Saturday 10-09-10

Miss. judge jails attorney for not reciting pledge
TUPELO, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi judge ordered an attorney to spend several hours in jail Wednesday after the attorney chose not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in court. The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal reported that Chancery Judge Talmadge Littlejohn told a court audience to rise and say the pledge. People in the courtroom said Danny Lampley of Oxford stood but did not say the words.
Records show Lampley was booked into the Lee County jail at 9:40 a.m. and released about 2:30 p.m. on the judge's orders.

Lampley did not immediately return a call to The Associated Press. Littlejohn was not immediately available through his office in New Albany or the court administrator's office in Tupelo.

Information from: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, http://nems360.com/

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2010-10-07-pledge-of-allegiance_N.htm

Gallop says unemployment is 10.1 percent
http://www.gallup.com/poll/143426/ga...september.aspx

Economy loses 95K jobs due to government layoffs
WASHINGTON (AP) - A wave of government layoffs in September outpaced weak hiring in the private sector, pushing down the nation's payrolls by a net total of 95,000 jobs.

The unemployment rate held at 9.6 percent last month, the Labor Department said Friday. The jobless rate has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 straight months, the longest stretch since the 1930s.

The report is the final one before the November elections, which means members of Congress will face voters next month with an economy that is still struggling to create jobs.

The private sector added 64,000 positions, the weakest showing since June.

A net total of 159,000 government jobs were lost in September. Local governments cut 76,000 jobs last month, most of them teachers. That's the largest cut by local governments in 28 years. About 77,000 temporary federal census jobs ended and state governments shed 7,000 jobs.

The cuts reflect the toll the recession is taking on state and local government budgets. Falling home values are just beginning to push down local governments' property tax revenues. Most state and local governments are required to balance their budgets, which means drops in revenue are forcing cuts in services.

Nearly 14.8 million people were unemployed last month. That's almost 100,000 fewer than in August.

Including those who have given up looking for work, and those who were working part time but wanted full-time jobs, the so-called "underemployment" rate jumped to 17.1 percent last month from 16.7 percent in August. That reflected an increase of more than 600,000 involuntary part-time workers.

The weak job market makes it more likely that the Federal Reserve will take additional steps to boost the economy. Most economists expect the Fed to decide at its meeting next month to buy government debt in an effort to lower interest rates and spur more borrowing.

Even areas that were strong are weakening.

Manufacturers cut 6,000 jobs, the second straight month of losses. The sector drove job growth earlier this year, adding 134,000 positions in the first five months of 2010, but factory employment has been flat since then.

Construction firms cut another 21,000 jobs, hampered by weakness in commercial real estate development. Information services lost 5,000 positions.

Other sectors showed job gains: Health care added 32,000 jobs, the leisure and hospitality sector added 38,000, and retailers added 5,700. Temporary help services hired nearly 17,000 workers.

Employers, faced with slow sales and a weak economy, see little reason to ramp up hiring. The economy expanded at a feeble 1.7 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter. Most analysts think the economy will fare little better for the rest of this year.

Since the recession ended in June 2009, the economy has grown 3 percent, according to economists at Deutsche Bank. That's less than half the average 6.5 percent pace in postwar recoveries.

http://wtop.com/?nid=111&sid=1658373

Obama reshapes administration for a fresh strategy
White House staff changes are being made with an eye toward achieving goals through executive actions rather than by trying to push plans through the next Congress, which is expected to be even more hostile to the president.
Reporting from Washington — As President Obama remakes his senior staff, he is also shaping a new approach for the second half of his term: to advance his agenda through executive actions he can take on his own, rather than pushing plans through an increasingly hostile Congress.

A flurry of staff departures and promotions is playing out as the White House ends a nearly two-year period of intense legislative activity. Where the original staff was built to give Obama maximum clout in Congress, the new White House team won't need the same leverage with lawmakers.

"It's fair to say that the next phase is going to be less about legislative action than it is about managing the change that we've brought," White House senior advisor David Axelrod said in an interview.

Rahm Emanuel, a former member of Congress who helped establish the Democratic majority in the House, resigned last week as White House chief of staff. His successor, for now, is Pete Rouse, a former congressional aide who has never held elective office.

Rouse won't emulate Emanuel, who was able to negotiate with lawmakers as a peer. Instead, the interim chief of staff will have a more operational role.

Winning passage of legislation wasn't easy for Obama, even with Democrats in firm control of both houses of Congress. Conditions will get tougher if, as expected, the Republicans pick up seats in the midterm election next month, or possibly take control of Congress.

"Whether or not the Republicans take over majorities in one or both houses, the margins will be so much narrower that the strategy of putting together a Democratic bill and picking off a handful of Republicans to push it over the top won't be viable anymore," said William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

So the best arena for Obama to execute his plans may be his own branch of government. That means more executive orders, more use of the bully pulpit, and more deployment of his ample regulatory powers and the wide-ranging rulemaking authority of his Cabinet members.

