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Inspirational Minute: Words From Iyanla Vanzant

Radio Kill Her — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:11:41 +0000

“Duck Behind God, When The Crazy Starts Flying”

D (Dodge) U (underdeveloped) C (consciousness) K (kindly) – Iyanla Vanzant

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Tennessee Tea Party Groups Demand Textbooks Overlook US Founders’ Slave-Owning History

News Talk 216 — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:31:06 +0000

via huffingtonpost.com

A little more than a year after the conservative-led state board of education in Texas approved massive changes to its school textbooks to put slavery in a more positive light, a group of Tea Party activists in Tennessee has renewed its push to whitewash school textbooks. The group is seeking to remove references to slavery and mentions of the country’s founders being slave owners.

According to reports, Hal Rounds, the Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said during a recent news conference that there has been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” Rounds said, according to The Commercial Appeal.

During the news conference more than two dozen Tea Party activists handed out material that said, “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

And that further teaching would also include that “the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy.”

The group demanded, as they had in January of last year, that Tennessee lawmakers change state laws governing school curricula. The group called for textbook selection criteria to include: “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

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Article courtesy huffingtonpost.com

Don’t Stop At SOPA

News Talk 216 — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:41:18 +0000

SOPA and PIPA are (almost) dead. Now can we talk about the law that already exists?by Mark P McKenna

Opposition to the Protect IP Act (“PIPA”) and Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) reached a fever pitch this week, following a coordinated effort by a number of technology companies and technology-related websites that included a day-long Internet “blackout” in protest of the proposed bills. And the opposition seems to have been remarkably successful, with the White House announcing its opposition to the bills and so many senators and representatives—including many former co-sponsors of the bills—withdrawing their support over the last few days that both the Senate and House have shelved consideration of their respective bills.

Thank goodness. These bills are terrible policy and they have very serious constitutional infirmities. Among other things (and there are many other things), these two bills empower the attorney general to have entire websites taken down based only on application to a court and an ex parte hearing (meaning a hearing at which the defendant is not present), flagrantly violating the Supreme Court’s prior restraint doctrine. They also allow courts to order Internet service providers to stop recognizing sites deemed “dedicated to infringing activities” in these ex parte hearings (of which there is no apparent opportunity for review). This remedial approach presents a clear threat to the Internet’s architecture and, according to the country’s top cybersecurity experts, greatly increases security and privacy risks. These and other problems have been well covered, and I will not belabor them here.

Rather than launch into new discussions of the somewhat-less-bad replacements for PIPA and SOPA that will inevitably be introduced, I’m hoping this week’s backlash will focus future discussion on the many ways in which intellectual property law is already causing the harms that made SOPA and PIPA so terrifying. Because many of the objectionable features of those two laws are already in use. It’s time to talk about that.

Even before SOPA and PIPA, the government began claiming authority to seize domain names and make their content disappear without notice or a hearing. Indeed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already seized hundreds of domain names without any express statutory authorization, sometimes later commencing actions under civil forfeiture laws, but sometimes simply holding those domain names without filing charges. Many of these domain name seizures, it seems clear, were essentially carried out at the direction of private content owners. Indeed, ICE even announced one set of seizures “on a Burbank soundstage (Walt Disney Studios) flanked by members of the Motion Picture Association of America.”

Supporters of SOPA and PIPA have claimed those bills target only “foreign rogue sites.” That is largely untrue, since neither bill limits the new private remedies to foreign sites. But to the extent it is true that the effect of these bills would be felt primarily by foreign sites, it is only because the government is already seizing domestic domain names (and, in the government’s view, a domestic domain name is any domain name that uses a U.S.-based TLD like .com or .net—even those clearly directed at users in a foreign country). Likewise, even without SOPA or PIPA, private parties have persuaded courts to issue injunctions (again, frequently ex parte) which include orders to non-party registries, registrars, and/or search engines to take precisely the same sorts of technical steps SOPA and PIPA would authorize. (The authority under which a court can order a nonparty to take such steps is a mystery.)

It would be one thing if these seizures or the injunctions entered by courts in cases of private enforcement really were limited to the most egregious cases—those involving only “rogue” sites “dedicated to infringing activities.” But they often have not been. In some cases, ICE has seized domain names, held them for many months without any notice to the owner, and then never filed charges. Why not? Because it turns out the domain name owner had, in fact, done nothing wrong. Oops. Even when it’s not making mistakes—mistakes, by the way, that can be avoided with a little due process—ICE has acted aggressively toward websites that are far from the core of copyright infringement. For example, ICE has seized domain names on the basis that the websites at the seized domain names linked to other sites that contained infringing material. Courts have generally not considered mere linking sufficient to constitute direct copyright infringement even on the civil side. Under certain circumstances, linking could give rise to contributory infringement. But contributory copyright infringement has never been thought to give rise to criminal liability, and criminal conduct is necessary for the proper use of civil forfeiture statutes. ICE has smuggled in a significant expansion of criminal liability under cover of enforcement against the “worst of the worst.”

