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Justice Scalia's scathing dissent in Supreme Court ruling to allow searches based on anonymous tip

Liz Klimas
The Blaze
Wed, 23 Apr 2014 09:35 UTC
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© Downtrend.com
"A freedom-destroying cocktail."

That's how Justice Antonin Scalia characterized Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling that law enforcement officers may pull over and search drivers based solely on an anonymous tip.

The justices ruled 5-4 Tuesday to uphold a traffic stop in northern California in which officers subsequently found marijuana in the vehicle. The officers themselves did not see any evidence of the tipped reckless driving, which was interpreted as drunkenness, even after following the truck for several minutes.

Justice Clarence Thomas said the tip phoned in to 911 that a Ford pickup truck had run the caller off the road was sufficiently reliable to allow for the traffic stop without violating the driver's constitutional rights.
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Stock Down

Sacrificing the world economy to bring down Russia

Kurt Nimmo
infowars.com
Tue, 29 Apr 2014 10:23 UTC
The United States and the unelected European Union nomenklatura have decided to sacrifice the world economy in a bid to punish Russia for its response to the crisis in Ukraine.

British Finance Minister says economic pain suffered by sanctions price worth paying.
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Star of David

Australia: Barrister warns Premier of Holocaust denial risk if hate speech laws repealed

Sean Nicholls
The Sydney Morning Herald
Mon, 07 Apr 2014 15:16 UTC
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© Alan Porritt/AAP
Changes to the Racial Discrimination Act proposed by federal Attorney-General George Brandis would ''open the door to Holocaust deniers'', allowing them to publish their claims with impunity, legal advice to NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell says.

The opinion by leading barrister Arthur Moses, SC, says the changes would ''radically narrow the protection that Australian citizens will receive from racial vilification'' and ''undermine the very purpose'' of the act.

''A new legislative right to engage in racial vilification in the course of public discussion would, for instance, open the door to Holocaust deniers to publish their opinions on websites and on social media in the course of 'public discussion','' he writes in the opinion handed to Mr O'Farrell on Friday.

Senator Brandis plans to abolish section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to publicly ''offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate'' a person. Section 18D, which provides protections for freedom of speech, will be removed.
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Red Flag

Impeachment proceedings begin against Missouri governor for saying gay couples could have equal tax breaks

David Edwards
The Raw Story
Wed, 23 Apr 2014 10:26 UTC
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© Orlin Wagner/AP
Republicans in the Missouri legislature are schedule to begin impeachment proceedings against Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon on Wednesday because he has said that same-sex couples could file state returns jointly, allowing them to receive the same tax breaks as straight couples.

Although Missouri does not allow same-sex couples to marry within the state, Nixon announced last year that couples who were married out of state could file jointly. The governor argued that because Missouri's tax system was so closely linked to the federal system, it made sense to follow federal guidelines.

According to Ituit's TurboTax tips, filing jointly allows married couples to receive one of the largest standard deductions possible.

"On the other hand, couples who file separately receive few tax considerations. Separate returns may give you a higher tax with a higher tax rate. The standard deduction for separate filers is far lower than that offered to joint filers," Intuit noted.
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USA

May 1 - "Workers' Day" in the rest of the world - officially declared "Loyalty Day" by President Obama - Loyalty to whom?

Jon Wiener
The Nation
Thu, 01 May 2014 12:12 UTC
loyalty day
© AP Photo/Nick UtThousands of demonstrators march along Wilshire Boulevard during an immigration protest in Los Angeles, May 1, 2006.
For more than a century, May 1 has been celebrated as International Workers' Day. It's a national holiday in more than eighty countries. But here in the land of the free, May 1 has been officially declared "Loyalty Day" by President Obama. It's a day "for the reaffirmation of loyalty" - not to the international working class, but to the United States of America.

Obama isn't the first president to declare May 1 Loyalty Day - that was President Eisenhower, in 1959, after Congress made it an official holiday in the fall of 1958. Loyalty Day, the history books explain, was "intended to replace" May Day. Every president since Ike has issued an official Loyalty Day proclamation for May 1.

The presidential proclamation always calls on people to "display the flag." In case you were wondering, that's the stars and stripes, not the red flag. Especially in the fifties, if you didn't display the stars and stripes on Loyalty Day, your neighbors might conclude that you were some kind of red.

During the 1930s and 1940s, May Day parades in New York City involved hundreds of thousands of people. Labor unions, Communist and Socialist parties, and left-wing fraternal and youth groups would march down Fifth Avenue and end up at Union Square for stirring speeches on class solidarity.

Comment: If "Loyalty Day" were anything other than a crude attempt to foster unquestioning compliance in the American people -- for example, if it actually confirmed the American people's loyalty to objective values -- Obama would be thrown out of office and the entire government would be restructured from the bottom up. Liberty, equality, and justice to all is currently exactly what Wiener says it is: an empty cliche, with no meat on its bones.

