"Not So Fast Babyboy" !

The Supreme Court has done it again, sidestepping
an issue. After reading the article below please give
us your thoughts about it, Ok?


The Supreme Court refused today to reconsider a legal rule that might surprise most Americans. It allows judges to punish defendants for certain crimes even after a jury has acquitted them of the charges.

In recent years, the justices have described the right to jury trial as one of the bedrock principles of American law. But they have been unwilling to say that a jury's not-guilty verdict means the defendant cannot be punished for these charges.

Instead, the court has said judges may take into account "acquitted conduct" when they decide on a prison term.

The case of Mark Hurn from Madison, Wis., provides a stark example. The justices today turned away his appeal of an extra 15-year prison term for having crack cocaine after a jury had acquitted him on the crack cocaine charges. He was convicted of having powder cocaine in his house, a charge that would warrant between two and three years in prison under the federal sentencing guidelines.

The high court endorsed this "acquitted conduct" rule a decade ago in a California case, but they did so in a brief opinion. They agreed judges can decide on the right sentence for a convicted criminal by "relying on the entire range of conduct" presented by prosecutors, not just the charges that resulted in guilty verdicts.

But in recent years, that rule has allowed judges to give defendants long prison terms even when a jury rejected key parts of the prosecution's case.





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Mistake?

Now this should fall under cruel and unusual punishment.
A mistake by a records keeper puts this woman through
the worst mental anguish that a person can experience
and I think this is wrong. I hope she sues them for this.


California authorities rearrested Sara Jane Olson at noon Saturday, just hours after she was prevented from flying home to Minnesota from Los Angeles, and said she must serve one more year in prison because they miscalculated her release date.

The former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army had been paroled Monday from a California women's prison after serving about six yeaOfficials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said at a news conference that they had made a mistake in computing the amount of time Olson should serve in a separate case in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for participating in a Sacramento-area bank robbery in which another SLA member killed a customer.

"The department is sensitive to the impact that such an error has had on all involved in this case and sincerely regrets the mistake," Scott Kernan, the agency's chief deputy secretary of adult operations, said at a Saturday afternoon news conference. "The department has launched a full investigation."

Kernan called the case "extremely complicated, given the amount of changes to the sentencing laws that have occurred over the last 30 years."

Olson should have been sentenced to 14 years, not 12, for the two crimes, Kernan said. He said state officials had failed to account for the bank robbery. The earliest possible release date for Olson now is March 17, 2009, he said. At that point, she will have served half of the 14-year term.

Like most California inmates, Olson has earned credit against her sentence for working while in prison. She served on a maintenance crew that swept and cleaned the main yard of the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, according to prison officials.rs for her role in a 1975 plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.



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Supreme Court To Bush: Whoa There Partner

Seems president Bush ain't as bad as he thought he was
and his Supreme Court told him so. What a blow this has
dealt to his ego!

The Supreme Court dealt President Bush a defeat today and ruled that he does not have the "unilateral authority" to force state officials to comply with international treaties.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts said the Constitution gives the president the power "to execute the laws, not make them." Unless Congress passes a law to enforce a treaty, the president usually cannot do it on his own, Roberts said.


The case decided today arose from an unusual dispute and an unexpected intervention by Bush. But the justices used it to make a strong statement about the limits of presidential power.

The International Court of Justice in the Hague, acting on a suit by Mexico, ruled that the United States had failed to carry out its treaty duty to inform a native country when one of its citizens was arrested and charged with a serious crime. The decision pointed to 51 Mexican nationals who were under death sentences in Texas, California and several other states.

It was unclear how this ruling could be enforced. But in a surprise move in 2005, Bush told Texas officials they must reopen and reconsider the cases of the Mexican-born murderers on death row. Bush, a former Texas governor, said he was acting "pursuant to the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution and laws of the United States."

Texas officials refused to go along with Bush's order, and they fought him in court.

In today's 6-3 decision, the high court sided with the Texas prosecutors.





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It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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Reinforcing The Dream

I happened to run across the article below and found
it to be the very thing that is needed so that we can keep
the dream of Dr. King's alive. Check it out and then give us
a holla.

