anthrax vaccine would have to be given weeks or months in advance of an attack. As for antibiotics, Danzig suggested that even a novice terrorist could "readily" make a resistant strain.

"Development of an antibiotic-resistant strain ... is quite easy," Danzig wrote. "Even at the high school level, biology students understand that an antibiotic-resistant strain can be developed."

This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training."

Several biodefense scientists said in interviews that producing such strains would not be easy.

"It's not a trivial endeavor," said Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University geneticist and anthrax expert. "This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training."

Citing his own published research, Keim said manipulating anthrax to resist antibiotics would decrease the germ's stability and virulence, typically rendering it nonlethal.

Danzig conceded this possibility in a footnote in "Catastrophic Bioterrorism." Nonetheless, he wrote that "we should give great priority" to developing "a third alternative" for coping with an anthrax attack.

An antitoxin was such an alternative, he said. It "could be invaluable if we confronted an attack with a strain that was broadly resistant to antibiotics, or if we became aware of the disease too late to treat it only with antibiotics," he wrote.

Those who would most benefit from a new treatment option, Danzig added, included "the president and his staff, members of Congress, key members of the military."

In another footnote, Danzig disclosed his connection to Human Genome and its experimental antitoxin:

"As a member of the Board of Directors of Human Genome Sciences, a Nasdaq listed company, I have encouraged the company in its efforts to develop an anthrax antitoxin. I do not believe that my views on this point are distorted by any financial interest, but readers will want to make their own determination. Under any conditions, alternative sources could supply antitoxin, and I make no representation as to which would be the best."

During his 11-year tenure on the board, which ended in August, Danzig collected at least $1,054,255 in director's fees and by cashing in grants of Human Genome stock and stock options, according to Fred Whittlesey of Compensation Venture Group, who reviewed the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings for The Times.

Nearly half of Danzig's compensation came from the stock options, of which he had been granted 184,000 by the end of 2011, Whittlesey said.

Danzig also invested his own money in Human Genome, buying 3,000 shares at a cost of $45,955 in May 2002. Danzig said he purchased the stock because "a director ought to have some of his own money at stake," and that he did not profit from the shares.

On March 18, 2003, Human Genome announced that it was developing raxi as a "mechanism of defense against anthrax," including antibiotic-resistant strains.

On May 13, Chief Executive William A. Haseltine told the House Homeland Security Committee that "in order to move forward the company needs a commitment from the federal government" to buy raxi.

Danzig, meanwhile, sought to keep policymakers focused on the threat.

In late October 2003, he co-hosted a two-day bioterrorism seminar at Aspen Wye River Conference Center, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, attended by dozens of senior policymakers — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Julie Gerberding, then-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scenarios and recommendations from Danzig's "Catastrophic Bioterrorism" were a centerpiece of the discussion.

When the government signed its initial order for raxi in June 2006, Human Genome's new president, H. Thomas Watkins, described its significance.

"It's a very important contribution to our movement forward as a company," Watkins told Wall Street analysts. "We think it will be a good move for shareholders."

In 2004, President Bush signed into law Project BioShield, which provided billions of dollars for biodefense drugs.

The contracts are administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, based on advice from federal agencies and consultants. Homeland Security must certify the need for a drug before the government can buy it.

Bioterrorism warning

Excerpts from "Catastrophic Bioterrorism — What Is To Be Done?" a 2003 report by Richard Danzig:

Danzig asserts that terrorists could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.

He also urges the government to stockpile a new type of drug to combat resistant strains of anthrax.

Danzig, through his seminars, writings and consulting duties, has helped frame the discussion over whether a given biological threat is "material" and whether the government should stockpile medicines to defend against it.

For example, Danzig has served as a member of a Homeland Security review panel that develops the Biodefense Net Assessment, intended to spotlight gaps in the nation's biological defenses. The panel includes officials from Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.

Danzig declined to discuss his role in the biodefense assessment or his other government consulting duties.

Vitko, who has chaired the biodefense review panel since its inception in 2006, declined to discuss its work or Danzig's participation.

Speaking of Danzig's broader role as a government advisor, Vitko said: "Richard's got incredible insights into this and I think has made major contributions."

He called Danzig one of "the major bio players" and said his views had informed a range of policy considerations, including "how many countermeasures do you need, of what kind."

It was in response to advice from Vitko and his staff that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in 2004 declared anthrax a "material threat," the certification required for the government to buy drugs to fight it.

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized its first order of raxi — 20,000 doses at a cost of $174 million.

That year, Ridge's successor, Michael Chertoff, signed a second, more specific declaration, adding "multi-drug-resistant" anthrax to the government's list of material threats.

Asked the basis for the second declaration, Vitko said: "I think the concern was more forward-looking, and saying, 'How could the threat evolve, and are we prepared for that?'"

Since 2009, the Obama administration has ordered an additional 45,000 doses of raxi for $160 million.

Danzig has continued to emphasize the threat. In 2009, he warned in a Pentagon-funded report, "A Policymaker's Guide to Bioterrorism and What to Do About It," that terrorists could try to "exploit our weaknesses," adding:

"They could do this, for example, by developing antibiotic-resistant strains when we have stockpiled a particular antibiotic."

Whether raxi would work as envisioned remains unknown.

Ethical considerations prohibit infecting human volunteers with anthrax. As a result, tests of raxi's effectiveness were conducted exclusively on animals, which may or may not predict its performance in humans. None of those tests used antibiotic-resistant anthrax.

The FDA approved raxi as an anthrax treatment in December, after an advisory committee voted that it was "reasonably likely" to be effective in humans.

Haseltine, the founding president of Human Genome, said the theoretical threat of terrorist-engineered anthrax had been a key factor in selling the drug to the government.

"They had an empty box: What do you do for antibiotic-resistant anthrax? We were able to fill that box for them," Haseltine said.

---

Danzig's twin roles

May 2001 — Washington lawyer Richard J. Danzig is appointed to the board of Human Genome Sciences Inc. in Rockville, Md.

Sept. 11, 2001 — Terrorists crash passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania. Soon after, the mailing of anthrax-laced letters to media organizations and congressional leaders sets the nation further on edge.

Late 2001 — Human Genome Sciences begins testing a compound with the potential to fight antibiotic-resistant anthrax. The work proceeds with Danzig's encouragement.

Early 2002 — Danzig, acting as a Pentagon consultant, begins holding invitation-only seminars for U.S. officials on anthrax and other biological threats.

Spring 2003 — Human Genome announces it is developing a new anthrax drug, raxibacumab, or raxi. Its chief executive tells Congress that "to move forward the company needs a commitment from the federal government" to buy the product.

August 2003 — Danzig circulates a study he prepared for the Pentagon saying that the U.S. "should give great priority" to stockpiling a drug capable of combating antibiotic-resistant anthrax.

June 2006 — The government completes its first order for raxi, worth $174 million, and Human Genome's chief executive calls the contract "a very important contribution to our movement forward as a company."

August 2012 — Human Genome is acquired by GlaxoSmithKline for $3.6 billion. By this point, the government has purchased $334 million worth of raxi, and Danzig has collected more than $1 million since 2001 in compensation from the biotech company.

Contact the reporter

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Goldwater Institute fights tyrants on Arizona Board of Cosmetology

Board out of woman’s business

By Robert Anglen The Republic | azcentral.com Sat May 18, 2013 1:08 PM

Confined to her Kansas City, Mo., home for six months with breast cancer in 2006, Lauren Boice conceived of a business linking cosmetologists with hospice patients.

She said the idea was to provide a beauty and care service for elderly and ill people who couldn’t get in a car for a trip to a salon.

In 2008, Boice brought Angels on Earth Home Beauty LLC to Green Valley. Two years later, she was locked in a legal battle with the Arizona Board of Cosmetology over a host of regulations that threatened to shut her down.

The board sent investigators to Boice’s house and accused her of operating an illegal salon. They told her she failed to comply with salon licensing requirements and told her she needed to install equipment such as a sink or lease space in a functioning salon.

No matter that Boice’s business operated as a dispatch service and the only equipment required to run it was a phone and a computer. Boice hired licensed cosmetologists and arranged for them to visit hospitals, care homes and private residences. The board insisted Boice was breaking the law.

“Every time I complied with one regulation, they say, ‘Now you have to do this... .’ It finally got to the point where I said, ‘This is just ridiculous,’ ” Boice said. “What snapped me was when the board said I had to book appointments through a (physical) salon. That would have removed me from my own business.”

Officials with the Cosmetology Board did not respond to interview requests Friday. Board members, who are appointed by the governor, regulate hair styling, manicures, massage and other spa-type treatments.

“It was clear they (the board) had no idea what I was doing. They were trying to pigeonhole me,” Boice said. “I wrote to the governor and the attorney general, saying, ‘Please help me.’ ”

Boice, 54, previously worked in a hospice. She now has a full-time marketing job and operates Angels in her spare time. She said the business doesn’t generate much profit, if any. She said it is more of a community service that gives those who are homebound a chance to look and feel better.

“It gives people a sense of well-being,” she said of the patients her technicians treat. “I’m not a technician. I’m not a salon owner.”

Boice said the board initiated its crackdown based on the complaint of a disgruntled job applicant whom she refused to hire.

Boice said the state was wrong, and she was determined to fight. When government officials failed to respond, she turned to lawyers with the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix.

The non-profit think tank challenges government and often takes up causes on behalf of small-business owners. Lawyers there described Boice’s case as a civil-liberties issue.

“The Board of Cosmetology has made a cottage industry of depriving consumers of choice,” said Clint Bolick, Goldwater’s vice president for litigation. “(Arizona’s board) may be the worst I’ve encountered. The board tends to take very draconian positions.”

Goldwater sued the board over a 2009 decision prohibiting a Gilbert salon owner from using live fish in a pedicure process. The fish eat dead skin off customers’ feet.

Board President Donna Aune said that the fish posed a potential danger to customers and could expose customers to bacteria and disease.

Goldwater Institute lawyers called the board’s decision arbitrary and without proof. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge in March sided with the board and ordered the owner to stop offering the treatment.

Bolick said Friday that Goldwater plans to appeal.

In 2011, Goldwater sued the board on Boice’s behalf, beginning a 16-month-long battle that ended last month when the board agreed to settle the case.

Bolick called it a capitulation. He said the board agreed it did not have jurisdiction in the case and that Boice is running a dispatch service, not a salon. He said the board put Boice through a 16-month ordeal only to determine it did not have the right to regulate her.

As part of the settlement, the board agreed that it would cease any attempts to regulate Boice’s business and agreed not to impose requirements on similar businesses, Bolick said.

He said the case cost Arizona taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps more. Goldwater waived its attorneys’ fees as part of the settlement.

“It was very, very frustrating,” Bolick said. “Litigating against the Board of Cosmetology is like banging your head against a wall.”

Boice said she was thrilled by the victory and praised Goldwater for taking the case. She said the board overreached and the state did nothing to stop it. “They just wanted to push me and push me,” Boice said. “When they realized that I wouldn’t back down, they backed down.”

Boice, whose cancer returned in October, is once again going through treatment. She said the real victory is for her customers.

“The idea was born out of my work with hospices,” she said. “It is a labor of love.”

Reach the reporter at robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com.

A fair trial when the judge was a prosecutor????

Source

NY ‘frisk’ judge calls criticism ‘below-the-belt’

Associated Press Sun May 19, 2013 10:06 AM

NEW YORK — The federal judge presiding over civil rights challenges to the stop-and-frisk practices of the New York Police Department has no doubt where she stands with the government.

“I know I’m not their favorite judge,” U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin said during an Associated Press interview Friday. It was another moment of candor for a judge known for her call-it-as-she-sees-it manner and willingness to confront government lawyers in a courthouse where many judges — former federal prosecutors themselves — seem less inclined.

“I do think that I treat the government as only one more litigant,” she said during the interview that proceeded with a single rule: no questions about the trial over police tactics that reaches closing arguments Monday.

The trial has put the NYPD and City Hall on the defensive as they justify a long-running policy of stopping, questioning and frisking some residents to deter crime. Critics say it discriminates against blacks and Hispanics. Scheindlin is not being asked to ban the tactic, since it has been found to be legal, but she does have the power to order reforms in how it is implemented.

During the trial, she’s shown an impatience with lawyers on both sides when they stray from the topic at hand, and a willingness to directly question witnesses — including police supervisors — about the nuts and bolts of trying to keep streets safe.

“I don’t think they’re entitled to deference,” she said of government attorneys. “I think some of the judges are a little more timid to maybe disagree with the U.S. attorney’s office. … They have to prove their case like anybody else. I don’t give them special respect. Maybe some judges do because they came from the office, they know the people there, whatever. I try not to do that.” [How can a person get a fair trial when the judge is a former prosecutor????]

Scheindlin, 66, appointed by President Bill Clinton, has had plenty of high-profile cases in 19 years in federal court, including three trials of John “Junior” Gotti, the son of the late legendary mob boss John Gotti, two trials of a California student who knew two of the Sept. 11 hijackers and the trial of international arms dealer Viktor Bout.

The AP interview came after a New York Daily News article revealed that the staff of Mayor Michael Bloomberg had reviewed her record to show that 60 percent of her 15 written “search-and-seizure” rulings since she took the bench in 1994 had gone against law enforcement. [If you ask me it should have been 100 percent!!!! What part of the 4th Amendment don't these judges understand!!!!]

The judge called it a “below-the-belt attack” on judicial independence. She said it was rare when any judge grants a request to suppress evidence in a law enforcement case and that inclusion of the numerous times when she rejected the requests with oral rulings from the bench would likely reduce the total to less than 5 percent.

She said reports that the mayor’s office was behind the study made it worse.

“If that’s true, that’s quite disgraceful,” Scheindlin said. “It was very discouraging and upsetting. I can’t say it has no toll.”

Of such criticism, she said: “It’s very painful. Judges can’t really easily defend themselves. … To attack the judge personally is completely inappropriate and intimidates judges or it is intended to intimidate judges or it has an effect on other judges and that worries me.”

A Bloomberg spokesman said Saturday, “We did a simple search of publicly available written decisions, as the media is also free to do.”

The New York County Lawyers’ Association called the report meaningless because it sampled so few Scheindlin rulings.

Scheindlin has faced heat before, most notably a decade ago when she presided over the trials of Osama Awadallah and one newspaper labeled her “Osama’s best friend,” a reference that some could misinterpret to refer to Osama bin Laden. [I guess the government will call any judge names when the judge refuses to rubber stamp their requests to railroad people they consider criminals]

“You could be in danger, physically,” she said.

The Awadallah case is memorable to Scheindlin for how it reflected the mood of the attitude across the country after the Sept. 11 attacks. Awadallah, born in Venezuela and raised in Jordan, was a young immigrant in San Diego who was picked up as a material witness after his telephone number was found in a car that one of the hijackers drove to the airport on Sept. 11. Prosecutors agreed he was no terrorist but claimed he intentionally misled grand jurors about how well he knew one of the terrorists. Defense attorneys said he was left confused after 20 days in detention. [Now that is a very good reason why you should always take the 5th and refuse to answer any questions from the police.]

She said she learned in talking to jurors after Awadallah’s first trial that they came within one vote of convicting him of false statements. At the next trial, he was exonerated.

“Same evidence. Same prosecutor. Same defense lawyers. Jury goes from 11-to-1 to 12-zip,” she recalled. “So I asked what happened. The answer is the country had turned in a new direction.”

She said immediately after Sept. 11, “people were so worried and so terrified that the next attack was around the corner that they were willing to cede many of their civil liberties.”

She added: “The second half of the (President George W.) Bush term, Bush policies were not popular any longer. People were much more distant from the event of 9/11. Now they were more concerned with civil liberties and less concerned with the security threat. … I thought it was dramatically shown by what happened in that case.”

In choosing law clerks, Scheindlin looks for varied experience like her own. She has been a prosecutor and a defense lawyer and was once politically active.

“I don’t want a kid who’s just done seven straight years of A’s at Harvard,” she said. “I want to know that they’ve done something, worked somewhere. Some experience. Some work. Some life. That makes for a rounded person.”

And should they someday become a judge, it makes them well prepared for the rare case of impact.

“That’s the day you live for, to do something that you believe is right and that is upheld as right and has a national impact, that’s great,” Scheindlin said. “That’s why people want to be judges, I think, so they can make a difference.”

———

Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Colleen Long contributed to this report.

Jobs for animal cruelty cops????

Source

Phoenix police learn to handle animals for cruelty cases

By Cecilia Chan The Republic | azcentral.com Sun May 19, 2013 9:25 PM

Chris West held out a pole with a noose at the end and deftly slipped it over the head of a Belgian sheepdog to restrain it.

West was teaching Phoenix police officers how to properly catch a dog in an emergency situation, such as suspected animal-cruelty and -abuse cases.

“If an animal is injured and startled, it can snap at an officer or an emergency medical technician,” explained West, an emergency animal medical technician and animal-cruelty investigator with the Arizona Humane Society.

Training officers on how to restrain an animal with the least amount of force is an alternative to shooting it, he said.

Phoenix officers for the first time have the opportunity to learn more about handling animal-cruelty and -neglect cases.

So far, 23 officers have voluntarily attended one of three classes last week. The two-hour class is open to all officers.

The goal is to train at least one officer per shift from each precinct, said Detective Vickie Berry, one of the instructors.

The training grew out of the increasing incidence of suspected animal abuse and neglect.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton in June formed a task force, which aims to combat animal abuse by providing officer training, raising public awareness and passing tougher laws. The ad hoc group includes community leaders, a state representative, a deputy city prosecutor and police officials.

Stanton’s task force was created after a tipster alerted the city to a number of dead animals, mostly dogs, found on private property near 15th and Southern avenues in Phoenix.

“It’s something that we deal with often enough that we need training,” said Officer Mike Paulson, who attended one of the training sessions on Friday.

He said he’s grateful for the training.

“Up until now, there’s been no training when it comes to animals, and it leaves us at a loss,” said Paulson, adding that the Humane Society is unavailable during some shifts. Paulson works the 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift.

Berry, who handles animal-cruelty and -neglect cases, instructed officers on how to look for signs of animal abuse, when to seize an animal and the importance of documenting everything to build a case. [If most cops can't spot animal cruelity without special training it probably isn't the problem the the city of Phoenix is making it out to be.]

“Animals are very resilient,” she said. “They mask pain very well. Sometimes you need to take them to the Humane Society and shave them to see the injuries.”

Physical injuries to the animals are key to building a case, she said.

Cruelty calls increasing

Thelda Williams, a Phoenix councilwoman and task-force co-chairwoman, said Phoenix police and the Humane Society have received 10,000 calls about suspected animal abuse in the city since the beginning of the year. [Yea, but how many of these are actually animal cruelty???]

The Humane Society has seen its calls increase, West said. The non-profit agency serves Phoenix and Scottsdale.

In fiscal 2011, the agency logged 23,000 animal-cruelty responses. In fiscal 2012, there were 26,000, which includes responses to the initial call and follow-ups, West said.

West could not say how many of the initial calls were legitimate. Some calls may stem from neighbors in a dispute or someone who simply doesn’t see water left out for a pet. However, the agency responds to all calls. [Do we really need to be paying cops $25 to $50 an hour to verify the people watered their pets? I suspect the police union will say "damn right", but people other then cops, who are being paid the big bucks to watch people animals will think it is a wast of tax dollars???]

