Wait, Wait: Ohio law against lies meets 1st Amendment

By Rady Ananda
COTO Report

Is a Supreme Court brief ever gut-splitting funny? It is when satirist P. J. O’Rourke writes it.

Having served as a paralegal for a couple decades, and later as a writer who follows Supreme Court decisions on food and other matters, like most of the public, I’ve found their rulings inordinately dry, even amid their life-changing effects. So, when a friend passed on a link to a Friend-of-the-Court (amicus) brief in a recent First Amendment case against an Ohio law that criminalizes political lies, I expected more snooze material.

I was delightedly wrong. O’Rourke, who’s often a guest on NPR’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me, was assisted in the amicus brief by the CATO Institute, which promotes “individual liberty, free markets, and limited government.”

Former DoJ prosecutor sues Obama, Verizon, DoJ for $3B over PRISM

This is an action for violations of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the U.S.Constitution.  This is also an action for violations of privacy, including intrusion upon seclusion, freedom of expression and association, due process, and other illegal acts.

Occupy Wall Street Primer: Uniformed Thugs Are Not Legally Police

Oakland Use of Illegal Force

Why Wall Street Is Not Enough, This is War

By Gordon Duff
Veterans Today

The disease is police forces in a nation of laws violating those laws, those who are supposed to protect the public safety making it more than clear to us here at VT that they are willing to stoop to criminality to work for the 1%.

My point?  It isn’t just the banks.  We are no longer a nation of civil law, no longer a nation of accountability, and those who would limit OCW (Occupy Wall Street) to demonstrations against banks may very well be working for the other side.

Tyranny at Occupy Oakland: Tear gas video; LRADs on scene

…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Tonight marks the two-week anniversary of Occupy Oakland. Police have brought in sound cannons and have hit the crowd with tear gas, arresting several.

Regularly updating this piece with new video as it becomes available:

NY Cops Uphold Constitution: Refuse to Arrest Occupiers

Defying the orders of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Albany mayor Gerald Jennings, New York state troopers and Albany police refused to enforce a park curfew where an estimated 700 Occupy Albany protesters are camped, reports The Times Union.

Jackboot North American strategy to deny right to mass protest

By The Real News Network

Michael Ratner: “There is a North America-wide strategy to take away the right to mass protest.”

5 Ways DHS Violates the Constitution with Website Domain Seizures

By David Makarewicz
Activist Post

Last week, Bryan McCarthy, the 32 year old operator of ChannelSurfing.net, was arrested on charges of criminal copyright infringement.  ChannelSurfing.net was one of the streaming sports sites that had its domain seized by federal authorities shortly before the Super Bowl as part of the “In Our Sites” program, run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Prior to the seizure, McCarthy reportedly made more than $90,000 from advertisements on his site.

This arrest has once again raised questions about the In Our Sites program, in which the Government has seized thousands of domains accused, but not convicted, of copyright infringement, illegal streaming of sporting events, selling black market goods and distributing child pornography.  Critics ranging from bloggers to individual rights advocates to Senators have questioned the constitutionality of these seizures.

Clarence Thomas Faces Call for Disbarment

By Roger Shuler
Legal Schnauzer

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should be disbarred for his failure to truthfully complete financial-disclosure forms over a 20-year period, according to a complaint filed by the watchdog group Protect Our Elections (POE).

In a bar complaint filed with the Missouri Supreme Court, POE attorney Kevin Zeese says Thomas committed multiple violations of the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct. (See full complaint below.) Zeese asks the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel to take immediate action against Thomas, including disbarment.

Media Matters: Iceland a Port of Refuge

By Tesha Miller
Seismologik

Julian Assange’s creation of Wikileaks and its subsequent release of hundreds of thousands of classified US War and Diplomatic documents has become one of the most controversial journalistic undertakings of the day. The release of this sensitive material has spurned a global debate about the role of journalism in contemporary times and what level of information is appropriate for individual consumption. The amount of knowledge that the public has on national and international affairs depends directly upon the legislative outcomes to these new information challenges and ultimately, how we decide to protect journalists, whistleblowers and news media organizations.

Obama’s war on dissent

United resistance pushes back against FBI raids and grand jury

By Linda Averill
Freedom Socialist

War on terror? Nope, it’s a war on dissent, as the feds raid anti-war groups’ offices and homes and open a grand jury witch hunt. And, since the FS went to press, the government has delivered subpoenas to nine additional Midwest activists – bringing the total to 23. For more information, click here.