The same sort of thing has happened in cases of private enforcement, where courts have ordered search engines or other Internet-related nonparties to block access to a site. Nor is this limited to copyright cases: ICE has seized the domain names of clothing resellers on the grounds that these sites were selling counterfeit products, without any apparent sensitivity to the fact that trademark law actually permits resale of branded goods in most circumstances. Here, too, ICE has worked a significant expansion of the scope of trademark law while pretending only to be enforcing the rules against those easily classified as rogue websites.

Story Compliments Of Slate.com

SOPA And PIPA Bills Postponed In Congress

News Talk 216 — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:43:13 +0000

via BBC News

The US Congress has halted debate on two contested anti-online piracy bills.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delayed a vote on the Protect IP Act (Pipa) scheduled for Tuesday.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith then said his panel would not consider the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) until a compromise was reached.

The decisions follow protests by online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and thousands of other websites, which went “dark” in protest for 24 hours earlier this week.

“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said in a statement on Friday.

Mr Smith, a Texas Republican in the House of Representatives, said in a statement: “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy.

“It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

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Article courtesy bbc.co.uk

Dutch Teen Completes Historic, Controversial Solo Sail Around The Globe

News Talk 216 — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:33:48 +0000

via CNN

Some 518 days after she first set off alone in her sailboat, 16-year-old Laura Dekker glided into a Caribbean port on Saturday to complete her historic, and controversial, voyage around the globe.

The Dutch citizen arrived in Sint Maarten around 3 p.m. (2 p.m. ET), her spokesman Anton Van de Koppel told CNN. And a picture linked from Dekker’s official website Saturday shows her standing behind a group of children holding a sign, “Congratulations Laura Dekker … Welcome back to St. Maarten.”

While other teens have made similar sea voyages — some of them without stopping, as Dekker did — the Dutch girl unofficially appears to be the youngest to do so sailing alone. In 2010, Australian Jessica Watson finished a non-stop, unassisted solo circumnavigation days before her 17th birthday.

But sailing journalists have said, and her team didn’t dispute, that her route was less than 21,600 orthodromic (or, in the same direction for a great circle) nautical miles, which is the length of the equator and the distance generally used for round-the-world sailing records.

Dekker states on her website that she traversed about 27,000 nautical miles on her own solo voyage aboard her 38-foot yacht, which she has dubbed Guppy. She was 14 when she began August 21, 2010, in Gibraltar and then headed west across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific, through the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and ultimately to her final destination in the Caribbean.

The trip almost didn’t happen — not because of problems at sea, but rather due to a high-profile legal fight by Dutch authorities to prevent the teen from setting sail, for her own safety.

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Article courtesy cnn.com

Go Sista! Obama Taps 31-Year-Old To Lead Black Voter Outreach

Warren Ballentine — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:49:53 +0000

The Barack Obama re-election campaign on Wednesday named a 31-year-old former field director for the NAACP to be African-American Vote Director for the campaign’s Operation Vote outreach effort.

SEE ALSO: Obama’s Big Oil Win

Stefanie Brown, formerly the national field director for the NAACP in Baltimore, Maryland, will direct the campaign’s black voter outreach efforts. Operation Vote is the campaign’s national drive to get black, female, Latino, LGBT, veteran and young voters to the polls. Obama won an overwhelming majority of black votes in 2008, and most experts believe he’ll need a similar groundswell among African-Americans to win in November.

Brown, a graduate of Howard University, served as both national field director and head of the NAACP’s Youth & College division. As national field director, she is credited with leading an effort that the NAACP says registered more than 200,000 voters for the 2008 and 2010 elections.

The Ohio native and former program coordinator for an HIV/AIDS prevention program focusing on at-risk black and Hispanic youth in Cleveland, was named one of Essence.com’s “Top 10 Emerging Political Leaders of 2010″ and was among Ebony magazine’s “Top 30 Young Leaders under the Age of 30″ in 2007.

