The Glade 4.0

I'm not sure I see any mention of criminal punishments ...

That's because this article is discussing a civil lawsuit, not potential criminal charges.

It does, however, illustrate why the IRS needs to be eliminated and its functions split. The people responsible for collecting taxes should not be the same people responsible for enforcing the tax laws.

Khross is probably referring to the mandatory criminal charges that exist within the revised HIPAA laws. For intentional data violations, individual offenders face criminal charges as mandatory, with civil violations being related but technically separate.

Fox News reports that three Fox staffers, two reporters and one producer, were targeted by Barack Obama's Justice Department. Fox doesn't have all the details yet on a reporter William La Jeunesse and producer Mike Levine, but their emails showed up in a IG report regarding Fast and Furious. Either their emails were leaked by the Justice Department officials they were sent to, or the email accounts of both were subpoenaed and invaded by government investigators.
The IG report does say that subpoenas were issued to obtain emails. Whose email was targeted is not yet known.

The third staffer is reporter James Rosen. The Washington Post's story behind that is downright chilling. What we have here is a case of the Obama Administration criminalizing reporting.

In June of 2009, James Rosen of Fox News reported that North Korea might respond to an increase in United Nations sanctions with even more nuclear tests. Rosen added that the CIA had learned this information from their sources within North Korea.

According to the Washington Post, upon hearing learning of Rosen's report, the White House launched what many believe is an unprecedented leak probe that went so far as to criminalize standard news-gathering.

Because the Justice Department believes the source of the leak to Rosen was Jin-Woo Kim, a government adviser, he is facing federal charges that could land him a 10-year prison sentence.

But in their zeal to dig into reporter Rosen's part in this (and supposedly firm up their case against Kim), the Post reports that FBI agent Regineld Reyes claimed there was "evidence Rosen had broken the law, 'at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.'”

After building their case against Kim, the Obama administration then went after Rosen, using his badge to trace his whereabouts in the State Department. But they also wanted Rosen's emails. The Post writes that in order to do this, because of legal protections offered the media, the case had to be made that Rosen was a co-conspirator in a criminal conspiracy to leak national security secrets:

Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter’s work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant — agreeing that there was probable cause that Rosen was a co-conspirator.

Rosen said the government never contacted him.

The thing you have to keep in mind here is that if Kim and Rosen did what the Obama administration says they did -- it is something that happens almost every day between reporters and their sources. It is called everyday journalism; and the Obama administration is attempting to criminalize everyday journalism.

If sources are not leaking information to journalists, what is the alternative? Well, the only alternative is that the media write what the government tells them to write.

The Biggest Obama Scandals Are Proven and Ignored
There is clear evidence that he has broken the law on multiple occasions. And not even Republicans seem to care.

Prompted by Peggy Noonan's claim in The Wall Street Journal that "we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate," Andrew Sullivan steps forward to defend Pres. Obama's honor. "Can she actually believe this?," he asks incredulously. "Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US' credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?"

An Obama critic, having overplayed her hand, gave Sullivan an opening to respond with what amounts to, "It isn't as bad as Watergate, nor as bad as George W. Bush." Let's concede those points. I don't much care what Obama's Republican critics say about him. The scandals they're presently touting, bad as two of them are, aren't even the worst of Team Obama's transgressions.

I have a stronger critique. Sullivan hasn't internalized the worst of what Obama's done, because his notion of scandal is implicitly constrained by whatever a president's partisan opponents tout as scandalous. If they criticize Obama wrongly, he defends Obama proportionately.

To see what he's forgotten as a result, let's run once more through the first questions in Sullivan's latest Obama apologia.

Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes?

Yes, President Obama has broken the law on multiple occasions. Despite clearly stating, in a 2008 questionnaire, that the commander-in-chief is not lawfully empowered to ignore treaties duly ratified by the Senate, Obama has willfully failed to enforce the torture treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and duly ratified by the Senate, that compels him to investigate and prosecute torture. As Sullivan put it earlier this year, "what Obama and Holder have done (or rather not done) is illegal."

Obama also violated the War Powers Resolution, a law he has specifically proclaimed to be Constitutionally valid, when committing U.S. troops to Libya without Congressional approval. Or as Sullivan put it in 2011, "I'm with Conor. The war in Libya becomes illegal from now on. And the imperial presidency grows even more powerful."

On the subject of war crimes, Sullivan wrote that "Obama and attorney-general Eric Holder have decided to remain in breach of the Geneva Conventions and be complicit themselves in covering up the war crimes of their predecessors - which means, of course, that those of us who fought for Obama's election precisely because we wanted a return to the rule of law were conned." In a separate entry, he went so far as to say that Obama is "a clear and knowing accessory to war crimes, and should at some point face prosecution as well, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything any more." That seems rather farther than Noonan went in her column.

Obama has not, as Sullivan points out, traded arms for hostages with Iran, or started a war with no planning for the inevitable occupation that would follow. But there are different questions that could be asked about Obama that would perhaps be more relevant to his behavior.

Has he ordered the assassination of any American citizens in secret without due process? Did he kill any of their teenage kids without ever explaining how or why that happened?

Has he refused to reveal even the legal reasoning he used to conclude his targeted killing program is lawful?

Has he waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers?

Has he spied on millions of innocent Americans without a warrant or probable cause?

Does he automatically count dead military-aged males killed by U.S. drones as "militants"?

Did he "sign a bill that enshrines in law the previously merely alleged executive power of indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects"?

