Why is this organized destruction of the reputations of innocent people allowed to go on like this? The DA down there should be bringing all the powers of the justice system to bear on this group of jihadists like a ton of bricks.  Arrest Grisham immediately for libel, criminal harassment, and violating citizens’ constitutional rights of life and liberty under the law.

The first amendment shouldn’t protect this crap. They can spend the rest of their lives compensating their victims for the injury and suffering they’ve caused. Not another person should be terrorized by these law-breakers. I have two words for this so-called Army of God: David Koresh. It’s past time to line up the battle wagons against Grisham and his goons.

Wrong country, wrong century, wrong god. Unacceptable on every level. Only twisted religious freaks could believe Jesus would ever endorse this kind of hate and persecution. Oh, and Grisham is also a security guard at a nuclear weapons storage facility? Great. General Ripper meets Randall Flagg. No reason to be concerned about that.

Here’s what you do, Dave. Move your operation to a repressive place like Iran. You’d fit right in over there. Of course, you’d probably have to switch religions. Better yet, save yourself the inevitable court costs and legal fees and drink the Kool-Aid now.

It’s disgraceful that the City of Amarillo is evidently content to do nothing but watch this happen to their neighbors. And always shameful to see some employers in town piling on the people who were libeled instead of turning against the holier-than-thou inquisitors. That they still have a long way to go in Texas has sure become a tiresome observation.

Reverbo

Critic-At-Large

Sir:

I have just learned of your statement in the Michigan group’s lawsuit attempting to undo the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. I should like to repeat the pertinent passage here, in which you claim there is “no need” to extend hate crimes definitions:

“Of the 1.38 million violent crimes reported in the U.S. by the FBI in 2008, only 243 were considered as motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation,” he wrote on the group’s Web site. “The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their Biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin.”

Translation: “Help! help, I’m being oppressed!”

Mr. Thompson, I can only suppose that by “Christians expressing their Biblically-based belief” you mean the part that involves kidnapping homosexuals, transporting them to the middle of nowhere, and beating them to death. Which is what happened to Matthew Shepard, and which has always been considered a crime in the United States of America. The law named for the late Mr. Shepard extends some special penalties, but is actually designed to let local law enforcement officials call on the technology and expertise of federal agencies to solve such crimes.  Source Article

Courtesy Raw Story:

Just three weeks ago, the United States Supreme Court ended a ban on corporate spending in political elections, drawing intense criticism for the ruling’s potential to erode the democratic process.

This week, a group that includes some of the wealthiest Republican CEOs on Wall Street have formed a group to take advantage of new fundraising possibilities for the GOP.

The Supreme Court ruling could potentially allowthe group, called the American Action Network, to take unlimited contributions from corporations for use in political campaigns.

“This administration as well as Citizens United [the Supreme Court ruling] — when you combine the two the prospects for funding these types of efforts are greatly enhanced,” said Norm Coleman, one of the group’s organizers

-Source.

The Nation
By Jeremy Scahill

January 28, 2010

Every detail of September 16, 2007, is burned in Mohammed Kinani’s memory. Shortly after 9 am he was preparing to leave his house for work at his family’s auto parts business in Baghdad when he got a call from his sister, Jenan, who asked him to pick her and her children up across town and bring them back to his home for a visit. The Kinanis are a tightknit Shiite family, and Mohammed often served as a chauffeur through Baghdad’s dangerous streets to make such family gatherings possible.

Mohammed had just pulled away from his family’s home in the Khadamiya neighborhood in his SUV. His youngest son, 9-year-old Ali, came tearing down the road after him, asking his father if he could accompany him. Mohammed told him to run along and play with his brothers and sister. But Ali, an energetic and determined kid, insisted. Mohammed gave in, and off the father and son went.

As Mohammed and Ali drove through Baghdad that hot and sunny Sunday, they passed a newly rebuilt park downtown. Ali gazed at the park and then turned to his father and asked, “Daddy, when are you gonna bring us here?”

“Next week,” Mohammed replied. “If God wills it, son.” Source Article

An accompanying slideshow of Ali Kinani, his family, and the Nisour massacre can be found here.

News Release

Supreme Court Ruling Spurs Corporation Run for Congress

January 27, 2010

ERIC HENSAL
WILLIAM KLEIN
Following the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns, Murray Hill Inc. today announced it is filing to run for U.S. Congress. “Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.” Murray Hill Inc. is believed to be the first “corporate person” to exercise its constitutional right to run for office.

Read the rest of the news release here.

Read the Murray Hill Inc. Press Release here.

Courtesy Newsweek:

It’s hard to know just yet what the precise impact of theSupreme Court’s landmark decision on campaign-finance reform this morning will be. But one thing is for sure: it will be huge. Dramatic, sweeping, fundamental, seismic—all those adjectives apply to this alteration of the political landscape. In all likelihood, Republicans will be the biggest beneficiaries. They’ve had a long history of taking care of their corporate buddies. And with the Administration today opening a new front in their battle on Wall Street, you can bet the financial industry will happily raid their bursting cash coffers to support Republicans in November.

The decision is a stunning display of judicial activism from a chief justice who promised to engage in anything but. Remember all his promises to respect precedent? Apparently he doesn’t. As E.J. Dionne writes:“Remember Roberts saying judges were like umpires calling the balls and strikes? In this case, he and his colleagues canceled the game altogether and decided on their own what the final score would be.” Roberts expanded the scope of the initial case before him,Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, to take on a century’s worth of campaign-finance regulation. Dahlia Lithwick describes it perfectly: “The court had to reach out far beyond any place it needed to go….This started off as a case about a single movie. It morphed into John Roberts’s Golden Globe night.”