“Stefanie has dedicated her life to empowering people of color to organize and advocate for justice and equality in their communities,” Obama campaign Manager Jim Messina said in a statement Wednesday. “She is a natural fit for a campaign who’s fueled by its grassroots strength. Stefanie’s youth, commitment and proven ability to mobilize and energize voters will be an invaluable asset to the campaign.”

For more on the Brown, go to theGrio.

Ginrich’s Racist Surge

Rules Against Coordination Between Super PACs, Candidates, Tough To Enforce

News Talk 216 — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:48:19 +0000

Punishment for coordination between candidates and outside groups is rare

By Rachael Marcus and John Dunbar

Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney knows that he can’t talk to the people who run the notorious “super PAC” that may have won the Iowa caucuses for him.

“It’s illegal, as you probably know. I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form,” he said in December on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. “My goodness, if we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the Big House.”

Well, probably not. Criminal prosecution is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely — and even civil sanctions are rare, according to a review of Federal Election Commission actions.

Since 1999, the FEC has conducted a total of three investigations into alleged coordination between a candidate committee and an individual or organization making “independent expenditures.” Two of those probes resulted in fines totaling $26,000, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

The Citizens United Supreme Court decision and a lower-court ruling in 2010 allowed corporations, individuals and labor unions to make unlimited contributions to independent organizations that use the money to support or defeat a candidate. The ruling led to the creation of “super PACs.”

There is no established fine for offenders. It is up to the six-member FEC — split evenly between Republicans and Democrats — to decide on punishment.

“They have the final say in how much a committee will be paying for a civil penalty,” said Christian Hilland, an FEC spokesman.

Small fines and infrequent investigations stem from the “exceedingly difficult” nature of investigating coordinating activities claims, said former FEC commissioner Karl Sandstrom.

“It requires evidence with respect to communications and conversations that took place, and usually those are not documented,” Sandstrom said.

The regulations governing independent expenditures are so specific that unless the commissioners have a witness to one of those consultations, the FEC is unlikely to gather enough evidence to open an investigation.

An expenditure is not independent if the candidate or his staff is “materially involved in decisions regarding the communications” or “shares financial responsibility” for it, according to FEC rules.

In the past, the rules banning coordination didn’t get much attention.

Prior to the super PAC era, only individuals, party committees, traditional PACs and nonprofits that refused corporate and labor union donations made independent expenditures. Because super PACs can raise such extraordinary sums of money, concerns about coordination have grown.

Despite the weak enforcement and low fines, the coordination rule faced a challenge in October.

Conservative super PAC American Crossroads asked the FEC to allow candidates to appear in super PAC ads. The PAC argued that while the ads are “fully coordinated” with candidates, they should not count as “coordinated communications” in the campaign finance sense.

FEC commissioners deadlocked 3-3, meaning the rule remains unchanged.

The super PAC that Romney took such care to distance himself from is called “Restore Our Future,” which spent more than $4.1 million on advertising and direct mail attacking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, primarily in Iowa.

The ads were blamed — or credited, depending on your perspective — for Gingrich’s plummet in the polls and a distant fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Romney stayed above the fray while the super PAC did the dirty work.

The PAC was founded and run by operatives from Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign, including Charles Spies, former chief financial officer, Carl Forti, former political director, and Larry McCarthy, a former media team member.

Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has answered by writing a $5 million check to “Winning Our Future,” a Gingrich-supporting super PAC. The money is expected to fund a $3.4 million ad campaign in South Carolina criticizing Romney’s tenure with private equity firm Bain Capital.

The most recent FEC investigation regarding coordination was settled in May 2009 and involved the election committee of former Rep. Joe Schwarz, R-Mich., and the Republican Main Street Partnership PAC.

The FEC uncovered emails spanning six months in 2006 between members of the PAC and the Schwarz campaign. One email revealed Schwarz campaign director Matt Marsden had contacted the PAC’s treasurer with a suggestion for a radio ad on behalf of Schwarz. One week later, two radio stations ran ads following the theme the Schwarz director suggested. Other emails revealed Schwarz staffers recommended which radio stations the PAC should target.

The complaint was filed by Club for Growth, a conservative PAC backing Schwarz’s main challenger. Schwarz vehemently denied his staff broke any laws and spent around $50,000 and three years fighting the charge before agreeing to settle, according to The Jackson (Michigan) Citizen Patriot.

Each group was fined $2,500.

One of the FEC’s most high-profile investigations resulted in no fines.

The Republican National Committee and the 2004 Bush campaign filed a complaint against liberal PAC MoveOn.org and its affiliates for coordination with the John Kerry campaign. The investigation did not turn up enough evidence to fine the group even with Kerry’s hiring of Zach Exley, a MoveOn.org project director.