There is more, as Sullivan knows, and it all amounts to a scandalous presidency, even if it happens that few Republicans care about the most scandalous behavior, and have instead spent almost a year* now obsessing about Benghazi. The IRS scandal and Department of Justice leak-investigation excesses are worrisome, but the biggest scandals definitely go all the way to the top, and are still largely ignored even by commentators who have acknowledged that they're happening. Sullivan has noted the stories as they broke, and seemed, for fleeting moments, to confront their gravity, noting the violation of very serious laws, and even once stating that Obama deserves to be prosecuted! Yet in response to Noonan, he writes, "So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong." How inexplicably they forget.

And Sullivan is hardly alone. At the New York Times, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and beyond, exceptional journalists take great care to document alarming abuses against the rule of law, the separation of powers, transparency, and human rights perpetrated by the Obama Administration. On a given subject, the coverage leaves me awed and proud to be part of the same profession. But when it comes time for synthesis, bad heuristics take over. Confronted with the opportunism and absurdity of the GOP, Obama's sins are forgiven, as if he should be graded on a curve. His sins are forgotten, as if "this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong."

Yes. He. Has.

Andrew "Trigg Truther" Sullivan.

A Republican Texas Judge has ordered a lesbian couple to live apart or give up custody of their children. According to Think Progress, Judge John Roach of McKinney, Texas has given Page Price 30 days to move out of the home she shares with Carolyn Compton and Compton’s two children from a previous marriage because he does not approve of Compton and Price’s “lifestyle.”

Roach has placed a “morality clause” in Compton’s divorce papers, which forbids Compton from having anyone she is not related to “by blood or marriage” in her home past 9:00 p.m. if the children are present. Same sex marriage is illegal in Texas, so by law, Compton cannot live with Price if she wishes to retain custody of her children.

Compton said that she and Price have been together for three years. Compton’s ex-husband rarely bothers to see the children and was previously arrested on charges of third-degree felony stalking in 2011, charges that he was able to plea down to criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor.

In a post on Facebook, Price wrote that Roach had inserted the morality clause into the divorce agreement when Compton’s ex-husband Joshua Compton attempted to gain custody of the children in 2011. The judge wrote that he disapproved of the two women’s “lifestyle.”

“Our children are all happy and well adjusted. By his enforcement, being that we cannot marry in this state, I have been ordered to move out of my home,” Price wrote.

The two women are working with attorneys to figure out what steps they can take to fight the state’s notoriously conservative court system.

Ken Upton Jr., senior staff attorney for Lambda Legal’s Dallas office, told the Dallas Voice newspaper that morality clauses are a holdover from a time when judges tried to keep people with children from living together outside of marriage. Courts often insert the clauses without telling the people involved, particularly in backward, conservative areas like Collin County, Texas.

“What the clause has become is an extra burden on gay people because they’re no more likely to violate it than straight people,” Upton told the Voice. “It’s a problem that continues with homophobia.”

Taxes on some wealthy French top 100 pct of income: paper
PARIS | Sat May 18, 2013 1:16pm EDT

(Reuters) - More than 8,000 French households' tax bills topped 100 percent of their income last year, the business newspaper Les Echos reported on Saturday, citing Finance Ministry data.

The newspaper said that the exceptionally high level of taxation was due to a one-off levy last year on 2011 incomes for households with assets of more than 1.3 million euros ($1.67 million).

President Francois Hollande's Socialist government imposed the tax surcharge last year, shortly after taking office, to offset the impact of a rebate scheme created by its conservative predecessor to cap an individual's overall taxation at 50 percent of income.

The government has been forced to redraft a proposed bill to levy a temporary 75 percent tax on earnings over 1 million euros, which had been one of Hollande's campaign pledges.

The Constitutional Council has judged such a high rate of taxation to be unfair, leaving the government to rehash it to hit companies rather than individuals.

Since then, a top administrative court has determined that a marginal tax rate higher than 66.66 percent on a single household risked being considered as confiscatory by the council.

Les Echos reported that nearly 12,000 households paid taxes last year worth more than 75 percent of their 2011 revenues due to the exceptional levy. ($1 = 0.7798 euros)

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/18/republican-texas-judge-orders-lesbian-couple-to-live-apart-or-lose-children/

Riov, The judge is just enforcing the contact the woman signed. Wouldn't it be activistic to nullify a contact between two consenting adults?

The ex husband is being a dick but being a dick isn't sufficient grounds to nullify a private contact. She could however get move to IL or another homosexual marriage state and get married.

That judge needs a bullet.

There is nothing sensible or reasonable about that "morality clause." It's sole reason for existence is to allow a religious bigot to punish a dyke for divorcing her husband.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

How about we have "the people" vote such so that a third-party candidate wins the popular vote in at least one state ...

... and only bring out the guns if the "establishment" actually tries to enforce the various laws (that few people know about) that would then keep that candidate from actually getting the corresponding electoral votes.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

How about we have "the people" vote such so that a third-party candidate wins the popular vote in at least one state, and only bring out the guns if the "establishment" actually tries to enforce the various laws (that few people know about) that would then keep that candidate from actually getting the corresponding electoral votes.

Um, no. That would not, in any way, justify "bring[ing] out the guns". Armed revolt is only valid when (i) conditions are truly oppressive and (ii) there is no plausible non-violent means of changing those conditions. in my opinion, the pre-Civil Rights era treatment of black people is pretty much the only modern example that comes close to justifying violent resistance.

Perot actually won the popular vote in a state and then was subsequently denied the electoral votes? That's news to me.

People can vote for who they want. You can't "keep someone off" the ballot, people can always write someone in.

Yes, the media and the legislatures manipulate things to bias the public against third party candidates. But they do not actually prevent people from voting for these candidates nor do they prevent votes for these candidates from being counted.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.