Apr 08 2013
As you may have heard by now, Camp Quest Oklahoma was thrown out of a fundraiser that they had arranged at a BBQ joint called Oklahoma Joe’s. Dave Muscato, PR Director for American Atheists, spoke to the organizers of the event and has the details in that Reddit thread:
Apr 02 2013
After royally screwing up a ruling on the use of dogs to sniff for drugs a few weeks ago, and in the midst of all the attention paid to the marriage equality cases, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Florida v Jardines that at least puts some limits on the use of dogs to …
Mar 27 2013
Like his father, Rand Paul can be maddening. Sometimes he sounds like a complete lunatic and other times he’s not only on the right side but is virtually alone in Congress in taking the right stand. That’s why ThinkProgress says that Democrats should be saying the things he’s saying about the disastrous war on drugs:
Mar 27 2013
Ellis Washington’s latest Worldnutdaily column is yet another inane and badly reasoned attack on liberal jurisprudence, this time focusing on the 6th Amendment, which details most of the protections for those accused of committing a crime. That amendment says:
Mar 26 2013
There’s an important class action lawsuit going on in New York that challenges the NYPD’s stop and frisk program, which subjects almost 700,000 people a year to humiliating and unnecessary searches while walking the streets, almost all of them — 87% — black and Latino. And one police officer has a tape of his supervisor …
Mar 22 2013
In the book he finished shortly before his death, Robert Bork delivered the familiar rhetoric of the right about the evils of unelected judges taking decisions out of the hands of the people and their appointed representatives by overturning laws passed democratically:
Mar 19 2013
BBC News has an interesting article with information that, with all the study I’ve done of Thomas Jefferson, I had never come across before. One of the influences on him when it came to religious and political liberty was Cyrus, the Persian king who conquered Babylonia in the sixth century BC.
Mar 14 2013
In a very encouraging development, the Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest in Garcia v. Montgomery County to support a First Amendment right to record the police. The case involves a journalist who was arrested for doing so in Maryland.
Mar 14 2013
At the end of February, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling declaring Florida’s drug testing requirement for those who receive financial assistance from the state to be unconstitutional. This was an absolutely open and shut case, so it’s not surprising that Mat Staver, the dumbest lawyer …
Mar 13 2013
In a rare en banc ruling, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, for the first time, said that the 4th Amendment does have at least some application in searches performed on those entering the country, particularly searches of one’s computer. Previously, the courts have held that border searches were essentially unlimited, with no need for …
Mar 13 2013
John Brennan was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden as the new director of the CIA and he did it in a way that I would ordinarily support a lot: He put his hand on the constitution rather than the Bible. But as Marcy Wheeler points out, there was some appropriate symbolism here:
Mar 12 2013
An atheist police officer in Puerto Rico has filed a federal lawsuit with the help of the ACLU claiming that he was retaliated against after not taking part in a prayer at the precinct. You can read the full complaint here and an article on Raw Story as well.
Mar 11 2013
My friend Radley Balko, who has done more than any other person in the country to document and combat the militarization of law enforcement, and the inevitable abuses that come with it, is finally getting some serious institutional help. The ACLU is launching a major project on the subject:
Mar 08 2013
Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that Google has released information that shows the FBI is spying on as many as a thousand people through their Google accounts. But they can’t get any more specific than that because it might hurt national security for weird, vague, unstated reasons.
Mar 05 2013
Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor and one of the expert witnesses in the Bradley Manning case, has a long and very compelling article in the New Republic about the dangers of that prosecution and how it is being pursued primarily as a deterrent to future whistleblowers. I found this passage particularly prescient:
:)
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