The FEC investigates illegal coordination claims based on complaints, but occasionally another government agency or the FEC will recommend an investigation, Hilland said.

Once a complaint is filed, commissioners open an investigation and decide whether or not penalties are warranted and, if so, how much the candidate or outside committee should be fined.

Top independent expenditures by super PACs supporting presidential candidates include Restore Our Future ($4.6 million); Texas Gov. Rick Perry supporter “Make Us Great Again” ($3.8 million); former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman supporter “Our Destiny PAC” ($2.5 million); Gingrich supporter Winning Our Future ($1.6 million); Ron Paul supporter “Endorse Liberty” ($1.0 million); Rick Santorum supporter “Red, White and Blue Fund” ($727,000); and President Barack Obama supporter “Priorities USA Action” ($321,000), according to an analysis of FEC data.

Story Compliments Of IWatchNews.org

Rick Perry: Obama Administration “Over-Reacting” to Marine Controversy

News Talk 216 — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:56:41 +0000

via CNN

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Sunday that Marines videotaped urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan made a “dumb” mistake, but should not face criminal prosecution.

In an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” the Republican presidential candidate said the Obama administration over-reacted to the incident by talking about possible criminal charges and speaking with what he called “disdain” about the U.S. military.

According to Perry, famous military figures including U.S. Gen. George Patton acted similarly in a war environment.

“When you’re 18 or 19, you do dumb things. These kids made a mistake, there’s not any doubt about it,” Perry told CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley.

Perry said the Marines involved should be reprimanded and “appropriately punished,” but added that “the idea that this administration would go after these young people for a criminal act, I think it is over the top.”

However, Republican Sen. John McCain, who has endorsed Mitt Romney for president, said Sunday he has no problems with the current administration’s handling of the incident.

“A full and complete investigation is entirely appropriate,” the former 2008 GOP presidential nominee said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

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Article courtesy cnn.com

Hip Hop That Helps Kids Stay Out Of Trouble

News Talk 216 — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:19:43 +0000

For a few hours a week in a community center in downtown’s Rampart area, high school kids are learning to make music without any of the instruments in the typical school orchestra. Instead, they generate beats on computers and tunes they can use live shows at the center, or maybe on an album.

This is Sessions LA, an after-school activity guided by Patrick Huang, a 30-year-old Chinese-American man also known as DJ Phatrick.

He was raised in an upscale Houston suburb with nurturing parents and access to a great education, but when Huang got to the University of California at Berkeley, a career in business or science didn’t appeal to him. He’d always loved music; the most important things in his bedroom at home were his turntables. At Berkeley, he immersed himself in ethnic studies and applied his DJ skills to campus activism and made music as a tool for justice.

“I had learned about hip-hop culture and the power of hip-hop as a cultural art form,” Huang said.

Huang eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he began to volunteer with Sessions LA, which uses hip-hop to draw kids in and keep them from trouble. Huang helped to develop the program’s curriculum, and helped it grow. It currently serves about 15 kids, most of them Latino, black and Asian. They’re often the children of immigrants, and many have experienced trauma or abuse.

These are the kind of at-risk students, Huang said, who don’t usually have much to keep them busy.

“The very worst that they would be doing is nothing,” he said.

Sessions LA staff uses the popularity of hip-hop and DJ culture to lure them in. It doesn’t have the money or space to buy classical instruments or teach traditional music, so they focus on digital beatmaking.

“That’s the most accessible and cheapest and most efficient ways to run a program like this right now,” Huang said.

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Article courtesy cnn.com

President Obama Asks For Power To Reorganize Six Federal Agencies

News Talk 216 — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:44:56 +0000

via BBC News

President Barack Obama has thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans by asking Congress for the power to shrink the federal government.

He told business leaders that he wants to close the US commerce department and merge six agencies.

The White House said the plan would save $3bn (£2bn) over 10 years and cut 1,000 to 2,000 jobs through attrition.

The proposal is seen as an attempt to counter Republican criticisms that Mr Obama is a big-government liberal.

With November’s general election on the horizon, it is not clear whether congressional Republicans will grant Mr Obama’s request for such reorganisational powers.

The president said his proposal followed discussions with business and agency leaders over many months.

“No business or non-profit leader would allow this kind of duplication or unnecessary complexity in their operations,” he said.

“So why is it OK in our government? It’s not. It has to change.”

The six agencies that would be consolidated are the Department of Commerce, the Small Business Administration, the Office of the US Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency.

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Article courtesy bbc.co.uk