This nuisance law passed by the right wing, ultra-ignorant of the US Constitution, Tennessee legislature is most assuredly unconstitutional and unenforceable even if it were. Can you just picture the mile high stack of law suits filed in Tennessee courts? Can you imagine the cost to the state? Smaller government? LMAO
Rachel Maddow reports on a new Tennessee law that bans the transmission or display of an image on-line that can frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress to someone who sees it.
Goldman Sachs has received a subpoena from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, which is investigating the investment bank’s role in the financial crisis, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The inquiry stems from a 650-page Senate report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that indicated Goldman had misled clients and Congress about its practices related to mortgage-linked securities.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who headed up the Congressional inquiry, had sent his findings to the Justice Department to figure out whether executives broke the law. The agency said it was reviewing the report.
The subpoena come two weeks after lawyers for Goldman Sachs met with the attorney general of New York’s office for an “exploratory” meeting about the Senate report, the people said.
The subpoena is apparently based on information contained in a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on Wall Street’s role in the housing market collapse. The report was critical of Goldman Sachs, and accused the bank of misleading buyers of mortgage-linked investments.
Is this what our brave men and women fought and died for, a police state? Bush had people arrested at his rallies for tee shirts and bumper stickers, now people are being arrested for dancing which the courts are ruling is a form of “protest”. What would Jefferson have thought about this and the way the Park Police behaved?
This country stands on the edge of no longer existing as the Founding Father’s envisioned in the Constitution. Congress is about to infer on the Executive branch unprecedented power to wage war anywhere, detain or assassinate anyone, anywhere without due process and continue the expansion of the national security and surveillance state. The renewal of the reviled Patriot Act, is slated to be passed by congress with bipartisan approval today. As Jon Walker so astutely observes:
The often praised “bipartisanship” is rarely ever the product of both parties coming together around what the people want, and almost always about using each other as cover to avoid electoral consequences for voting in opposition to the will of the electorate.
The controversial Patriot Act, a bill once despised by almost every Democrat, passed cloture in the Senate on Monday night by 74 to 8. As Glen Greenwald noted only bills in support of Israel get this kind of near unanimous support. Eight Senators voting against cloture were Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, Democrats Jeff Merkley, Mark Begich, Max Baucus, and John Tester, and GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, and Dean Heller. Tester and Paul spoke out specifically, objecting to the most egregious parts of the bill and the need for reform.
I have to give Rand Paul credit here, demonstrating more integrity than Obama, since he is insisting on these reforms and will use delaying tactics to prevent the bill’s re-authorization without them despite threats from Sen Diane Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Sen. Paul announced that he was considering using delaying tactics to hold up passage of the bill in order to extract some reforms (including ones he is co-sponsoring with the Democrats’ Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Leahy, who — despite voicing “concerns” about the bill — voted for cloture). Paul’s announcement of his delaying intentions provoked this fear-mongering, Terrorism-exploiting, bullying threat from the Democrats’ Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, Dianne Feinstein:
“I think it would be a huge mistake,” Feinstein told reporters. “If somebody wants to take on their shoulders not having provisions in place which are necessary to protect the United States at this time, that’s a big, big weight to bear.”
In other words: Paul and the other dissenting Senators better give up their objections and submit to quick Patriot Act passage or else they’ll have blood on their hands from the Terrorist attack they will cause. That, of course, was the classic Bush/Cheney tactic for years to pressure Democrats into supporting every civil-liberties-destroying measure the Bush White House demanded (including, of course, the original Patriot Act itself), and now we have the Democrats — ensconced in power — using it just as brazenly and shamelessly (recall how Bush’s DNI, Michael McConnell, warned Congressional Democrats in 2007 that unless they quickly passed without changes the new FISA bill the Bush White House was demanding, a Terrorist attack would likely occur at the Congress in a matter of “days, not weeks”; McConnell then told The New Yorker: “If we don’t update FISA, the nation is significantly at risk”). Feinstein learned well.