There Goes the Internet

By Glen Ford
Black Agenda Radio

With the “compromise” on Internet neutrality, President Obama has betrayed another campaign promise, and this time has no excuse that the Republicans made him do it. The outcome was really never in doubt, since Obama named as his FCC chairman a man who helped make radio and television into a corporate wasteland, under Bill Clinton’s administration.

Yahoo censors SOTT.net E-mail Edition

By Signs of the Times

Starting yesterday, 16 December 2010, Yahoo decided to return all 276 E-mail Editions sent to our subscribers who signed up with a Yahoo e-mail address.

In the past, we would receive returned messages because we are part of Yahoo’s “spam feedback loop”. This means that if someone labeled the E-mail Edition as junk, we would be notified. We would then promptly remove their e-mail address from the mailing list.

In addition, we received other detailed error messages from Yahoo explaining the reason why our E-mail Edition was rejected for a particular address.

This time, we got: “554 Content not allowed [299]”.

Justice Department Prepares for Ominous Expansion of ‘Anti-Terrorism’ Law Targeting Activists

By Michael Deutsch
TruthOut

In late September, the FBI carried out a series of raids of homes and antiwar offices of public activists in Minneapolis and Chicago. Following the raids, the Obama Justice Department subpoenaed 14 activists to a grand jury in Chicago and also subpoenaed the files of several antiwar and community organizations. In carrying out these repressive actions, the Justice Department was taking its lead from the Supreme Court’s 6-3 opinion last June in Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project, which decided that nonviolent First Amendment speech and advocacy “coordinated with” or “under the direction of” a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as “terrorist” was a crime.

The Internet Is the Collective Mind: Take Action

Amazon, PayPal, VISA and Mastercard allow the Ku Klux Klan in, but not WikiLeaks

By Dissident Priest
Seismologik

I would ask something of you. I would ask that you join with Anonymous in fighting the companies, industries, and individuals that would like to control the information available to you. That IS what the Anonymous attacks are all about. There really IS a concerted effort taking place to censor the Internet, and decide what YOU are allowed to know and experience. How does that make you feel? Personally, it makes me retch.

SPECIAL REPORT: Constitutional Law Research and Analysis of Forced Vaccination During Declaration of Martial Law, War, Outbreak or Pandemic

By Greg Glaser, Attorney at Law
Center for Advanced Medicine and Clinical Research
(Also at Scribd)

Constitutional Law Analysis 2010
Pandemic Response Project

Brief Excerpt from Introduction: Is it lawful for government powers in a Republic, like the United States, to force vaccination or quarantine in the event of declared martial law, war, outbreak or pandemic? No, in a Republic, the individual rights of humans to be “peacefully natural” categorically defeat a government‘s emergency powers, unless the government can lawfully establish any of the following….

To: Professional Panel of the Pandemic Response Project
From: Greg Glaser, Attorney at Law
Date: October 15, 2010

Google Blacklists Prison Planet.com

Double standards: You Tube targets the Alex Jones Channel for showing a brief segment of a video that appears on hundreds of other You Tube channels, including Russia Today and CBS News.

You Tube freezes Alex Jones Channel as web censorship accelerates in frightening early salvo of move towards tiered Internet system that favors large corporations while strangling independent voices

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

In a damning new lurch towards web censorship, Google’s news aggregator has blacklisted Prison Planet and Infowars despite the fact that both websites are internationally known and now attract more traffic than many mainstream media websites, while Google-owned You Tube has frozen the Alex Jones Channel based on a spurious complaint about showing Wikileaks footage that has been carried on hundreds of other You Tube channels for months.

Banner on Penn. Ave: ‘MR. OBAMA: END THESE FUCKING WARS! WAR IS THE OBSCENITY’

Veterans’ 25 x 17 banner tells it straight to Obama at 555 PA Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. Photo by Ellen Davidson (Click here for larger image.)

By David Swanson
War Is a Crime

Today at 1:00pm eastern time, U.S. military veterans hung an enormous banner on the front of the Newseum, wrapping their message around the First Amendment chiseled in five stories of limestone.

Opposed to the wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine, the vets’ message said loud and clear: “MR. OBAMA: END THESE FUCKING WARS! WAR IS THE OBSCENITY.”