Homeless in Arizona

Sheriff Joe Arpaio - Worst Sheriff in the world!!!!

 

Arpaio says crosses to be put where bodies found

What part of the First Amendment and Arizona Constitution doesn't Sheriff Joe understand??? Oh, that's right Sheriff Joe considers himself above the law.

1st Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

Arizona Constitution

No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or to the support of any religious establishment.
Source

Arpaio says crosses to be put where bodies found

By D.S. Woodfill The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 15, 2013 9:03 PM

Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies will begin erecting white wooden crosses to mark the final resting places of immigrants who die after crossing the border into the U.S. from Mexico, the Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday.

The crosses aren’t mere memorials, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said as he stood in front of several perched in a patch of desert in Laveen.

Arpaio said the crosses bear a number that, when given to 911 operators by a person seeking help, will be used to identify his or her location.

Sheriff’s spokesman Chris Hegstrom said responders had previously relied on identifying landmarks provided by those stranded.

Arpaio said the crosses would also provide a reminder of the risks of illegal border crossing.

“The crosses symbolize death,” Arpaio said, pointing out that four bodies had been found in the previous four days near Gila Bend.

The crosses are made by Maricopa County Jail inmates, and Arpaio said he hopes to have Sheriff’s Posse members and inmates erect more in other areas of county desert.

“This is just one way to try and save some lives,” he said.


Legal fight brews on impairment in medical-marijuana DUIs

I suspect this is one of the reasons the Founders gave us the Second Amendment.

Arizona's medical marijuana law says people with medical marijuana prescriptions or recommendations are they are called can't be arrested for DUI simply because they have marijuana metabolites in their body, but the cops have decided to ignore Prop 203 and arrest medical marijuana patients for DUI solely because they have microscopic traces of marijuana in their body.

I believe Arizona's DUI/DWI laws are among the strictest in the nation and if even a microscopic trace of marijuana is detected in your body you are consider guilty of drunk driving according to ARS 28-1381 and ARS 13-3401

28-1381.A. It is unlawful for a person to drive or be in actual physical control of a vehicle in this state under any of the following circumstance

3. While there is any drug defined in section 13-3401 or its metabolite in the person's body.

13-3401. Definitions

4. "Cannabis" ...

But Prop 203 which is Arizona's medical marijuana law in ARS 36-2802.D, clearly says if you are a medical marijuana patient you can not be arrested for DUI because you have marijuana metabolites in you body:
ARS 36-2802.D Operating, navigating or being in actual physical control of any motor vehicle, aircraft or motorboat while under the influence of marijuana, except that a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment.
Now according to this article in the Aug 8, 2013 issue of the Arizona Republic the police in Arizona are arresting medical marijuana patients for DUI simply because they have microscopic traces of marijuana metabolites in their body, which should be legal per Prop 203.

Source

Legal fight brews on impairment in medical-marijuana DUIs

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Aug 7, 2013 10:54 PM

Medical-marijuana cardholders in Arizona who drive after using the drug may face a difficult legal choice: their driver’s license or their marijuana card. If they use both, they could be charged with DUI.

Valley prosecutors say that any trace of marijuana in a driver’s blood is enough to charge a motorist with driving under the influence of drugs [per ARS 28-1381.A and ARS 13-3401] and that a card authorizing use of medical pot is no defense. [per ARS 36-2802.D - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

But advocates of medical marijuana, which voters approved in November 2010, argue that the presence of marijuana in a person’s bloodstream is not grounds for charging drivers who are allowed to use the drug. [again per ARS 36-2802.D]

The legal battle over the rights of medical-marijuana cardholders to drive while medicating is being fought in the state’s court system. Motorists convicted in municipal courts, which typically rule it unlawful for a driver to have any trace of marijuana in his or her blood, are appealing cases to Superior Court, where judges’ decisions could set precedents for how the medical-marijuana law applies to Arizona drivers.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia authorize the use of marijuana for medical purposes, making marijuana-related DUIs an issue for police, prosecutors and politicians nationwide.

The biggest issue is deciding what blood level of marijuana makes a driver impaired, similar to the way blood-alcohol levels determine when a person is legally drunk. [Arizona's DUI laws say any microscopic trace of an illegal drug is an automatic conviction for DUI, but Arizona's medical marijuana law says this does not apply to people with medical marijuana prescriptions or recommendations]

In Arizona, the confusion over interpretation of the Medical Marijuana Act stems from its inception because prosecutors and police didn’t have the chance to weigh in before it went to voters in 2010. [it's not confusion, police and prosecutors have decided to ignore Prop 203 which says - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

Prosecutors say Arizona law allows motorists who are not impaired to drive with prescription drugs in their system if they are using them under doctors’ orders.

The problem for marijuana cardholders is that pot can’t be prescribed, only recommended, offering no legal grounds for a motorist to drive with even trace amounts of the drug in their system, according to prosecutors. [wrong Prop 203 very specifically excludes people with medical marijuana prescriptions - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

For most driving-under-the-influence-of-marijuana cases, the drug charge is secondary to the charge of driving while impaired. Arizona’s DUI laws have three aspects: driving while impaired to the slightest degree, driving under the influence of alcohol and driving under the influence of drugs.

The handful of cases making their way through the courts grew out of traffic stops, where drivers are typically cited for both driving while impaired to the slightest degree and driving under the influence of drugs.

Attorneys for the accused say they are willing to argue about impairment, which would allow a drug expert hired by the defense to counter testimony from a police drug-recognition expert, but that a suspect’s legal participation in the state’s medical-marijuana program should provide a defense to the DUI-drug charge if there is no evidence of impairment.

Prosecutors in Mesa and other jurisdictions have successfully argued to keep juries from hearing information about a suspect’s medical-marijuana card, which could be appealed.

“They can make that argument (about impairment) and I think it’s a fair one to make. What they can’t do is preclude a jury from hearing that he has a medical-marijuana card,” said Craig Rosenstein, an attorney representing a DUI-drug suspect in Mesa. “The idea that he would be able to beat the (DUI-drug) charge is impossible unless the jury can hear that they have a medical-marijuana card. Otherwise, he’s just a kid smoking weed and he got caught.”

Morgan Jackson Doyle, 24, was coming back from the Salt River on Memorial Day 2012 when he was stopped at a sobriety checkpoint by Mesa police near Power Road and the Red Mountain Freeway.

An officer said Doyle had reddened eyes and a raspy voice, which prompted him to ask whether Doyle had recently smoked marijuana, according to police.

Rosenstein, Doyle’s lawyer, said Doyle gave the officer his medical-marijuana card with his driver’s license, “out of an abundance of truth.”

Doyle was put through a series of field-sobriety tests, some of which indicated impairment while others did not, before a trained drug-recognition officer was called to put Doyle through more thorough tests that look for clues of drug use.

The drug-recognition expert determined it was not safe for Doyle to drive, police said. He was cited for driving while impaired to the slightest degree and driving under the influence of drugs.

Blood tests later showed Doyle had the psychoactive component of marijuana in his blood, but in an amount that falls below levels some scientists consider the threshold for impairment.

A judge in Mesa refused to allow Doyle to introduce the card at his trial, prompting his lawyer to seek a ruling in Superior Court, which sent the case back to Mesa. If the court rules as expected, attorneys said the case will be appealed.

“I think it’s ridiculous. Voters in Arizona adopted the Medical Marijuana Act, whether politicians agree, or not,” Rosenstein said. “My concern was, if this isn’t isolated to Mesa, in theory that could make bad law for the entire state.”

Phoenix prosecutors have taken the same stance on drug DUIs for marijuana cardholders, in part, because the drug does not come with any of the same controls as a standard prescription, said Beth Barnes, the city’s traffic-safety resource prosecutor.

The potency of marijuana can vary among dispensaries that sell to patients, and doctors’ recommendations do not have dosage limits and warning against operating heavy machinery that prescriptions usually carry, she said.

Those and other factors mean possession of a card is not relevant in DUI cases, Barnes said.

Aaron Carreón-Ainsa, Phoenix’s chief prosecutor, said he understands it is legal for authorized patients to use medical marijuana, but that right can infringe on other privileges they might enjoy.

“For those people who have medical-marijuana cards, OK, it’s legal. Fine,” Carreón-Ainsa said. “But don’t come to this building because you’ve been driving. Just take it and don’t drive.”

Blood concentration

Though some states have tried to attach a number to impairment, experts say the practice is complicated by a number of factors including the patient’s metabolism and smoking frequency.

A 10-year study of more than 8,700 DUI-drug cases in Sweden led researchers to conclude that zero-tolerance policies were probably most effective because they help identify suspects whose concentration-level might have fallen below an arbitrarily set limit while waiting to give a blood sample.

“Scientists have found it virtually impossible to agree upon the concentration of a psychoactive substance in blood that leads to impairment in the vast majority of people,” the researchers wrote.

Colorado legislators consistently rejected proposals to link impairment with a particular amount of marijuana in a driver’s blood, but this year passed a law allowing prosecutors to presume impairment if that level is above 5 nanograms per milliliter. Defense attorneys argue that 5 nanograms is an arbitrary amount that has no bearing on impairment.

“We need to stop looking at a meaningless number, and in the case of Arizona, not only a meaningless number but a cruel and unusual application of it: you punish somebody on a Monday morning for them killing their pain on a Friday night,” said Lenny Frieling, a Colorado attorney and medical-marijuana advocate.

“I don’t want impaired drivers on the road. The key in my mind is looking at whether somebody really is or is not impaired. If they’re impaired, I don’t care which drug impaired them.” [but Arizona's DUI laws in ARS 28-1381 say that anybody with a detectable amount of an illegal drug is considered guilty of DUI even if they ARE NOT impaired - and a person can have marijuana metabolites in their body weeks after using marijuana]

Frieling is developing a mobile test that gauges factors, including memory and balance, that could help determine impairment, but without years of clinical trials and research about marijuana concentrations that equate to impairment, the issue often relies on police drug-recognition experts and interpretation of state laws.

Courts within the same states have been inconsistent in applying the law.

A Michigan man was charged with driving a car with a prohibited substance in his system after he told an officer during a traffic stop that he was an authorized medical-marijuana cardholder and had smoked five hours earlier.

A judge concluded that the state’s medical-marijuana law protected him from prosecution unless police could prove he was impaired. Another court agreed before the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the judge’s order and determined that legislators deemed it unsafe for a motorist to drive with any amount of marijuana in their system.

The Michigan Supreme Court reversed that Appeals Court decision earlier this year and found that the state’s medical-marijuana law authorized participants to have traces of marijuana in their bloodstream so long as they were not impaired while driving.