“The most common calls we get, depending on the time of year, most of the time, it’s failure to provide food or water and also failure to provide medical attention and abandonment,” West said.

Berry said police receive one to two calls daily reporting an animal being abused, neglected, hit by a car or needing to be restrained. [OK, but I suspect that only a very small percent of these cases are animal cruelty.]

She said a majority of the calls involve dogs. In her three years of investigating cases, she’s never dealt with a staged dogfight but has investigated three to four cockfights.

Preventing animal abuse

Williams said the City Council is expected to consider an ordinance that would prohibit animal hoarding and better define what constitutes animal cruelty.

Animal abuse includes letting a pet loose in an area where it has to fend for itself, she said. [Yea, and if you let a cop make that decision they will be putting people in jail for leaving their dogs in the back yard in the summer]

The task force aired a public-service announcement emphasizing that animal abuse is a crime. It’s planning a second PSA reminding residents of the dangers of leaving a pet in a hot car.

Additionally, the task force last fall sponsored a poster contest for fourth- and fifth-graders in Phoenix on animal-abuse prevention. [With that in mind this sounds like it is a politically correct stunt put on by the politicians to get the vote of the animal lovers]

“We got over 400 posters in the contests,” Williams said. “This was really sending a message out to kids that animal abuse is a crime and don’t abuse animals.” [Base on this it sounds like the politicians and police are creating a nonexistent problem out of thin air to create jobs for the cops, and get votes for the politicians]

The task force bought 16 “tool kits” for officers working on animal-abuse cases and expects to buy dozens more.

The kits cost $200 each and consist of a duffel bag with food, water, a can opener, collapsible water bowl, control pole, cardboard cat carrier and heavy-duty gloves, city spokesman Michael Hammett said. [So the cops wasted $3,600 of our tax dollars on these silly kits.]

Williams said the task force is not using taxpayer dollars and has so far raised $6,000 to fund its efforts. [Yea, but the money the city of Phoenix spends on paying wages to pay these cops to look out for Fido's best interest will be big bucks.]

Nobody cares about Bakersfield police murder???

When I first read about the murder in the LA Times I thought it would quickly spread across America, making people angry as h*ll.

I was wrong. As of today, I have not even seen an article about the murder in the Arizona Republic.

A welfare program for drug testing companies???

Source

Proposed Calif. Measure Requires Doctor Drug Tests

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 20, 2013 at 9:08 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO — A proposed state ballot measure in California would require doctors to be randomly subjected to drug and alcohol testing.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports (http://bit.ly/10PKfJP) the "Pee in the Cup" initiative is being pushed by Bob Pack, a technology mogul and former executive at AOL Inc. and NetZero Inc.

His young son and daughter were killed a decade ago by a driver under the influence of alcohol and prescription pills.

Pack's campaign already is armed with $2 million in funding and will launch this summer.

The newspaper reports the initiative might also seek to lift the cap on damages in medical malpractice cases.

The goal is to get the measure on the November 2014 ballot.

A spokesperson for the California Medical Association calls the effort a "publicity stunt."

___

Information from: San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com

Drug testing for California doctors?

Drug testing for California doctors?

They’re calling it the “Pee in the Cup’’ initiative — a proposed state ballot measure that would require doctors to be randomly subjected to drug and alcohol testing, the same way bus drivers are.

It’s being pushed by a tech mogul who’s on a very personal crusade to clean up the state’s medical practices.

Bob Pack is a former AOL and NetZero exec whose 10-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter were struck and killed a decade ago near their Danville home by a driver under the influence of alcohol and prescription pills.

After going public with a campaign to put his kids’ killer behind bars for second-degree murder, Pack turned his attention to helping the state track patient prescriptions and spot “doctor shoppers’’ like the driver in Danville.

After state funding for the effort dried up, Pack tried and failed to qualify a ballot initiative that would have taxed drug companies to pay for the tracking.

Now he’s taking aim at doctors who abuse drugs themselves. He’s enlisted the help of consumer advocate Harvey Rosenfield — the guy behind the landmark 1988 measure regulating the insurance industry — and former Clinton White House adviser Chris Lehane, whose trial lawyer clients have already dropped $2 million into a campaign account.

Pack and his pals are armed with a new poll showing 85 percent of California voters would be on board with random testing of physicians. They’re also touting an article in the prestigious Journal of American Medicine advocating confidential, mandatory testing.

They’re looking to hit the streets this summer with either a single-issue measure or a multi-prong initiative that would also:

–Lift the cap on damages in medical malpractice cases.

–Change the makeup of the state Medical Board, which disciplines bad doctors, to require that a majority come from outside the medical profession.

–And ensure funding for a state database to track what drugs doctors are prescribing —and if they’re being recklessly prescribed.

The California Medical Association “isn’t in the business of speculating on every hypothetical, ridiculous ballot measure that is floated,’’ say spokeswoman Molly Weedn, but she calls the effort by Pack and his cohorts “nothing more than an ill-fated publicity stunt.’’

CMA claims the real goal to lift the decades-old cap on medical malpractice cases — a “money grab” by the trial lawyers that won’t fly with either the Legislature or voters.

We’re told a deal is about to be announced in Sacramento, with support from the doctors, that will ensure funding for the database and reorganize the Medical Board.

That could leave just malpractice awards and peeing in a cup on the November 2014 ballot. If that happens, you’re likely to see a battle royal.

For more M&R, including the the surprise bill that former Oakland cops are getting from the city, read here.

How to Legalize Pot

Source

How to Legalize Pot

Nicholas Blechman

By BILL KELLER

Published: May 19, 2013 56 Comments

THE first time I talked to Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at U.C.L.A., was in 2002, and he explained why legalization of marijuana was a bad idea. Sure, he said, the government should remove penalties for possession, use and cultivation of small amounts. He did not favor making outlaws of people for enjoying a drug that is less injurious than alcohol or tobacco. But he worried that a robust commercial marketplace would inevitably lead to much more consumption. [33 million Americans already use marijuana so who cares if a few million more start using it??] You don’t have to be a prohibitionist to recognize that pot, especially in adolescents and very heavy users, can seriously mess with your brain.

So I was interested to learn, 11 years later, that Kleiman is leading the team hired to advise Washington State as it designs something the modern world has never seen: a fully legal commercial market in cannabis. Washington is one of the first two states (Colorado is the other) to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana as a recreational drug for consumers 21 and over. The marijuana debate has entered a new stage. Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.

“At some point you have to say, a law that people don’t obey is a bad law,” Kleiman told me when I asked how his views had evolved. He has not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market.

Ah, but what does that look like? A few places, like the Netherlands, have had limited legalization; many jurisdictions have decriminalized personal use; and 18 states in this country have approved the drug for medical use. (Twelve others, including New York, are considering it.) But Washington and Colorado have set out to invent a whole industry from scratch and, in theory, to avoid the shortcomings of other markets in legal vices — tobacco, alcohol, gambling — that lurched into being without much forethought, and have supplied, along with much pleasure, much misery. [No they are NOT inventing a new industry from scratch. Marijuana was legally sold before 1937, and all other drugs were legal before 1914, when the "1914 Harrison Narcotic Tax Act" was passed]

The biggest shadow hanging over this project is the Department of Justice. Federal law still makes felons of anyone who trades in cannabis. [And many legal scholars will tell you these laws are unconstitutional per the 10th Amendment, even if the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise] Despite the tolerant drift of the polls, despite evidence indicating that states with medical marijuana programs have not, as opponents feared, experienced an increase in use by teenagers, despite new moves toward legalization in Latin America, no one expects Congress to remove cannabis from the list of criminal substances any time soon. (“Not until the second Hillary Clinton administration,” Kleiman says.) But federal authorities have always left a lot of room for local discretion on marijuana enforcement. They could, for example, declare that they will prosecute only drug producers who grow more than a certain amount, and those who traffic across state lines. Attorney General Eric Holder, perhaps preoccupied with scandal management, has been slow to come up with enforcement guidelines that could give the states a comfort zone in which to experiment.

One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers — the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry — a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. “When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales,” said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. “And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers.” [That is rubbish. If marijuana is 100 percent legalized, a kilo of marijuana won't cost any more then a head of lettuce, and nobody will be making big bucks off of it. After all marijuana is a stinking weed that grows every where.]

What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry — a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors. It would help, too, to let individuals grow a few plants at home — something Colorado’s new law permits but Washington’s does not, because polling showed Washingtonians didn’t want that.

If you read the proposal Kleiman’s team submitted to Washington State, you may be a little boggled by the complexities of turning an illicit herb into a regulated, safe, consumer-friendly business. Among the things on the to-do list: certifying labs to test for potency and contamination. (Pot can contain, among other nasty things, pesticides, molds and salmonella.) [Yea, and so do tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce and all other legal agricultural products. He is just using that fact to demonize marijuana] Devising rules on labeling, so users know what they’re getting. Hiring inspectors, to make sure the sellers comply. Establishing limits on advertising, because you don’t want allowing to become promoting. And all these rules must account not just for smoking but for pot pastries, pot candies, pot-infused beverages, pot lozenges, pot ice cream, pot vapor inhalers. [Does he also want to micromanage the industries that sell these products when they don't contain marijuana???]

One of the selling points of legalization is that states can take a cut of what will be, according to estimates, a $35 billion to $45 billion industry and earmark some of these new tax revenues for good causes. It’s the same tactic used to win public approval of lotteries — and with the same danger: that some worthy government function comes to depend on creating more addicts. [Addicts??? Marijuana is not addictive. That is just drug war propaganda to demonize marijuana.] And how do you divvy up the revenues? How much goes to offset health consequences? How much goes to enforcement? How do you calibrate taxes so the price of pot is high enough to discourage excessive use, but not so high that a cheap black market arises? All this regulating is almost enough to take the fun out of drugs.

And then there is the issue of drugged driving. Much about the chemistry of marijuana in human beings remains uncertain, in part because the government has not supported much research. So no one has come up with a pot version of the breathalyzer to determine quickly whether a driver is impaired. In the absence of solid research, some legalization advocates insist stoned drivers are more cautious, and thus safer. (Hands up if you want Harold and Kumar driving your taxi. Or piloting your airplane.) On this and much else, Washington and Colorado will probably be making it up as they go, waiting for science to catch up. [Again about 33 million people currently illegally use marijuana. So the problem is driving while stoned probably isn't as bad as the author makes it out to be. While I favor 100 percent legalization of ALL drugs, I certainly don't think people should drive while they are stoned]

And experience tells us they are sure to get some things wrong. New York decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot way back in 1977, with the condition that there be no “public display.” The lawmakers meant to assure that you partied at home, not in the parks or on the sidewalks. They did not envision that this provision would create a pretext for throwing young black and Latino men in jail. When police in New York City stop and frisk, which they do a lot in rougher neighborhoods, they order their targets to turn out their pockets and — whoa, public display, come with us, son! Gov. Andrew Cuomo is promoting an amendment to curb that abuse of power.

On the opposite coast, California demonstrates a different kind of unintended consequences. The state’s medical marijuana law is such a free-for-all that in Los Angeles there are now said to be more pot dispensaries than Starbucks outlets. Even advocates of full legalization say things have gotten out of hand. [I didn't say that, and I am for 100 percent legalization of ALL drugs, not just marijuana.]

“It’s a bit of a farce when you can watch people come out of a dispensary, go around the corner and resell their drugs,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor and former San Francisco mayor, who favors legalization. [Give me a break. Here in Arizona, medical marijuana costs a lot more in the legal pot dispensaries, then drug dealers sell it for illegally on the street. I suspect the same is true in California. I suspect that statement by Gavin Newsom is just propaganda to demonize marijuana] “If we can’t get our medical marijuana house in order, how do we expect voters to deal with legalization?” He is now part of a group discussing how to impose more order on California’s medical marijuana market, with an eye to offering broader legalization in 2016. And, he told me, his state will be paying close attention to Washington and Colorado, hoping somebody can, as Mark Kleiman puts it, “design a system that gets us to ‘orderly’ without getting us to ‘way too stoned.’ ”

Mayor Lewis and Barney sound like tax and spend terrorists.

In most city governments the salaries of the police account for about 40 percent of the budget, while the fire department accounts for about the next 20 percent, with police and fire departments salaries accounting for about 60 percent of the budget.

Gilbert Mayor John Lewis and Queen Creek Mayor Gail Barney seem to want you to think they are not going to spend your hard earned tax dollars on cops and firemen, but rather on roads and sewers, which is a lie.

Sadly America is the worlds biggest police state and we jail a higher percentage of our population then any other country in the world.

And the number one reason most of these people in American prisons are their for victimless drug war crimes.

If Gilbert Mayor John Lewis and Queen Creek Mayor Gail Barney really wanted to save your tax dollars they would order their police to stop arresting people for victimless crimes and concentrate on real criminals that hurt people, like robbers, burglars, muggers and rapists, not harmless pot smokers.

Source

Sales-tax simplification shouldn’t kill cities, towns

Our Turn by John Lewis and Gail Barney

The Southeast Valley’s explosive growth has municipalities such as Gilbert and Queen Creek scrambling to keep up with such fundamental needs as roads, sewers and public-safety services as developers and home builders erect waves of new homes.

To fund this critical growth-related infrastructure, Arizona cities and towns rely heavily on the construction sales tax, a key component of overall sales-tax revenues. Local sales tax represents approximately 50 percent of general-fund revenues in Gilbert and more than 47 percent in Queen Creek. [And of course almost all of those taxes goes to pay for the cops and firemen, not roads and sewers as Mayors John Lewis and Gail Barney want you to think]

With numbers like these, we are alarmed over the continued push in the state Legislature to eliminate the construction sales tax. Special-interest groups are attempting to use Gov. Jan Brewer’s important legislation on tax simplification as the means to achieve this financial windfall no matter the devastation to the state budget or that it will force many development-related costs onto our existing residents and businesses. [Yes, the problem here is SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS, but it's not the unnamed special interest groups mention by Mayors John Lewis and Gail Barney. It's the special interest groups called the police union and the fireman union. The police and fire department unions LOVE taxes, because they get about 60 percent of the taxes that most cities collect to pay their salaries]

Gov. Brewer has made tax simplification a top priority and worked tirelessly to develop business-friendly tax reforms to aid economic development and job-creation efforts.

As the mayors of Gilbert and Queen Creek, we are fully supportive. If anyone in the state knows the importance of job creation, it is the leadership of cities and towns. These efforts should not be lost in a legislative battle over special-interest tax breaks.

While the Arizona system of taxation is far from perfect, it does honor the axiom “growth must pay for itself.” The cost of putting in new roads and infrastructure should be shouldered by developments incurring the cost, not by existing homeowners and businesses that already paid their way.

But does tax simplification need to occur? We say yes.

Is eliminating the construction sales tax the best way to achieve this simplification? The answer is clearly no.

We share the objectives behind Gov. Brewer’s tax-simplification legislation but have differing thoughts on how to get there. For this reason, we have been actively engaged in providing feedback, communicating concerns over devastating financial impacts while also spending countless months researching and crafting alternative solutions.

We are almost there.

After months of hard work, with continued guidance from the governor’s office, leaders of cities and towns developed a modified proposal streamlining sales-tax reporting, collection and auditing. We drafted legislative language making Arizona compliant with the federally proposed Marketplace Fairness Act (Internet taxation). [Translation Mayors John Lewis and Queen Creek Mayor Gail Barney want to shake us down for even more taxes with an internet tax!!!]

We are working diligently to find a solution on the construction sales tax that is common-sense, benefits Arizona businesses and taxpayers and doesn’t blow an enormous hole in state or local budgets. And we are almost there. [Translation - Mayors John Lewis and Gail Barney are working diligently to shake you down for as many taxes as they can!!!]

No one is certain when this legislative session will end. But we do know it can end abruptly, without notice. When it does end, tax simplification should not get lost in the shuffle, nor should legislation get pushed through that harms communities like Gilbert and Queen Creek. [Sorry guys, taxes don't harm the government, taxes feed government bureaucracies. Taxes harm the people that Mayors John Lewis and Gail Barney pretend to be looking out for]

Municipalities are the very economic engines of Arizona. Providing infrastructure is vital to economic development and job creation. We ask for continued partnership and transparency to ensure the ultimate outcome on tax simplification is a win for taxpayers, a win for the state and a win for cities and towns. [Translation - Mayors John Lewis and Gail Barney want to shake you down for as much of your hard earned money as they can get away with]

John Lewis is the mayor of Gilbert and Gail Barney is the mayor of Queen Creek.

Obama aides knew of IRS audit; Obama not told

Source

More Obama aides knew of IRS audit; Obama not told

Associated Press

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior advisers knew in late April that an impending report was likely to say the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups, President Barack Obama's spokesman disclosed Monday, expanding the circle of top officials who knew of the audit beyond those named earlier.

But McDonough and the other advisers did not tell Obama, leaving him to learn about the politically perilous results of the internal investigation from news reports more than two weeks later, officials said.

The apparent decision to keep the president in the dark underscores the White House's cautious legal approach to controversies and reflects a desire by top advisers to distance Obama from troubles threatening his administration.

Obama spokesman Jay Carney defended keeping the president out of the loop on the Internal Revenue Service audit, saying Obama was comfortable with the fact that "some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them."

"It is absolutely a cardinal rule as we see it that we do not intervene in ongoing investigations," Carney said.

Republicans, however, are accusing the president of being unaware of important happenings in the government he oversees.

"It seems to be the answer of the administration whenever they're caught doing something they shouldn't be doing is, `I didn't know about it'," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CBS News. "And it causes me to wonder whether they believe willful ignorance is a defense when it's your job to know."

Obama advisers argue that the outcry from Republicans would be far worse had McDonough or White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler told the president about the IRS audit before it became public, thereby raising questions about White House interference.

Still, the White House's own shifting information about who knew what and when is keeping the focus of the IRS controversy on the West Wing.

When Carney first addressed the matter last week, he said only that Ruemmler had been told around April 22 that an inspector general audit was being concluded at a Cincinnati IRS office that screens applications for organizations' tax-exempt status. He said the audit was described to the counsel's office "very broadly."

But on Monday, Carney said lower-ranking staffers in the White House counsel's office first learned of the report one week earlier, on April 16. When Ruemmler was later alerted, she was told specifically that the audit was likely to conclude that IRS employees improperly scrutinized organizations by looking for words like "tea party" and "patriot." Ruemmler then told McDonough, deputy chief of staff Mark Childress, and other senior advisers, but not Obama.

A new Pew Research Center poll shows 42 percent of Americans think the Obama administration was "involved" in the IRS targeting of conservative groups, while 31 percent say it was a decision made solely by employees at the IRS.

The IRS matter is one of three controversies that have consumed the White House over the past week. In each instance, officials have tried to put distance between the president and questionable actions by people within his administration.

As with the IRS investigation, the White House says Obama learned only from news reporters that the Justice Department had subpoenaed phone records from journalists at The Associated Press as part of a leaks investigation. And faced with new questions about the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Obama's advisers have pinned responsibility on the CIA for crafting talking points that downplayed the potential of terrorism, despite the fact that the White House was a part of the process.