Paul and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) are preparing to introduce an amendment to the PATRIOT Act that would phase out some of the most controversial components of the national security law but that may not happen. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is preparing to do an end run around Senate procedures by including the Patriot Act in another bill from the House that has already passed in the Senate but was amended in the House. David Waldman explains this better:
Harry Reid turned the Senate around in it consideration of the PATRIOT Act renewal. Instead of fighting it out on cloture on the motion to proceed to the bill, and then having to fight another cloture battle on the bill itself, he’s pulling a nifty parliamentary trick that allows him to skip on of the cloture fights. The House just got done passing S. 990, a small business bill, and has sent it back to the Senate, apparently amended in some way (although they passed it under suspension of the rules, which doesn’t permit amendments, so I missed whatever process they might have used to change it between receiving it on Monday and passing it on Tuesday).
At any rate, the bill having been amended, it now returns to the Senate for their approval of its new form. And here’s where the trick comes in: Reid will move to agree to the House amendment, but add just one more. That additional amendment will be… to remove the entire existing text and replace it with the text of S. 1038, the PATRIOT Act renewal bill they were just trying to get to the floor.
Why do that? Because although you can filibuster the amendment (or technically, the motion to concur in the House amendment with a further amendment), if you manage to get cloture on that and vote it through, it has the effect of sending a completed PATRIOT Act bill over to the House, with no second cloture vote needed.
It’s a nifty trick and I always admire it, but I wish it wasn’t happening with the damn PATRIOT Act.
It seems that Congress and the President are determined to continue shredding the Constitution by extending the Patriot Act another 4 years. I cry for this country.
Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman and Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, have entered into an agreement that will grant Mr. Schneiderman powers to criminally prosecute corruption involving taxpayer money, significantly expanding the attorney general’s authority to pursue public integrity cases.
Under the agreement, the comptroller and the attorney general will establish a joint task force on public integrity. Mr. Schneiderman’s prosecutors will work with Mr. DiNapoli’s investigators and auditors looking into legislative earmarks, state pensions and government contracts.
But in a twist, Mr. DiNapoli has also agreed to employ a little-known provision of state law to refer any findings from joint investigations to Mr. Schneiderman for criminal prosecution.
“We’ll coordinate our respective roles to uncover and prosecute government waste, fraud and abuse,” Mr. DiNapoli said in a statement. “This is a powerful message: New York’s two independently elected oversight officials are partnering together to ensure integrity and accountability to every level of government in New York State.
snip
“It could be a very effective approach,” said Eric R. Dinallo, who headed the securities bureau in the attorney general’s office under Eliot Spitzer and was later superintendent of the State Insurance Department. “If you can’t get legislative relief around ethics issues in government and you’re trying to get jurisdiction, sometimes the law has all the jurisdiction you need – if you look at it in a creative way.”
Dahlia Lithwick, a lawyer and senior editor at Slate, spoke with Cenk Uygur about returning the rule of law to thus country now that Osama bin Laden is dead. She calls for President Obama to fulfill his campaign promises to close Guantanamo, end military tribunal in lieu of Article III trials. In her article at Slate she discusses “Closing Pandora’s Box” ending the euphemistic “was on terror”:
So now what? Legally speaking, there are two broad lessons to derive from the Obama administration’s latest salvo in the war on terror. One is that it shows the need to continue operating outside legal norms indefinitely. The other is that it allows us to declare a symbolic victory over terrorism and return once more to the pre-9/11 regime in which the rule of law is inviolate.
snip
About all we can say with certainty is this: We tortured. We live in a world in which we must contend with information obtained by torture. We now need to decide whether we want to continue to live that way. Writers from ideological backgrounds as diverse as Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat argue that it is time to return to the paradigm abandoned after 9/11. Let’s put the 9/11 attacks and the existential threat it created behind us. With Bin Laden’s death, let’s simply agree that the objectives of the Bush administration’s massive anti-terror campaign have finally been achieved, and that the time for extra-legal, extra-judicial government programs-from torture, to illegal surveillance, to indefinite detention, to secret trials, to nontrials, to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay-has now passed. There will be no better marker for the end of this era. There will be no better time to inform the world that our flirtation with a system of shadow-laws was merely situational and that the situation now is over.