The Michigan driver’s blood contained 10 ng/ml of the active marijuana metabolite — twice the limit adopted in Colorado — but the justices said the amount was not enough to constitute driving under the influence without evidence of impairment.

“The MMMA (Michigan Medical Marihuana Act) shields registered patients from the internal possession of marijuana,” the court ruled. “The MMMA does not define what it means to be ‘under the influence’ but the phrase clearly contemplates something more than having any amount of marijuana in one’s system and requires some effect on the person.”

Arizona’s medical-marijuana users should be afforded similar protections when they are not impaired, say the law’s supporters.

Andrew Myers, campaign manager for the organization that got the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act on the 2010 ballot, said law enforcement should not base an arrest solely on the presence of marijuana in a cardholder’s system.

“The presence of metabolites alone shall not constitute impairment under the law — period,” he said. He said the program’s language was “very mindfully” written to avoid cases such as the Mesa case.

“There’s absolutely no way that, if challenged in court, that a conviction would stand — the law is absolutely clear on this point,” Myers said. “You could medicate on a Friday and get pulled over on a Monday two weeks later. It’s that ridiculous — it would absolutely preclude any medical-marijuana cardholder from operating a motor vehicle at any time if they were an active patient. And that’s ridiculously onerous and it’s not reflective of reality for a person who medicates.”

Myers said law enforcement should propose legislation to establish a legal standard of impairment: “Until that point, I think the law needs to favor the citizenry,” he said. [Arizona's medical marijuana law clearly says it is illegal to drive when stoned on marijuana, but it also says that you are not considered guilty of DUI simply because you have marijuana metabolites in your body.]


The sky is falling - We need a police state!!!!

 
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! We need  all your phone records!! Your key strokes!! Your internet searches!! Everything!!! NSA -  Homeland Security - FBI - DEA - BATF
 


Most people are in prison for victimless drug war crimes

After victimless drug war crimes most people are in prison for weapons violations

 
Over 51 % percent of the people in US Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. That is followed by victimless weapon violations and victimless immigration violations
 

Victimless drug and gun crimes are why most people are in Federal prisons.

51 percent of federal prison inmates are there for victimless drug war crimes. In the above graph the second highest number of people are in federal prisons for weapons violations. The article didn't give a percent for weapons violations.

Source

Eric Holder is cutting federal drug sentences. That will make a small dent in the U.S. prison population.

By Dylan Matthews, Published: August 12 at 2:50 pm

Populations at federal prisons have grown, but state prisons are the real problem.

Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday that the Justice Department will no longer charge nonviolent drug offenders with serious crimes that subject them to long, mandatory minimum sentences in the federal prison system. As my colleague Sari Horwitz explains, Holder “is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences.”

He’s also expected to call for the expanded use of prison alternatives, such as probation or house arrest, for nonviolent offenders and for lower sentences for elderly inmates. And he’ll endorse legislation by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would increase federal judges’ flexibility in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.

The changes Holder wants will likely make a big difference at the federal level. But that won’t be enough to solve America’s mass incarceration problem.

Focusing on drug offenses is a smart way to go about reducing the federal incarceration rate. According to data in Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, a new book by UC – Berkeley’s Steven Raphael and UCLA’s Michael Stoll, the most serious charge for 51 percent of federal inmates in 2010 was a drug offense. By comparison, homicide was the most serious charge for only 1 percent, and robbery was the most serious charge against 4 percent.

Tougher drug sentencing accounts for much of the increase in the incarceration rate. “If you go back and decompose what caused growth in the federal prison system since 1984, a large chunk can be explained by drug offenses, around 45 percent,” Raphael says. The other big category accounting for the federal increase is weapons charges, such as the five-year mandatory minimum faced by drug offenders caught with guns. Raphael estimates that that accounts for 18 to 19 percent of the increase.

There’s also been an increase in incarcerations on immigration charges, with the rest of the increase in other areas. But there’s no doubt that the biggest category of crime behind the increase in the federal incarceration rate is drugs. Easing up on drug sentencing would make a big dent.

The states are different

But the federal system isn’t really where the action is. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimates find that there are 1,353,198 people incarcerated at the state level and 217,815 incarcerated federally. So about 13.9 percent of U.S. prisoners are in federal institutions; the other 86.1 percent are in state facilities. And most prisoners at the state level are not there for drug crimes.

In 2004, about 20 percent of state-level inmates were incarcerated on drug convictions, Raphael and Stoll find. Compared with the federal population, those incarcerated at the state level are much likelier to have committed violent offenses. In 2004, 14 percent were in prison for homicide, 9 percent for rape or sexual assault, 12 percent for robbery and 8 percent for aggravated assault. In 2011, it was much the same, according to BJS stats on state inmates serving sentences of a year or more. Fifty-three percent of inmates were in prison for violent offenses, 18.3 percent for property crimes, 10.6 percent for “public order” offenses such as drunk driving, weapons possession or vice offenses, and 16.8 percent for drug convictions.

Bjs state breakdown

Raphael and Stoll’s estimates of what’s accounting for the higher incarceration rates suggest that violent crimes are a big part of the state-level story. They find that harsher sentencing for violent offenders explains 48 percent of growth in incarceration rates, compared with about 22 percent attributable to increases in drug sentencing, and 15 percent due to increases in property crime and other sentences.

Then again, most people who go through state criminal justice systems do so on drug offenses. If you look at admission rates, rather than incarceration rates, at the state level, drugs become a much bigger part of the picture. For admissions, Raphael and Stoll find “relatively modest increases for violent crimes and property crimes and pronounced increases for drug offenses, parole violations, and other less serious crime.” And while higher admissions for less serious crimes with shorter sentences don’t affect the incarceration rate as much as increases in sentencing for serious crimes, they do dramatically affect the lives of those admitted, who have to find work as ex-offenders and live with the sundry restrictions states impose upon those who’ve served time.

It’s not hopeless

Holder is taking a fairly plausible approach to reducing the U.S. incarceration rate at the level where he can effect it. But that’s not the level that matters most, and if we were to get serious about reducing the state-level incarceration and admissions rates, we need to talk not just about reducing sentences for drug crimes but also about reducing prison admissions for drug offenses, and perhaps also lowering sentences for property crime and even violent offenses, particularly robbery.

There has been growing enthusiasm for reforming state sentencing laws, even backed by many conservatives. The American Legislative Exchange Council has joined the cause, creating model legislation for loosening state mandatory minimum laws. Especially if it’s not just limited to drug offenses, that kind of reform could greatly reduce the state incarceration rate.


Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

Don't these pigs have any real criminals to hunt down????

I remember we had an anti-war protest in Phoenix and the government used the same convoluted logic about a chalk drawing made on the sidewalk.

They also said the drawing would cost thousands of dollars to clean up, when in fact 5 minutes with a hose and water is all it would take to clean up the drawing.

 
Not one single cop in [Las Vegas, Nevada] Metro's entire history has been charged after shooting someone. Even if that person was unarmed and/or innocent
 

Source

Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

By FRANCIS MCCABE

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Four people could face up to a year in jail for chalking up city sidewalks while protesting police misconduct.

Kelly Wayne Patterson, 44, Brian Ballentine, 31, Hailee Jewell, 18, and Catalino de la Cruz Dazo Jr., 20, face multiple gross misdemeanor counts of placing graffiti or defacing property and conspiracy to commit placing graffiti.

If convicted, they could face probation, a suspended driver’s license, community service and up to a year in the Clark County Detention Center.

The four protesters, affiliated with Nevada Cop Block and Sunset Activist Collective, used washable colored chalk in July to write critical statements of police on the sidewalks outside the Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters and in front of the Regional Justice Center.

Demonstrating against police brutality and officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas, the protesters say they were practicing free speech and should not face charges.

District Attorney Steve Wolfson is taking the case seriously.

“This is not a kid drawing with a piece of chalk on the sidewalk. These are adults who used chalk to draw profanity,” he said. “And there is a law on the books that make it a crime to engage in this activity.”

One statement read: “Not one single cop in Metro’s entire history has been charged after shooting someone. Even if that person was unarmed and/or innocent.”

Another was: “(Expletive) the police.”

Officers on July 13 watched the protesters write statements on the sidewalk and told them they were violating anti-graffiti laws, according to police reports and court documents.

After the protest, Patterson and Ballentine were cited, and police called the city graffiti abatement team, which used high-powered washers to clean the dusty words.

Days later, before a scheduled court hearing on the citation the protesters again used colored chalk, typically made from a composite of calcium sulfate, as part of their protest outside the Regional Justice Center.

One statement read: “(Expletive) Pigs.”

An unknown woman dumped coffee on it, washing it away, according to police who witnessed the protest.

According to documents, Patterson then wrote on the coffee-stained ground, “(Expletive) the police.”

Police documented the evidence, called the city’s graffiti abatement team and began exhaustive research about the perils of power washing to sidewalks, including that it “artificially erodes and abrades the concrete’s surface thereby adding to the unnecessary wear and tear.”

Detailed police reports said the city crew cost $1,550 to clean both crime scenes.

The reports did not include the cost of the coffee used to clean one of the statements. It’s unclear whether it was a small, medium or large coffee.

Lawyer Robert Langford called the case preposterous and is representing the defendants pro bono.

“Under that standard, any kid that does hopscotch patterns on the sidewalk can be guilty of the same crime,” Langford said.

The veteran defense lawyer added, “Justice in this case is that the case should be dismissed. They were engaged in constitutionally protected First Amendment activity. Period. They have the right to engage in that type of protest. This was something that was harmless.”

Langford accused law enforcement officials of inflating the cost of the cleanup to justify the arrest and incarceration until bail was posted, instead of simply issuing a citation.

Part of his defense will be to show that the chalk could have been cleaned up at a lessor cost.

“My bet is a good stiff broom would have done the same thing,” he said.

By employing the power washing crew at a cost of more than $250, the graffiti charge was elevated from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor, which could mean a stiffer sentence if they are convicted.

Langford said the amount of time, money and other taxpayer resources spent on the case is ridiculous. And all “because the bullies at the Las Vegas police department wanted to hurt people who wanted to criticize them. That’s, in the final analysis, what this case is about.”

Langford added he’s considering filing a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the defendants.

“Public property is being defaced with profanity,” Wolfson said. “That’s what it comes down to.”

A preliminary hearing is set for December.

Contact reporter Francis McCabe at fmccabe@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039.


Sheriff Arpaio, ACLU at odds over court-appointed monitor

Source

Sheriff Arpaio, ACLU at odds over court-appointed monitor in profiling case

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 16, 2013 10:10 PM

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and American Civil Liberties Union have agreed on a number of measures Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s agency will need to take to resolve a federal racial-profiling case.

