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Wow! Stays of injunctions pending appeal are fairly common and it's not unheard of for district judges to be disqualified at the point the appeal is decided for public statements made after an appeal is launched. For example, in U.S. v. Microsoft. But I've never heard of a federal judge being removed from a case before the appeal is decided.  In a civil rights case injunction to protect civil rights, this is outrageous. 

The Washington Post has reported that "on July 15 [2001], the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court's own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as "pen register, trap and trace," that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line." .  The seminal case on pen registers is the Supreme Court's 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision, bookmarked here and the Clerk's syllabus highlighted, with the Court's discussion on the same web page. We will be hearing a lot about this case decision in the weeks and months to come.  Let it suffice for now to record a few points of what my antenna are telling me:  -- Both technology and the law have moved on since then. We are 34 years down the line from the Smith decision. Its pronouncements have been sliced and diced by subsequent decisions. Not a single Justice who sat on the Smith case is still on the High Bench.   -- In Smith, a single pen register was used to obtain calling information from a single telephone number by law enforcement officials. In the present circumstance, we face an Orwellian situation of a secret intelligence agency with no law enforcement authority forbidden by law from conducting domestic surveillance perusing and all digital communications of the entire citizenry. -- The NSA has been gathering not only information analogous to pen register results but also the communications of American citizens themselves. The communications themselves --- the contents --- are subject to the 4th Amendment warrant requirement. Consider the circuitous route of the records ordered to be disclosed in the Verizon FISA order. Verizon was ordered to disclose them to the FBI, not to the NSA. But then the FBI apparently forwards the records to the NSA, who has both the "pen register

Much more detail about the Brazil situation in this Associated Press report. 

As Erdogan promised, the government has responded brutally to Turkish protests, while concurrently censoring news sources. But the resistance grows as five unions announce a one-day strike in protest over the government violence. 

Tony Cartalluci continues to pull together the evidence that the recent bombing in Bangkok was engineered by deposed prime minister in hiding Thaksan Shinawatra, a puppet of the Carlyle Group, which is deeply invested in the U.S. defense industry. Shinawatra "red shirts" have been committing widespread acts of violence in Thailand since Shinawatra -- forced out of office by a corruption conviction -- was succeeded by his sister, who was then ousted by military coup in 2014. During the sister's reign, she repeatedly and openly admitted that her brother was actually making the decisions. It is a situation where American attempts to overthrow a foreign government have been at the zenith of visibility. 

The destabilization and fragmentation of Israel's neighboring nations has indeed been on the Zionist/Neocon drawing board for a very long time. http://goo.gl/Z1gdoA In the Mideast, it's important to remember that there are no significant Islamist forces that are not under the control of the U.S. or its allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Iraqi Army's withdrawal of the two divisions from the defense of Mosul is indeed curious. In that regard, Col. Peters' map of a future Mideast is almost certainly more than a coincidence. 

"SOURCE: SIGMUND FRAUD, WAKING TIMES "In prison, illusions can offer comfort." - Nelson Mandela For a magician to fool his audience his deceit must go unseen, and to this end he crafts an illusion to avert attention from reality. While the audience is entranced, the deceptive act is committed, and for the fool, reality then becomes inexplicably built upon on a lie. That is, until the fool wakes up and recognizes the truth in the fact that he has been duped. Maintaining the suspension of disbelief in the illusion, however, is often more comforting than acknowledging the magician's secrets. We live in a world of illusion. So many of the concerns that occupy the mind and the tasks that fill the calendar arise from planted impulses to become someone or something that we are not. This is no accident. As we are indoctrinated into this authoritarian-corporate-consumer culture that now dominates the human race, we are trained that certain aspects of our society are untouchable truths, and that particular ways of being and behaving are preferred.  Psychopaths disempower people in this way. They blind us with never ceasing barrages of suggestions and absolutes that are aimed at shattering self-confidence and confidence in the future.  "

The concurrent article by The Intercept is at https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/15/new-zealand-bangladesh-gcsb-surveillance-human-rights/

To get a glimmer of just how ridiculous this DoJ initiative is, skim http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/08/youre-nine-times-likely-killed-police-officer-terrorist.html Talk about misplaced priorities. 

THE OBAMA WATCH Newt Gingrich begins his new book, To Save America: To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, rightly describing the grave, mortal threat America faces today due to the left-wing extremism of the Democrats and the vast failures of the Republicans. He writes: This is a book I never expected to write. After the victory of freedom over Communist tyranny, of religious liberty over secular police states, and of American pride over the malaise and cynicism of the 1970s, I fully expected America to follow an upward curve of consistent improvement. I did not expect the Left to ignore the lessons of history and move further into ideological extremism. I did not expect them to react to their meager popular support by seeking to impose a corrupt, Chicago-style political machine on the entire country. After leaving Congress in 1999, I certainly did not foresee Republican failure so vast that it allowed left-wing radicals to take over the House, Senate and Presidency. America as we know it is now facing a mortal threat. This danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991. We stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.

With the 2012 presidential election before us, the country is again caught up in debating national security issues, our ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism. There is one related subject, however, that is rarely mentioned: civil liberties. Protecting individual rights and liberties - apart from the right to be tax-free - seems barely relevant to candidates or voters. One man is primarily responsible for the disappearance of civil liberties from the national debate, and he is Barack Obama. While many are reluctant to admit it, Obama has proved a disaster not just for specific civil liberties but the civil liberties cause in the United States.

In depth story about the Federal Reserve failure to act as an unregulated subprime mortgage industry raced out of control, and major banking and financial institutions bought into the wild wild west of high interest rate - predatory lending. excerpt:  during the years of the housing boom, pleas from consumer advocate groups failed to move the Fed, the sole federal regulator with authority over subprime mortgage businesses. Under a policy quietly formalized in 1998, the Fed refused to police lenders' compliance with federal laws protecting borrowers, despite repeated urging by consumer advocates across the country and even by other government agencies. The hands-off policy, which the Fed reversed earlier this month, created a double standard. Banks and their subprime affiliates made loans under the same laws, but only the banks faced regular federal scrutiny. Under the policy, the Fed did not even investigate consumer complaints against the affiliates.

Also echoed by former CIA Director James Woolsey. http://jonathanturley.org/2013/12/18/ex-cia-director-calls-for-snowden-to-be-hanged-by-his-neck-until-he-is-dead/ Personally, I'm against the death penalty but if anyone is to swing from the yardarm, it should be the perverted politicos and bureaucrats who turned this nation into a police state, as well as their willing lackeys like Bolton and Woolsey.  Edward Snowden is a patriot; these guys used the Constitution to wipe their behinds every day.