Former White House officials say a president has little choice but to distance himself from investigations and then endure accusations of being out of touch, or worse.

"It's a tough balance," said Sara Taylor Fagen, who was White House political director for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007.

"With a scandal, there's no way to win," said Fagen, whom the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed and sharply questioned in a probe of dismissed U.S. attorneys. "There may never have been any wrongdoing by anyone in the White House, on any of these issues," she said, "but once the allegations are made, you can't win."

A White House peeking into an ongoing investigations can trigger a political uproar. A well-known case involved President Richard Nixon trying to hinder the FBI's probe of the Watergate break-in.

In a less far-reaching case in 2004, the Bush White House acknowledged that its counsel's office learned of a Justice Department investigation into whether Sandy Berger _ the national security adviser under President Bill Clinton _ had removed classified documents from the National Archives. Democrats said the White House hoped to use the information to help Bush's re-election campaign.

In the current IRS matter, two congressional committees are stepping up their investigations this week with hearings during which IRS and Treasury officials will be questioned closely about what they knew and when.

Former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman heads to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, giving lawmakers their first opportunity to question the man who ran the agency when agents were improperly targeting tea party groups. The Senate Finance Committee wants to know why Shulman didn't tell Congress _ even after he was briefed in 2012 _ that agents had been singling out conservative political groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.

Also testifying will be Steven Miller, who took over as acting commissioner in November, when Shulman's five-year term expired. Last week, Obama forced Miller to resign.

On Wednesday, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin will testify before the House oversight committee.

Treasury inspector general J. Russell George says he told Wolin about the subject of the IRS inquiry last summer.

In a related matter, the IRS acknowledged Monday that an official testified to Congress about tax-exempt matters long after her duties supposedly had shifted to the rollout of Obama's health care law.

Republicans point to Sarah Hall Ingram's history at IRS as they question the agency's ability to properly oversee aspects of Obama's health care overhaul. The IRS will play a major role in determining benefits and penalties under the new law.

The IRS had said last week that Ingram shifted to overseeing the health care law rollout in December 2010, well before alarm bells went off at headquarters that a unit of the tax exempt division was targeting tea party groups for extra scrutiny.

But records show she testified to Congress in her capacity as head of the tax-exempt office as recently as last year.

Monday the IRS said in a statement that Ingram "was in a unique position to testify" about tax-exempt policies in May 2012. It said Ingram "still formally held" the title of IRS commissioner of tax exempt and government entities, even though "she was assigned full-time to (health care law) activities since December 2010."

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, says Congress needs to find out what Ingram and other officials knew, and when they knew it.

___

Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Jim Kuhnhenn and researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Charles Babington at http://twitter.com/cbabington

Obama administration mistakes journalism for espionage

Obama administration mistakes journalism for espionage

By Eugene Robinson, Monday, May 20, 4:48 PM

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” should rule out secretly obtaining two months’ worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what the Justice Department did.

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior.

The Post reported Monday that the Justice Department secretly obtained phone and e-mail records for Fox News reporter James Rosen, and that the FBI even tracked his movements in and out of the main State Department building. Rosen’s only apparent transgression? Doing what reporters are supposed to do, which is to dig out the news.

In both instances, prosecutors were trying to build criminal cases under the 1917 Espionage Act against federal employees suspected of leaking classified information. Before President Obama took office, the Espionage Act had been used to prosecute leakers a grand total of three times, including the 1971 case of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Obama’s Justice Department has used the act six times. And counting.

Obviously, the government has a duty to protect genuine secrets. But the problem is that every administration, without exception, tends to misuse the “top secret” stamp — sometimes from an overabundance of caution, sometimes to keep inconvenient or embarrassing information from coming to light.

That’s where journalists come in. Our job, simply, is to find out what the government doesn’t want you to know.

Sometimes reporters come across information whose disclosure would genuinely put national security at risk. When officials appeal to news organizations on such grounds, editors listen.

The case involving the Associated Press is a good example. The story at issue, published last May, involved details of a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled a terrorist plot to bomb an airliner. AP chief executive Gary Pruitt said on “Face the Nation” that the news service agreed to hold the story after administration officials warned publication would threaten security. The AP published only after officials from two government entities said the threat no longer existed, according to Pruitt.

Ironically, this was a story of success in the fight against terrorism. I have to wonder whether the administration’s real aim is to find out who leaked this bit of good news — or to discourage potential leaks of not-so-rosy news in the future.

The Fox News case is even worse. At issue is a 2009 story about how North Korea was expected to react to a U.N. Security Council resolution criticizing the rogue nation’s nuclear tests. The Justice Department is prosecuting Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, then an analyst working for the State Department, for allegedly leaking to Fox News reporter Rosen a report about what North Korea was thought likely to do.

Prosecutors examined Rosen’s phone records, read his e-mails and, using the electronic record left by his security badge, even tracked when he entered and left the State Department building. How did officials justify such snooping? By asserting in an FBI affidavit, according to The Post, that Rosen broke the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”

In other words, since there is no law that makes publishing this classified information illegal, the Justice Department claims that obtaining the information was a violation of the Espionage Act.

Rosen has not been charged. Every investigative reporter, however, has been put on notice.

If this had been the view of prior administrations, surely Bob Woodward would be a lifer in some federal prison. The cell next door might be occupied by my Post colleague Dana Priest, who disclosed the CIA’s network of secret prisons. Or by the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who revealed the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.

A federal “shield” law protecting reporters from having to divulge their sources means nothing if it includes an exception for cases involving national security, as Obama favors. The president needs to understand that behavior commonly known as “whistleblowing” and “journalism” must not be construed as espionage.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.

LAPD Officer Accused of Lewd Acts with 2 Girls

Source

LAPD Officer Accused of Lewd Acts with 2 Girls

SAN FERNANDO, Calif. (KTLA) — An officer with the Los Angeles Police Department was expected to appear in court on Tuesday on charges of molesting two young girls.

Officer Miguel Schiappapietra, 28, was arrested on Saturday at his home in the 28000 block of Branch Road in Castaic.

He was booked on two counts of lewd acts with a child, according to Sgt. Brian Hudson, of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Special Victims Bureau.

There were at least two victims involved, both under the age of 10, Hudson said.

Schiappapietra allegedly lured the two girls into his home, police said.

He had reportedly just moved into the neighborhood about five weeks ago. Schiappapietra is also apparently the father of two young children himself.

He is a six-year veteran of the force, and was stationed most recently at the LAPD’s Foothill Station.

Schiappapietra was being held on $100,000 bail.

The investigation was ongoing. Anyone with information about the case was asked to call the Sheriff’s Department’s Special Victims Unit (877) 710-5273.

East Bay vice squad cop sentenced to 14 years in federal prison

Source

Former head of East Bay vice squad sentenced to 14 years in federal prison

By Malaika Fraley

Contra Costa Times

Posted: 05/21/2013 06:07:00 AM PDT

mfraley@bayareanewsgroup.com

OAKLAND -- The former head of an elite Contra Costa County vice squad was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison Monday for stealing drug evidence, robbing prostitutes and making phony arrests -- crimes he said he committed as a cry for help while in a depressed and suicidal state.

"When I see the charges I've pleaded to, I'm overwhelmed with guilt and shame," ex-Central Contra Costa Narcotics Enforcement Team Cmdr. Norm Wielsch said as he sobbed and clutched a tissue. "I'm sorry, that's not really me." [Translation - Please give me a slap on the wrist for punishment. I am a cop and it is impossible for me to commit real crimes.]

Wielsch's attorney argued for electronic home detention for the 51-year-old Antioch resident, who asserts he "impulsively" began abusing the badge while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by his 25-year law enforcement career and a degenerative muscular disease that eventually will put him in a wheelchair.

Judge Saundra Armstrong said she wasn't convinced. By Wielsch's own account, he was motivated, at least in part, by greed, the judge said.

Armstrong said she would have sentenced Wielsch to 17½ years, as the U.S. Attorney's Office requested, but thought 14 years took into account both his medical problems and the damage he caused to the public's confidence in law enforcement.

"He was crushed," defense attorney Raymond Erlach said after the sentencing. "In Norm's mind, he's being unfairly singled out because he's a cop." [Does he think cops deserve a "get out of jail card" for crimes they commit like armed robbery???]

Criminal cases against suspects arrested by Wielsch and others were dismissed, and several civil lawsuits were filed, after undercover state Department of Justice agents in February 2011 caught Wielsch and Concord private investigator Christopher Butler trying to sell drugs that had been seized by CNET. The Department of Justice program headed by Wielsch and staffed by local officers was suspended indefinitely as authorities launched a police-corruption probe that resulted in the prosecution of officers from Danville and San Ramon.

Wielsch pleaded guilty in December to five felonies: conspiracy to distribute marijuana and methamphetamine; theft from programs receiving government funds; robbery; and two counts of conspiracy against civil rights. Another six felony charges were dismissed as part of the plea deal.

His attorney said Monday that it was Wielsch's mental illness that made him susceptible to Butler, a sociopath who corrupted otherwise good people. At one point, Wielsch wanted to stop robbing prostitutes, Erlach said, but Butler blackmailed him into continuing by claiming that he had video of a married Wielsch having sex with one. Prosecutor Hartley West told the court there's no evidence that's true.

"If you trace their criminal conduct, all of it traces back to Mr. Butler," Erlach said.

Butler, 51, of Concord, was sentenced to eight years in federal prison in September. He and Wielsch started their law enforcement careers together at the Antioch Police Department in the early 1990s.

Wielsch had previously told investigators that he robbed and sold drugs to prepare for retirement and to earn favor with Butler for a position in Butler's expanding private investigation business.

Wielsch suffers from Charcot—Marie—Tooth disease, which has caused severe atrophy to his feet and lost feeling in his legs from the knees down. The disease struck him 30 year earlier than it did his father, who uses a wheelchair.

He said he was too proud to seek help for his depression over the disease, and it sent him into "a downward spiral of self-destruction" after 24 years of "honest hard work." He said he wants to speak at police academies and police departments about the importance of getting help for depression.

"I wish I had someone to warn me," Wielsch said.

Outside the courthouse, defense attorney Sara Zalkin said she has evidence that Wielsch abused his authority earlier in his career than he claims. She said she represents clients who had been arrested by Wielsch but declined to talk further, citing attorney-client privilege.

Former Danville officer Stephen Tanabe, 48, of Alamo, is awaiting trial on charges that he conspired with Butler to set up the estranged husbands of Butler's P.I. firm clients for DUI arrests. San Ramon attorney Mary Nolan, of Oakland, is awaiting trial on charges that she and Butler used eavesdropping equipment on her clients' estranged spouses.

And former San Ramon police officer Louis Lombardi, 40, of Discovery Bay, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for stealing drugs and other property when he was a CNET agent under Wielsch.

Wielsch will be eligible for parole in 10 years, his attorney said.

Contact Malaika Fraley at 925-234-1684. Follow her at Twitter.com/malaikafraley.

Top IRS official will invoke Fifth Amendment

Source

Top IRS official will invoke Fifth Amendment

By Richard Simon and Joseph Tanfani

May 21, 2013, 12:15 p.m.

WASHINGTON – A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd.

Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee Wednesday.

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter by Taylor to committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, R-Calif. The letter, sent Monday, was obtained Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.

Taylor, a criminal defense attorney from the Washington firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, said that the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation, and that the House committee has asked Lerner to explain why she provided “false or misleading information” to the committee four times last year.

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” There was no immediate word whether the committee will grant her request.

According to an inspector general’s report, Lerner found out in June 2011 that some staff in the nonprofits division in Cincinnati had used terms like “Tea Party” and “Patriots” to select some applications for additional screening of their political activities. She ordered changes.

But neither Lerner nor anyone else at the IRS told Congress, even after repeated queries from several committees, including House Oversight, about whether some groups had been singled out unfairly.

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @JTanfani

richard.simon@latimes.com

Twitter: @richardsimon11

Rep. Juan Mendez - I’m an atheist

The good news was the gay community has fought that, so now while a lot of people still hate gays it has become socially unacceptable to terrorize gay folks like it used to be.

Sadly us atheists are in the same position that gays were in 20 years ago. Sadly it's still socially acceptable to terrorize atheists.

I think it's great that Rep. Juan Mendez, D-Tempe has come out and admitted that he is an atheist. While a lot of people will hate him for it, I think that it will help people began to see the fact that atheists should have the same rights as all other people, even if they hate us.

I am still pretty pissed at Arizona US Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema for refusing to admit that she is an atheist. It sure seems like Kyrsten Sinema refuses to tell the public any of her positions if she thinks it may cost her votes, even if it is the truth.

Her official religion at the US Congress is listed as no religion, even though us folks here in Phoenix that know her, know that she is an atheist.

I am also still pretty pissed off at Kyrsten Sinema's attempt to slap an 300 percent tax on medical marijuana when she was in the Arizona Legislator.

I know Kyrsten Sinema never met a tax she didn't love. I a lot of conservative groups consider Kyrsten Sinema the worst legislator in the history of Arizona when it comes to her socialist tax and spending.

I also know that in all of Kyrsten Sinema campaigns for both the Arizona and US Congress she has been supported by the police unions. She says she supports the people, but when she votes, it seems like she supports the police state.

So I don't know if she tried to slap that 300 percent tax on because it is part of her usual love to tax and spend and simply thinks that every penny in your wallet is hers.

Or if she did it for the police unions, in an attempt to flush Prop 203 down the toilet. Prop 203 is Arizona's medical marijuana law.

Oddly Kyrsten Sinema does admit she is a gay, while not admitting she is an atheist, other then saying she doesn't have a religion.

Kyrsten Sinema is also a gun grabber and has been given an F by the NRA with a zero percent rating on a scale of 0 to 100.

Source

Arizona lawmaker: I’m an atheist

By Mary K. Reinhart The Republic | azcentral.com Tue May 21, 2013 10:06 PM

A state lawmaker acknowledged that he is an atheist as he gave the daily House invocation Tuesday, urging legislators to look at each other, rather than bow their heads, and “celebrate our shared humanness.”

Rep. Juan Mendez, D-Tempe, who said it was freeing to be open about his secular views, also introduced about a dozen fellow members of the Secular Coalition for Arizona who watched from the House gallery.

The House and Senate convene with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Members take turns giving the prayer or inviting a religious leader to do so — similar to practices that have taken place for centuries in Congress, statehouses and city halls throughout the country.

Mendez’s secular invocation comes as the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on whether prayers can be offered at government meetings.

An appeals court last year ruled unconstitutional the practice in Greece, N.Y., of having Christian pastors give prayers before public meetings. The Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom appealed and the high-court ruling, expected by June 2014, will resolve conflicting appeals-court rulings about religious expression.

Tuesday’s invocation was to have been given by Serah Blain, executive director of the Secular Coalition of Arizona. But Mendez said House staff had no record of his request to allow Blain’s remarks, so he offered the remarks himself.

“This is a room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration,” he said. “But this is also a room where, as my secular humanist tradition stresses, by the very fact of being human we have much more in common than we have differences.”

House lawmakers appeared to have no reaction to Mendez’s remarks.

But in a statement Monday on the Supreme Court case, Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, defended the practice of praying before government meetings.

“The outcome of this case could very well preserve or eliminate one of the great American traditions, which poses no threat to the secular nature of the business of the state,” he said.

Blain leads a growing coalition that represents 17 secular organizations at the Legislature, focused on pushing back against the powerful Christian-based Center for Arizona Policy and promoting a death-with-dignity law and science-based sex education in schools.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that people with no religious affiliation make up the third-largest group worldwide, after Christians and Muslims. About 20 percent of people in the U.S. say they are religiously unaffiliated.

FBI names Benghazi suspects — but no arrests yet

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FBI names Benghazi suspects — but no arrests yet

Associated Press Tue May 21, 2013 8:02 PM

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. has identified five men who might be responsible for the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, and has enough evidence to justify seizing them by military force as suspected terrorists, officials say. But there isn’t enough proof to try them in a U.S. civilian court as the Obama administration prefers.

The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya’s post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country’s cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.

A senior administration official said the FBI has identified a number of individuals that it believes have information or may have been involved, and is considering options to bring those responsible to justice. But taking action in remote eastern Libya would be difficult. America’s relationship with Libya would be weighed as part of those options, the official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.

The Libyan Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Waiting to prosecute suspects instead of grabbing them now could add to the political weight the Benghazi case already carries. The attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans weeks before President Barack Obama’s re-election. Since then, Republicans in Congress have condemned the administration’s handling of the situation, criticizing the level of embassy security, questioning the talking points provided to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her public appearances to explain the attack and suggesting the White House tried to play down the incident to minimize its effect on the president’s campaign.

The FBI released photos of three of the five suspects earlier this month, asking the public to provide more information on the men pictured. The images were captured by security cameras at the U.S. diplomatic post during the attack, but it took weeks for the FBI to see and study them. It took the agency three weeks to get to Libya because of security problems, so Libyan officials had to get the cameras and send them to U.S. officials in Tripoli, the capital.

The FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies identified the men through contacts in Libya and by monitoring their communications. They are thought to be members of Ansar al-Shariah, the Libyan militia group whose fighters were seen near the U.S. diplomatic facility prior to the violence.

Republican lawmakers continue to call for the Obama administration to provide more information about the attack. The White House released 99 pages of emails about the talking points drafted by the intelligence community that Rice used to describe the attack, initially suggesting they were part of a series of regional protests about an anti-Islamic film. In those emails, administration officials agreed to remove from the talking points all mentions of terror groups such as Ansar al-Shariah or al-Qaida, because the intelligence pointing to those groups’ involvement was still unclear and because some officials didn’t want to give Congress ammunition to criticize the administration.

U.S. officials say the FBI has proof that the five men were either at the scene of the first attack or somehow involved because of intercepts of at least one of them bragging about taking part. Some of the men have also been in contact with a network of well-known regional Jihadists, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

The U.S. has decided that the evidence it has now would be enough for a military operation to seize the men for questioning, but not enough for a civilian arrest or a drone strike against them, the officials said. The U.S. has kept them under surveillance, mostly by electronic means. There was a worry that the men could get spooked and hide, but so far, not even the FBI’s release of surveillance video stills has done that.

FBI investigators are hoping for more evidence, such as other video of the attack that might show the suspects in the act of setting the fires that ultimately killed the ambassador and his communications specialist, or firing the mortars hours later at the CIA base where the surviving diplomats took shelter — or a Libyan witness willing to testify against the suspects in a U.S. courtroom.

Administration officials have indicated recently that the FBI is zeroing in.

“Regardless of what happened previously, we have made very, very, very substantial progress in that investigation,” Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers last week.

That echoed comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry to lawmakers last month.

“They do have people ID’d,” Kerry said of the FBI-led investigation. “They have made some progress. They have a number of suspects who are persons of interest that they are pursuing in this and building cases on.”

But options for dealing with the men are few and difficult, U.S. officials said, describing high level strategy debates among White House, FBI and other counterterror officials. Those confidential discussions were described on condition of anonymity by four senior U.S. officials briefed on the investigation into the attack.

The U.S. could ask Libya to arrest the suspects, hoping that Americans would be given access to question them and that the Libyans gather enough evidence to hold the men under their own justice system. Another option is to ask the Libyans to extradite the men to the U.S., but that would require the U.S. to gather enough solid evidence linking the suspects to the crime to ask for such an action.