But the two parties could not come to terms on the powers of the court-appointed monitor who will oversee any agreement to ensure the Sheriff’s Office is no longer profiling, a key component to any resolution, according to U.S. District Judge Murray Snow.

The two parties agreed to increase the racial-profiling training that deputies will receive each year and to implement more systems to collect data on the nature and length of deputies’ traffic stops, according to a joint statement filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix on Friday.

The longtime foes filed a joint agreement with Snow that detailed the agreed-upon measures and highlighted 11 specific areas that remain disputed.

Besides disagreeing on the monitor, the two sides remain apart on the amount of community input that will be part of any court-ordered resolution, the nature of racial-profiling training that deputies receive, and whether deputies can request ID from passengers in cars they have stopped.

The ongoing disputes over how to resolve the profiling ruling did not sit well with activists and community leaders who have for years accused Arpaio of discrimination.

“We hope that this time Judge Murray Snow stops this and actually imposes on Arpiao the monitor he has to impose, imposes on Arpaio the community liaison he has to work with and imposes all those conditions he disagrees with,” said Salvador Reza, a longtime Arpaio critic.

Snow left little doubt at a hearing in June that a monitor would be in place to oversee the agreement, with or without Sheriff’s Office approval.

With that in mind, ACLU attorney Dan Pochoda said it was the sheriff’s resistance to court-ordered community input and an overhaul of the sheriff’s disciplinary system that were among the most disturbing points of contention.

“We feel it is very problematic and does not indicate a desire to reverse the widespread harms done to this community,” Pochoda said.

The sheriff’s attorney, Tim Casey, said some of the ACLU’s proposals were beyond the scope of the racial-profiling lawsuit, which began in 2007 after sheriff’s deputies stopped a Mexican man, who was legally in the United States, near Cave Creek and detained him for nine hours.

The lawsuit was later certified as a class-action suit to include every Latino driver sheriff’s deputies have stopped since 2007.

Snow oversaw a tightly managed trial in downtown Phoenix and issued his landmark ruling in December that found the sheriff’s immigration-enforcement tactics, which had brought Arpaio worldwide acclaim and criticism, amounted to constitutional violations.

Casey said Arpaio remains opposed to a court-appointed monitor in any capacity, but the Sheriff’s Office is committed to complying with Snow’s ruling and the agency has already taken steps to improve data collection, for example.

The agreement filed Friday, despite the disputed areas, is another step toward resolving the six-year old lawsuit, Casey said, and a hearing on Aug. 30 will offer a more definitive outlook for the future of the Sheriff’s Office after Snow offers his thoughts on the proposed remedies.

“I think both sides entered into these discussions very earnestly and in good faith,” Casey said. “I believe Sheriff Arpaio also was very receptive and cooperative. Obviously, he disagrees with the court’s findings, but he also recognizes that he needs to comply and must comply.”

But Casey said the ACLU’s proposal to create a system that would allow the Sheriff’s Office or court-appointed monitor to review a deputy’s performance to ensure compliance with the racial-profiling ruling goes beyond the issues discussed in court.

The ACLU’s proposal also includes changes to the way the Sheriff’s Office handles complaints about deputies and conducts internal investigations.

“This (lawsuit) was not about any malfeasance in internal-affairs matters,” Casey said. “We object to it as beyond the scope.”

Snow allowed each side 20 hours to present its case in the trial last summer, which limited the witnesses the Sheriff’s Office and ACLU could bring before the judge. But Pochoda said if the goal of the ruling is to create systemic change in the Sheriff’s Office, areas that were not the subject of much testimony would have to be addressed in the agreement.

“You’re not starting on a clean slate here. You’re starting after six, seven years of unconstitutional actions, and you have to reverse those,” Pochoda said. “The fact that it was not part of significant testimony doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that it’s beyond the scope. We did have testimony from some of our witnesses, and to the extent they testified about internal discipline and complaint processes, it was, ‘I couldn’t get anyone to take my complaint.’”

The proposed agreement mirrors settlements from other jurisdictions, including an Arizona Department of Public Safety racial-profiling agreement that created a traffic-stop advisory board. The ACLU has proposed a similar board, which the Sheriff’s Office has rejected out of concerns that it will become a political entity intent on removing Arpaio from office, Casey said.

And Arpaio’s role as an elected law-enforcement officer further sets him apart from other police chiefs and department heads whose agencies have settled racial-profiling agreements, which Snow will have to consider in determining the role of any court-appointed monitor, Casey said.

“Whatever powers the monitor has, it has to be consistent with the elected sheriff’s powers under the Arizona Constitution. Unlike with a police chief, the monitor cannot have the ultimate veto,” Casey said. “He can advise, he can recommend, he can urge or argue, and we welcome that type of professional input. But if he says, ‘You will do this,’ that is not the type of authority that is consistent with the Constitution.”


Arpaio: Armed militias beware or be shot

This is kind of interesting. Some of Sheriff Joe's goons where were pretending to be dope smugglers got arrested by some Arizona Minuteman where were pretending to be cops.

Personally I think we should just end the insane and unconstitutional "war on drugs" to stop all this nonsense.

Source

Arpaio: Armed militias beware or be shot

Associated Press

PHOENIX — Tough-talking Sheriff Joe Arpaio is warning civilians who embark on armed patrols in remote desert terrain that they could end up “seeing 30 rounds fired” into them by one of his deputies.

His unapologetically terse comments came Tuesday after a member of an Arizona Minuteman border-watch movement was arrested over the weekend for pointing a rifle at a Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy he apparently mistook for a drug smuggler.

“If they continue this there could be some dead militia out there,” Arpaio said.

Richard Malley, 49, was heavily armed with two others dressed in camouflage Saturday night along Interstate 8 near Gila Bend, a known drug-trafficking corridor in the desert about 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, when he confronted the deputy who was on patrol conducting surveillance, authorities said.

According to court records, the deputy and his partner stopped their vehicle, then flashed their headlights and honked their horn, a common practice used by law enforcement to trick drug smugglers into thinking the car is there to transfer their narcotics load and lure them out of hiding.

The deputies then got out, also dressed in camouflage but clearly marked with sheriff’s patches on their clothing, and began to track what appeared to be fresh footprints, authorities said.

That’s when Malley emerged from the darkness with his rifle raised “yelling commands,” according to the probable-cause statement.

The deputy, illuminated by Malley’s flashlight at this point, identified himself as law enforcement, pointing out the “word sheriff across his chest,” and ordered Malley to drop his gun.

“You aren’t taking my weapons,” replied Malley, who was armed with a semi-automatic rifle, a .45-caliber handgun and a knife, according to court records.

Another deputy eventually arrived and arrested Malley for aggravated assault. He was released on $10,000 bail and is set for a court appearance on Monday. It wasn’t clear if Malley had an attorney, and telephone numbers listed for him were disconnected.

Malley claimed “he had the right to point his rifle at the individual because he had reasonable suspicion to believe a crime was occurring,” according to the probable-cause statement. He identified himself as a “militia Minuteman.”

Such Minuteman-type militias of armed civilians patrolling the deserts for illegal border crossers and smugglers grew to prominence in the early 2000s, but the organizations’ numbers have since dwindled as they fractured into multiple splinter groups, such as crews like Malley’s who were on patrol with just three armed men.

Arpaio, whose county doesn’t run along the border but has seen an increase in drug and human trafficking, warned there will be “chaos if you’re going to have private citizens dressed just like our deputies taking the law into their own hands.”

“I have to commend my deputy for not killing this person, which easily could have happened,” Arpaio said. “He’s lucky he didn’t see 30 rounds fired into him.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Andy Adame also expressed concern for the safety of both the militia members and Border Patrol agents.

Adame said the civilian groups could easily trigger remote sensors operated by the Border Patrol to detect illegal crossers.

“And we respond to them in a manner where we expect to encounter illegal immigrants or drug traffickers,” he said. “We can encounter them (militia members) out in the middle of the desert, which may result in disastrous personal and public safety consequences.”

In short, he noted, someone could get shot and killed, either an agent or a civilian.

Glenn Spencer, president of American Border Patrol, a civilian group that operates from a ranch along the Mexican border in Southern Arizona, won’t condemn the actions of private armed militia organizations, but he also doesn’t recommend it.

“It’s a free country. They’re not violating any law. They’re not trespassing,” said Spencer, whose group uses technology, including sensors and unmanned aircraft rather than boots on the ground, to monitor the border.

“But I wouldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do it,” Spencer added. “Going out there is dangerous.”


The Emperor Wears No Clothes

I didn't know this but the book:
The Emperor Wears No Clothes
is on the web and you can read it for free right here. The book is by Jack Herer who recently died.

If you want a thousand good reasons to legalize, or re-legalize marijuana the book The Emperor Wears No Clothes has those reasons for you.


People are starting to realize Sheriff Joe sucks

Poll on Sheriff Joe Arpaio
YearApproveFair Disapprove
2012 49 15 32
2013 37 12 42
change-12-310

Source

Arpaio’s approval rating declining, poll says

Associated Press Thu Aug 22, 2013 11:50 AM

A new poll says Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s approval rating declined over the last 18 months.

The poll released Thursday by the Behavior Research Center found 37 percent of those were surveyed approved of Arpaio.

Twelve percent say Arpaio was doing a fair job.

Another 42 percent disapproved of the sheriff.

The poll of 418 heads of households in Maricopa County was taken between July 8 and July 21 and has a sampling error of plus or minus 4.8 percentage points.

Arpaio won his sixth term last year in his second-closest election.

A January 2012 survey by the Behavior Research Center found 49 percent of those surveyed approved of Arpaio, while 15 percent said he was doing a fair job and 32 percent disapproved of the sheriff.


Gay to Straight program to be used in all Arizona schools

Here is a link to the video.

 
  Damn, for a minute there I thought Cathy Harrod and the Center for Arizona Policy succeeded in passing another law forcing their brand of religion on the state of Arizona!!!!

Source

Arizona schools not implementing gay-conversion therapy

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 22, 2013 2:42 PM

Arizona public schools are not implementing a new conversion-therapy program for gay students this fall.

A fictional article posted Wednesday by the staff of the political satire website National Report has gone viral, leaving Gov. Jan Brewer and the Arizona Department of Education scrambling to assure parents that the information is inaccurate.

National Report stated that Arizona would, on Nov. 1, implement a mandatory program for K-12 students “to help homosexual males and women become straight.”

The site indicates that the program is part of People Can Change, a real Virginia-based non-profit with a mission to “support and guide men who seek to transition away from unwanted homsexuality.”

People Can Change posted a large disclaimer at the top of its website declaring the National Report story fake.

