Author: admin

“Free speech all the time. Not just when admin
says when, where, what about,” read one side of the neon-yellow
sign fielded by Ali Cohen, an education major at Coastal Carolina
University, during a recent campus rally.

Cohen is one of a handful of Coastal students facing disciplinary action for
sidewalk chalk messages protesting racial injustice and
the non-indictment of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Three
of the students—those caught in the act—were handcuffed and
detained by CCU police. The university said it will not be pursing
criminal charges, but Cohen and her chalk co-conspirators have been
charged with violations of the university’s conduct code, including
vandalism and “unauthorized usage/entry.” 

The situation at Coastal echoes other recent conflicts between
university administrations and student activists, notes Elizabeth
Nolan Brown. Across the country, student activism has been on an
upswing. But with it has come increased efforts to suppress speech
and exert control from college adminstrators. 

View this article.

• Greenpeace has apologized for an unbelievable
  recent stunt in which activists desecrated the 2,000-year-old
  
  Nazca lines.
• Google is
  considered one of the best places to work. Too bad Spain is
  going to miss
  out.
• Angry students
  interrupted Peter Thiel’s speech at the University of
  California, Berkeley. Thiel was chased off stage as a “Black Lives
  Matter” protest began.
• Reining in the IRS is a
  top priority for Congressional Republicans in the coming
  year.
• CIA Director John Brennan
  says we’ve had enough of all that silly transparency business.
  “Over the top transparency,” he called it.
• The 2015 Golden Globe nominations
  were announced.

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Two Little Rock, Arkansas, police officers who
shot and killed 67-year-old Eugene Ellison in his apartment after
investigating an open door while working private security for the
apartment building have been trying to claim immunity in the
shooting. They are now
appealing a judge’s decision to deny them immunity in an
ongoing lawsuit by Ellison’s family. The family held a press
conference earlier this week, as
reported by KATV:

The press conference was also held four years to the day since
Ellison was shot by Officers [Donna] Lesher and [Tabatha] McCrillis
in his apartment on Colonel Glenn Road on December 9, 2010. The two
officers were allegedly investigating an open door into Ellison’s
apartment, and apparently an altercation took place once the
officers entered the residence. According to police reports,
Ellison had apparently come at the officers with a walking
cane. 

“What the city is trying to do is conflate the fight with the
shooting,” said Michael Laux, attorney for the Ellison family.
“It’s very important to understand that however bad this fight was
– and we have to take the officer’s word for that – it was over…
long over by the time they shot Mr. Ellison.” 

One of Ellison’s son is a police officer with the Little Rock
police and claims he’s been retaliated against for his family’s
lawsuit, including being moved to a midnight shift.

In 2012, the Department of Justice said it would
look into the shooting but nothing appears to have happened.
Two years later, and four years after the shooting, the Ellison
family
continues to press the feds to investigate the shooting. The
family hopes renewed attention to police violence improves their
lawsuit’s chances of success.

When the Senate’s
report on enhanced interrogation and torture was released
earlier this week, one of the immediate defensive talking points
from the CIA was that the Senate
did not interview any of their employees. The Senate report
makes note of this issue in a footnote, saying that the CIA
wouldn’t require its staff to cooperate and attributed it to a
Department of Justice investigation.

Just before that footnote is an additional note that the White
House also withheld thousands of documents from the Senate
investigation, claiming executive privilege. Brian Doherty
wrote about that detail Tuesday.

Apparently among those documents are interviews with about 100
witnesses with information about the interrogation program. The
New York Times has
filed a lawsuit to try to get access to these reports to see
why no charges have been filed as a result of the investigation.
The White House is fighting having to disclose the records:

The Obama administration has
urged a court to reject a request to disclose thousands of
pages of documents from a Justice Department investigation into the
torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency, including
summaries of interviews with about 100 witnesses and documents
explaining why in the end no charges were filed

The administration made the filing late Tuesday in response to a
Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit brought by The New York Times, hours after the Senate
Intelligence Committee made public a 524-page executive summary of
its own investigation into C.I.A. torture. The committee based its
report on a review of C.I.A. documents but did not conduct any
interviews.