For their part Republicans are defending the ruling as rolling back infringements of free speech. They’re wrong. The First Amendment protects an individual’s right to free speech. Corporations are not individuals, although in this ruling, the Supreme Court equates the two. That leaves the door open for further challenges. Today’s ruling focuses on independent expenditures but leaves in place the restrictions that bar corporations from donating to political parties or individual candidates. That’s still the terrain of individual supporters and explicitly designated political action committees, which are also subject to strict rules. But with this ruling, it’s easy to imagine a legal challenge to allowing direct contributions as well. After all, if corporations are give the same free speech protections as individuals when it comes to political campaigns, why can’t they have the same right to donate? That argument might not pass muster with the Supremes, but I’d be willing to bet it will be raised.

-Source.

Today is a big day in the H.O.R.N. family history. Our very own Cassie (Freckles) has made her major publication debut!

Congratulations Cassie. A wonderful insight from your unique perspective. As always, superb writing. Now the wider world can get to know you. The whole family here is very proud. Go get ‘em!

The Parent Trap

Although I never blurted anything out on national television that led to the arrest of one of my parents, I think I may know how 6-year-old Falcon Heene and his brothers feel as their dad begins a 90-day sentence for his role in the infamous “Balloon Boy” hoax. I am sure they blame themselves, and I know they’re worried about what will happen to them after their father (and then their mother) goes to jail.

My mother was incarcerated more than seven years, so I’ve often written about this topic on my blog. I’ve also been a regular caller into Bob Kincaid’s radio program on the Head-On Radio Network since I was 14 and serve as its teen correspondent. I try to call in whenever something comes up relating to imprisonment, especially when an inmate’s children are in the news. Bob refers to Americans’ preoccupation with incarceration as our national punishment fetish, and it seems that the national media has viewed the Heene story with punishment in mind rather than looking at the story the way I do, from the perspective of a child whose parents have been convicted of a crime.

Continue reading

TPM Muckraker

Zachary Roth | January 7, 2010, 2:02PM

Who ever said there are no second acts in American life never met some of the Republicans who played roles in the U.S. attorney firings.

Three figures from the Bush Justice Department scandal of 2006 are back in the limelight, running for office under the GOP banner in 2010.

Perhaps the most prominent is Tim Griffin, the former RNC operative who worked as a top White House aide to Karl Rove. In numerous emails to colleagues, Rove made clear his desire to see Griffin land a powerful government post. And in December 2006, Bud Cummins was fired as U.S. attorney in Arkansas, in order to create a vacancy for Griffin. Griffin was appointed U.S. attorney via an interim appointment, but the Democratic Senate refused to confirm him, and in June 2007 he resigned. Source

Courtesy The Bismarck Tribune:

North Dakota’s attorney general said he expects the state to sue Minnesota over a plan there to tax carbon created by electrical generation.

After discussing the issue with the state Industrial Commission in a closed session this month, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said “It is very likely that we will be suing the state of Minnesota.”

At issue is a measure by Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission to add a fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide to the cost of electrical generation starting in 2012. The majority of electricity in North Dakota is generated by coal-fired power plants, which emit a large amount of carbon relative to other fuels sources. North Dakota officials argue that the move would place an unfair tax on electricity from the state and discourage its use by Minnesota utilities.

Stenehjem said possible legal action would relate to constitutional protections against restrictions on commerce between states.

-Article Continues @ Source.

Courtesy Alternet:

You might remember Robert McNamara’s stunning mea culpa, delivered a quarter century after his Vietnam War policies sent some 50,000 Americans (and even more horrendous numbers of Vietnamese) to their deaths in that disastrous war. In his 1995 memoir, the man who had been a cold, calculating secretary of defense for both Kennedy and Johnson belatedly confessed that he and other top officials had long known that the war was an unwinnable, ideologically driven mistake. “We were wrong,” he wrote, almost tearfully begging in print for public forgiveness. “We were terribly wrong.”

Yes, they were, and so are today’s leaders (from the White House to nearly all local governments), who are keeping us mired in the longest, most costly, and most futile war in U.S. history: the drug war. As one adamant opponent of this ongoing madness put it, “I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the War on Drugs is a failure. Americans are paying too high a price in lives and liberty for a failing War on Drugs, about which our leaders have lost all sense of proportion.”

That was no ex-hippie stoner expressing himself through a haze of herbal smoke. It was America’s “Uncle Walter,” the journalistic icon Walter Cronkite, calling earlier this year for a new truthfulness and sanity in American drug policy.

The drug war is rife with major failures and absurdities, including the rise of a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico, caused by U.S. consumer demand for drugs outlawed by our government; Plan Colombia, a secretive, multibillion-dollar U.S. military operation started by Bill Clinton in 2000 to eradicate coca production in that country, which now produces 15% more coca than it did before the plan was launched; the racist and grossly unjust sentencing disparity, established by lawmakers in the 1980s, between crack-cocaine users (mostly black) and powder snorters (mostly white); and the ridiculous refusal by pious federal authorities to allow our farmers to grow hemp–a useful, profitable, sustainable, and historic crop (see Lowdown, May 1999).

Here we focus on one particular piece of policy insanity that has afflicted our country for nearly 100 years and was foisted on us by political demagogues, power-hungry police agencies, fire-breathing preachers, fear-mongering media moguls, self-appointed moralists, and other forces of ignorance and arrogance. Thanks to them, America is mired in–get this–a war on a weed. Marijuana is the foe, and after a century of battle, the weed is winning!

A painful price

-Article continues at Source.