“The spokesperson is fake, the interview is fake, the photo with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is fake, the press conference is fake -- and the quotes are fake, rude, and demeaning of gays,” the People can Change site states. “People Can Change does not provide programs or services for minors. We are a peer-led support organization of men who have personally experienced significant change from unwanted same-sex attractions ourselves and who now share our experience and give support to other adults who voluntarily seek similar change.”

The National Report article included fake quotes from Brewer stating that, “I think this will be an amazing opportunity for gay children to finally learn who they truly are for once in their lives ... Can you imagine how much more productive these ‘now-straight’ children will be not... wondering why god made them defective? What we have done here today is monumental. I can only hope and pray that other states follow suit.”

"It’s a completely phony and vile report, and its authors should be ashamed," Brewer spokesman Andrew Wilder said.

The article was submitted as a “press release” and posted on the news release dissemination site www.prlog.com. It gives no indication that it is intended to be satire and lists its source as a Fox News cable network story. There, it was viewed more than 70,000 times.

It’s since been posted on blog sites, popular community forums like cafemom.com and babycenter.com and social media.

Hundreds of comments have been posted on various sites in response to the article, many believing the information is accurate.

Nearly 900 people posted responses to the article on National Report’s website.


OK, this is a hoax, but a funny hoax. For a minute there I thought Cathy Harrod and her nut jobs at the Center for Arizona Policy got another one of their laws passed forcing their brand of religion on the rest of us Arizonans

Source

Gay-To-Straight Program To Be Used In All Arizona Public School Curriculums Beginning November 1st

Phoenix, AZ — Beginning November 1st of this year, the state of Arizona is implementing a mandatory school program designed for all children grades K-12 to help homosexual males and women become straight. The controversial conversion therapy will be used in all of Arizona’s 2,325 public school curriculums and is already gathering a large amount of criticism as well as those who approve of the new program.

Dean Huls who is the brain child behind People Can Change spoke with Fox News about their plan to help all the gay children of Arizona. “Since 2000 ‘People Can Change’ has been helping thousands of children resolve their unwanted same-sex attractions. We bring the gay demons out of these individuals so they can become who god intended them to be. Our success and track record speaks for itself,” Huls said. “Facing the reality that you have unwanted homosexual feelings can cause tremendous turmoil – especially as a child whose feelings conflict with deeply held values, beliefs and life goals. But there is a way out. A path that leads them to resolve rather than fight their homosexual feelings. A path to authentic brotherhood and to our innate heterosexual masculinity.”

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer who signed off on the the ‘People Can Change’ program told CNN she is excited about the program. “I think this will be an amazing opportunity for gay children to finally learn who they truly are for once in their lives,” Brewer said. “Can you imagine how much more productive these ‘now-straight’ children will be not always being bullied or wondering why god made them defective? What we have done here today is monumental. I can only hope and pray that other states follow suit.”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio who runs some of the toughest jails and prisons in the country applauds Brewer’s decision. “Less gays in our jails makes for a smoother running prison system. There will be no more prancing around along with all the other gay activities that homosexuals like to do,” Arpaio said. “More importantly, we as parents can now sleep a little better at night just knowing there will be less gays out there wandering the streets trying to molest our children. I’m excited about this and I know all Arizonans are too.”

Though not everyone from Arizona feels the same way as Brewer and Arpaio. 32-year-old Katherine Morris from Phoenix whose son Daniel is a 12-year-old homosexual said she does not agree with the program. “My son Daniel is one of the nicest boys in the world. He is the most wonderful and loving child you could ever meet in your life. There’s not a problem with him, there is a problem with this conversion therapy,” Morris said. “I urge all Arizonians to fight back before this curriculum takes effect in November. Call your congressman. Call your senator. We still have time to fix this wrong. Tell them we do not want ‘People Can Change’ in our schools! It’s not only a waste of tax payer money but it is fixing something that is not broken.”

The organization ‘People Can Change’ is located in Ruckersville, Virginia and has hundreds of gay-to-straight camps and therapy conversion facilities all around the country. They have been in operation since May of 2000. ‘People Can Change’ can be contacted at 434-985-8551 or by email at lynn@peoplecanchange.com.

National Report attempted to contact the Superintendent of Public Instruction for comment but as of press time had received no response.


Source

Governor Jan Brewer Threatens Lawsuit Against Hoax Author Who Claimed She Supports Mandatory Gay Conversion Classes For Children

Phoenix, AZ — Governor Jan Brewer’s spokesman Andrew Wilder held a press conference this morning with reporters announcing news of a possible lawsuit against Phoenix, Arizona resident 34-year-old Paul Horner. Horner was the culprit behind yesterday’s hoax which had the internet up in arms. The satirical article stated that Brewer signed off on a bill implementing a mandatory school program designed for all Arizona children grades K-12 requiring all homosexual males and women to become straight.

Brewer’s office did not see the humor in such a stunt, and denounced the suggestion that the governor would target young people with such a discriminatory program: “It’s a completely phony and vile report, and its authors should be ashamed,” Wilder told the Arizona Republic yesterday.

“This lawsuit is real and is nothing to be taken lightly,” Wilder told CNN. “If the author of the article in question wants to avoid legal action, we are asking him to immediately remove the story from National Report and cease and desist any further foolishness of this nature against the governor.” Wilder continued, “Governor Brewer also expects a full and sincere apology, no less than 1,000 words long. This is to help compensate the harm and mayhem his ridiculous article caused the great state of Arizona and to the Governor’s Office. Mr. Horner can either post a public apology on his Super Official News website, National Report, his Facebook page located at facebook.com/paulissuperawesome or contact the governor directly at janjanbrewbrew1944@aol.com.”


NSA Surveillance - Lady Liberty Raped

 
NSA surveillance - Lady Liberty stripped naked and raped
 


NSA Surveillance - TSA goons destroying America

 
NSA surveillance - TSA goons destroying America
 


MCSO: Policy violated in fatal jail fight

This is kind of unusual, Sheriff Joe's goons admitting a crime???

I suspect that for one reason or another Detention Officer Anthony Hatton has p*ssed off his masters in Sheriff Joe's gulag and needs to be fired so this will be the excuse they use.

Source

MCSO: Policy violated in fatal jail fight

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Aug 26, 2013 11:07 PM

A sheriff’s detention officer involved in a jailhouse fight that left an inmate dead violated policies when he plunged his knee into the handcuffed inmate’s back, but not when he repeatedly punched the inmate, according to a recently released internal report.

Ernest Atencio, 44, died in December 2011 after getting into a fight with a group of Maricopa County sheriff’s detention officers and Phoenix police officers in the booking area of the Fourth Avenue Jail, prompting Atencio’s family to file a federal lawsuit.

The sheriff’s internal report is the first admission that any public employee violated policies during the fight that left Atencio in a coma for five days before his family removed him from life support.

A widely viewed jailhouse video of the fight that left Atencio dead shows that, when a Phoenix officer placed his arm around Atencio’s neck and took him to the ground, nearby officers joined the effort to subdue Atencio. His family called following events a “jailers’ riot.”

A critical-incident review released by the Sheriff’s Office late Monday looked at four different moments in the altercation when detention officers used force with Atencio.

The first came when Atencio began to struggle as Phoenix officers tried to remove his shoes and socks, but the sheriff’s report makes no judgment about whether Phoenix officers acted appropriately in taking Atencio to the ground. Instead, the report concludes that sheriff’s officers acted within policy when they jumped in to assist the Phoenix officers.

The second use of force occurred moments later: Phoenix police and sheriff’s officers wrestled with Atencio, and Detention Officer Anthony Hatton punched Atencio once in the shoulder and twice in the side of his face.

Sheriff’s investigators found that Hatton acted properly because Hatton said Atencio was twisting his wrist and would not let go. The investigators also determined that an officer’s repeated use of a Taser on Atencio was appropriate because Atencio continued to struggle after being shocked.

Hatton’s lone inappropriate use of force, according to sheriff’s investigators, came as the fight ended and Atencio, half-naked and handcuffed, was being loaded into a padded “safe cell.” As officers attempt to remove his handcuffs, Hatton used his knee to drop down on Atencio’s shoulder.

Hatton left the Sheriff’s Office on his own accord in April 2012.

Atencio’s family filed a $20 million claim against Maricopa County and Phoenix police, which became a federal civil-rights lawsuit after neither agency settled for that amount. The lawsuit continues to make its way through U.S. District Court.


Sacrifice a politician????

 
No, the Gods didn't ask for the sacrifice of a politician, it just seemed like a really good idea
No, the Gods didn't ask for the sacrifice of a politician, it just seemed like a really good idea
 


Hearing today in Sheriff Arpaio racial-profile ruling

Source

Hearing today in Sheriff Arpaio racial-profile ruling

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 30, 2013 6:12 AM

The specific steps Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will have to take to resolve a racial-profiling ruling should become clearer after a hearing in federal court scheduled for Friday morning.

Attorneys for Arpaio and the American Civil Liberties Union have spent months negotiating a resolution to U.S. District Judge Murray Snow’s ruling that the Sheriff’s Office engaged in widespread discrimination against Latino residents through the agency’s patrol operations.

Lengthy and detailed court documents filed during the last month have offered a glimpse into the progress of those negotiations and the disputed areas where Snow will have to weigh in with his opinion.

“The MCSO maintains its stance of denying there is a problem,” attorneys for the ACLU wrote in the opening of its 30-page brief filed last week that went on to detail Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s opposition to a court-appointed monitor, increased training, the creation of a community-advisory board and collecting the data on drivers stopped by deputies that the plaintiffs desire.

The two parties agreed to increase the racial-profiling training that deputies will receive each year and to implement more systems to collect data on the nature and length of deputies’ traffic stops, according to a joint statement filed in U.S. District Court earlier this month.

Whether the Sheriff’s Office agrees to a monitor or not, Snow left little doubt at a hearing in June that one would be in place to oversee the agreement.

With that in mind, ACLU attorney Dan Pochoda said it was the sheriff’s resistance to court-ordered community input and an overhaul of the sheriff’s disciplinary system that were among the most disturbing points of contention.

“We feel is very problematic and does not indicate a desire to reverse the widespread harms done to this community,” Pochoda said.

The sheriff’s attorney, Tim Casey, said some of the ACLU’s proposals were beyond the scope of the racial profiling lawsuit, which began after sheriff’s deputies stopped a Mexican man who was legally in the United States near Cave Creek in 2007 and detained the immigrant for nine hours.

The suit was later certified as a class-action suit to include every Latino driver sheriff’s deputies have stopped since 2007.

Dozens of demonstrators are expected to gather outside the courthouse Friday morning to protest Arpaio’s resistance to a court-appointed monitor and some of the other changes proposed in the ACLU’s court filings.

If Snow issues an order from the bench on Friday it will be a break from his deliberate approach to the case so far- he took nine months to craft his opinion that the Sheriff’s Office had engaged in discrimination.

