The site for ranting and reporting by John Masters
A general category for things related to our society and how we interact with one another.
Bruce Brendlin was arrested in 2001 for drug possession after a car in which he was a passenger was stopped by Yuba City police. The State had conceded there was no basis for the original vehicle stop, so Brendlin had argued that the drug evidence should be suppressed. The Associated Press is reporting that the Supreme Court has ruled that passengers in automobiles have the same Constitutional protections from illegal searches.
Read moreI only caught the tail end of the report, but it appears, based on what I was hearing on WRAL that in a statement in his State Bar hearing, Durham DA Nifong announced that he was going to step down as DA. According to the WRAL reporter, he was “nearly in tears.”
Read moreWow, the courts have sure been busy lately. They given us lots of fun stuff to cover. Let’s see what we have:
Read moreThis is a wrap of smaller news items for the week ending June 10, 2007.
Read moreLast week the U.S. Military reported finding Al Qaeda torture manuals in a “safe house” in Iraq. The pro-torture wingnuts are all atwitter with the news, as they get out there to say, “they do it too.” As if that’s all the license the U.S. needs to condone torture.
Read moreThis is one of the funniest things I’ve seen yet on YouTube. It’s an ad for “immunity,” the cure for republican memory loss.
Read moreThere is a story making the rounds you can expect to see the religious right latch onto in their desperate attempts to paint the pending Hate Crimes Legislation as something that will make “thoughts” illegal. They’re even calling it the “Thought Crimes” Bill. This is about the case of a 16-year-old teen in Crystal Lake, Illinois who was arrested for passing out a flyer?
Read moreSteve Benen, in a post at Crooks and Liars makes an excellent point about the U.S. Attorney firings. It seems that all these high ranking Justice Department officials have been asked who created the list of the U.S. Attorneys to be fired, and none of them know. I guess given Bush’s divine dispensation, it just floated down from heaven.
Read moreCampbell County authorities arrested a Liberty University student for having several homemade bombs in his car. The student, 19-year-old Mark D. Uhl of Amissville, Va., reportedly told authorities that he was making the bombs to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service.
Read moreI’m posting the weekly news round up early this week, May 20, 2007. I have to be in Orlando tomorrow morning (Sunday) at 8am to attend a software conference.
Read moreThe North Carolina wingnuts here will not quit. House Bill 493 is back and the Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly are trying to bring it to a floor vote next week by using a procedural end-run to recall the anti-gay amendment from the Rules Committee.
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