Asking other countries to detain suspects hasn’t produced much thus far. In this case, the Egyptian government detained Egyptian Islamic Jihad member Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad for possible links to the attack, but it remains unclear if U.S. intelligence officers were ever allowed to question him.

Tunisia allowed the U.S. to question Tunisian suspect Ali Harzi, 28, who was arrested in Turkey last October because of suspected links to the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack, but a judge released him in January for lack of evidence.

Finally, the U.S. could send a military team to grab the men, and take them to an offsite location such as a U.S. naval ship — the same way al-Qaida suspect Ahmed Warsame was seized by special operations personnel in 2011 in Somalia. He was then held and questioned for two months on a U.S. ship before being read his rights to remain silent and have an attorney, transferred to the custody of the FBI and taken for trial in a New York court. Warsame pleaded guilty earlier this year and agreed to tell the FBI what he knew about terror threats and, if necessary, testify for the government.

The U.S. has made preparations for raids to grab the Benghazi suspects for interrogation in case the administration decides that’s the best option, officials said. Such raids could be legally justified under the U.S. law passed just after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that authorizes the use of military force against al-Qaida, officials said. The reach of the law has been expanded to include groups working with al-Qaida.

The option most likely off the table would be taking suspects seized by the military to Guantanamo Bay, the facility in Cuba that Obama has said he wants to close. “Just as the administration is trying to find the exit ramp for Guantanamo is not the time to be adding to it,” said Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo.

Beyond being politically uncomfortable, it’s less effective, he said. “There’ve been a total of seven cases completed since 2001,” with six of them landing in appeals court over issues with the legitimacy of the charges.

----

Political Fallout

Waiting to prosecute suspects instead of grabbing them now could add to the political weight the Benghazi, Libya, case already carries.

The attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans weeks before President Barack Obama’s re-election. Since then, Republicans in Congress have condemned the administration’s handling of the situation, criticizing the level of embassy security, questioning the talking points provided to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her public appearances to explain the attack and suggesting the White House tried to downplay the incident to minimize its effect on the president’s campaign.

IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

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IRS big wig takes the 5th and refuses to answer Congress's questions.

Many of the Founders died to give you your Fifth Amendment rights. You should always take it, like Lois Lerner did, who is a 34 year life time employee of the IRS.

Any defense attorney will tell you to NEVER answer police questions. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.

One problem with talking to the police is frequently the questions are rigged, and any answer you give will be an admission of committing a crime. Even if you didn't know you were confessing to a crime.

In Arizona one trick question cops use to convict you of DUI or DWI is to ask "On a scale of 1 to 10 how intoxicated are you".

If you give the cop the answer he asked you for, which is a number between 1 and 10 you have admitted to committing the crime of drunk driving.

In Arizona the slightest bit of intoxication is consider to be drunk driving, so if you answer the question with "1", you have admitted to driving while drunk.

Of course the only answer to that question is ZERO, and the cops don't give you that as an option to answer the question with.

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Lois Lerner invokes Fifth Amendment in House hearing on IRS targeting

By William Branigin and Ed O’Keefe, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:46 AM E-mail the writers

The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, faced with allegations of improper targeting of conservative groups, told a House committee Wednesday that she has done nothing wrong but declined to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lois G. Lerner told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in an opening statement that members of the panel have already accused her of providing false information to Congress.

IRS controversy: Who knew what, and when

“I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” But on the advice of counsel, she said, she would not answer questions or testify before the committee.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, asked her to reconsider, to no avail, then dismissed her and her attorney from the hearing room. At that point, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) objected, saying Lerner waived her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment by making an opening statement. “She ought to stay here and answer our questions,” he declared.

Issa excused Lerner anyway “subject to recall” if the committee determines she did not properly invoke her right. He added that he might consult with the Justice Department about giving Lerner “limited immunity” to testify.

Lerner’s attorney informed the Oversight Committee Tuesday that she would invoke the Fifth Amendment, but she was required to appear anyway. She said in her opening statement that she has been a government employee for more than 34 years, moving to the IRS exempt organizations office in 2001 and becoming the director of that unit in 2006. She said she was responsible for 900 employees and the processing of more than 60,000 applications a year.

“I am very proud of the work that I have done in government,” Lerner said.

Appearing before the committee along with Lerner were Douglas Shulman, the Bush administration appointee who led the IRS during President Obama’s first term; J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration; and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin.

The House hearing was the latest in a series of Capitol Hill grillings of officials in connection with an audit by George’s office, which reported last week that it found inappropriate targeting of groups applying for tax-exempt status based on terms such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their case files.

In opening the hearing, Issa charged that George, who has been largely spared the grillings reserved for other officials in previous hearings, failed to keep Congress informed about his findings as the audit proceeded.

“We must also insist ... that we not wait 10 months to find out that there’s a there there,” Issa said. He called the delay “the greatest failing of an otherwise well-regarded inspector general.”

George reminded the committee that his office conducted an audit, not an investigation. He said the improper practices by an IRS unit in Cincinnati started in 2010 and were “not fully corrected’ until May 2012. “These practices were inappropriate,” he said. “They remained in effect for approximately 18 months.”

In questioning George, Issa said that under the law, “you have a responsibility to keep us continually and ... equally informed.”

George said there are “established procedures for conducting an audit” to ensure fairness and noted that information given to Capitol Hill “sometimes is not retained on the Hill.”

Issa retorted that the Obama administration has been known to leak information, and he charged that the IRS “maliciously leaked” the inspector general’s main finding in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the audit report.

With Lerner having refused to answer questions, lawmakers also turned their focus to Shulman, whose testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday irked some senators as he rebuffed attempts to blame him for the fiasco in which conservative groups were listed separately for special scrutiny.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House panel, criticized Shulman for not correcting his March 2012 testimony after learning that IRS employees had indeed targeted conservative groups.

“It seems to me that you would come back even if it were a phone call or a letter,” Cummings said. “I mean, common sense.”

Cummings also asked Shulman whether he was upset after learning from Steven T. Miller, who worked under Shulman at the time, that the IRS had targeted conservatives, an issue that members of Congress were concerned about.

“I felt comfort that the IG was going to look into this and report back to Congress at the appropriate time,” Shulman said.

Under questioning from Republicans, Shulman said he did not discuss the IRS targeting of conservative groups with the White House during what one GOP lawmaker said were more than 100 visits there in 2010 and 2011.

“It would not have been appropriate to have a conversation with anyone at the White House about the subject of discriminating against conservative groups,” Shulman said.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) also asked George to clarify whether officials at the Treasury Department or the White House ever directed IRS employees in the tax-exempt unit to target certain groups.

“We did pose that question,” George replied, adding that “the response was that there was no direction” of that nature from Treasury to the Cincinnati unit or from the unit’s affiliate office in Washington. He said in response to another question that his auditors “didn’t question anyone as to whether or not they’d received any direction from the White House.”

Norton urged George to look into that issue.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, Shulman said he was “saddened” by some of the agency’s actions regarding applications for tax-exempt status during his tenure.

“I certainly am not personally responsible for making a list that had inappropriate criteria on it,” Shulman said, adding: “With that said, this happened on my watch, and I very much regret that this happened on my watch.”

Asked at one point by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) whether he would apologize to Cornyn’s constituents who were unfairly targeted by the IRS, Shulman said that he was not sure what occurred specifically with Texas-based groups and announced his regret that the wrongdoing occurred on his watch.

“Well, I don’t think that qualifies as an apology,” Cornyn said.

The confrontation Tuesday was one more example of the growing acrimony surrounding congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the IRS targeting scandal as the outgoing acting IRS commissioner, his predecessor and the Treasury Department tax watchdog rejected the idea that political partisanship played any role in singling out conservative nonprofits for heightened scrutiny.

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Miller, the acting commissioner who submitted his resignation under pressure last week, sat alongside Shulman, who headed the IRS from March 2008 to November 2012, as each detailed how they first learned of the situation and the steps they took to remedy it.

Testifying for the first time since IRS officials admitted to the situation, Shulman was asked why he did not come forward before to acknowledge the improper screening that occurred before his departure.

“I did not have a full set of facts” before an IRS inspector general’s audit was made public last week, Shulman told the panel. He said he knew “sometime in the spring of 2012” that “there was a list being used” to designate groups for extra scrutiny and that the term “tea party” in a group’s name was a criterion. But he said that he did not know what other words were on the list and “didn’t know the scope and severity of this.”

“I agree that this is an issue that when someone spotted it, they should have brought it up the chain, and they didn’t,” Shulman said under questioning. “Why they didn’t, I don’t know.”

Shulman said several times that he was “dismayed” and “saddened” to read about the agency’s improper actions in the report released last week and said that he had made certain George’s office looked into the matter once he learned about it.

But Shulman refused several times to take personal responsibility for the situation or to explicitly apologize.

After Cornyn asked for an apology, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) offered Shulman another opportunity: “Are you responsible?”

“I’m deeply regretful,” Shulman said.

“Okay, never mind,” Roberts said, cutting him off. “Let’s just move on.”

Miller, as he had last week, took full responsibility for the agency’s decision to publicly apologize for the targeting by planting a question to raise the issue.

Under questioning, Miller explained that IRS leaders were aware that George was on the verge of releasing his report, so “we thought we should begin talking about this. We’d thought we’d get out an apology.”

Miller said he worked with Lerner, who leads the agency’s tax-exempt unit, to ensure that she would be asked a question about the controversy during a panel discussion at a conference.

“We wanted to reach out to the — to Hill staff about the same time [the report would] come out,” Miller said. But that strategy “did not work out,” he said. “Obviously, the entire thing was an incredibly bad idea.”

At a separate hearing held by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said he would have “advised against” the decision by the IRS to plant the question at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association in Washington instead of first notifying lawmakers.

Lew told the committee that he was not involved in the decision to plant the question but that some Treasury and IRS officials discussed the strategy in advance. He emphasized that the management of the matter was up to the IRS’s discretion.

Discussions about the IRS’s plans to apologize began in late April, according to a senior department official. That’s when IRS officials first told the Treasury that Lerner was considering making a speech in which she would make a public apology for inappropriate conduct. Also in late April, the IRS told Treasury that Miller would apologize when asked in forthcoming congressional testimony.

Treasury did not advise the IRS what it should do, the official said.

In both of these cases, Treasury discussed the potential disclosures with the White House and said that the department planned to defer to the IRS.

Finally, Treasury was told ahead of time that Lerner would be asked a question about the controversy at the American Bar Association conference.

Treasury did not tell the White House about the planned disclosure at the ABA conference.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney defended the administration’s deliberations on the issue.

“It was very important, in our view . . . that we not take any action that could even be seen to create the appearance of intervening in an ongoing investigation like this. In this case, an independent inspector general audit. And so, of course, we did not,” Carney said.

Aaron Blake, Zachary A. Goldfarb, Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums.

Cops/FBI kill bombing suspect during questioning

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Man tied to Boston bombing suspect killed in confrontation with FBI, others

By Sari Horwitz and Jenna Johnson, Updated: Wednesday, May 22, 9:50 AM E-mail the writers

A Chechen man who was friends with one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was shot and killed in Orlando early Wednesday when an interview with the FBI and other police officers erupted into a violent confrontation, the FBI said.

The victim was identified as Ibragim Todashev, 27, who knew Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev through the world of martial arts.

The FBI said in a statement that Todashev was being questioned about the bombing by an FBI agent, two Massachusetts state police officers and other law enforcement personnel when the witness turned violent. The FBI said that the agent, who was not identified, was injured and that Todashev was shot and killed.

Two federal law enforcement officials said that, during the questioning, Todashev had implicated himself and Tsarnaev in a triple homicide in Waltham, Mass., two years ago. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said Todashev brandished a knife and threatened the officers during the interview in his apartment.

Tsarnaev had been identified as a potential suspect in the triple slaying shortly after the bombings.

The FBI statement provided few details about the death in Orlando and did not address the Waltham killings. It said only that Todashev initiated a violent confrontation while being questioned. “During the confrontation, the individual was killed and the agent sustained non-life threatening injuries,” the statement said.

The FBI has been conducting interviews across the United States and in Russia with associates of Tsarnaev and his brother, Dzhokhar, over the past month to learn whether anyone else was associated with the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded more than 260.

The interviews have focused heavily on people from the northern Caucasus area of Russia, where Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months in 2012. The Tsarnaev family has roots in Chechnya, part of the restive region, and the FBI suspects he might have had contact with Islamic militants there last year.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police four days after the bombing. His brother was captured later that day and faces charges that could carry the death penalty. Before he was charged, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI that no one else was involved in the plot and that he and his brother had acted out of anger over the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A team of officers went to Todashev’s apartment in a residential area near Universal Studios in Orlando to interview him about his relationship with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Khusen Taramov, who said he was a friend of Todashev, told an Orlando television station that Todashev used to live in Boston and knew Tsarnaev through marital arts circles.

“He was not radical at all,” Taramov told WESH-TV. He added that the FBI had been tracking Todashev since the Boston bombing.

At some point, Todashev moved to Florida. He was arrested for aggravated battery this month, according to police records, after getting into a fight with a man in a parking lot.

When the FBI agent and others arrived at his apartment early Wednesday, the law enforcement officials said Todashev initially was cooperative. They said he appeared on the verge of signing a confession to the killings of three people in Waltham in September 2011. They said he had implicated Tsarnaev in the homicides.

But the interview turned violent, the officials said, and Todashev went for a knife. He injured the FBI agent and was shot and killed. The FBI did not say whether he was shot by the agent or one of the other law enforcement officers.

Tsarnaev’s name has surfaced in earlier news reports about the Waltham slayings, which remain unsolved. Stephanie Guyotte, a spokeswoman for Middlesex County’s district attorney’s office, said the investigation is ongoing and refused to say whether Todashev or Tsarnaev was a suspect.

On Sept. 12, 2011, police found three men dead in a well-kept rental house on a short, quiet street in Waltham. The men were identified as Brendan Mess, 25, of Waltham, Erik Weissman, 31, of Cambridge, and Raphael Teken, 37, of Cambridge. The Boston Globe and other news outlets have reported that Tsarnaev was friends with Mess and that the two met through boxing.

A woman who lived next door to the rental house said she home that day and consoled Mess’s distraught girlfriend, who reportedly found the bodies and ran screaming outside. The neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she does not want her name associated with the gruesome slayings, said she was told that the men had their throats slashed and that their bodies were covered with pot.

“She was horrified,” the neighbor said of the girlfriend. “We didn’t hear a thing that night. . . . The fact that all of this attention has come here again is very painful.”

Authorities say that the men died early Sept. 12, but relatives of at least one of the victims insist that the men were killed Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. Sept. 11 is the date listed on the tombstone of Weissman, according to photos on an online memorial.

At the time of the killings, Waltham police issued a statement saying that detectives did not think the attack was random and that the victims probably knew their attacker or attackers. The Middlesex district attorney’s office later said in a statement that the men died of “sharp-force injuries of the neck.’’ The Globe reported that the deaths were probably drug-related.

Two friends of Teken and Weissman said they believed the deaths were connected to a massive May 2011 drug bust in nearby Watertown. The bust followed a year-long investigation by federal authorities and resulted in charges against 18 people. Weissman was a founder of a company that produced high-end glass bongs.

Julie Tate and Peter Hermann contributed to this report.

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

By Dana Milbank, Published: May 21

There are various reasons you might not care about the Obama administration’s spying on journalist James Rosen and labeling him a “co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor” in an espionage case.

Liberals may not be particularly bothered because the targeted journalist works for Fox News. Conservatives may not be concerned because of their antipathy toward the news media generally. And the general public certainly doesn’t have much patience for journalists’ whining.

But here’s why you should care — and why this case, along with the administration’s broad snooping into Associated Press phone records, is more serious than the other supposed Obama administration scandals regarding Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service. The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

Beyond that, the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility and discourage allies who would otherwise defend the administration against bogus accusations such as those involving the Benghazi “talking points.” If the administration is spying on reporters and accusing them of criminality just for asking questions — well, who knows what else this crowd is capable of doing?

When Rosen and I covered the Bush White House together a decade ago, I knew him as a scrappy reporter who had a fascination with Watergate trivia. He later wrote a sympathetic biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced attorney general. Now he’s learning just how abusive a Justice Department can be, from an administration that has launched more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.

My Post colleague Ann E. Marimow, who broke the Rosen story, obtained the affidavit by FBI agent Reginald Reyes seeking access to Rosen’s private e-mails. In the affidavit, Reyes stated that “there is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed or is committing a violation” of the law against national security leaks. The affidavit detailed how the FBI had monitored Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department and tracked his various phone calls with the suspected leaker, analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.

The administration snoops had spied on Rosen enough to know of his Watergate hobby: his Gmail address named for the Nixon aide who installed the secret taping system, and Rosen’s “clandestine communications plan” (a modern-day version of Bob Woodward’s fabled flowerpot) in which an e-mail containing one asterisk meant Rosen should contact Kim.

Rosen’s supposed crime? Reyes got his evidence from an e-mail from the reporter: “I want to report authoritatively, and ahead of my competitors, on new initiatives or shifts in U.S. policy, events on the ground in [North Korea], what intelligence is picking up, etc. . . . I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses. . . . In short: Let’s break some news, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it, or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.”

That is indeed compelling evidence — of good journalism.

And how did Rosen commit this crime? Kim told investigators Rosen is a “very convincing, persistent person” who “would tell me I was brilliant and it is possible I succumbed to flattery.”

Only in this Justice Department could flattery get you a prison term.

President Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, told reporters that there must be a “balance” between a free press and leaks that “can endanger the lives of men and women in uniform and other Americans serving overseas.”

True, but the 2009 reports that prompted the probe confirmed what was already conventional wisdom, that Kim Jong Un was likely to replace his father, Kim Jong Il, as North Korea’s leader, and that there were worries that North Korea would respond to new sanctions by launching a third nuclear test. As it happens, the intelligence was wrong, and Pyongyang didn’t launch another test at the time.

Carney told the White House press corps Tuesday that Obama doesn’t think “journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs” (perhaps he could remind the FBI of that), and the administration has renewed its support for a media shield law (a welcome but suspicious gesture, because the White House thwarted a previous attempt to pass the bill).

If Obama really is “a fierce defender of the First Amendment,” as his spokesman would have it, he will move quickly to fix this. Otherwise, Obama is establishing an ominous precedent for future leaders whose fondness for the First Amendment may not be so fierce.

Twitter: @Milbank

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Elgin deputy police chief charged with identity theft, misconduct

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Former Elgin deputy police chief charged with identity theft, misconduct

By Kate Thayer Tribune reporter

7:02 p.m. CDT, May 21, 2013

A former high-ranking Elgin police officer and current Stockton police chief was indicted Tuesday on charges he used a law enforcement database to hack into an e-mail account and get personal information, according to Kane County prosecutors.

Robert Beeter, 51, of Elgin, faces felony charges of identity theft and official misconduct, Kane County prosecutors said. He was arrested Tuesday afternoon and released after posting $2,500 bond, according to prosecutors.

Beeter could not immediately be reached for comment.