Snow oversaw a tightly managed trial in downtown Phoenix and issued his landmark ruling in May that found the sheriff’s immigration-enforcement tactics, which had brought Arpaio worldwide acclaim and criticism, amounted to constitutional violations.

Arpaio’s attorneys and the ACLU have been working since May to come to a joint resolution on the changes that need to be made in the agency in order to correct the practices that led deputies to discriminate against Latinos and to ensure they won’t occur again in the future.


Has Arpaio gone ‘Back to the Future?’

Source

Has Arpaio gone ‘Back to the Future?’

It’s déjà Joe all over again.

There is no other explanation for the recent behavior of the local county sheriff.

Out of nowhere Joe Arpaio has expressed sympathy — not disdain — for the plight of illegal border crossers. Out of nowhere he has expressed disdain — not sympathy — for the self-proclaimed militia members who patrol the border.

It’s as if Arpaio climbed into a 1981 DeLorean time machine, hit the gas pedal and … BOOM! … it’s 2003.

Has the Toughest Sheriff in America has gone “Back to the Future?”

Ten years ago, before Arpaio went on his anti-immigrant rampage, I had several conversations with him about bodies his deputies had discovered dumped in a remote area near the I-10 and Buckeye.

“It’s like I told you,” Arpaio said at the time, “if I had nine dead bodies in Scottsdale, people would be a lot more interested. Am I right?”

Another time, a running gun battle between rival gangs of human smugglers left shot-up vehicles and dead bodies over a wide stretch of freeway.

The sheriff said, “It’s like the old Mafia wars where you try to get rid of the competition… And it’s going to get worse.” [Of course if you legalize drugs, the violence and crime will end the very next day, and people will buy their drugs at Circle K and Walgreen's where they buy their beer.]

That combination of empathy and concern continued for Arpaio until April, 2005.

It ended abruptly when an Army reservist from Michigan named Patrick Haab held a group of suspected illegal immigrants at gunpoint at a freeway rest stop.

At first, Arpaio was appalled. He said of Haab, “You don’t go around pulling guns on people. Being illegal is not a serious crime.” [Of course Sheriff Joe's goons don't arrest dishwashers, maids and gardeners for the petty crime of being illegal, they slap bogus felony identity theft and forgery charges on them because they made up a Social Security number to get the job]

It turned out, however, that the general public as well as recently-elected County Attorney Andrew Thomas were solidly behind Haab. They supported him completely.

So Arpaio reversed his position.

He joined the rapidly growing anti-immigrant army and rose in the ranks to what appeared to be Commander in Chief. (At least if you count appearances on Fox News.)

But that was then.

In the past year or so the public’s attitude has changed. Softened.

Arpaio’s office was sued by the Justice Department. And a federal judge ruled that his policing practices were discriminatory and violated the Constitution. A federal monitor might be appointed to oversee his department. On top of that Arpaio’s reelection was closer than ever.

So the sheriff has taken a step back — perhaps even a leap.

Last weekend a member of the Arizona Minuteman (border patrol wannabes) was arrested for pointing a rifle at a sheriff’s deputy he mistook for a drug smuggler. [More or less the exact same thing that Patrick Haab did to some Mexicans, but Patrick Haab wasn't prosecuted for anything]

“If they continue this, there could be some dead militia out there,” an angry Arpaio said.

He warned about the “chaos” that would be caused by private citizens acting like law enforcement, adding, “I have to commend my deputy for not killing this person, which easily could have happened. He’s lucky he didn’t see 30 rounds fired into him.”

In addition, Arpaio has instituted a program in which his deputies erect white crosses to mark the spots they find the bodies of immigrants who died crossing into the U.S. [f*ck that First Amendment thing about separation of church and state!!!]

“The crosses symbolize death,” Arpaio said, adding, “This is just one way to try and save some lives.” [and he is hoping he will get a few votes from the Christian nut jobs in the next election for erecting the crosses]

It’s a nice sentiment, a caring sentiment.

Of course, a skeptical person might question the sheriff’s sudden decision to humanize individuals he’s spent years dehumanizing. A suspicious individual might wonder if this is calculated public relations scheme to convince federal Judge G. Murray Snow, who ruled against Arpaio, that the sheriff would never again allow his deputies to racially profile people. [Naaaah!!!! Sheriff Joe isn't a publicity hound like Ernie Hancock who would make up a calculated public relations scheme. OK, I lied about that, Sheriff Joe is one of the few people who are bigger publicity hounds then Ernie Hancock]

Personally, I hope Judge Snow is not so cynical.

I hope he is willing to give Arpaio the benefit of the doubt. I hope the judge is open-minded enough to believe the sheriff is being sincere … and wise enough to appoint a monitor to watch over Arpaio’s department. Just in case.

This is Arizona, after all, where politicians like Arpaio leap back and forth on issues the way Marty McFly and the “Back to the Future” cast leapt back and forth in time.

And just like the movie, there are lots of sequels.


Judge delays ruling in Arpaio racial profiling case

It is illegal for the police to stop a car just because it looks suspicious. Cops need either "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion" that a crime has occurred before stopping a car.

But cops will routinely illegally stop a suspicious looking car without the required "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion". Next the cops illegally search the car and persons looking for something to arrest them for.

If they cops find nothing they will let the people go.

If the search of the car finds something illegal the cops will then invent or manufacture a "legal" reason on why they stopped the car to justify the illegal search and false arrest.

And of course that is why Sheriff Joe's goons don't like this request. Because it will make it much more difficult for them to illegally stop and search cars, which contain the brown skinned people Sheriff Joe hates. That request is:

"for deputies to note to dispatchers why they have stopped a vehicle before they make contact with the driver"
Source

Judge delays ruling in Arpaio racial profiling case

Posted: Friday, August 30, 2013 5:06 pm

Associated Press

A federal judge delayed a ruling in the racial profiling case against Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office Friday as both sides remain at odds over key remedies to ensure the agency adheres to constitutional requirements.

U.S. District Judge Murray Snow found in May that the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office singled out Latinos and deputies unreasonably prolonged detentions, marking the first finding by a court that the agency covering Arizona's most populous county engages in racial profiling.

Snow delayed a ruling in the case in June after parties indicated they wanted more time to reach an agreement, though it was clear during Friday's hearing that neither side would cave to the other's demands.

"I presume that you're now leaving it up to me to take your outline and create an order, and that's what I intend to do," Snow told attorneys.

The judge gave the lawyers until Sept. 18 to file additional briefs in the case and said he would issue a final order soon thereafter.

One key proposal that attorneys for the Sheriff's Office vehemently objected to is for deputies to note to dispatchers why they have stopped a vehicle before they make contact with the driver.

Given that the case arose after a small group of Latinos sued the agency for violating their constitutional rights, saying they were detained simply because of their race, the plaintiffs' attorneys said such a requirement is crucial to discern the motivation of the stop.

Maricopa County Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan told the judge it would be burdensome and risky since "traffic stops are one of the most dangerous things that deputies do."

"It takes less than a second to say, 'I'm pulling this car over because it was speeding,'" said Cecillia Wang, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is representing the plaintiffs, adding that such a requirement is needed "given the record ... of racial profiling of Latinos in this county."

Another key point of contention is the appointment of a monitor to oversee the agency's adherence to the judge's eventual order.

Arpaio says allowing a monitor means every policy decision would have to be cleared through the observer and would nullify his authority.

"Obviously, my client opposes the appointment of any monitor," Tim Casey, one of Arpaio's lawyers, told the judge.

Casey said in addition to usurping the sheriff's authority, the agency is concerned about how much power the monitor would have, and how privy the observer would be to sensitive information, including ongoing investigations and search warrants.

"Basically, the concern is one of safety," Casey said. "The more people who know, the greater the risk of being burned."

Despite the objections, Snow indicated that a monitor would be appointed and would have significant authority.

"It will be the monitor's obligation to determine when the MCSO is in full compliance," the judge said.

Arpaio's office also opposes the plaintiffs' proposal to create an advisory board aimed at improving the department's relationship with the Latino community.

Casey argued the Sheriff's Office already has a community outreach liaison, and that "the sheriff recognizes there needs to be some improvement."

"There's a positive effect if my client goes to the Latino community voluntarily," he said, adding that if it were court-ordered and coupled with an advisory board, it would appear as if the sheriff was being forced to build better relations, "throwing fuel on the fire."

ACLU attorney Dan Pochoda snapped back that the stance "reflects the sheriff's anti-Latino attitude."

Snow's May ruling doesn't altogether bar Arpaio, 81, from enforcing the state's immigration laws, but it does impose a long list of restrictions on the sheriff's patrols, some of which focused heavily on Latino areas in the county. They include prohibitions on using race as a factor in deciding whether to stop a vehicle with a Latino occupant and on detaining Latino passengers only on the suspicion that they're in the country illegally.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit last year that also alleges racial profiling in Arpaio's immigration patrols. Its suit, however, claims broader civil rights violations, such as allegations that Arpaio's office retaliates against its critics and punishes Latino jail inmates with limited English skills for speaking Spanish. Arpaio has denied the claims.


45 Enemies of Freedom

Sheriff Joe is #3 on Reason's list of "Enemies of Freedom"

Arizona's John McCain came 27th.

I was looking for Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema on this list but couldn't find her. I suspect that is because she hasn't got a long established record of government tyranny.

Kyrsten Sinema is the tyrant who attempted to flush Arizona's medical marijuana law, Prop 203, by introducing a bill that would have slapped a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

Kyrsten Sinema seems to be a clone of Emperor Obama, Michael Bloomberg, Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton who all think they THEY know know to run your life better then YOU do.

Source

45 ENEMIES OF FREEDOM

People who have been trying to control your life since reason was founded in 1968

From the August/September 2013 issue

In 2003, to celebrate 35 years of publishing a monthly magazine dedicated to Free Minds and Free Markets, reason named “35 Heroes of Freedom”—innovators, economists, singers, anti-communists, pornographers, professional athletes, and even the occasional politician who contributed to making the world a freer place since 1968.

These weren’t necessarily the 35 best human beings to span the globe. Richard Nixon, for example, was selected for encouraging “cynicism about government” through his rampant abuses of power. And, well, let’s say Dennis Rodman hasn’t aged particularly well. But the list reflected the happy, unpredictable cacophony that has helped liberate the world one novel or deregulation or electric guitar at a time.

Our 45th anniversary has come along at a darker time. The post-9/11 lurch toward unchecked law enforcement power has now become a permanent feature of our bipartisan consensus, with a Democratic president now ordering assassinations of American teenagers and with millions of Americans unaware that the feds are combing through their telecommunications. Keynesians in Washington responded to the financial crisis of 2008 by ushering in a lost decade of government spending, sluggish growth, and the worst employment numbers since Jimmy Carter was president. And after an initially promising Arab Spring, whole swaths of the Middle East seem poised for a long, sectarian, transnational war.