The lingering vestiges of America's racist past present a serious challenge to the hope that many hold for a nation that lives out its most cherished values - liberty and justice for all.

Persistent recurrences of racial incidents such as Jena, La., remind us that hatred and animosity still fester. Suspicion lurks under the surface of many interactions. Even the government's response to Hurricane Katrina is often criticized as manifesting discernable racial discrepancies.

Movies like Crash, and the news coverage of the Duke University lacrosse team sex-party debacle, and even the prospect of a Black presidential nominee in the 2008 elections remind us of the tenuous and fragile nature of racial harmony in the United States of America.

We seem to live under an uneasy truce.

It has been four and a half decades since the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered. Yet none of us can say we have fully lived up to Dr. King's vision of a land where each person would be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.

Tensions continue, and weekly we hear of yet another incident somewhere in our country where race is presented as a precipitating factor.

Things are different today than they were 45 years ago. Yet the questions remains, why has it been so difficult for us to embrace and consistently live out Dr. King's dream?

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It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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Race Not A Factor

I have to agree with the LAPD on this one that most
of the cities homicides have been either black on black
or latino on latino. The homicides that have been committed
between races have been blown up by the media coverage
that they get. I live in a latino neighborhood and the two
rival gangs here have been keeping the local funeral homes busy.


Has racial hatred between African Americans and Latinos played a role in this year's rise in Los Angeles killings? Absolutely not, LAPD officials said earlier this week as they cited an analysis and statistics of the more than 90 people who have been slain so far this year. As has long been the case, the vast majority of homicide victims were likely to have been killed by someone of their own race or ethnic group, according to the survey (read to the end for the stats).

The statistics and statements by Police Chief William J. Bratton have not swayed many African American leaders and residents. Betty Pleasant, who writes the Soulvine Column for the Wave papers, echoed the feelings of many who say their concerns are being ignored as Bratton and others downplay the role of race in the killings of blacks.

I’m certain that he’s sitting up in Parker Center earnestly believing I am inflaming a situation that could make his job of keeping the peace that much harder. I can’t help that. It is what it is regardless of what he says it is. I’m not "taking on the chief," I’m taking on what the chief said, if that makes any sense.

-- Jesus Sanchez

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It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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Shades Of Martin?

When I read the text of Barack Obama's speech
a renewed sense of well being swept through me.
The spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was very
much present. The man is taking up where Dr. King
left off. He most certainly has my vote!

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

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"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
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High Court Leaning To Say No?

As lawyers prepare to present their cases in the
District of Columbia handgun ban the Supreme
Court seems ready to strike the law down. It seems
to me that the city has presented a pretty strong
case. But that's just my opinion. After reading the
article below let us hear yours.


The Supreme Court justices, hearing a historic argument on the meaning of the 2nd Amendment, signaled they are likely to strike down a handgun ban in the District of Columbia and rule that homeowners have a right to keep a gun for self-defense.

But if the oral arguments are any guide, the outcome will not be unanimous. Several justices said they believed the 2nd Amendment was intended to protect the state's right to maintain a "well-regulated militia," not to give gun rights to individuals.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is the swing vote in close cases, said he believed the 2nd Amendment did more than bolster the state militia. "In my view, there is a general right to bear arms" that goes beyond serving in the militia, Kennedy said.

Most Americans believe the 2nd Amendment protects the right of law-abiding persons to "keep and bear arms." But the legal meaning of this provision remains in doubt. The high court has never invoked this right to strike down a gun law nor has it ruled that it protects a personal right to own a gun.

Justice Antonin Scalia, like Kennedy, described the 2nd Amendment as protecting individual guns. Justice Clarence Thomas is likely to join with them. And Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they believed the city council in Washington, D.C., went too far by prohibiting homeowners from having handguns.

"Why is that a reasonable regulation?" Roberts asked the lawyer defending the city's law.

Walter Dellinger, arguing for the city, said the framers of the Constitution were concerned about protecting the right of the people to defend the state or the community. The 2nd Amendment creates "a right to participate in the common defense," he said.