Although, I agree with Ms. Lithwick that President Obama has a grand opportunity to fulfill some of his campaign promises ending many of the extra-legal abuses of the Bush administration and his own, I disagree on others. Without prosecuting US war criminals — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, all the lawyers and military commanders — the United States will never regain the stature it once had in the world in Human Rights. Pretending it never happened not going to make all the violations of International and US law go away. It is unrealistic to think it will.
The first four Directors of the CIA (from 1947-1953) were military officers, but since then, there has been a tradition (generally though imperfectly observed) of keeping the agency under civilian rather than military leadership. That’s why George Bush’s 2006 nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to the CIA provoked so many objections from Democrats (and even some Republicans).
The Hayden nomination triggered this comment from the current Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein: “You can’t have the military control most of the major aspects of intelligence. The CIA is a civilian agency and is meant to be a civilian agency.” The then-top Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, said “she hears concerns from civilian CIA professionals about whether the Defense Department is taking over intelligence operations” and “shares those concerns.” On Meet the Press, Nancy Pelosi cited tensions between the DoD and the CIA and said: “I don’t see how you have a four-star general heading up the CIA.” Then-Sen. Joe Biden worried that the CIA, with a General in charge, will “just be gobbled up by the Defense Department.” Even the current GOP Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, voiced the same concern about Hayden: “We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time.”
Of course, like so many Democratic objections to Bush policies, that was then and this is now. Yesterday, President Obama announced — to very little controversy — that he was nominating Gen. David Petraeus to become the next CIA Director. The Petraeus nomination raises all the same concerns as the Hayden nomination did, but even more so: Hayden, after all, had spent his career in military intelligence and Washington bureaucratic circles and thus was a more natural fit for the agency; by contrast, Petraues is a pure military officer and, most of all, a war fighting commander with little background in intelligence. But in the world of the Obama administration, Petraeus’ militarized, warrior orientation is considered an asset for running the CIA, not a liability.
That’s because the CIA, under Obama, is more militarized than ever, as devoted to operationally fighting wars as anything else, including analyzing and gathering intelligence….
We’re a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.
I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even pretend to be one on the Internet but the above statement, according to the Constitution of the United States, is just so egregiously wrong that it is hard to believe that it was uttered by a lawyer much less one that purports to be a “Constitutional Law Professor” and sits in the Oval Office. If I were a lawyer, I’d be embarrassed by this man claim to be a member of my profession. As a citizen of the Unites States, I am more than embarrassed, I am ashamed.
Not just worse than Bush but worse than Richard Nixon, too. I can’t imagine Eric Holder telling Obama to say he “mispoke”.
“Here was a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.”
What I didn’t recall from that time was that John Mitchell, easily American history’s crookedest Attorney General ever, was at Nixon’s side when he made that statement in Denver. He recognized right away that there was a serious problem with Nixon’s statement:
“This has got to be clarified,” he told Presidential Aide John Ehrlichman immediately afterward.
Even in an era of news moving only as fast as the wire services, reporters rushed to telephones and the story moved. In half an hour, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler appeared before reporters:
After some minutes of verbal fencing, Ziegler agreed that Nixon’s words about Manson should be retracted. When Ziegler told Nixon what had happened, the President was surprised: “I said ‘charged,’ ” he replied.
Which, of course, Nixon had not said. And, as in Obama’s case, there was video.
During the 3½-hour flight back to Washington, Mitchell persuaded Nixon to put out a statement backing Ziegler up. It read in part: “The last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person in any circumstances. I do not know and did not intend to speculate as to whether or not the Tate defendants are guilty, in fact, or not.”
This is the President of the United States speaking about a US military soldier detained for almost a year on charges of leaking classified (but not top secret, the level of files released by Ellsberg) documents. Manning’s lawyer is considering considered (corrected: his transfer made the writ moot) filing a writ of habeus corpus for the length of time and totality of abuse suffered by Manning while in military custody.
President Obama has already made up his mind. He thinks Manning “broke the law.” It’s no wonder he considered Manning’s abuse to “meet our basic standards” when he thinks Manning is already guilty.