So it’s fitting that this time around we’re anointing reason’s 45 Enemies of Freedom. Again, these aren’t the worst human beings who bestrode the planet since 1968 (though Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden rank right down there). Some, like John McCain, are even genuine American heroes. What unites them is their active effort to control individuals rather than allow them free choice, to wield power recklessly rather than act on the recognition that the stuff inherently corrupts, and to popularize lies in a world that's desperate for truth.

You’ll see some familiar names there (we can’t quit you, Tricky Dick!) and some others that deserve to be more notorious. But in our otherwise alphabetical list we’ll start with the man who nearly everyone on our staff nominated, a figure who embodies so much that is wrong with public policy and the political conversation in these United States.

1. Michael Bloomberg

Here is how New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg explained the importance of his widely derided 16-ounce limit on servings of sugar-sweetened beverages after a state judge overturned it last March: “We have a responsibility as human beings to do something, to save each other, to save the lives of ourselves, our families, our friends, and all of the rest of the people that live on God’s planet.” Bloomberg literally thinks he is saving the world one slightly smaller serving of soda at a time.

As grandiose as that may seem, it is consistent with Bloomberg’s view of government. A few years ago in a speech at the United Nations, he declared that “to halt the worldwide epidemic of non-communicable diseases, governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option,” which he described as “government’s highest duty.” On Bloomberg’s to-do list for government, apparently, defending us against our own unhealthy habits ranks above defending us against foreign invaders or marauding criminals.

Public health is not the only area where Bloomberg’s authoritarian tendencies are apparent. There is his enthusiasm for gun control, his illegal crackdown on pot smokers, and his unflagging defense of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, which portrays the Fourth Amendment as a gratuitous barrier to effective policing. But his determination to halt “epidemics” of risky behavior shows him at his most arrogantly ambitious.

Bloomberg has pursued that goal not only by meddling with people’s drink orders but by banning trans fats, pressuring food companies to reduce the salt content of their products, imposing heavy cigarette taxes, severely restricting the locations where people are allowed to smoke (even outdoors), mandating anti-smoking posters in stores that sell cigarettes (a policy that, like his big beverage ban, was rejected by the courts), and proposing a rule that would require merchants to hide tobacco products from people who might want to buy them.

The attitude driving Bloomberg’s crusade to “make healthy solutions the default social option” is reflected in another comment he made after his pint-sized pop prescription ran into legal trouble. “It was not a setback for me,” said the billionaire with degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I watch my diet. This is not for me.” No, indeed. It is for those poor, benighted souls who think it is acceptable to drink a 20-ounce soda.

2. Idi Amin

The bombastic Ugandan dictator and self-appointed Conqueror of the British Empire lived in luxury during his 1970s rule while overseeing a unique brand of sadism that included mass killings, forced deportations, and torture.

3. Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Maricopa County, Arizona’s chief law enforcement officer is famous mostly for publicly degrading inmates: forcing them to live in a tent city, work on chain gangs, wear pink underwear. Meanwhile, his more serious transgressions receive far less attention. Arpaio has created citizen posses to track down and arrest illegal immigrants, overseen a jail staff that has violently abused inmates (resulting in the death of three prisoners and the paralysis of a fourth), and used law enforcement resources to harass and intimidate his political opponents.

4. Osama bin Laden

His desire to impose an Islamic caliphate marks the late terrorist as decidedly anti-liberty. But Osama bin Laden’s real crime against freedom was masterminding the murderous 9/11 terror attacks, which not only slaughtered nearly 3,000 people, but also inspired the U.S. government to react with overseas wars, the PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Transportation Security Administration. It is thanks in no small part to bin Laden that the United States is far less free.

5. Leonid Brezhnev

Give Brezhnev credit for this much: He made it a lot harder to imagine that communism would be exciting. If Stalin was the supervillain who made the Soviet Union an empire and Khrushchev was the Cold War confrontationist, Brezhnev was the bland figure who enforced a deadly conformity. An adept at bureaucratic warfare, Brezhnev consolidated his power over the course of the ’60s and ’70s as he spread his mixture of economic stagnation and banal totalitarianism throughout the eastern bloc.

6. Fidel Castro

His iron grip over Cuba lasted for more than 50 years of individual, physical, and social ruin. Though Castro formally stepped down as leader in 2008, he passed the reins of the police state to his brother and still serves as an elder statesman of the least free country in the Western Hemisphere.

7. Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney makes the list instead of George W. Bush or Barack Obama because the former vice president provided the intellectual and legal template that both presidents followed to curtail our freedoms. In the wake of 9/11, Cheney, a lifelong defender of executive branch power, pushed the Bush administration to increase secrecy, surveillance, and war. It’s the most lasting legacy in a four-decade career that includes intimate involvement in both Iraq wars, plus the conflicts in Afghanistan, Panama, and Somalia.

8. Hillary Clinton

“It takes a village,” Hillary Clinton famously wrote, and we’ve learned since that her meaning encompassed villages in Iraq and Afghanistan to house American troops, villages of taxpayers to fund her favored programs, and villages of snoops to staff a national security state. Those villages must be prudish, too, given Clinton’s longstanding fear of video-game sex. To Hillary’s credit, she does advocate Internet freedom for villages overseas. Too bad she doesn’t promote the same idea at home.

9. Paul Ehrlich

In 1968’s dystopian bestseller The Population Bomb, this biologist predicted that “hundreds of millions” would die in massive famines in the 1970s. Erlich lamented that it was technically and politically impossible to sterilize people through the water and food supplies, the antidote for which would be rationed by the government. Meanwhile, on a mostly voluntary basis, the global fertility rate has fallen by more than half since the 1960s. Freedom, and the economic growth it generates, turn out to be the best contraceptive.

10. Dianne Feinstein

Say Feinstein’s name in front of anybody who takes the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution seriously and watch that person’s face curdle. The California senator’s federal assault weapons ban, which passed in 1994 and expired in 2004, failed to have any noticeable impact on crime rates. She didn’t allow such facts to keep her from using the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 to unsuccessfully attempt to reinstate the ban. Like the National Rifle Association, she also blames youth violence on video games and has threatened new regulations on that industry as well.

11. Daryl Gates

Inventor of the SWAT team and four-star general in America’s war on drugs, Gates is as responsible as any other law enforcement officer for the blunt, pseudo- military instrument our police forces have become. Thanks to significant incidences of wrong-door raids and dangerous prank calls that send SWAT teams to innocent families’ homes, Americans don’t even have to be doing drugs or breaking any laws to witness the fruits of Gates’ labor.

12. Newt Gingrich

Gingrich rose to fame as a politician, but he’s more like an annoying dinner-party guest: He’ll say anything to get attention. During the 2012 campaign, the former speaker of the House called fellow Republican Paul Ryan’s budget proposal a “radical” form of “right-wing social engineering”—but later said he’d vote for it. In 2005, he declared his support for an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, even going so far as to predict that it could be done in a way to “make most libertarians relatively happy.” By 2012, he was saying the mandate was “fundamentally wrong” and “unconstitutional.” Gingrich never truly stands for anything except himself.

13. Steven Hayne

For 20 years, Mississippi prosecutors looking for a way to put a friendly thumb on the scales of justice turned to Dr. Steven Hayne. A graduate of Brown Medical School, Hayne performed roughly 1,500 autopsies per year at the behest of prosecutors—1,175 more per year than is permitted by the National Association of Medical Examiners. The result? A lot of bad evidence and a lot of faulty convictions. Thanks to Radley Balko’s investigatory work in reason and elsewhere, Hayne is no longer performing autopsies in Mississippi. Sadly, the number of false convictions he contributed to is suspected to be in the hundreds.

14. Eric Hobsbawm

Until his death last year at the age of 95, British historian Eric Hobsbawm enjoyed the dubious honor of being perhaps the world’s most prominent academic apologist for communism. Asked in 1994 if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” if the result was the establishment of a Marxist society, the lifelong Communist Party member replied, “yes.”

15. J. Edgar Hoover

The FBI’s investigations into militias during the 1990s and Muslims in the 2000s trace their roots to the tenure of James Edgar Hoover. The agency’s longest-serving director, Hoover was famous for investigating groups that challenged the American government and its empire. He spied on and entrapped leftists, and he smeared and undermined civil rights leaders.

16. Jeffrey Immelt

In fairness, anyone who ran General Electric would probably make this list. Not because the blue-chip energy/media/whatever company is particularly evil, but because it’s particularly big, and as such it’s a natural poster boy for modern-day crony capitalism. GE has spent more than $200 million on lobbying already this young century. Immelt, head of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, reacted to the 2008 financial crisis by claiming, “The interaction between government and business will change forever.…The government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.” That’s exactly the problem.

17. Michael Jacobson

The most zealous of the foodie nanny-staters, Michael Jacobson is the guy who makes Mayor Bloomberg seem like a reasonable moderate. The Ralph Nader protégé co-founded the Center for Science in the Public Interest in 1971 to fight for fat taxes, ominous warning labels, and laws requiring that broadcasters give a minute advertising time to broccoli for each minute of Froot Loops. His group, he once said, “is proud about finding something wrong with practically everything.”

18. Ed Jagels

During the 1980s, Kern County (California) District Attorney Ed Jagels led the nation in prosecuting bogus Satanic child molestation cases. Without any physical evidence, Jagels, his prosecutors, and local police coached and cajoled children into accusing their parents and neighbors of sexual abuse that never actually happened. Years later, when witnesses recanted, Jagels called them liars. Eventually, 25 of his 26 Satanic molestation convictions were overturned.

19. Leon Kass

As the propounder of the idea of “the wisdom of repugnance,” philosopher Leon Kass holds that viscera trump reason. Kass opposed in vitro fertilization on the grounds that it was dehumanizing, but the more than 5 million IVF babies born since then have been quite human. As head of George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, Kass sought to ban research on potentially lifesaving technologies such as human embryonic stem cells and cloning. He argues against using human ingenuity to liberate ourselves from the natural horrors of disease, disability, and death.

20. Ruhollah Khomeini

Leader of the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah, the ayatollah created the modern blueprint for an atavistic, Islamic revolution. As Iran’s supreme leader, Khomeini ordered the murder of his political opponents, waged a deadly war with Iraq, supported the sacking of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and offered a bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie.