The Justice Department materials, the court filing revealed,
include 10 reports and memorandums totaling 1,719 pages — more than
three times the number of pages in the Senate report released
Tuesday — as well as “numerous” pages of reports on interviews with
current and former C.I.A. officials.

According to the Times, the Justice Department is
fighting the release of the documents because it would “affect the
candor of law enforcement deliberations about whether to bring
criminal charges.”

Read more
here. CIA Director John Brennan gave a press conference this
afternoon essentially going over the same points used in the
agency’s
official response (pdf) to the Senate report. When a reporter
asked him directly if he thought destroying video tapes of
interrogations had been appropriate, he vaguely responded that
people “took actions at the time that they believed were the right
thing to do. Let’s leave it at that.” If those are the kind of
responses to expect, what exactly were Senate staffers going to get
from their own interviews anyway?

Will the cromnibus—the $1.1
trillion spending bill intended to fund the government through next
September and avoid a government shutdown—actually pass?

The general
assumption yesterday was that the law would make it through the
House today with votes from both sides of the aisle.

But after lawmakers spent the day pouring over the
newly-published text of the proposal, the fate of the massive
spending bill is now in doubt: Some conservatives are upset because
the bill doesn’t block President Obama’s executive action on
immigration, and some liberals don’t like a provision that alters
the way Dodd-Frank regulates derivatives. Opposition from both
parties might end up killing a bill that was supposed to pass with
bipartisan support. 

GOP complaints that the bill doesn’t block Obama’s immigration
action tend to conveniently ignore a rather significant problem:
Congress doesn’t have the power to block Obama’s action through the
appropriations process (the cromnibus is mostly a combined
appropriations bill). As Rep. Hal Rogers, the Republican chair of
the House Appropriations Committee,
explained last month, “the Appropriations process cannot be
used to ‘de-fund’ the agency” that is tasked with carrying out the
action. The agency can fund its work through user fees without
approval from Congress—and could even do so in the event of a
government shutdown.

(The idea that the immigration action can be stopped by
defunding closely resembles the idea that went around last year
that Congress could stop Obamacare by defunding it. In October of
2013, the government shut down; Obamacare’s exchanges crashed on
opening, but not because Republicans had taken it out through the
budget process.)

The objection to the cromnibus from the left has to do with a
relatively obscure rule in Dodd-Frank regulating derivatives known
as the
swaps push-out provision. Under the rule, some types of
derivatives would have to be moved to financial entities that
aren’t protected by government backing. The change included in the
cromnibus would allow some of those derivatives to stay in house.
For more details, the Republican Study Committee’s legislative
bulletin is
worth reading. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) makes the case for
the change here.

The liberal objection to the bill, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren,
is basically that it defangs the financial regulations in
Dodd-Frank. Complicating liberal opposition, however, is that

the White House came out in favor of the cromnibus today,
noting that it didn’t like the derivatives provision but was
supportive overall.

What we’re seeing, then, is a test of White House influence over
the Democratic party. The administration wants the cromnibus to
pass; there are a number of Democrats who would be content to let
it die.
According to Politico, Democratic House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has voiced strong objections to the
derivatives rule change, “has privately mused that a three-month
continuing resolution might actually be better for Democrats.”

That would not necessarily mean a shutdown, however. If the
cromnibus spending bill falls apart, House Republicans have some
backup plans, including a three month continuing resolution (CR),
which would punt the funding fight into the next Congress, or
perhaps a one-week extension allowing more time to get a vote
together before the end of the year. (Republicans reportedly
said
this afternoon that the three-month CR is the go-to
alternative.)

At this particular moment, though, it’s all up in the air. The
House is currently in recess, which means a vote on the cromnibus
has been postponed, although GOP leadership still says a
vote will likely happen sometime today.