The indictment alleges that between Aug. 11, 2010 and April 12, 2011, Beeter on several occasions used personal identification information of “someone he knew” to access that person’s personal e-mail account, prosecutors said. In June 2010, Beeter also accessed the Law Enforcement Agencies Data System four times to gain information on someone for his personal use, the indictment charges.

During that time, Beeter was Elgin’s deputy police chief. Beeter also served for a period as acting police chief in Elgin, though not during the time in question. He has since been laid off from the Elgin force and, last June, became the chief of Stockton’s police department.

Prosecutors did not specify whose e-mail account and personal information was at the center of the allegations.

Recently, though, former Elgin Police Lieutenant Greg Welter filed a lawsuit against the city of Elgin, Police Chief Jeff Swoboda and other city officials. In it, Welter, who retired in 2010 after 29 years in the Elgin Police Department, claimed he was forced to retire after an affair between his wife – also a police officer – and Beeter was made public.

The suit alleges that Welter’s wife and Beeter hacked into Welter’s personal e-mail account. The lawsuit further accuses the pair of anonymously tipping department and city officials off to e-mails implying Welter improperly used his role at the department to get vehicle information – something Welter denies.

A judge earlier this year dismissed that lawsuit, agreeing with the city’s stances that Welter was not forced out and that the alleged wrongdoing was reported before Welter retired.

In another federal lawsuit, Welter and a business partner are suing Beeter and Welter’s estranged wife, Tamara Welter. That pending lawsuit claims Beeter and Tamara Welter accessed Greg Welter’s personal e-mail account.

The complaint also reiterates claims they used information they found in the e-mail to pass along to Elgin police and city officials.

Beeter is due back in court June 12, officials said. If convicted, Beeter faces between 2 and 5 years in prison, or could be placed on probation, according to prosecutors.

Stockton Police Sgt. Don Trost declined to comment Tuesday evening, but said a prepared statement was pending from officials.

Swoboda in Elgin released the following statement: “Whenever an officer is alleged to have abused their authority, no matter what rank and no matter when it occurred, we will investigate it fully and take the appropriate action.”

kthayer@tribune.com

Will Humble Shakes Down Midwifes???

From this article it looks like Arizona Health Services Director Will Humble is now screwing over women, in addition to medical marijuana users.!!!

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Midwives take aim at new state regulations

By Mary K. Reinhart The Republic | azcentral.com Wed May 22, 2013 10:54 PM

Arizona midwives and their clients are railing against state officials over proposed regulations that they claim would limit health-care choices and endanger lives.

But the state health director says that the controversy is fueled by a misunderstanding of current rules and state law and that regulators and midwives are not far apart after six months of meetings on the regulations scheduled to take effect July 1.

Close to 100 midwives, mothers and their children protested Wednesday in front of the Arizona Department of Health Services, saying the new regulations will limit a woman’s right to have her child delivered by a midwife and prohibit midwives from administering medications they’ve used for decades.

“Keep home births safe!” children and moms chanted as they marched along 18th Avenue in front of the ADHS building with signs reading, “Don’t force midwives to abandon me” and “Don’t let (ADHS) Director Will Humble set back women’s rights 40 years.”

There are 63 licensed midwives in Arizona. They assist in about 1 percent of births.

At issue in the draft rules is an informed-consent provision that says midwives cannot assist mothers who refuse to undergo certain blood tests and regulations that could subject midwives to criminal prosecution if they administer medications they’ve offered for years to mothers and babies.

State law and current regulations appear to conflict on the medication issue. The law does not allow licensed midwives to prescribe or administer controlled substances, but current regulations require them to have on hand certain drugs, such as anticoagulants, in case of emergency.

Midwives say they fear for the safety of mothers and babies without the ability to have those drugs on hand. In a statement, the American Association of Birth Centers called on the ADHS to scuttle the medication rule.

“It is unreasonable for the department to create unnecessary risks to the life and health of women and babies by revoking access to these medications for licensed midwives,” said Julia Hall, executive director of the Babymoon Inn birth center in Phoenix.

Humble said state officials hope to find some middle ground, such as allowing midwives to provide medications under standing orders from physicians. Adding midwives to the list of those authorized to dispense medication would require a change to state law.

“I think there’s some confusion about what the regulations actually say,” he said. “There’s obviously some confusion around the administration of medications. We’re still trying to work through some of those issues.”

Women and midwives opened the door to the new regulations two years ago, when they set out to update the rules to allow women who have had Caesarean sections to give birth to subsequent children at home. Current rules prohibit midwives from helping women deliver twins, breech babies or post-Caesarean babies at home, in addition to other births that are considered high-risk.

They met with Humble and other state health officials, who helped them shepherd a bill through the Legislature last year to streamline regulations and establish an advisory committee to consider allowing post-Caesarean deliveries by midwives.

Humble said the proposed regulations will improve a disjointed system by requiring better communication among midwives, emergency responders and hospitals. Among other things, midwives will be required to call the closest hospital to report when a mother goes into labor and after she has delivered.

It also creates an electronic database of reports on home births that currently are collected on paper and submitted haphazardly.

“My focus has been to try to build a safer, better, more efficient system,” Humble said. “Home births can be a really good, safe and less expensive option. But you’ve got to have a system that works in harmony.”

But midwife Marinah Farrell said the new rules could reduce the number of home births and compromise safety by leading to more unattended deliveries.

“There are a lot of issues, but for me, the biggest is safety,” she said. “And I just don’t want more women to die.”

During Wednesday’s protest, state health officials brought cases of water to the crowd, which included dozens of babies and preschoolers with little shade from the midday sun. Looking down on the crowd from his fifth-floor office, Humble fretted about dehydration and praised the group’s organization and dedication.

“If everyone did this,” he said, “we’d have a better country.”

Reach the reporter at maryk.reinhart@arizonarepublic.com

Cops assume you are guilty till proven innocent???

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Phoenix police battle for proof in 2 fatal crashes

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Wed May 22, 2013 11:01 PM

Investigators identified what they believe to be the weapon and the man who owns it.

But charges against Christopher Wakefield Chevalier, suspected of driving a convertible that killed a pedestrian in March, were dropped last month. That left investigators to find more evidence proving the car’s owner was driving when the vehicle hit and killed the pedestrian.

Investigators are facing the same scenario in trying to determine who was driving the SUV that they say struck and killed Phoenix police Officer Daryl Raetz last weekend.

Experts say that without an eyewitness account placing SUV owner Jesus Cabrera Molina, 24, in the driver’s seat shortly before or after Raetz was hit near Cambridge and 51st avenues, that process could take months.

Phoenix police believe Chevalier, the owner of the orange Alfa Romeo, was driving the convertible when it struck and killed Ana Blaze as she walked along Northern Avenue near 11th Avenue on March 2. But they can’t prove it yet.

Charges were dismissed on April 2, but prosecutors asked police to do further investigation, and the charges could be refiled.

As in Raetz’s death, there were witnesses who could describe the car that ran down Blaze; and as in Raetz’s death, there was evidence collected from the scene and the vehicle that police believe links the car to the crime.

But there is no obligation for the driver of either vehicle to implicate themselves, said Mike McCullough, a former Phoenix police vehicular-crimes investigator.

“If you’re involved, you’re going to do everything you can in an effort to not cooperate with the police to prove you were the driver,” he said.

Chevalier, 45, contacted his attorney and came to the police station the morning after Blaze was hit, according to court documents, but he refused to answer questions. Still, Phoenix police believed the evidence collected was strong enough to arrest Chevalier on March 21 on allegations of manslaughter, leaving the scene of a fatal accident and tampering with evidence.

Less than a month later, the charges against Chevalier were dropped at the request of the prosecutors.

Phoenix police believe they can recommend some of the same charges against Chevalier when the investigation is complete.

“(Prosecutors) are asking for some of the results of forensic testing, they are asking for some comparative testing to be done on some of the items on the vehicle that were at the scene and recovered from the vehicle itself,” said Sgt. Trent Crump, a Phoenix police spokesman. “One of the best things we can have in this is time and making sure everything is done correctly and everything is done thoroughly.”

Experts say proving who was driving can be difficult. If that is established, it can be as hard to prove the suspects were acting recklessly — a requirement for manslaughter — or that the drivers knew they hit a human instead of an animal — a requirement for fleeing the scene of an accident.

Investigators collected DNA and a cellphone from Chevalier two days after Blaze was killed, according to court documents. But a car owner’s DNA should be throughout their vehicle, and a cellphone can typically be used to help track someone’s movements only if the phone is in use, said Jim Botsko, a former Phoenix police investigator and accident reconstructionist.

The detectives in Phoenix’s vehicular-crimes unit, who are also investigating the death of a Phoenix firefighter last weekend, are likely taking many of those same steps as they investigate Raetz’s death and hoping ubiquitous surveillance cameras somewhere captured footage of the driver, he said.

“You have to do something to be able to put the person behind the wheel relatively soon in time to when the collision occurred,” Botsko said.

Investigators in Chevalier’s case collected surveillance video from a gas station not far from where Blaze was struck, according to court documents. The video showed an orange convertible with “severe damage” on the passenger side of the windshield and shattered glass in a bent window frame, according to court documents, but there is no mention of the driver.

Court documents in Molina’s case indicate that an off-duty officer saw Molina driving an SUV matching the description of the truck that hit Raetz about 90 minutes after the wreck. But detectives are still searching for a witness who can place Molina in the driver’s seat before the wreck.

“As the investigation unfolds, you may not realize there was something in the vehicle that you may want to go back and examine, like receipts from where the driver may have stopped before the collision,” said McCullough, the Phoenix investigator. “At that point, you’ve got a known person who was operating a vehicle, so you’re going to take that information to the retail outlet.”

But all of this takes time, the investigators cautioned.

Molina, who’s being held without bond, was arrested on suspicion of cocaine possession on Sunday afternoon.

Federal immigration officials said they’ve also issued a detainer to take custody of Molina because he’s in the country illegally and skipped a court date after posting a $5,000 bond in 2012. Federal officials likely will take Molina into custody after the drug charges are resolved, including serving any sentence that may be imposed. That could happen before Phoenix police complete the investigation into Raetz’s death.

Time also allows investigators to rely on some of their most reliable tools: chatty criminals and an eye for detail, McCullough said.

“There’s no honor among thieves; all it takes is someone’s lips who are a little loose, and you start to build a case,” he said. “You don’t have a lot of corroborating evidence or witnesses to help your case. It relies on the numerous tricks you can use up your sleeve to learn information or your ability to analyze a scene.”

Glendale police chief threatens to "Burn down store" of drug dealer

According to this articles Glendale assistant police chief Greg Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” of Spanky’s Smoke Shop for selling spice to his son.

If a civilian had done that he would probably be sitting in prison now. Of this piggy thinks his slap on the wrist punishment was too severe and is appealing it.

Spice, the drug in question was legal in Arizona until just recently. I don't know if spice was legal or illegal when Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” of Spanky’s Smoke Shop.

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Former Glendale assistant police chief says he regrets actions

By David Woodfill The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Wed May 22, 2013 8:27 PM

Glendale’s former assistant police chief who got demoted after accusations that he threatened a local business he thought sold drugs to his son told The Arizona Republic and 12 News Wednesday he regrets his actions, but acted as a concerned father.

Greg Dominguez was demoted one rank to commander, took a $15,000 pay cut and was suspended for a week following some sort of confrontation he had with an employee at Spanky’s Smoke Shop on Bell Road in Peoria.

The police department has disclosed few details from their internal investigation of the incident, but according to a Peoria police report, someone who worked at Spanky’s said Dominguez threatened to “burn the store down” if he did not stop selling “stuff” to his son. The worker said threat was made during one of two encounters in February.

Dominguez acknowledged going to the store and using curse words, but said he doesn’t know exactly what he said other than “I asked him to stop selling to my son.”

He said he acted out of fear for his son.

He teared up as he described watching his son destroyed his health. At one point, he said he thought his son had died after he walked into the room and saw him laying perfectly still in his bed.

“Scared,” is how Dominguez described his state of mind when he decided to go into Spanky’s to confront the person he thought was selling the drug.

Dominguez said he doesn’t remember the exact date of his encounter with the employee, but said he knew his son had just gone to the store because he used a smart phone tracking application.

He never identified himself as a police officer, he said. "This was me going to try and save my son."

Dominguez said in hindsight he realized that convincing one person to stop selling his son drugs wasn’t going to help.

“I know different things now,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot about addiction, a lot about spice.”

Dominguez said he plans to stay at the Glendale Police Department and was appealing his punishment, which he said was too punitive. [That is 100 percent rubbish!!!! If a civilian had threatened to burn down the business of a police officer who committed a crime against him, the civiilan would almost certainly be convicted of a crime and be sitting for a long time in prison. Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez got a slap on the wrist for a serious felony and is now complaning that his punishment is too severe!!!! That is rubbish. Glendale police chief Greg Dominguez should be sitting in a prison cell, not running the Glendale Police Department]

National Guard reforms are just 'posterior covering'

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National Guard reforms are just 'posterior covering'

Our View: Recommended changes not really changes at all

By Editorial board The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 23, 2013 7:52 AM

From the earliest days of the Arizona National Guard scandal, the people at the top of this important institution displayed a sense that if they could just wait out the troubles, the troubles would go away.

Maj. Gen. Hugo Salazar, who inexplicably remains the adjutant general of the Guard, clearly feels that way. So does his chief booster and boss, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer.

But the nagging woes have not just gone away. Arizona Republic reporter Dennis Wagner’s continuing, impeccably documented depictions of a military organization rotting from the top down ultimately led to a scathing critique from the outside.

Inexcusably lax discipline, especially among the Guard’s powerful cadre of non-commissioned officers. Appalling leadership lapses. Rampant, often sexual, fraternization with enlisted personnel. Financial fraud.

Every step of the way leading up to the release of the investigative report by Maj. Gen. Ricky Adams of the National Guard Bureau, the Arizona Guard’s top leaders argued the accusations were overstated. Adams found otherwise.

Now come the proposed reforms. Salazar unveiled his plans for reforming the Guard’s leadership, setting protocols to avoid corruption and improving the morale of Guard personnel.

It would be unfair to call Salazar’s reforms underwhelming, but many of his proposals to tighten ship add regulations against behaviors already prohibited. Fraternization and harassment have always been forbidden.

The bottom line is execution. Is Salazar, who has been a top Arizona Guard officer for at least five years, capable of implementing the reforms he prescribes? We have our doubts.

As do others. State Sen. Debbie McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, is attempting to schedule unofficial hearings into conditions within the Arizona Guard, reportedly including testimony from a whistle-blower or two.

If the Guard’s woes originated in part from its isolation from other institutions, that wall is crumbling. The problems uncovered by Wagner ensure people will be watching Salazar’s follow-through for a long time.

The Republic earlier this month called for Salazar to step down, presuming that a longtime member of the Arizona Guard’s cadre was not a likely candidate for reforming things. Brewer nevertheless defended him and has opted to keep him on the job.

Very well. But Salazar’s enthusiasm for real change thus far is not impressive. His new code of conduct, which included restrictions against blowing whistles, were less of a stab at reform and more of a closing of ranks.

We will see if the adjutant general’s two dozen new initiatives are, in fact, “catalysts for broad, systemic program change,” as he called them. Or whether they are more posterior covering.

The Guard doors won’t be closing any time soon.

AG: 4 Americans killed since 2009 in drone strikes

OK, I suspect that Emperor Obama will disagree with that and claim he is protecting America from terrorists when he plays judge, jury and executioner when he murders people with drones.

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AG: 4 Americans killed since 2009 in drone strikes

Associated Press Wed May 22, 2013 2:26 PM

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that four American citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009 in Pakistan and Yemen. The disclosure to Congress comes on the eve of a major national security speech by President Barack Obama.

In conducting U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida and its associated forces, the government has targeted and killed one American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and is aware of the killing by U.S. drones of three others, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy.

Al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Holder said three other Americans were killed by drones in counterterrorism operations since 2009 but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who also was killed in Yemen two weeks later; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.

“Since entering office, the president has made clear his commitment to providing Congress and the American people with as much information as possible about our sensitive counterterrorism operations,” Holder told Leahy, a Democrat.. “To this end, the president has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified.”

“The administration is determined to continue these extensive outreach efforts to communicate with the American people,” Holder wrote.

Gilbert High coach won’t be charged in assault investigation

Of course when Gilbert High School football coach Daniel Dunn slaps a 15-year-old boy in the face with the back of his hand we get the old "Do as I say, not as I do" from our government masters.

Again I suspect if you asked the Founders why they created the Second Amendment this would be one of the reasons.

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Former Gilbert High coach won’t be charged in assault investigation

By Luci Scott The Republic | azcentral.com Wed May 22, 2013 2:35 PM

No criminal charges will be brought against teacher and former Gilbert High School football coach Daniel Dunn, who was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into allegations he had assaulted a student.

“After careful review of the relevant statutes and case law as applied to the facts, we have decided we will not be bringing any criminal charges at this time,” Gilbert town prosecutor Lynn Arouh said Wednesday. She declined to elaborate.

Phone calls from The Republic to Dunn’s Mesa home went unanswered, and there was no immediate word from Gilbert Public Schools as to whether Dunn was reinstated from his administrative leave. The 2012-13 school year ends this week in GPS.

Police had said that Dunn, who resigned last year from his coaching job but still teaches math, slapped a 15-year-old boy in the face with the back of his hand during class on April 17.

At the time, Dunn was yelling at another student about bad behavior. He was standing next to a boy who began to laugh and allegedly slapped the amused boy in the face, the police report said. The investigating officer found no sign of injury on the boy’s face.

Dunn told police he had been correcting one boy’s behavior when he was standing near the alleged victim, who began to stand up, “hootin’ and hollerin.’ ” Dunn said he reached over to motion the alleged victim to sit down when his hand hit the boy’s hat.

Dunn, 67, has been at Gilbert High since 2009, but had worked there from 1971 to 1980.

In April, a flurry of e-mails praising Dunn arrived at district offices as students, parents and other adults rallied to his defense.

Machelle Granger-Couch said that in 1979 she was a freshman who hated math but with Dunn’s help she improved her grade. She said he never gave up on students, no matter how much they struggled.

“I was not a cheerleader or an athlete ... and yet he went out of his way to make sure I received the help I needed,” she said.

Lori Anderson, a 1980 graduate of Gilbert High, said Dunn, “has always shown the utmost professionalism in his work.”

Sandy Jauregui-Held described Dunn as a “great teacher and example.”

Lorna Reber Stock, whose family dates back decades in Gilbert and whose husband played football for Dunn in high school, said, “He is an honorable man.”

“Many of my teachers from GHS were my role models, Mr. Dunn being one of them. I am pleased to have known him, and I know that his character speaks volumes,” wrote Stock, who taught secondary education for 11 years.

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s defense plan detailed

The real problem is government is corrupt to the core. And sure now and then government works doing it's function of being a public servant, but most of the time the only function of government is to enrich the elected officials, the special interest groups that helped get them elected, and of course the unelected government bureaucrats who run their government fiefdoms.

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Horne’s defense plan detailed

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Thu May 23, 2013 10:17 PM

As the campaign-finance allegations against Attorney General Tom Horne hang in legal limbo, documents obtained by The Arizona Republic offer insights into the case Horne and his co-defendant would make if it goes to court.