21. Henry Kissinger

As secretary of state and national security advisor under presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger embodied a ruthless, amoral vision of America’s place in the world. From the “secret” bombing of Cambodia to the “Christmas” bombing of North Vietnam, from his complicity in the coup that installed a repressive dictatorship in Chile to his green light for Indonesia’s bloody occupation of East Timor, Kissinger may not be the only answer to the question “Why do they hate us?”—but he’s a far larger part of the answer than any one man should be.

22. Naomi Klein

Before her 2007 book Shock Doctrine slandered all of modern libertarian thought as a scam dreamed up by the dictator-loving rich to screw over the poor, Klein had a noisy and altogether self-defeating career as an anti-branding activist. Her “No Logo” campaign and 2000 book, designed to ride the wave of anti-globalization to lead a revolt against advertising, instead became a go-to manual for marketers seeking to exploit the yearning for authenticity. Meanwhile, the anti-globalization movement died a richly deserved death.

23. Paul Krugman

The Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist is a reliable advocate of economic intervention and deficit spending, arguing that the problem with failed government stimulus programs to fight the recession of the ’00s was that they didn’t go far enough. Krugman’s low point in 2012 was recommending (only mostly in jest) that it would be a good thing if the government wasted huge sums of taxpayer money preparing for an alien invasion. Keep this man’s hands away from any rocks—he might try to break nearby windows to “stimulate” the economy.

24. Loki

The sneering (fictional) baddie in the 2012 superhero blockbuster, The Avengers, sticks to a familiar supervillain playbook: His aim is world domination, and he’s got a cosmic doohicky and an army of alien invaders to make it happen. But the justification he offers for his global power grab sounds more like a terrestrial dictator: “It’s the unspoken truth of humanity,” he tells a cowering crowd, “that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled.” Fortunately, like all supervillains, he was made to be defeated.

25. Jeffrey Loria

A successful New York art dealer (unlike you, he owns an original Picasso), Loria spent years pleading poverty to the taxpayers of Miami-Dade County so that they would pay for a fancy new stadium to house his professional baseball franchise, the Marlins. Locals finally agreed to cover what’s projected to be $2.4 billion in costs, only to discover that Loria had actually been turning large profits while fielding a mediocre, underpaid team. With his stadium safely finished, Loria promptly dismantled his club, which is now the worst in Major League Baseball.

26. Mao Tse-Tung

As the founder and leader of the People’s Republic of China, this Communist despot’s cruelly stupid collectivist policies killed at least 35 million Chinese citizens. He kept the hundreds of millions who managed to survive in impoverished bondage until his death in 1976.

27. John McCain

It is possible to be both an enemy of freedom and a genuine American hero. John McCain endured unbearable punishments and greatly boosted camp morale during his five-year Viet Cong prison stint, for which he deserves our gratitude. He has also been among the most consistently interventionist politicians in the United States Senate, agitating for never-ending “rogue-state rollback” while focusing his war at home on political speech and the healthy American trait he derides as “cynicism.” It’s fitting McCain would close out his career barking sporadic insults (like “wacko bird”) at a new generation of more libertarian legislators.

28. Jenny McCarthy

A second-string actress who has managed to stay in the limelight by promoting the bogus theory that vaccines cause autism, McCarthy traffics in pseudoscience and fear. Partly as a result of her widely publicized yet scientifically ignorant pronouncements, hundreds of thousands of fearful parents have needlessly endangered the health and lives of their children.

29. Robert McNamara

Did anyone fuse the roles of technocrat and destroyer more completely than Robert Strange McNamara? He was a functionary from Ford Motor Company when John F. Kennedy brought him in to run the Pentagon, and in that role he systematically escalated the Vietnam War as though the conflict were an assembly line. When he took over the World Bank in 1968, he continued to couple technocratic planning with mass destruction, sponsoring vast “development projects” whose most notable effect was to evict peasants from their land. Robert McNamara: the Organization Man as monster.

30. Newton Minow

The godfather of boob-tube nannying, Minow was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1961 to 1963. There he was a key advocate for the regulation of television. In a 1961 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, he famously described the era’s television programming as a “vast wasteland,” railed against the medium’s “mayhem, violence, sadism, murder,” and proposed that TV content should be strictly regulated in the name of the “public interest.”

31. Robert Moses

The most authoritarian city planner in New York history, Moses wielded eminent domain and many other government powers, unleashing his bulldozers and wrecking balls on the homes, businesses, and churches of as many as half a million powerless citizens, many of them black, brown, or poor.

32. Robert Mugabe

The racist, homophobic, and corrupt president of Zimbabwe has overseen record levels of inflation, destroying the purchasing power of citizens in a previously much more prosperous country. Forbidden from exiting the country with any assets, Zimbabweans have had to live under Mugabe’s brutal misrule for decades.

33. Richard Nixon

This American president launched the modern drug war, imposed wage and price controls, kept a pointless war going in Vietnam long after he knew it was hopeless, and imposed massive new bureaucracies on the American economy. Nixon’s vision of government in general had no clear limits, and his view of executive power helped him commit and collude in crimes that he thought were not crimes because he did them. Richard Nixon should be a cautionary tale for all future presidents, but all too often he serves as an example.

34. Henry Paulson

When the nation’s financial markets collapsed in the fall of 2008, Hank Paulson, secretary of the treasury for President George W. Bush, came in with guns blazing. In September of 2008, he proposed the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), a scheme he falsely advertised as a way to remove “illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy.” Instead it became a justification for an endless series of bailouts, including of non-banks like General Motors. Even TARP’s biggest proponents acknowledge that the economy has underperformed the past five years.

35. Sean Penn

When not chewing the scenery in overrated Oscar-winning films, the multimillionaire brother of Christopher Penn spends much of his time acting as an apologist for authoritarians like the late Hugo Chavez and the still-breathing Fidel Castro. When Chavez died, Penn said: “the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” That’s one way of putting it.

36. Pol Pot

A French school flunkie turned peasant revolutionary, Pol Pot might have been the most efficient murderer in communism’s grisly history. It took the dictator and his Khmer Rouge less than four years to kill and centrally plan to death up to 3 million people—20 percent of the Cambodian population.

37. Vladimir Putin

While many were optimistic that Russia would manage to modernize after almost a century of Marxist misery, the former KGB agent and Russian president has vindicated skeptics of liberal progress while clamping down on free speech, mucking about in Russia’s “near abroad,” and supporting horrid governments such as the Assad regime in Syria.

38. Bruce Ratner

A real estate tycoon and serial beneficiary of eminent domain abuse, Ratner partnered with New York officials in 2001 to forcibly evict some 55 midtown businesses standing in the way of a new headquarters for the New York Times Company. A few years later in Brooklyn, Ratner and his government allies seized and razed dozens of homes and businesses in order to build a basketball arena for a team then owned by Ratner himself.

39. Diane Ravitch

A school reformer turned union flack, this New York University professor did an about-face after four decades as one of the nation’s most prominent charter advocates. Part of the right-wing think tank braintrust that hatched the initial policy proposals for vouchers, she now says “Vouchers are a con, intended to destroy public education.” She has been welcomed with open arms by defenders of the status quo.

40. John Rawls

The philosophical father of 20th century liberalism, Rawls’ seminal Theory of Justice (1971) has dominated moral and political philosophy for decades. His framing of “justice as fairness” and his notion that societies should be arranged to improve the lot of the least advantaged subtly underpin nearly all of our national policy debates, lending a justification to multitudinous extensions of state power. His longtime rival, the libertarian thinker Robert Nozick, offered an alternative based in property rights and personal liberty. Sadly, Rawls has been more influential.

If (bad) conservative screenwriters set out to create a smugly liberal, lens-hungry New York senator, they’d come up with Charles Schumer—and they’d be criticized for creating a strawman. But Schumer is, somehow, real. He crusades sneeringly against guns, drugs, breakfast cereal, cybercurrencies, and caffeinated powders while supporting security-state legislation and cozying up with crony capitalists on Wall Street.

42. Steven Seagal

Starring in 20 of the worst action flicks ever made, all with titles like Above the Law and Executive Decision, Seagal also produced several ludicrous environmental message-movies, including one that ends with his character giving a four-minute speech about how “the internal combustion engine has been obsolete for 50 years.” He has made two truly awful records and been serially accused of sexual harassment, but what separates Seagal from most Hollywood scumbags is that he has also actively participated in gross law enforcement abuse, including a raid in Arizona that damaged a man’s house and killed his puppy.

43. Lamar Smith

The Internet threatened to shut down in protest last year when Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that sought to grant movie studios and record labels unprecedented power to police copyright. Under SOPA, studios and labels would’ve had the power to block offending sites from showing up in Google search results, and the authority to tell service providers which sites their customers couldn’t visit. In an Orwellian twist, SOPA also would have empowered “content creators” to prevent Internet users from discussing—on Facebook and other social media sites—how to circumvent SOPA.

44. Aaron Sorkin

A virtual assembly line for fictional authority-worship, Sorkin is the dramatist of choice for progressive technocrats. In the worlds detailed in West Wing and The Newsroom, all of America’s problems could be solved if those dumb, undereducated conservatives and independents would listen to their incorruptible Ivy League betters. Sorkin longs for an imaginary golden age of American government that never existed. Bonus points for being just as misogynist as any of the archconservatives he loathes.

45. Elizabeth Warren

One of the left’s foremost academic activists, Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat recently elected to the Senate, is a Harvard professor with a history of using shoddy scholarship to promote dubious public policies. She has exaggerated the prevalence of medical bankruptcy, argued that student loan rates should be set equal to bank loan rates, and pushed for controls on everything from credit cards to home loans. Warren’s life project amounts to an argument that most people are too stupid to know what to do with their money unless the government steps in to help.


Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

I have lots of questions about this!!!!
1) I have always suspected that the NSA can use it's supercomputers to crack PGP and other public key encrypted messages. But I suspected it took some effort to decrypt the messages. Is that still true??? Or it is now a trivial inexpensive task for NSA to read messages that are encrypted with PGP and other public key??

2) Just what are these "secret portals" or "hooks" that the NSA has created??? I suspect they are hooks that tell the encryption software used by HTTPS encryption to create encrypted data that is easily decrypted by NSA and other government agencies.

3) This shows that it is really not safe to put ANYTHING that you would like to keep secret from anybody, especially the government on the internet. Same goes for putting the data on telephone lines, radio waves or any public communication method.

Source

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

By Michael Winter USA Today Thu Sep 5, 2013 4:51 PM

U.S. and British intelligence agencies have cracked the encryption designed to provide online privacy and security, documents leaked by Edward Snowden show.

In their clandestine, decade-long effort to defeat digital scrambling, the National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have used supercomputers to crack encryption codes and have inserted secret portals into software with the help of technology companies, the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica reported Thursday.

The NSA has also maintained control over international encryption standards.

