Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Veteran Loses Over $60,000 To Police, Despite Lack Of Criminal Charges

Mark Brewer is a decorated Air Force veteran who fought in the global war on terror. But last month, he became a casualty in the drug war.

In late March, the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government could take more than $60,000 of Brewer’s cash with civil forfeiture, even though he was never charged with a crime. The decision lets many Midwestern states continue to take property from people who have done nothing wrong.

A former military police officer and weapons specialist, Brewer earned several medals during his service in the Air Force, before he was medically discharged in 2008. Brewer said he developed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder after a deployment in Afghanistan.

In November 2011, Brewer was driving on Interstate 80 in Nebraska, when Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Wintle pulled Brewer over for crossing traffic lanes without signaling. During the stop, Wintle performed a criminal background check, which “revealed no major violations.”

After gaining Brewer’s consent, Wintle walked around the car with a canine unit; the dog alerted to the trunk. When he searched the trunk, Wintle found two backpacks that had a “strong odor of raw marijuana” and $63,530 in cash.

Brewer said he was travelling to Los Angles to visit his uncle and planned to use the money as a down payment for a house. According to Brewer, he had been saving that cash during his military service and from disability payments. Wintle did not believe his story, so Brewer’s cash was seized and his car was towed.

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Monday, April 27, 2015

Settlement Won’t Even Cover Medical Bills for Baby Whose Face was Blown Apart by Police Grenade

In May of last year, Bounkham “Baby Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, 19-months-old, was asleep in his crib. At 3:00 am militarized police barged into his family’s home because an informant had purchased $50 worth of meth from someone who once lived there. During the raid, a flash-bang grenade was thrown into the sleeping baby’s crib, exploding in his face.

Beyond the disfiguring wounds on the toddler’s face, the grenade also left a gash in his chest. As a result, Bou lost the ability to breathe on his own and was left in a medically induced coma for days after the incident. Bou was not able to go home from the hospital until July.

No officers were charged for their near-deadly negligence, and the department claimed that they did not know that there were children in the home. They defended their reckless actions by saying that they couldn’t have done a thorough investigation prior to the raid because it “would have risked revealing that the officers were watching the house.”

Now, a nearly $1 million dollar settlement has been reached between the family and the county. One of the terms of the settlement is that the family may not sue individuals involved in maiming their son. Instead of coming from the wallets of the negligent officers, it will come strictly from the taxpayers.

Medical bills for the treatment of Bou’s injuries are expected to reach $1 million dollars.

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Rand Paul gets ‘Constitutional Champion’ award, is slammed by establishment Republicans

Presidential contender Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been getting criticized pretty heavily by his peers in the establishment wing of the GOP for his policy positions — some of them the same policy positions that just earned him a Constitutional Champion prize from The Constitution Project.

The 2016 presidential candidate received the award from the political watchdog group dedicated to fighting the erosion of Americans’ constitutionally protected civil liberties.

Ginny Sloan, who serves as president of The Constitution Project, wrote of Paul in a Huffington Post piece: “Sen. Paul has … been a vocal critic of NSA spying. He introduced legislation declaring that ‘the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not be construed to allow any U.S. government agency to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause,’ and has made it clear that he will vote against any extension of the Patriot Act provisions expiring in June.”

Sloan also noted: “Sen. Paul is an ardent defender of the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Along with Sen Tim Kaine (D-Va.), he has been outspoken in his insistence that the Obama administration seek authorization from Congress in order to carry out military actions against Islamic militants in Syria and Iraq, disputing the assertion that the president as commander-in-chief could act alone. Finally, six months after the airstrikes began, President Obama submitted a request for war authority to Congress, and the Senate is expected to take up the issue in the coming weeks.”

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Friday, April 24, 2015

Senate GOP Leaders Endorse Bill To Extend Obamacare Subsidies To 2017

The Senate’s top five Republican leaders have cosponsored legislation to extend until 2017 the Obamacare insurance subsidies that may be struck down by the Supreme Court this summer.

The legislation, offered by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), one of the most politically vulnerable Senate incumbents in 2016, would maintain the federal HealthCare.gov tax credits at stake in King v. Burwell through the end of August 2017.

The bill was unveiled this week with 29 other cosponsors, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his four top deputies, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), John Thune (R-SD), John Barrasso (R-WY) and Roy Blunt (R-MO). Another cosponsor is Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the chairman of the conference’s electoral arm.

Such a move would seek to protect the GOP from political peril in the 2016 elections when Democrats would try to blame the party for stripping subsidies — and maybe insurance coverage — from millions of Americans in three dozen states. A defeat for the Obama administration in a King ruling would likely create havoc across insurance markets and pose a huge problem for Republicans, many of whom have been pushing the Supreme Court to nix the subsidies.

“This bill is a first step toward reversing the damage that Obamacare has inflicted on the American health care system,” Johnson said.

He recently explained the rationale for the legislation, warning that Democrats would swarm the GOP with attacks and horror stories about “individuals that have benefited from Obamacare” and lost their coverage.

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Thursday, April 23, 2015

McConnell Fast-Tracks Bill To Reauthorize Patriot Act Until 2020

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced a bill Tuesday night to reauthorize a portion of the Patriot Act that allows the National Security Agency to sweep up call records on millions of Americans until 2020.

McConnell began the process of placing the bill on the Senate calendar Tuesday night under Rule 14, which allows the legislation to skip committee markup.

The bill, cosponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, “extend[s] authority relating to roving surveillance, access to business records, and individual terrorists as agents of foreign powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and for other purposes.”

Under the legislation, Section 215 of the Patriot Act would be renewed for another five years. Section 215 authorizes the NSA to collect and store virtually all Americans’ landline telephone records, including telephone numbers, dialed numbers, call durations and locations. The provision expires on June 1.

McConnell’s bill comes amid a renewed effort to revive the U.S.A. Freedom Act in the House, where it passed last year but failed in the Senate. The Freedom Act renews Section 215, but includes reforms to limit the NSA’s access to phone records.

Republicans led by McConnell attacked the Freedom Act late last year, insisting the new reforms would open the U.S. up to greater threats from terrorist organizations including ISIS in the Middle East.

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