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Star of David

Pink Floyd's Roger Waters: Comparisons between Israel and Nazis 'crushingly obvious'

Travis Gettys
Raw Story
Wed, 11 Dec 2013 12:00 UTC
roger waters

Former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters said the comparisons between present-day Israel and Nazi Germany in the 1930s were "crushingly obvious."

Waters, a longtime critic of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, told CounterPunch magazine on Saturday that the powerful "Israeli propaganda machine" had influenced U.S. policy in the region and shaped the mainstream media narrative.

"The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock 'n' roll, as they say," Waters said.

He has called on musicians to boycott Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, which he also compared to ethnic cleansing and South African apartheid.
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Bad Guys

Ukraine begins army offensive to regain Slavyansk; Separatists fight back, shoot down helicopters

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Fri, 02 May 2014 08:12 UTC
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© REUTERS/Baz RatnerUkrainian soldiers stand guard at a Ukrainian checkpoint near the eastern town of Slaviansk May 2, 2014.
After a few days of extended verbal foreplay, it was only a matter of time before Ukraine finally snapped and resumed a military operation to regain the lost cities in the east, especially once the warmongering IMF made it explicitly clear that should Ukraine lose control of pro-Russian controlled cities the $17 billion bailout package would be lost too. Sure enough, early this morning Kiev launched a military operation to regain control of the pro-Russian separatist stronghold of Slovyansk, overrunning numerous roadblocks and surrounding the city, officials said, but meeting stiff resistance from militants who managed to shoot down at least one helicopter.
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Compass

'The State should never be the arbiter of what people can think' says new Australian attorney general

Brendon O'Niell
Spiked Online
Thu, 17 Apr 2014 07:55 UTC
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© Alan Porritt/AAP
Brendan O'Neill meets the Voltaire-inspired attorney general of Australia

Ever since Captain Cook set foot here, Australia's exotic creatures have wowed the rest of the world. Mammals that lay eggs! Marsupials that hop! Well today, Australia contains what must surely count as the most exotic, rarely sighted creature of the twenty-first century: a politician who believes in freedom of speech. Extinct in Europe, seriously endangered in America, this most hunted of the modern era's political beasts still survives Down Under, and it goes by the name of George Brandis.

'I'm a John Stuart Mill man', Brandis tells me, over too much booze and amazing food at one of Sydney's oldest political haunts, which is called - wait for it - Machiavelli's. Brandis is the senator for Queensland for the ruling right-wing Liberal Party, a key cog in the government of Liberal PM Tony Abbott, and, most importantly, the attorney general of Australia. This basically means he's in charge of Australian law and justice. And since taking office with the election of Abbott in 2013, Brandis has doggedly, and often controversially, devoted himself to reforming the section of the Oz Racial Discrimination Act that forbids people from 'offending, insulting or humiliating' a person or group on the basis of their racial or ethnic origins. Why has he done this? Why is he so determined to rip up restrictions on insulting ethnic minorities? Why has he allowed himself to be branded by many on the Australian left as a 'friend of bigots' who is using his power to help 'unleash Australia's racists'?
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Quenelle

Apple, Facebook, others defy authorities, notify users of secret data demand

Craig Timberg
The Washington Post
Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00 UTC
Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators' demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Fueling the shift is the industry's eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year's disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

As this position becomes uniform across the industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.
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Padlock

Russian resources minister says nyet: Moscow will not bargain with illegal Ukranian over Crimea's water supply


RT
Tue, 29 Apr 2014 18:11 UTC
crimea water
© Agence France-Presse/Yuriy Lashov
A picture taken in the Crimea's Kirovsky region on April 27, 2014, shows a man pumping out water from the nearly empty Northern Crimean Canal, which supplies the peninsula's water.
Russia will not engage in political bargaining with the Ukrainian government over its decision to cut off Crimea's water supply, Russian natural resources minister Sergey Donskoy said.

"The situation clearly shows that Kiev is unfriendly towards the people of Crimea. We're not surprised by this as recent developments characterize the regime in Kiev as anti-popular," Donskoy said, as quoted by Itar-Tass news agency.

Moscow will not take part in political bargaining because "it's the ordinary people who suffer" from water shortages, the minister said as he arrived in the city of Sevastopol.

Donskoy stressed that Crimea's agricultural industry is most affected in the current situation, but added that "we'll find ways to compensate the water demands."

"In Crimea, a lot of water is wasted. It's dumped into the sea. There's no water recycling in place, which would enable us to use water for technical needs after preliminary processing," he said.

The minister added that Crimea's water supply system is in rather bad shape after decades of Ukrainian rule.
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