But even more fascinating is Obama’s invocation of America’s status as a “nation of laws” to justify why Manning must be punished. That would be a very moving homage to the sanctity of the rule of law — if not for the fact that the person invoking it is the same one who has repeatedly engaged in the most extraordinary efforts to shield Bush officials from judicial scrutiny, investigation, and prosecution of every kind for their war crimes and surveillance felonies. Indeed, the Orwellian platitude used by Obama to justify that immunity — Look Forward, Not Backward — is one of the greatest expressions of presidential lawlessness since Richard Nixon told David Frost that “it’s not illegal if the President does it.”
But it’s long been clear that this is Obama’s understanding of “a nation of laws”: the most powerful political and financial elites who commit the most egregious crimes are to be shielded from the consequences of their lawbreaking — see his vote in favor of retroactive telecom immunity, his protection of Bush war criminals, and the way in which Wall Street executives were permitted to plunder with impunity — while the most powerless figures (such as a 23-year-old Army Private and a slew of other low-level whistleblowers) who expose the corruption and criminality of those elites are to be mercilessly punished. And, of course, our nation’s lowest persona non grata group — accused Muslim Terrorists — are simply to be encaged for life without any charges. Merciless, due-process-free punishment is for the powerless; full-scale immunity is for the powerful. “Nation of laws” indeed.
And lest we forget that last year this same president appointed himself not only judge and jury but executioner as well.
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.
The Bush/Cheney cabal may have shredded the Constitution, this president wants to bury it.
Former New York governor and attorney general general, now CNN talk show host Eliot Spitzer appeared on Anderson Cooper’s “360” with “Rolling Stone” editor and blogger, Matt Taibbi discussing the two year investigation of the financial institutions that “plunged the U.S. economy into a painful recession”. The Senate subcommittee’s 650 page report that was released on April 13th is a scathing indictment of cover-ups, lies, the conflict of interest of regulators and the cozy relationship with ratings agencies. During the discussion, Spitzer challenged Attorney General Eric Holder to either prosecute Goldman Sachs or resign:
SPITZER: Senator, I’m going to take a leap. I’m going to say it out loud. Very directly.
Goldman Sachs, you lied to the public. You lied to your clients. You’ve got a problem. You come on the show. Sue me. I don’t care. You lied to the public, you should be prosecuted.
I’m going to say it right now. And I hope they are.
It isn’t surprising that the “powers that be” went after Spitzer because this is the man who should be the US Attorney General.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.
Senator Carl Levin, releasing the findings of a two-year inquiry yesterday, said he wants the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine whether Goldman Sachs violated the law by misleading clients who bought the complex securities known as collateralized debt obligations without knowing the firm would benefit if they fell in value.
The Michigan Democrat also said federal prosecutors should review whether to bring perjury charges against Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and other current and former employees who testified in Congress last year. Levin said they denied under oath that Goldman Sachs took a financial position against the mortgage market solely for its own profit, statements the senator said were untrue.
By Tom Braithwaite in Washington and Francesco Guerrera and Justin Baer in New York,
Financial Times
April 14 2011 00:15 | Last updated: April 14 2011 00:15
US Senate investigators probing the financial crisis will refer evidence about Wall Street institutions including Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to the justice department for possible criminal investigations, officials said on Wednesday.
Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the powerful Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, said a two-year probe found that banks mis-sold mortgage-backed securities and misled investors and lawmakers.
“We will be referring this matter to the justice department and to the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission),” he said. “In my judgment, Goldman clearly misled their clients and they misled Congress.”
A voluminous report on the financial crisis by the United States Senate – citing internal documents and private communications of bank executives, regulators, credit ratings agencies and investors – describes business practices that were rife with conflicts during the mortgage mania and reckless activities that were ignored inside the banks and among their federal regulators.
The 650-page report, “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,” was released Wednesday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations…
…
…The result of two years’ work, the report focuses on an array of institutions with central roles in the mortgage crisis: Washington Mutual, an aggressive mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008; the Office of Thrift Supervision, a regulator; the credit ratings agencies Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service; and the investment banks Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
“The report pulls back the curtain on shoddy, risky, deceptive practices on the part of a lot of major financial institutions,” Mr. Levin said in an interview. “The overwhelming evidence is that those institutions deceived their clients and deceived the public, and they were aided and abetted by deferential regulators and credit ratings agencies who had conflicts of interest.”
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