"This would fit into the status quo for the White House," said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for House Republican whip Eric Cantor of Virginia. "The White House is showing no effort to work with Republicans. It has shown no interest in listening to the American people and has at all costs tried to ram through legislation that was tremendously unpopular."

With healthcare and financial regulatory packages passed, the Obama administration is now focused on putting the measures in place, which could change the way Americans get medical treatment, take out mortgages and deal with banks and credit card companies.

One area of likely administration action is climate change. Legislation curbing emissions that cause global warming is stalled in Congress. Such efforts have a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 17% below 2005 levels over the next decade.

The Obama administration does not think it can achieve the same reductions through regulation alone. Nonetheless, the Environmental Protection Agency is determined to use its regulatory power under the Clean Air Act to begin lowering emissions, in the absence of congressional action.

"The ambition is to get a reasonable start," an Obama administration official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

A major effort is also underway to set up the regulatory apparatus aimed at preventing another collapse of the financial system. Regulators are drafting hundreds of new rules required by the recently enacted financial overhaul, such as subjecting bank holding companies and other institutions to stricter regulation.

As part of the effort, Elizabeth Warren, a prominent consumer advocate, also is helping to create a new agency meant to protect consumers from high-interest mortgages they can't afford, among other things.

The president's staff said an array of personnel changes had been under consideration for months. Rouse has been reviewing the staff organization since before Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley announced he would not run for reelection, setting in motion Emanuel's exit.

Rouse's assessment assumed there would be a change in the White House relationship with Capitol Hill, even if the Democrats retain control of the House and Senate, officials said.

Although some Democratic strategists said Obama could use the fresh perspective than an outsider would bring, the White House seems to be going another route, promoting trusted aides and filling vacant positions internally.

Rouse, for instance, has spent months at Emanuel's elbow, preparing for the likely moment when he would be called on to step into the position.

In Christina Romer, the White House lost a prominent and candid economist who had helped sell the president's policies on Capitol Hill and through the media. When she left her post as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Obama had someone sitting nearby ready to take her place: Austan Goolsbee, a Chicago economist who worked side by side with Romer for 20 months.

Similarly, when Press Secretary Robert Gibbs moves on to another position, deputy Bill Burton is standing by, ready to take over.

Many in the West Wing assume that Burton, an Obama veteran who is the only person ever to stand in for Gibbs at media briefings, will become the country's first African American White House press secretary.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-staff-strategy-20101007,0,6919242.story

We want our bug back or ...
"We're going to make this much more difficult for you if you don't cooperate."

These are words that ought to chill you when delivered by an agent of the government.

Wired has the story of 20 year-old American citizen Yasir Afifi who discovered a GPS tracking device attached to his car. He removed it, took pictures of it, and posted those pictures on line asking viewers if they could identify it. Turns out it was an Orion Guardian ST820 tracking device.

People wondered if it was real.

The answer to that question came less than 24 hours later when the FBI came to recover their "expensive piece" of hardware. Afifi was told:
We're here to recover the device you found on your vehicle. It's federal property. It's an expensive piece, and we need it right now.
When Afifi asked if the FBI had placed it on his car, the response was:
Yeah, I put it there. We're going to make this much more difficult for you if you don't cooperate.
Now the really chilling thing about this is that the FBI didn't need a warrant to track the whereabouts of Mr. Afifi. They needed no probable cause, and didn't have to convince a judge that it was necessary to put a tracker on his car, they could just do it to whomever they wished because the Ninth Circus Circuit Court of Appeals has said it's fine. In the January 11 decision of U.S. v. Pineda-Moreno the Court said:
...in United States v. Knotts, the Supreme Court held that law enforcement officers do not conduct a "search" cognizable under the Fourth Amendment by using a beeper to track a vehicle because "[a] person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another."
Pineda-Moredo appealed for an en banc rehearing and that appeal was denied in August (PDF).

I am reminded, once again, of Judge Alex Kozinski's unforgettable dissent in the denial of an en banc rehearing of the Silveira v. Lockyer case. In that one Kozinski wrote:
Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or...the press” also means the Internet...and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths....When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases - or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it's using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.
Kozinski also dissented in this case:
Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, United States v. Lemus, 596 F.3d 512 (9th Cir. 2010) (Kozinski, C.J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc); United States v. Black, 482 F.3d 1044 (9th Cir. 2007) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc), our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home's curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.
Read the whole dissent, it's worth your time. And hey, it's Kozinski. The man can write.

And remember: YOU HAVE NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY WHEN MOVING IN PUBLIC. The .gov can track you for any reason it feels like.

And if you find out they're doing it, they can "make it very difficult for you" if you don't cooperate.
http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/10/were-going-to-make-this-much-more.html