An attorney representing Kathleen Winn, Horne’s director of community outreach, argues in the documents that allegations the two illegally coordinated campaign efforts are based on speculation. Attorney Timothy La Sota also questions investigators’ tactics, revealing they not only continued to tail Horne more than a year after the alleged violation, but also followed Winn’s attorney, Larry Debus.

Investigators’ techniques “raise questions of bias and political motives and taint this entire investigation,” La Sota wrote in a letter to the Secretary of State’s Office.

“Despite all the resources poured into this investigation, all the interviews and surveillance ... the FBI and Maricopa County Attorney’s Office have speculation and conjecture, but not hard evidence,” he wrote.

Horne and Winn last year were accused of unlawfully coordinating campaign spending during the 2010 election, when Horne was the Republican candidate for attorney general and Winn was chairwoman of Business Leaders for Arizona, an independent-expenditure committee. Both have denied wrongdoing.

After a 14-month investigation, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery accused Horne and Winn of collaborating to quickly raise more than $500,000 to run negative ads against his Democratic opponent. By law, candidates are not allowed to coordinate certain activities with independent-expenditure committees.

Montgomery pursued a civil-enforcement action, but a judge this month ruled the case could not move forward because of legal technicalities and procedural failings by the Secretary of State’s Office, which found reasonable cause exists to believe a campaign-finance violation occurred.

“While we certainly welcomed Mr. La Sota’s submission, it doesn’t change our reasonable cause determination,” said Matt Roberts, Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s spokesman. “It doesn’t sway our opinion at all.”

Montgomery declined to comment on La Sota’s letter.

A spokesman for the FBI also declined to comment.

The judge said the secretary of state must submit the case to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office to determine how to proceed. The Attorney General’s Office can send the case to another law-enforcement agency or a private attorney for review, Montgomery has said.

While the case is with the Attorney General’s Office, Horne, Winn “and immediate staff such as executive assistants,” won’t have access to information, discussion, or decisions on the case, according to Horne’s spokeswoman.

In his letter to the secretary of state, La Sota says:

Despite authorities’ “exhaustive” and “expensive” investigation, they were only left with “speculation and conjecture” about coordination.

La Sota wrote that calls between Winn and Horne before the release of an attack ad against Horne’s Democratic rival were tied to a complex real-estate deal — not the ad. Horne never referred anyone to an independent campaign to make a donation, never suggested to Winn the names of people to be solicited for contributions, never spoke to anyone about contributing to an independent campaign, and never weighed in on how an independent campaign’s money should be spent.

A statute that Winn and Horne are accused of violating is unconstitutional.

La Sota argues the Arizona Revised Statute 16-905 “is blatantly unconstitutional” because contribution limits were too low, and therefore violated free speech and equal protection under the U.S. and Arizona constitutions. La Sota points out that the state Legislature this session raised contribution limits partly because “they were ripe for a free-speech challenge.”

La Sota says Montgomery, in testifying before lawmakers, blamed the number of investigations by his office on low contribution limits. An affidavit from an official with the Goldwater Institute declaring current individual contribution limits under current state statutes are unconstitutional is included with La Sota’s letter.

The FBI “came with an agenda and that was to get Tom Horne.”

La Sota questions why the FBI was involved in the investigation. Authorities have said the FBI took the case because Horne was conflicted from investigating himself. La Sota accuses the FBI of attempting to “intimidate witnesses and lie to them in order to get them to say what they wanted.” He accuses the FBI of threatening to use “the ‘Martha Stewart’ treatment”— to send them to prison for lying — to get them to cooperate.

La Sota says the FBI’s undercover surveillance of Horne was “the most unseemly part” of the investigation. “The FBI was following the Arizona Attorney General around years after alleged civil campaign finance violations had been committed, looking for any type of infraction that they might be able to pin on him,” he wrote. “What in the world did this have to do with a civil campaign finance matter?”

During that surveillance, the FBI saw Horne back a borrowed car into a Range Rover and leave without leaving a note. An FBI report states Horne did not leave a note because he was having an extramarital affair with a subordinate who was with him during the accident. Earlier this month, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge stemming from the incident and paid a $300 fine.

Democrats are trying to use Horne’s driving offense — and the FBI report accusing him of an affair — to their advantage as Horne gears up for a re-election campaign. One Democratic senator has called on lawmakers to initiate impeachment hearings against Horne, and this week, the state Democratic Party called on him to explain the circumstances surrounding the accident.

La Sota also takes issue with investigators having a mole in the Attorney General’s Office: “A one point and perhaps still to this day, the FBI had what they call a human asset apparently inside” the agency. La Sota said the mole raises questions about potential “invasions of attorney-client protected relationships to federalism concerns.”

Amanda Bynes arrested on marijuana charge

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Amanda Bynes arrested on marijuana charge

Associated Press Fri May 24, 2013 10:18 AM

NEW YORK — Police say actress Amanda Bynes has been arrested in midtown Manhattan after she heaved a marijuana bong out of a window.

It happened at an apartment building on West 47th Street at about 7:40 p.m. Thursday.

Police say a building official called police to complain that Bynes was smoking marijuana and rolling a joint in the building's lobby.

The officers went to Bynes' apartment where they saw heavy smoke and a bong, which Bynes then threw out the window in front of the officers.

Bynes was arrested on charges of reckless endangerment, tampering with evidence, and criminal possession of marijuana. It wasn't clear if she had a lawyer.

Bynes rose to fame starring in Nickelodeon's "All That" and has also starred in several films, including 2010's "Easy A."

Marijuana causes another death!!!!!

I don't know if Matthew David Stewart was murdered by the police, or if it was a suicide as his father thinks. But either way if marijuana was legal Matthew David Stewart would be alive today.

Last I suspect the Founders would have considered Matthew David Stewart killing a police officer who was trying to arrest him on unconstitutional victimless drug war crimes self defense not murder. In fact I suspect if the Founders were alive today they would tell you it is cases like this that they created the Second Amendment for.

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Man charged in Utah police shooting found dead at jail

Associated Press Fri May 24, 2013 10:14 AM

SALT LAKE CITY — An Army veteran charged with killing a police officer and wounding five others in a shootout during a marijuana raid was found dead at Weber County jail, the veteran’s father said Friday.

Matthew David Stewart was found dead late Thursday, said his father, Michael Stewart, who doesn’t believe foul play was involved and says it may have been a suicide.

The Weber County Sheriff’s Office wouldn’t confirm the inmate death ahead of a late morning news conference.

Michael Stewart said he wasn’t told how his 39-year-old son died. He said his son was despondent over a judge’s recent refusal to hold a hearing on what the family believes was an illegally obtained search warrant.

Stewart was accused of killing strike force agent Jared Francom and wounding other officers when authorities descended on his Ogden home during a January 2012 raid. He could have faced the death penalty if convicted of aggravated murder.

He also faced charges of attempted aggravated murder and marijuana cultivation.

Investigators said they received a telephone tip that Stewart was growing marijuana in his home about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. Officers have said they visited when no one was home and believed they could see equipment inside for growing marijuana. [If they said they "believed they could see equipment inside for growing marijuana" instead of saying they "saw marijuana growing" I suspect the cops illegally broke into the guys home and made up the line of they "believed they could see equipment inside for growing marijuana" to justify their crime]

Authorities obtained a search warrant, and a drug task force raided the site on Jan. 4, 2012.

Stewart maintained he never heard the officers identify themselves and believed he was being robbed when they broke open his door with a ramming device.

Police said Stewart had not responded to a knock at the door and waited for police to enter before firing into a hallway from his bedroom.

During the gun fight, Stewart suffered several gunshot wounds and was hospitalized for nearly a month.

Man gets 340 years for victimless crimes

Jesus don't these pigs have any real criminals to hunt down??? Sure the guy is a pervert, but so what!!! He didn't hurt anybody, steal anything or cause any trouble other then looking at dirty pictures.

The only other victim in this crime, besides David Greenberg, the alleged criminals are the taxpayers of Arizona who will be forced to pay hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of dollars for putting this guy in prison for the rest of his life.

The last time I checked it cost something like $50,000 a year to put a person in prison in Arizona.

If David Greenberg lives to be 70 years old, which is about the average life expectancy of Americans, he will spend the next 25 years in the Arizona State Prison system costing the taxpayers $1,250,000 in current tax dollars.

Yep, we will be spending $1,250,000 to put a guy in prison for looking at dirty pictures!!!!

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Flagstaff man gets 340 years for child sex crimes

Associated Press Thu May 23, 2013 10:37 PM

FLAGSTAFF -- A 45-year-old man has been sentenced to 340 years in prison in a child-sex case that included voyeurism, surreptitious videotaping and extensive downloading of child pornography.

David Greenberg was sentenced Wednesday in Coconino County Superior Court to 17 years in prison on each of 20 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. State law requires that the terms be served consecutively, so the sentences add up to 340 years.

The sentence imposed was the normal one prescribed by state law, above the minimum of 190 years sought by Greenberg’s lawyer and below the maximum of 482 years sought by the prosecution, the Arizona Daily Sun reported.

Defense attorney David Bednar argued that the sentencing violated his client’s constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

However, Judge Cathleen Brown Nichols ruled that it didn’t because Greenberg was sentenced on multiple counts.

Nichols said Greenberg’s actions caused extreme harm to the victims and that she doubted Greenberg’s expressions of remorse.

Hailing the lengthy prison sentence, County Attorney David Rozema cited Greenberg’s voyeurism and extensive collection of child pornography.

“The threat of harm from this type of offender cannot be overstated,” Rozema said.

A Flagstaff police detective testified that Greenberg had so much pornography that police decided to not look at most of it because it would take a detective one year of full-time work to review it all.

“This was the most graphic, gut-wrenching, stomach-turning content I’ve ever seen,” said Sgt. Gene Shantz.

Greenberg is a former science researcher and doctoral student at Northern Arizona University.

Shantz said the case began when Greenberg was arrested trespassing at a home and investigators suspected from Greenberg’s statements that he was a predator. The investigation led to a search of Greenberg’s home and the discovery of child pornography.

Greenberg told Nichols that his obsession was shameful and disgusting. However, Greenberg said it was an addiction that never physically threatened anyone because he never actually touched any of the victims.

“The shame I feel no one can even begin to understand and I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I don’t understand how I’m going to prison for the rest of my life,” Greenberg said.

Prosecutor Jonathan Mosher said Greenberg’s behavior had caused great harm.

Each time a person views an image or video of a child being abused, that child is victimized again, Mosher added.

“When you possess an image of a baby being (sexually abused), you get the maximum — period,” Mosher said.

American military propaganda efforts ineffective???

Since 2005, the Pentagon has spent hundreds of million of dollars on Military Information Support Operations (MISO). These propaganda efforts include websites, leaflets and broadcasts

And you thought that only evil Nazis and Commie governments spend millions on propaganda!!!

I have a bit of advice for the American Empire which I am sure will be ignored. But if you you quit invading countries like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and giving Israel millions of dollars and probably billions of dollars in weapons to murder their Arab neighbors the world would have a much better view of the American government and you wouldn't have to spend millions lying to people to get them to love us.

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Report raps military propaganda efforts as ineffective

Tom Vanden Brook, USATODAY4:57 p.m. EDT May 23, 2013

WASHINGTON — Pentagon propaganda programs are inadequately tracked, their impact is unclear, and the military doesn't know if it is targeting the right foreign audiences, according to a government report obtained by USA TODAY.

Since 2005, the Pentagon has spent hundreds of million of dollars on Military Information Support Operations (MISO). These propaganda efforts include websites, leaflets and broadcasts intended to change foreigners' "attitudes and behaviors in support of U.S. Government" objectives, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office. Some of them disclose the U.S. military as the source; others don't.

The Pentagon's response noted that it partly concurred with the GAO criticism. Lt. Col. James Gregory, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday the military is revising its tracking requirements for propaganda programs, has a pilot program to assess their effectiveness and will soon publish revised guidelines that emphasize better planning of its operations.

The report offers a rare glimpse inside the cloaked world of military propaganda, much of which is held secret by the Pentagon. [Why is is secret??? If our leaders think that America is the best government on the planet their thoughts on the matter shouldn't be secret!!!!] It shows the effort extends from Southeast Asia to South America, with special operations troops deployed to embassies to "erode support for violent extremist ideologies."

The stakes are high. Used effectively, the programs can dampen extremism and increase support for U.S. military operations. However, "if used ineffectively, MISO activities have the potential to undermine the credibility of the United States and threaten (Pentagon) and other agencies' efforts to accomplish key foreign policy goals," the report says.

While the report says some of the military's propaganda teams have succeeded in the 22 countries, "it is unclear whether MISO activities are effective overall."

"Once again we are seeing a misguided spending approach by the government," said Scott Amey, general counsel of the non-partisan watchdog the Project on Government Oversight. "It is horrifying to think that millions are spent on propaganda with little administration of those funds and without some metric of the campaigns' success."

Military propaganda and marketing efforts have been the focus of a series of USA TODAY stories. In 2012, the paper found that the Pentagon had spent as much as $580 million per year on propaganda programs at the height of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but had trouble gauging their effectiveness. It spent $54 million last year, according to the GAO. The GAO refused USA TODAY's request for the report, which was obtained from another government source.

The GAO found three "weaknesses" in the Pentagon's tracking of its propaganda programs:

• The Pentagon and Congress "do not have a complete picture" of the efforts and the funding used to pay for the programs.

• The Pentagon can't measure the effects of propaganda programs well enough to know where to allocate funding.

• Lacking goals, the Pentagon does not have "reasonable assurance" that it is putting resources into countries that need it.

Gregory noted that the Pentagon already provides Congress with substantial data on its MISO programs every three months.

The Pentagon "submits an exhaustive report of all MISO activities to key Congressional staffers," Gregory said. "This report, often well in excess of 100 pages, provides comprehensive tracking of all MISO activities and the resources used to support them."

The report also outlines how propaganda works. In war zones such as Afghanistan, the military deploys three- and four-soldier MISO teams to drop leaflets telling insurgents how to surrender, air radio broadcasts "to explain U.S. military operations in a favorable light," collect local propaganda and devise counterpropaganda, according to the report.

It also relies heavily on contractors to produce advertising, leaflets and radio broadcasts, many of them unattributed to the U.S. government because locals do not trust western influence, senior military officerstold USA TODAY last year. [using contractors is one way to keep the American public from knowing what is going on, because that money is frequently hidden from view]

In safer countries, teams of two to 10 special forces soldiers are deployed at the request of combatant commanders and ambassadors. They lead programs that include helping "instill confidence by local populations in their law enforcement" and offering rewards for information.

Senior State Department officials told GAO that the efforts were valued at embassies. In Bangladesh, for example, the team worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development and "another (Pentagon) organization" to incorporate counter-radicalization messages into disaster response exercises." In Peru, a top-level Drug Enforcement Administration official praised a military team for its effort in the battle against "Shining Path" terrorists.

Less successful: regional websites set up by the military. U.S. Special Operations Command provided $22 million for combatant commands, such as Central Command in the Middle East, to operate regional websites "that offer readers an alternative to extremist ideology." They're "an important tool," according to the Pentagon, but GAO found "instances where the websites are not well-coordinated" with local embassies or even MISO teams in those countries.

In Nepal, for example, the embassy's public affairs office was "unaware of U.S. Pacific Command's website." State Department officials have expressed concern about U.S. Africa Command's website "about the Maghreb region of northern Africa, saying that a program marketed as a (Pentagon) operation may not be well received by countries traditionally sensitive to foreign military presence." Islamic extremists have waged insurgencies against countries such as Mali in northern Africa and are suspected in the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi last fall and three other Americans.

While the Pentagon has taken some steps to coordinate the websites with State Department, senior embassy officials told the GAO the "websites have the potential to unintentionally skew U.S. policy positions or be out of step with other government efforts in a particular country."

The report also pointed out that its reserve forces may not be adequately trained or equipped. In 2006, the Pentagon separated the MISO force into 2,800 special forces soldiers and 4,200 reservists but funded only the active-duty component. The Army's reserve command does not provide funding for language and cultural understanding courses its soldiers are required to have. There is also no dedicated fund to pay for reservists' equipment.

One result, according to the report, is that one reserve company reported asking "local businesses in Iraq and Afghanistan to print MISO products because they did not have working printers, and that these scenarios were not ideal because due to the sensitive nature of the products."

LAPD detective sentenced to 20 years for beating wife to death

Source

Ex-LAPD detective sentenced to 20 years for beating wife to death

By Andrew Blankstein, Los Angeles Times

May 23, 2013, 7:05 p.m.

A former Los Angeles police homicide detective was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in a Hawaii prison for beating his wife to death, authorities said.

Dan DeJarnette, 59, pleaded guilty in March to manslaughter. The plea came shortly before he was to face trial in the death of Yu DeJarnette, 56, who was found in November 2006 on a lava embankment a short distance from the couple's home in Ka'u, on the southern end of the Big Island.

The retired LAPD detective initially told police he woke up and found his wife outside the home suffering from injuries after falling over the embankment while hanging laundry.

An autopsy later determined that she died of two gaping wounds caused by blows from a tire iron. One left a scallop pattern consistent with the weapon, and paint chips were found in her hair. Yu DeJarnette also had scrapes from being dragged over lava rocks.

Her husband was arrested and booked on suspicion of murder. But citing a lack of evidence, prosecutors did not file charges and DeJarnette was released.

In January 2012, deputy prosecutor Linda Walton was assigned the case and undertook a thorough review. The follow-up investigation included additional blood evidence linking DeJarnette to the death.

The evidence suggested that DeJarnette used a bleaching-type agent to clean up blood in the bathroom, but he could not remove it completely. Subsequent tests showed his wife's blood on items recovered from the home.

A Hawaii grand jury indicted DeJarnette, leading to his arrest on May 14, 2012.

At the LAPD, DeJarnette investigated rape cases in the Robbery Homicide Division-Rape Special Section of the Van Nuys Division. He worked 21 years in the department before retiring in 2003 and moving to Hawaii.

By 2006, his marriage was showing signs of strain. Yu DeJarnette told co-workers that she wanted to leave her husband. She had consulted with a divorce attorney on whether she would be entitled to half of her husband's property and pension should the couple split.

DeJarnette took out an insurance policy on his wife a year before her death.

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

Mexican gets 284 days in jail for possession of a pen in Arizona!!!!

Luz Ruiz Rascon a Mexican national who was working in Arizona copped a plea to possession of a forgery device to get out of Sheriff Joe's Tent City gulag.

That forgery device was the pen which she used to fill out her employment papers with.

The racist pigs and prosecutors in Maricopa County claim that despite the fact that the social security number made up by Luz Ruiz Rascon was not assigned to anyone she is still guilty of felony forgery crimes. What rubbish.

The article says that if a White person had committed the same crime they would have received at most 90 days.

Source

After Nine Months in Jail for Working Without Papers, Luz Ruiz Rascon Finally Will Go Free

By Stephen Lemons Thursday, May 23 2013

It took nine months of incarceration in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's notorious Estrella Jail, but what should have happened in August of last year, happened just recently in the case of Luz Ruiz Rascon, mother of two U.S.-citizen children, one of whom suffers from leukemia.