As the Times points out, encryption "guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world."

The NSA calls its decryption efforts the "price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace."

A 2010 memo describing an NSA briefing to British agents about the secret hacking said, "For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies. Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."

The GCHQ is working to penetrate encrypted traffic on what it called the "big four" service providers ---Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, the Guardian said.


Who needs back up files when you have the NSA????

Who needs backup files when the goons at the NSA, the FBI, Homeland Security, the TSA, the BATF, and DEA backing up all our files and emails for us for free.

Don't think of it as the government flushing the Bill of Rights down the toilet!!!

Think of it as a free file backup service run by government goons!!!!

Who needs back up files when you have the NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, DEA, BATF, Bush, Obama reading our email and spying on our internet use
Who needs back up files when you have the NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, DEA, BATF, Bush, Obama reading our email and spying on our internet use
Who needs back up files when you have the NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, DEA, BATF, Bush, Obama reading our email and spying on our internet use


N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

Here is the full article from the New York Times on what the NSA or National Security Agency and their English buddies the GCHQ or the Government Communications Headquarters have been doing to read your encrypted emails and listen to your encrypted phone calls.

The article says the NSA has been getting makers of ICs or integrated circuits to put back doors into their products so the NSA can read or listen to your data before the chip encrypts it.

The article says the NSA is also working with software vendors like Microsoft getting them to put back doors in their software products, again so the NSA can grab the data before the software encrypts it.


Journalist Facing Prison Over a Link

Placing a "link" or an "A tag" to a document is a Federal crime???

Placing a "link" or an "A tag" like <a href="xxx"> to a document the government doesn't like is a Federal crime???

"By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities ... are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it"

I guess that is just a cockamamie, convoluted, lame excuse to flush the First Amendment down the toilet by Obama's federal goons.

Source

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

By DAVID CARR

Published: September 8, 2013

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

In 2007, he co-wrote a well-received book, “Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny,” and over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy.

From all accounts, including his own, Mr. Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns. Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.

By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas — Mr. Brown lives in Dallas — are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. In the news release announcing the indictment, the United States attorney’s office explained, “By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.”

And the magnitude of the charges is confounding. Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to participating in the actual hacking of Stratfor in the first place, is facing a sentence of 10 years.

Last week, Mr. Brown and his lawyers agreed to an order that allows him to continue to work on articles, but not say anything about his case that is not in the public record.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Charles Swift, one of his lawyers, spoke carefully.

“Mr. Brown is presumed innocent of the charges against him and in support of the presumption, the defense anticipates challenging both the legal assumptions and the facts that underlie the charges against him,” he said.

Others who are not subject to the order say the aggressive set of charges suggests the government is trying to send a message beyond the specifics of the case.

“The big reason this matters is that he transferred a link, something all of us do every single day, and ended up being charged for it,” said Jennifer Lynch, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that presses for Internet freedom and privacy. “I think that this administration is trying to prosecute the release of information in any way it can.”

There are other wrinkles in the case. When the F.B.I. tried to serve a warrant on Mr. Brown in March 2012, he was at his mother’s house. The F.B.I. said that his mother tried to conceal his laptop and it charged her with obstruction of justice. (She pleaded guilty in March of this year and is awaiting sentencing.)

The action against his mother enraged Mr. Brown and in September 2012 he made a rambling series of posts to YouTube in which he said he was in withdrawal from heroin addiction. He proceeded to threaten an F.B.I. agent involved in the arrest, saying, “I don’t say I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids ... How do you like them apples?”

The feds did not like them apples. After he was arrested, a judge ruled he was “a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight.” In the video, Mr. Brown looks more like a strung-out heroin addict than a threat to anyone, but threats are threats, especially when made against the F.B.I.

“The YouTube video was a mistake, a big one,” said Gregg Housh, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who first introduced him to the activities of Anonymous. “But it is important to remember that the majority of the 105 years he faces are the result of linking to a file. He did not and has not hacked anything, and the link he posted has been posted by many, many other news organizations.”

At a time of high government secrecy with increasing amounts of information deemed classified, other routes to the truth have emerged, many of them digital. News organizations in receipt of leaked documents are increasingly confronting tough decisions about what to publish, and are defending their practices in court and in the court of public opinion, not to mention before an administration determined to aggressively prosecute leakers.

In public statements since his arrest, Mr. Brown has acknowledged that he made some bad choices. But punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n


Montgomery to Saldate - Please help us frame Debra Milke

Bill Montgomery to Armando Saldate - Please help us frame Debra Milke

In this article it sure sounds like Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is sending a message to crooked Phoenix Police Detective Armando Saldate saying he won't be charged with perjury if he helps Bill Montgomery frame Debra Milke for murder.

With prosecutors like Bill Montgomery and cops like Detective Armando Saldate it's almost guaranteed an innocent person won't get a fair trial.

I am not sure on this but I think according to the rules of the court Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is required to give Debra Milke any evidence that could help her prove her innocent. And that certainly would include evidence that Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate seems to be a lying scum back cop based on things he has done in the past.

An interesting case that is related to this is Brooklyn, New York where New York City Police Detective Louis Scarcella is suspected of framing around 50 people for murder. The similarities are amazing.

NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella is accused of making up imaginary confessions up out of thin air, just like Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate.

NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella is accused of giving criminal snitches drugs, money, reduced sentences and special favors in exchange for them making up imaginary evidence to convict people he was investigating of murder. Just like Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate.

And NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella is accused of beating people us to get confessions out of them. Just like Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate.

This case also has a lot of simularities to the Phoenix area Buddhist Temple murders in which four kids from Tucson were framed for the murders in the Buddhist Temple.

Source

Montgomery: Milke case detective being intimidated

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Sep 13, 2013 10:39 PM

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery delivered a message on Friday to the detective who allegedly received the disputed confession at the heart of the Debra Milke murder case: You have no reason to avoid testifying because you fear prosecution.

A lawyer for former Phoenix police Detective Armando Saldate told a trial judge on Thursday that he had recommended Saldate take advantage of his constitutional protection against self-incrimination if he is called to the witness stand in Milke’s retrial, a move that would bar her alleged confession from being considered in the case.

The confession was crucial to her conviction in the 1989 shooting death of her 4-year-old son, Christopher, which left two men on death row and sent Milke there for 22 years until her release last week.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out her conviction and death sentence earlier this year because the trial court refused to let her introduce evidence that could have discredited the confession. Prosecutors “remained unconstitutionally silent” about Saldate’s history of misconduct, including lying, the panel wrote.

And if Saldate doesn’t testify during Milke’s retrial, the confession will not be allowed into the retrial, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Rosa Mroz said Thursday.

In pointed remarks aimed at Saldate, his attorney and lawyers representing Milke, Montgomery said the belief that Saldate could face some sort of prosecution for the misconduct outlined in the 9th Circuit’s ruling is being used to intimidate the 21-year Phoenix police veteran and keep him from testifying. [What's wrong with threatening a crooked cop with being jailed for perjury if he lies in court or lied in court to frame Debra Milke for murder?]

And there is no reason for Saldate to believe he could implicate himself in criminal activity by testifying, Montgomery said.

“There is no basis for the state’s witness to be able to assert the Fifth Amendment … because there is no criminal conduct,” Montgomery said.

The panel that sent Milke’s case back to Maricopa County Superior Court also requested that the opinion be sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for investigation into whether Saldate’s misconduct outlined in the ruling amounted to a violation of Arizonans’ rights. Federal prosecutors sent a letter to Montgomery’s office in late August saying that the statute of limitations had expired on any misconduct by Saldate. [So the message to Detective Armando Saldate is please help us frame Milke because the statute of limitations is expired and you can't be charged with any crimes you committed when you helped frame her the first time???]

“There is no objective basis for Mr. Saldate to fear prosecution from anyone for anything,” Montgomery said. [because if he commits perjury helping me frame Debra Milke for murder I won't prosecute him for anything]

But investigative documents released late Friday afternoon by Milke’s defense team indicate that Saldate was reluctant to speak with police and prosecutors soon after the appeals court released its opinion.

An investigator for the County Attorney’s Office wrote that he contacted Saldate in April to talk about the case and was unable to reach him for months until the investigator served Saldate with a subpoena in late July.

An attorney representing Saldate did not return a call for comment Friday afternoon.

Montgomery spent nearly 20 minutes of his news conference on Friday going through cases where the 9th Circuit cited court rulings that noted potential misconduct on Saldate’s part, none of which were related to Milke’s confession but all of which should have been provided to her defense team at the time of her trial, according to the appeals court.

But Montgomery is convinced the 9th Circuit got it wrong, and the three-judge panel that sent Milke’s case back to court had it in for Saldate, who retired from Phoenix police within a year of taking the confession.

“The 9th Circuit, on a wild goose chase, went after detective Saldate,” Montgomery said.

So, Montgomery plans to file a memo with Mroz, who is the assigned judge for Milke’s trial, in the hopes of making her aware of some of the shortcomings he perceives in the federal appeals court’s opinion.

“It is very unusual,” Montgomery said, adding that he thought a unique approach was warranted.

“I was dumbfounded when I read the (9th Circuit) opinion and in researching what had actually happened in those cases, that the reality is very different from how they were characterized and the conclusions that were drawn,” he said.

An attorney for Milke questioned Montgomery’s analysis of the 9th Circuit opinion, noting that the panel drew its conclusions about Saldate from completed court cases, not pending allegations against the former detective.

“If you even look at the way (Montgomery) analyzes the facts, he doesn’t do that very well,” attorney Michael Kimerer said. “What I think he’s trying to do, quite frankly, is use the media to confuse the facts and issues.”


The DEA, CIA, FBI and NSA were reading my email

Several times in the past when I was reading my email I got messages saying that my session was disconnected because my email was being read at another IP address.

Of course I was paranoid and wonder was someone else really reading my email.

Of course my first guess was that it was one of my enemies like David Dorn.

And of course the second guess was that it was the government.

Of course now after Edward Snowden released his information that the government was spying on it that I realized that the government probably was involved with illegally reading my emails several times.

I also wondered why on Earth government would waste their time cracking my passwords.

Well again from the recently released information about government spying it turns out that the government wasn't cracking my passwords.

The NSA was simply twisting the arms of Google and Yahoo and getting them to give the government the passwords and email addresses of people the government considers to be criminals like me.

Of course the government's definition of a criminal seems to be any body that "thinks they have Constitutional rights" or anybody that expects the government to obey it's own laws.

And I guess by those definitions I am a criminal because I do think I have "Constitutional Rights" and I do expect the government to obey it's laws.

Of course I an not a criminal by the standards most normal people think of criminals being.

I don't steal stuff. I don't vandalize stuff. I don't destroy property.


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