You may recall from my February 7 cover story, "Bill Montgomery Is No Immigration Moderate," that Rascon, 38, was arrested in an Arpaio raid on a GNC warehouse in Phoenix and charged with six class-four felonies involving identity theft and forgery.

Rascon had used a non-existent Social Security number to score work at GNC, though she didn't adopt a false identity. Moreover, for all 11 years that she'd worked at GNC, she filed tax returns using a taxpayer-identification number.

She has no prior criminal history and never had been in jail before.

But because she is undocumented and because the Maricopa County Attorney's Office intentionally overcharged her, she was held non-bondable under the dictates of Proposition 100, an amendment to the Arizona Constitution passed by voters in 2006.

On Monday May 20, after 284 days in custody, Rascon pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of possession of a forgery device in a deal with the MCAO.

The felony counts against her were dropped.

The "forgery device" in question? A pen. You know, the one she used to write the made-up Social Security number.

Before sentencing, Judge Peter Reinstein asked Rascon if she wished to address the court. She said yes, and spoke briefly.

"I would like to apologize for the harm I could have caused," Rascon explained in Spanish, via a court interpreter. "It was never my intent to hurt anybody by working."

She went on to thank the judge and the MCAO for offering the plea deal.

Judge Reinstein gave her a suspended sentence and six months unsupervised probation. She had served more than three times the usual 90 days someone with a class-four felony conviction receives in such cases.

"I don't think you hurt anyone by your actions," Reinstein told Rascon. "I'm glad the state saw fit to offer you this plea agreement. I think it's appropriate."

Afterward, a pink-handcuffed Rascon hugged Delia Salvatierra, one of the three attorneys involved with the case. (Salvatierra's co-counsel is Johnny Sinodis, and their partner in defending the undocumented is Dori Zavala.)

By the time this column went to press, Rascon had yet to be transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Once that happens, it's anticipated that ICE will release her.

Outside court, Salvatierra was pleased that her client soon would be free, but she lamented the obvious.

"I can't even say justice prevailed today," Salvatierra said. "Because she's been detained for nine months. That's a hard sentence for a woman for pre-conviction incarceration, when she didn't harm anybody."

Salvatierra praised her client's heroism in not surrendering. Initially, prosecutors wanted Rascon to plead to the lead. She refused.

If she'd copped to a felony, she would've gotten out of county sooner, but she would have faced deportation, a 10-year bar to legal re-entry and indefinite separation from her kids.

And under the current language of the Gang of Eight's immigration-reform bill, she wouldn't have been eligible for a probationary legal status, like the 11 million or 12 million other mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children who stand to benefit.

County Attorney Bill Montgomery is, in word if not in deed, an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform. He even backs a proposal that would carve out an exception in any immigration overhaul for undocumented people convicted of felonies related to identity theft and forgery.

Nevertheless, his office pursues a hard-line policy toward the undocumented, overcharging them, so as to hold them non-bondable in Arpaio's inhumane gulags, thereby coercing them into pleading to a felony that ultimately will cause their removal from the country.

Montgomery denies this, of course. But an ICE PowerPoint I got hold of earlier this year gives the lie to that denial. In it, ICE shows how to charge the undocumented to make certain their deportation. It was part of an ICE seminar for Montgomery's prosecutors at the beginning of 2012.

When I interviewed Montgomery for the cover story, he defended his prosecution of Rascon, claiming he had no choice but to charge the undocumented in the manner he does.

The fact that there was no victim in the Rascon case? Didn't matter, according to Monty.

He claimed the fake Social Security number Rascon used to work at GNC possibly could be assigned down the road to someone, and that person would be Rascon's victim.

Which is ridiculous, but the question remains, what has happened since that January interview to cause this minor dent in Montgomery's inflexible charging policy?

Sure, Salvatierra submitted what's called a deviation request in Rascon's case recently, and the plea deal was a consequence of that letter asking the prosecutor to deviate from the initial charges.

But Salvatierra had submitted a similar deviation request in February, so what gives?

A couple of things. First, since lawyers such as Salvatierra now are taking on these cases, Montgomery's prosecutors have had to start going to trial, rather than counting on the defendant to cave. This means Monty's office has begun to lose.

I've written about some of these cases. One of Rascon's fellow workers at GNC, Rafael Lavallade Gonzalez, a 70-year-old diabetic was found not guilty after a seven-day trial on felony forgery and identity-theft charges. He had spent six months in jail.

In April, Miguel Angel Morales, a worker caught up in Arpaio's raid on United Construction in Glendale, was found not guilty of similar allegations in a five-day trial. He, too, had done six months on charges that usually pull a 90-day sentence.

Also in April, Sol Zenil, received the same deal as Rascon following six months in jail, after arrest by the Arizona Department of Public Safety for working illegally at a retail store.

Zenil, 23, pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, but that was just to gain her freedom. The offer was made after the prosecutor admitted to Zenil's attorney that the Social Security number in question was legit, obtained when Zenil was much younger, and when the rules involved were much looser.

But most of the people charged with a class-four simply plead out to a felony to escape lockup in Arpaio's hoosegow.

Recently, 14 of the 23 individuals rounded up in the February raid on Sportex Apparel pleaded guilty to class-six felonies, though they weren't the sort of class-six charges that give an immigration attorney a solid chance at blocking deportation.

My colleagues in the press have been scrutinizing Monty on this issue. And some of the Hispanic organizations that Montgomery had been flirting with now want nothing to do with him.

He was denounced by the Hispanic Bar Association Los Abogados, and the civil rights group Puente demonstrated on the doorsteps of the county building where the MCAO has its offices. Children crying for their jailed mothers and grandmothers often participate.

Until Montgomery changes his policy across the board and deals with each of these cases according to its merits — handing out misdemeanors more often than not — then this issue will remain a problem for him.

I think Montgomery wants it to end. In some ways, he's a prisoner of his own right-wing rhetoric.

But if he takes out his telescope and gives the horizon a look-see, he'll glimpse a future without Arpaio, with immigration reform, and with Hispanics on the rise. That's where Monty wants to go, as long as the weight of his own actions doesn't keep him mired in the recent past.

Court - Sheriff Joe guilty of profiling Mexicans

Judge: Sheriff Arpaio’s agency engaged in racial profiling

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 24, 2013 10:06 PM

A federal judge’s ruling that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engaged in racial profiling against Latinos could bring significant changes to the agency’s controversial approach to immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow issued a lengthy ruling that prohibits sheriff’s deputies from using race as a factor in law-enforcement decisions, from detaining people solely for suspected immigration violations and from contacting federal immigration authorities to arrest suspected illegal immigrants who are not accused of committing state crimes.

The ruling, issued Friday afternoon — more than eight months after the final arguments were heard — brings an end to a case that started with the 2007 arrest near Cave Creek of Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres, a day laborer.

Snow’s ruling also provides thorough dissection of the constitutional violations that Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement efforts imposed on Latinos in Maricopa County, and it frequently contrasts Arpaio’s own news releases and statements to media with testimony he offered during the trial.

Critics of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement efforts, many of whom have for years accused the Sheriff’s Office of discriminating against Latinos, said they felt vindicated by the ruling.

“It seems like what we have always known, that racial profiling was being done, was brought out by Judge Snow; now I think we all need to look at the remedies,” said Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a longtime critic of the sheriff’s immigration policies.

“In my mind, people have been very abused in our communities,” she said. “We knew racial profiling was taking place and it was very hard to prove it.”

Arpaio’s attorney, Tim Casey, strongly denied that sheriff’s deputies ever engaged in racial profiling and promised to appeal the ruling.

Casey also took a broad view of the issue, drawing on recent court rulings, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, to conclude that the federal government is trying to send a message to local law enforcement.

“It is very clear that when it comes to people in the country unlawfully, that federal law does not want any local law-enforcement participation,” he said.

‘Nothing has changed’

Arpaio’s boast that his office would not change its approach to immigration enforcement after the federal government stripped deputies of that authority in 2009, and his subsequent decision to train deputies based on an inaccurate understanding of immigration law, made plaintiffs’ claims relevant, Snow wrote.

Had the Sheriff’s Office ceased immigration enforcement after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials removed the deputies “287(g)” authority to enforce federal immigration law, the plaintiff’s claims might have been moot, he wrote.

“As was made clear by the testimony of the sheriff and other members of the MCSO command staff at trial, nothing has changed,” Snow wrote.

The case began when Melendres, a Mexican tourist in the United States legally, was stopped outside a church in Cave Creek where day laborers were known to gather. Melendres, the passenger in a car driven by a White driver, claimed that deputies detained him for nine hours and that the detention was unlawful.

Eventually, the case grew to include complaints from two Hispanic siblings from Chicago who felt they were profiled by sheriff’s deputies, and from an assistant to former Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon whose Hispanic husband claims he was detained and cited while nearby White motorists were treated differently.

The lawsuit did not seek monetary damages. Instead, plaintiffs asked for the kind of relief the Sheriff’s Office has resisted in the past: a declaration that spells out what deputies may or may not do when stopping potential suspects, and a court-appointed monitor to make sure the agency lives by those rules.

Snow gave each side 20 hours to present their case in a tightly controlled trial that took place in late July and early August last year in the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs took a three-pronged approach, using Arpaio’s own statements about undocumented immigrants along with racially insensitive requests from constituents for immigration enforcement to show what they called the sheriff’s callous attitude toward the rights of Latinos and his agency’s intention to discriminate.

Data showing that Latino drivers were more likely to be stopped during the sheriff’s immigration sweeps, and that those stops were likely to last longer, was designed to show the outcome of that intent. And statements from residents who claimed they were victims of profiling was intended to illustrate the impact of the sheriff’s policies.

Setting policy at the Sheriff’s Office

The ruling indicates that Snow, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2007, agreed with the attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union on many of their points. He frequently cites Arpaio’s statements to the media and his office’s news releases to draw conclusions about Arpaio’s point of view at the time of the immigration sweeps and work-site raids, regardless of what the sheriff said on the witness stand.

At one point, Snow says flatly that the sheriff’s testimony was incorrect when it came to the issue of whether racially insensitive e-mails from constituents motivated some of the sheriff’s saturation patrols, in which deputies would typically flood neighborhoods with high Hispanic populations.

“The evidence demonstrates that on October 4, 2007, the MCSO conducted a small-scale saturation patrol on the corner of Ellsworth and Ocotillo, based on a complaint transmitted to the MCSO on October 2 that Hispanic day laborers congregated there,” Snow wrote.

Cecillia Wang, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the ruling supports the ACLU’s claim that the direction in the Sheriff’s Office comes from Arpaio, despite deputies’ attempts during the trial to distance the six-term lawmaker from day-to-day decisions of the office.

“What he says publicly either to constituents in response to their racist e-mails, or what he writes in his book, did set the tone and set policy for the Sheriff’s Office. The evidence showed that the sheriff does set policy. His response to overly racist letters led down the road to these immigration raids,” Wang said. “This is an agency where you saw a classic instance of a law-enforcement culture that led directly to a situation where all the Latino residents of the county who the sheriff swore to protect and serve were victimized by his law enforcement.”

Snow also frequently cited data presented at the trial about the ethnicity of the suspects the sheriff arrests and detains to come to the conclusion that sheriff’s deputies used race as a factor in making law-enforcement decisions. Even if race was not the only factor, as the Sheriff’s Office has contended, the practice resulted in more Latinos being arrested during the sheriff’s sweeps and Latinos being detained longer than non-Latino counterparts during traffic stops.

The practices led to violations of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, Snow wrote.

Snow used the data provided to support his skeptical view that sheriff’s deputies actually engaged in a “zero tolerance” policy requiring them to arrest anyone who violated the law during patrols.

Several deputies testified that bad drivers are so prevalent in Maricopa County it is easy to find moving violations to make traffic stops. [Yea, and even if you aren't a bad drive they will make something up - Look he is weaving 2 nano inches every 2 miles.]

“To accept Deputy (Michael) Kike’s testimony in its entirety would mean that Deputy Kikes spent at least four days on traffic patrol in an environment where so many people commit traffic or equipment infractions it would be impossible to stop them all,” Snow wrote. “And all of that resulted in five arrests over four days, all of which just happened to be of Hispanic persons who were in the country without authorization.”

Monitoring still a sticky issue

The most immediate and visible effect of Snow’s ruling could be his injunction preventing sheriff’s deputies from contacting ICE when they have detained suspected undocumented immigrants who are not accused of violating a state law.

After deputies lost their federal-immigration authority, the Sheriff’s Office enacted a policy that authorized deputies to contact ICE’s law-enforcement agency response team whenever they encounter such immigrants.

The Sheriff’s Office has not had a formal saturation patrol in years, but the agency continues to engage in work-site raids looking for identity theft and fraud suspects. Casey, Arpaio’s attorney, said it was too early to tell what Snow’s ruling would do to those operations.

The stickier issue might come with the role of a court-appointed monitor to ensure the ruling is properly enacted: Arpaio flatly refused to consider the idea in an effort to resolve a racial-profiling complaint the U.S. Justice Department brought against the Sheriff’s Office. That case hasn’t been resolved. [F*** a court monitor. Sheriff Joe needs to be removed from the job and placed in prison for violating our rights!!!]

Casey indicated Arpaio’s feelings have not changed. [Arpaio is a corrupt racist cop who probably will never change]

“I don’t know how there can be a monitor on a constitutionally elected representative,” Casey said. “It will supplant the sheriff’s authority.” [Again, don't monitor Sheriff Joe, put him in prison where he belongs!!!]

Wang declined to provide details on what the ACLU will ask for, but said some oversight would be necessary to correct problems the federal court identified.

Snow set a hearing for mid-June to determine how the Sheriff’s Office will ensure it is adhering to the court’s ruling.

“When you’ve got an agency that is so deeply infected from the top with both a culture and a policy that results in this type of unconstitutional conduct, you need to have concrete provisions to ensure we uproot the problem,” Wang said.

But future hearings have no bearing on the significance of Friday’s ruling, Wang added.

“I want people in the county to know that this is an immediate and permanent injunction,” she said. “Anyone in the county who is discriminated against can immediately go into court and seek relief.”

And if that means more litigation, and more costs to taxpayers, Wilcox, the county supervisor, said the county would have to do whatever is necessary. [Mary "Bullet in the Butt" Rose Wilcox is also corrupt and just as bad as Sheriff Joe. She voted to steal a billion or so for that worthless Bank One Ball Park. Google Larry Naman]

“I hope the county is not having to suffer monetarily because of all this,” Wilcox said. “But whatever it takes to right it, we are going to have to bite the bullet and do what it takes.”

Judge: Arpaio's office systematically profiles Latinos

Judge: Arpaio's office systematically profiles Latinos

Posted: Friday, May 24, 2013 5:18 pm | Updated: 7:19 pm, Fri May 24, 2013.

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services | 4 comments

A federal judge on Friday found the department run by the self-professed "toughest sheriff in America'' was guilty of racial profiling and ordered the agency's practices permanently halted.

In a 140-page ruling, Judge Murray Snow said members of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, under the direction of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, were detaining individuals they believed to be in this country illegally without some other reason to arrest them for violating any state laws. Snow said that continued to occur even after the Department of Homeland Security revoked the MCSO's authority to identify and detain those not in the country legally.

RELATED: "Reasonable Doubt" -- The East Valley Tribune's five-part series investigating the hidden costs of the MCSO's immigration enforcement efforts... winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting [See this URL]

"In some instances these policies result in prolonging the traffic stop beyond the time necessary to resolve the issue that initially justified the stop,'' Snow wrote. And he said that, absent some reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, holding people longer than necessary violates their constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Snow said that entitled Hispanic individuals who sued to an injunction permanently barring the sheriff's department from using Hispanic ancestry or race to determine whether to stop a vehicle. It also prohibits deputies from detaining or arresting Latino vehicle occupants on a belief that they are in this country illegally if race is the only factor they have.

The order also bars the agency from detaining Latino occupants of vehicles stopped for traffic violations any longer than necessary to process the citation unless they have "reasonable suspicion'' that any are committing a federal or state crime.

Arpaio told Capitol Media Services he does not believe his agency engages in racial profiling.

"That's why we're going to appeal it,'' he said.

Byt Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said the ruling confirms the allegations that Latinos have been "terrorized'' by MCSO deputies and "forced to endure years of racial harassment and abuse.'' And Pochoda, in a prepared statement, said all that can be laid at the feet of "Arpaio's proven willingness to seek political gain at the expense of public safety and constitutional guarantees.''

Snow said that, at least on paper, the instructions to deputies were that vehicles were not to be stopped based on the race of any subject in a vehicle.

But he said evidence painted a somewhat different picture.

"While officers were prohibited from using race as the only basis to undertake a law enforcement investigation, they were allowed as a matter of policy and instruction to consider race as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions in the context of immigration enforcement,'' the judge wrote.

Snow reached his ruling after reviewing years of crime prevention "saturation patrols'' by the department. He said these were far from neutral.

"The MCSO almost always scheduled its day labor and small-scale saturation patrols where Latino day laborers congregated,'' he said. "The same is true for a considerable number of its large-scale saturation patrols.''

And Snow said it is clear that the purpose of these patrols was to enforce immigration laws, citing the news releases issued by the agency's public relations department.

"These news releases either emphasized that the patrols' purpose was immigration enforcement, or prominently featured the number of unauthorized aliens arrested during such operations,'' Snow said. "Most of the time, the reports ignored any other arrests that took place.''

Snow also said the saturation operations were just a pretext to stop vehicles with people who may be in this country illegally.

"During saturation patrols, participating deputies conducted many stops for minor violations of the traffic code, including minor equipment violations,'' the judge said. "This departments from MCSO's traffic enforcement priorities during regular patrols.''

And Snow said that, generally speaking, deputies "had no difficulty in finding a basis to stop any vehicle they wished for a traffic infraction.''

Arpaio’s fantasy ends here

Arpaio’s fantasy ends here

The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 24, 2013 6:56 PM

From the beginning, this racial-profiling case clearly had legs.

It was brought against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio by people of Hispanic ancestry with real-life stories to tell.

By Americans from Chicago. By Mexican citizens with a perfectly legitimate right to be in the United States. By people of a darker hue who suffered the indignity of seeing lighter-hued people in the same car treated far, far more kindly by Arpaio’s deputies.

All of those plaintiffs, according to U.S. District Judge Murray Snow, told the same story with clarity: They were targeted in the course of sweeps by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office solely because they were Latino.

Snow ruled on Friday, nearly eight months after the seven-day trial, that Arpaio’s department had engaged in forbidden racial profiling.

The case parallels the still-pending federal case against Arpaio brought by the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights. But while that case — led by President Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Labor, Thomas Perez — appears to rest heavily on expert testimony and statistical analysis, this case stands on evidence closer to the ground.

That evidence included Sheriff Arpaio’s own words.

In addition to weighing the strong, personal stories related by the plaintiffs, Judge Snow also considered Arpaio’s often intemperate observations about his rationale for conducting so-called “crime sweeps” in neighborhoods that just happened to be largely Hispanic.

Hubris and ego have long been hallmarks of America’s Toughest Sheriff. His snarky, smirking, contempt-laden denials that his sweeps profiled Hispanics always pushed the margins of believability. Now, a federal judge has called him on it.

The ruling will be appealed. That was guaranteed, regardless of which way the judge ruled. But Snow’s order that the Sheriff’s Office halt its practice of using Hispanic ancestry as a reason for stopping drivers is only the beginning. In addition to the Justice Department case, Snow indicated that still more remedies may follow his injunction against Arpaio’s practices.

The motivation behind Arpaio’s obnoxious sweeps can be traced to a specific incident in 2005, which constituted a political epiphany for the image-conscious sheriff. He saw the public reaction — outrage — when a young veteran was arrested for holding a group of suspected illegal aliens at gunpoint.

From that moment forward, he saw political gold in transforming himself into America’s Toughest Immigration Warrior.

Judge Snow’s decision is evidence that Arpaio’s gold fantasy is finally turning back into lead.

Drop off unwanted drugs at Mesa Police substations

Source

Drop off unwanted medicine at Mesa Police substations

Posted: Thursday, May 23, 2013 3:04 pm

TRIBUNE

The Mesa Police Department was the first law enforcement agency in Maricopa County to offer convenient "drop-off" locations for unwanted prescription drugs.

The following Mesa Police Substations are equipped with MedReturn boxes in their lobbies and are available 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Fridayy:

Central Substation, 120 N. Robson;

Red Mountain Substation, 4333 E. University Drive; and

Superstition Substation, 2430 S. Ellsworth Road.

A drop-off box will open at the Fiesta (Dobson) Substation when it opens in September.

Marijuana laws are racist????

Let’s stop wrecking lives over a bag of weed

By Paul Zukerberg, Published: May 24

In a little office on the third floor of Metropolitan Police Headquarters on Indiana Avenue NW is a small window to the future — open to some, closed to many. This is where you get your D.C. “police clearance.”

If you have never been there, that’s because you have never applied for a job flipping burgers, mowing lawns or cleaning restrooms in the District. Room 3033 is the human resources department for the poor, the young and the disenfranchised. The piece of paper you get there — if you have no criminal record — is what you need to land a job. Without it, you’re out of luck.

For 29 years, I have defended clients facing marijuana charges in the District. At every initial appearance, without fail, the judge admonishes the defendant either to stay in school or to hold down a job. In the majority of cases, however, a job is not possible because most employers in this town will not hire entry-level workers who do not have a police clearance.

What crime is increasingly tripping up those looking for work? Possession of marijuana.

In 1995, police in the District arrested about 1,850 people for having pot. By 2011, the number had skyrocketed to more than 6,000. It’s still rising.

To put that into perspective, there are twice as many marijuana arrests in the District as there are students graduating from D.C. high schools each year.

And though marijuana usage rates for blacks and whites are about the same, more than 90 percent of those arrested on pot charges in the District are black. Most of them are young men. By the time their cases are over, months or sometimes years later, they have gone from the unemployed to the long-term unemployed.

For young people denied jobs, crime and public assistance become far more enticing. Marijuana laws create a permanent underclass of people unable to join the legitimate workforce.

The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” Is it not cruel, and unusual, to deny a young person caught with a bag of weed his chance for entry into productive society? Long experience shows that legitimate employment is the best remedy for youthful indiscretions.

The costs of our current marijuana policy are extraordinary, both for those arrested and for society. We are spending millions of dollars, and tens of thousands of hours’ work by police, enforcing punitive marijuana laws. Add up what is spent on the arrests, booking, forensic testing, prosecution, court-appointed lawyers, judges, marshals and probation officers, and the cost of a single marijuana prosecution can begin to rival the cost of sending a student to college. [I consider the drug war nothing but a jobs program for all these cops, prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers, and prison guards. Of course they all tend to justify the insane unconstitutional war on drugs, because it gives them their fat pay checks, even if drug war only puts people in prison for the victimless crime of using or selling drugs]

There are two types of marijuana users the District. Those who have avoided arrest, and those whose lives are derailed by involvement with the criminal courts. The first group is predominantly white and privileged. The second, black and disadvantaged. Research confirms what many people of color suspect: The disparity between white and black marijuana arrests is the result of racial bias in the application of the law. [I suspect a better way of saying that is the racist police routinley single arrest Blacks for marijuana use, while they ignore a large number of White people who commit the same crime.]

I talked a great deal about this issue when I ran for D.C. Council in April’s special election. I didn’t win, but that doesn’t mean that the city’s leaders can’t take a sensible action to improve the prospects of thousands of young people.

It’s time for Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and the D.C. Council to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. Seventeen states and several major cities already have. Blue states such as Massachusetts and red states such as Nebraska have realized that it is counterproductive to pointlessly saddle their kids with criminal records. If Cambridge intellectuals and Nebraska “cornhuskers” can agree on decriminalizing marijuana, why can’t the District’s elected leaders figure this out, too?

Decriminalization is not legalization. With decriminalization, marijuana is still prohibited but the maximum penalty for those caught with small amounts is reduced from a criminal misdemeanor to a civil violation.

Adults are given a citation and fined. Juveniles are assigned to an educational class, and their parents are notified. Because there’s no arrest, there’s no arrest record — and no impediment to finding legitimate employment.

Public safety is not enhanced by locking up people for small amounts of pot. In fact, public safety is compromised, and society pays a hefty price, when law enforcement turns harmless young pot users into “lawbreakers” and drags them into a system that ultimately spits out them out on a dead-end street.

The writer is a D.C. lawyer.

The rise of the fourth branch of government

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The rise of the fourth branch of government

By Jonathan Turley, Published: May 24 E-mail the writer

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University.

There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.

Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion.

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.

The autonomy was magnified when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC, Chief Justice John Roberts warned: “It would be a bit much to describe the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”

The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority. Just ask John E. Brennan. Brennan, a 50-year-old technology consultant, was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security Administration. He was cleared by a federal judge, who ruled that his stripping was a form of free speech. The TSA was undeterred. After the ruling, it pulled Brennan into its own agency courts under administrative charges.

The rise of the fourth branch has occurred alongside an unprecedented increase in presidential powers — from the power to determine when to go to war to the power to decide when it’s reasonable to vaporize a U.S. citizen in a drone strike. In this new order, information is jealously guarded and transparency has declined sharply. That trend, in turn, has given the fourth branch even greater insularity and independence. When Congress tries to respond to cases of agency abuse, it often finds officials walled off by claims of expanding executive privilege.

Of course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have evolved into largely independent entities over which the president has very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules. There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — that are protected from White House interference.

Some agencies have gone so far as to refuse to comply with presidential orders. For example, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. Postal Service to withdraw a lawsuit against the Postal Rate Commission, and he threatened to sack members of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors who denied him. The courts ruled in favor of the independence of the agency.

It’s a small percentage of agency matters that rise to the level of presidential notice. The rest remain the sole concern of agency discretion.

As the power of the fourth branch has grown, conflicts between the other branches have become more acute. There is no better example than the fights over presidential appointments.

Wielding its power to confirm, block or deny nominees is one of the few remaining ways Congress can influence agency policy and get a window into agency activity. Nominations now commonly trigger congressional demands for explanations of agencies’ decisions and disclosures of their documents. And that commonly leads to standoffs with the White House.

Take the fight over Richard Cordray, nominated to serve as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray is highly qualified, but Republican senators oppose the independence of the new bureau and have questions about its jurisdiction and funding. After those senators repeatedly blocked the nomination, Obama used a congressional break in January to make a recess appointment. Since then, two federal appeals courts have ruled that Obama’s recess appointments violated the Constitution and usurped congressional authority. While the fight continues in the Senate, the Obama administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such conflicts as products of our dysfunctional, partisan times. Today’s political divisions are mild compared with those in the early republic, as when President Thomas Jefferson described his predecessor’s tenure as “the reign of the witches.” Rather, today’s confrontations reflect the serious imbalance in the system.

The marginalization Congress feels is magnified for citizens, who are routinely pulled into the vortex of an administrative state that allows little challenge or appeal. The IRS scandal is the rare case in which internal agency priorities are forced into the public eye. Most of the time, such internal policies are hidden from public view and congressional oversight. While public participation in the promulgation of new regulations is allowed, and often required, the process is generally perfunctory and dismissive.

In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.

We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

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It's not about safe food, it's about pork for special interest groups.

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U.S. meat labels to detail animal’s origin; Canada, Mexico raise concern

By Peter Whoriskey, Published: May 24 E-mail the writer

New rules for U.S. meatpackers will require labeling that tells consumers where the animal was born, raised and slaughtered.

Sounds simple.

Canada and Mexico say rules will unfairly hurt their livestock trade with the United States.

But the regulations, posted Friday by the Department of Agriculture, are the latest move in a trade dispute that has pitted U.S. consumer groups, which favor the labels, against free-trade advocates, who say the regulations are biased against cattle and pork from Canada and Mexico.

Nor are the regulations likely to be the last word in the international controversy, which seems destined to wind up — again — before the World Trade Organization, which has previously ruled that U.S. labeling regulations discriminated against Canadian and Mexican livestock.

The dispute over meat labeling is one of a handful in recent years in which U.S. efforts to regulate food and other products have been rejected by the WTO. The WTO has ruled against U.S. “dolphin-safe” tuna labels and weighed in as well against a ban on clove-flavored cigarettes.

“The big lesson for American consumers is that the WTO has invaded aspects of our lives that have nothing to do with trade,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s group on trade issues. “They have come to your dinner table. Depending on what the WTO does, either consumers will be provided with important information, or the U.S. may face trade sanctions.”

The dispute over meat labeling promises to continue.

While U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says the new rules on meat labeling will bring the United States “into compliance” with trade obligations, Canada disagrees and Mexico has already complained about the regulations.

“Canada is extremely disappointed with the regulatory changes put forward by the United States,” according to a statement from the Canadian trade and agriculture ministers, Ed Fast and Gerry Ritz. “These changes will increase discrimination against Canadian cattle and hogs and increase damages to industry on both sides of the border.”

“Mexico regrets that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has chosen to propose amendments to the regulations that would exacerbate the adverse impact [of the labeling program] on bilateral trade,” Mexican trade and agriculture ministers Kenneth Smith Ramos and Carlos Vazquez Ochoa wrote.

The meat labeling dispute dates back to March 2009, when the United States required that meat be labeled with its country of origin — without specifying, as the new rules do, where the animal was born, raised and slaughtered.

Canada and Mexico objected to those rules, arguing that the hassles of tracking each animal’s nationality prompted slaughterhouses to prefer animals that had been born and raised in the United States. This created a bias against foreign livestock, they argued.

Canada and Mexico took their concerns to the World Trade Organization, which ruled against the United States in June.

By making the labeling more specific, the United States appears to be addressing the WTO’s concern that the record keeping required under the previous rules was too onerous given the meager amount of information it gave consumers. The new rules, which cite more information, better justify the record keeping required, at least according to the American view.

“The requirement will provide consumers with more specific information on which to base their purchasing decisions without imposing any additional recordkeeping requirements on industry,” the USDA’s announcement said.

The United States estimates that more than 2,800 livestock processing and slaughtering companies, 38 chicken processing companies and about 4,300 retailers will be affected by the new rules. Officials estimated the cost of implementing the rules at $33 million.

Arizona sheriff illegally used racial profiling, judge rules

Arizona sheriff illegally used racial profiling, judge rules

By Michael Mello, Los Angeles Times

May 24, 2013, 11:17 p.m.

TUCSON — A federal judge has ruled that the immigration enforcement policies of the man who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff" violated the Constitution by using racial profiling.

For years, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has ordered his deputies to detain people they suspect of residing in the country illegally and to hold them for federal authorities.

The 142-page ruling issued Friday by Judge G. Murray Snow came as part of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Latino plaintiffs who asserted that race was a major factor in initiating immigration enforcement stops.

Snow wrote that the sheriff's practices did in fact rely heavily on race, violating the Constitution's 4th and 14th amendments. The 4th Amendment guards against unreasonable search and seizure; the 14th Amendment was created to cement the rights of U.S. citizens.

Attorney Tim Casey, who represents the Sheriff's Office, said the agency would comply with the judge's order but pursue an appeal.

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office "is disappointed in the decision reached today," Casey said. "The position was and always has been that race is not used to make law enforcement decisions."

He also suggested that if there were problems, they arose from training deputies received from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency. "There was some bad training," he said.

ICE officials could not immediately be reached for comment Friday evening.

Maricopa County is home to Arizona's biggest city, Phoenix, and has significant Latino and immigrant populations.

In his ruling, Snow took issue with many of the six-term sheriff's actions. The judge noted that deputies frequented places where day laborers gather. In four day-labor sweeps he cited, none of the 35 people arrested was detained for violation of state or local laws, and all were passengers in vehicles, not drivers.

Snow issued an order immediately and permanently barring the Sheriff's Office from detaining or arresting Latinos or stopping Latinos in vehicles simply because of a suspicion they may be in the country illegally.

Snow noted that at one time the federal Department of Homeland Security — which oversees enforcement of immigration laws — had authorized the Sheriff's Office to use race as a factor in determining who should be detained. However, Homeland Security officials have since retracted that right, an act that formed the basis for most of Snow's decision.

Friday's ruling was cheered by immigrant rights activists.

"Today's decision vindicates the rights of Latinos in Maricopa County who've been terrorized by discriminatory [Sheriff's Office] practices and have had their communities torn apart," Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said in a statement. "The court recognized that racial profiling within the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is a pervasive and widespread problem that can only be addressed through substantive, meaningful changes to eradicate this egregious practice and begin rebuilding public trust."

nation@latimes.com

FBI investigating alleged gun resales by L.A. SWAT, SIS officers

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FBI investigating alleged gun resales by L.A. SWAT, SIS officers

By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times

May 24, 2013, 5:30 p.m.

The FBI is investigating whether members of the Los Angeles Police Department's elite SWAT and Special Investigations Section units violated the law by purchasing large numbers of custom-made handguns and reselling them for profit, according to interviews.

Federal authorities opened the inquiry into the alleged gun sales in recent weeks after LAPD officials alerted them to possible gun violations, multiple sources told The Times.

The move comes after an earlier LAPD investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of officers. But on Friday, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck acknowledged that that probe was "clearly lacking" and said the department has opened a second investigation of the weapons transactions that is still ongoing.

Suspicion over the guns first arose in May 2010, when a lieutenant in the LAPD's Metropolitan Division, which includes SWAT, attempted to inventory the division's weapons, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by the lieutenant and a report last year by the LAPD's inspector general, Alex Bustamante.

While accounting for the weapons, Lt. Armando Perez discovered that SWAT members had purchased an unknown number of pistols from the gun maker Kimber Manufacturing and were "possibly reselling these Kimber firearms for large profits to people outside of Metro SWAT," according to the lawsuit and Bustamante's report.

Sales records indicated that as many as 324 pistols had been purchased from Kimber, Bustamante reported. There are only about 60 officers in SWAT, and the guns were intended to be used by the officers while on duty.

Investigators have been trying to determine how many of those guns were resold and to whom. There are some indications the guns were sold to other LAPD officers outside the unit as well as others outside of law enforcement.

The FBI is expected to look as well into the possibility that officers from the LAPD's Special Investigations Section, which conducts surveillance in major, high-risk cases, were also improperly reselling Kimber guns, the sources said.

Federal and state gun laws restrict gun sales by people not registered as weapons dealers.

Kimber's dealings with the LAPD date back to at least 2002, when the department contracted with the company to buy a relatively small number of pistols, Bustamante reported.

Then, in 2007, the company unveiled a new edition of its model 1911 pistol that had been designed for officers in the Special Investigations Section. The weapons were emblazoned with the SIS insignia, and the company made the .45-caliber handgun to address specific requests made by SIS officers. The guns, for example, were lighter than those typically carried by LAPD officers and could be cocked and fired with one hand, in case the other was injured or otherwise unavailable.

Kimber appears to no longer sell the SIS gun. However, it continues to sell another version of the pistol that it says on its website is "identical to the pistol carried by LAPD® SWAT."

For years, the company and the LAPD have had a formal agreement that allows Kimber to use the department's badge, uniform, motto and other LAPD trademarks in its promotional materials, according to department records.

In his report, Bustamante said that Kimber sold the SWAT guns, which bore a special "LAPD SWAT" insignia, to members of the unit for about $600 each — a sharp discount from their resale value of between $1,600 and $3,500. It is not known how much the SIS officers paid.

Details of how the gun sales were done — and how many officers were involved — have remained murky. The confusion is due largely to what the inspector general's report found was the "deficient" and "limited" investigation the department conducted in 2010. That inquiry was closed without investigators interviewing Perez or any of the SWAT officers he found were involved in the gun dealings, Bustamante said in his August report.

Bustamante noted that "the purchase of firearms with the intent to immediately transfer the weapon to a third party may violate city ethics regulations and federal firearm laws." The report did not specify which regulations and laws may have been violated.

The department opened its second investigation last summer only after Bustamante drew attention to the unanswered questions. The current probe has dragged on far longer than expected. Asked to explain the delay, Cmdr. Stuart Maislin, who is overseeing the investigation, wrote in an email only that it was "very complex and there really is a lot left to do."

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak.

Perez, the SWAT lieutenant, filed his lawsuit earlier this year, alleging that he has endured harassment and threats from other LAPD officers since drawing attention to the gun dealings. Through his attorney, Matthew McNicholas, Perez declined to be interviewed because of an order from police officials not to comment while the LAPD investigation continues.

McNicholas said that there is evidence that shows the LAPD had formal contracts with Kimber to buy a certain number of the custom SWAT and SIS guns but that the gun company sold more weapons directly to officers through informal "gentleman agreements." One or more SWAT officers collected money from others in the unit who wanted to purchase the guns and then contacted Kimber when they had gathered orders from about 20 officers, McNicholas said. In his lawsuit, Perez said an officer working in the Metropolitan Division's armory, James Quinlan, facilitated the sales between Kimber and the SWAT officers but did not provide details of Quinlan's role.

Quinlan, who is now retired, declined to comment, as did Capt. John Incontro, who commands the Metropolitan Division. A spokesperson for Kimber did not return repeated calls.

At times, a private company named Cinema Weaponry would also purchase guns, Perez said in the lawsuit. Cinema Weaponry is owned by Michael Papac, according to the state's business registry, and appears to rent weapons to film productions out of a small, run-down building in Glendale. Papac is not an LAPD officer and did not return calls seeking comment.

Perez also found that a Lucas Ranch Gun Sales, a registered gun dealer not affiliated with the LAPD, was involved in the gun transactions, according to his lawsuit and Bustamante's report. Jim Manhire, who owns Lucas Ranch, said in an interview with The Times in August that Kimber sent guns purchased by SWAT officers to him and that he completed the state and federal registration process that must be done for all weapons. After he had registered the .45-caliber weapons in the officers' names, the officers would pick them up, Manhire said.

Andrea Ordin, president of the L.A. Police Commission, which oversees the LAPD, declined to discuss the specifics of the investigation but said the decision to alert federal authorities was probably made because they would be better qualified than LAPD investigators to assess whether any of the country's often arcane, complicated gun laws had been violated.

Beck echoed Ordin, saying, "In every internal investigation we always consider reaching out to outside entities, such as the district attorney, the United States attorney or the Federal Bureau of Investigation as appropriate."

joel.rubin@latimes.com