The amendment says: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."




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"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
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FBI Doesn't Care

If the FBI had so much info on the first attack
of Tupac then why the heck didn't they move on
it? Well we've always known the answer to that.
White folks have never given a hoot about blacks
killing blacks. After all these were two rappers who
were anti-establishment. What do you think?


Cameras flashed as paramedics carried the victim into the glare of Times Square on a stretcher. Blood seeped through bandages from five gunshot wounds.

Tupac Shakur had been beaten, shot and left for dead at the Quad Recording Studios on New York's 7th Avenue. As he was borne to a waiting ambulance through a swarm of paparazzi on Nov. 30, 1994, the rap star thrust his middle finger into the air.

It was a portentous moment in hip-hop -- the start of a bicoastal war that would culminate years later in the killings of Shakur and rap's other leading star, Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G.

The ambush at the Quad remains a source of fascination and frustration to music fans and law enforcement officials alike. No one has ever been charged in the attack.

Now, newly discovered information, including interviews with people who were at the studio that night, lends credence to Shakur's insistence that associates of rap impresario Sean "Diddy" Combs were behind the assault. Their alleged motives: to punish Shakur for disrespecting them and rejecting their business overtures and, not incidentally, to curry favor with Combs.

The information focuses on two New York hip-hop figures -- talent manager James "Jimmy Henchman" Rosemond and promoter James Sabatino, who is now in prison for unrelated crimes.

FBI records obtained recently by The Times say that a confidential informant told authorities in 2002 that Rosemond and Sabatino "set up the rapper Tupac Shakur to get shot at Quad Studios." The informant said Sabatino had told him that Shakur "had to be dealt with."

The records -- summaries of FBI interviews with the informant conducted in July and December 2002 -- provide details of how Shakur was lured to the studio and ambushed. Others with knowledge of the incident corroborated the informant's account in interviews with The Times and gave additional details.




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Kids Pay The Price?

The article below tells of a most absurd situation.
The actions of a small group of school administrators
may jeopardize the future of 53,000 mostly African
American students. But then how can students be
discredited because of the mismanagement of the
school district. Punish the managers not the children!


Kyanda Daniels, a junior, ran for miles with the Jonesboro High School track team the other day. When she was done, she stood above the stadium, gasping for air, and wondering what on Earth she was striving for.

"We're in school for nothing, basically," said Daniels, 17. "When I get out my homework, I think to myself, 'Man, why am I doing this?' What college is going to accept us? Who would give us a scholarship?"

Anxiety has engulfed students across Clayton County, a predominantly black area south of Atlanta, ever since they learned their school district could become the first in the nation since the 1960s to lose its accreditation.

Last month, the Southern Assn. of Colleges and Schools recommended that the district's accreditation be revoked Sept. 1 because of ethical violations by its board. The national accreditation commission will vote Saturday.

For the county's nearly 53,000 public school students, loss of accreditation would mean they would not be eligible for state scholarships or be accepted at many universities. They also would have difficulty transferring to other high schools.

Such a devastating scenario would also have symbolic significance for this once mostly white, rural county, where Margaret Mitchell set her 1936 novel, "Gone With The Wind," and where large numbers of blacks have settled as Atlanta has grown in recent years. The population is now 62% African American.

For many, the accreditation problem puts an embarrassing spin on the county's transition from white to black.

"It makes me mad," said Garrett Anderson, 36, a forklift operator who came to Jonesboro High the other afternoon to pick up his 14-year-old son, Garrius, after weight training. "How can nine adults rob so many kids of their dreams?" According to the report, Clayton County Public Schools' nine-member school board is so "dysfunctional" that it has had difficulty recruiting a superintendent, teachers and bus drivers. It accuses board members of nepotism, conflicts of interest, micromanagement, lax fiscal responsibility and failure to audit school attendance.

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AL Is Guaranteeing To Back A Winner

The Rev. Al Sharpton has still not committed to any
presidential candidate as of yet but in his address to
The Concordia Student Union in Canada the Reverend
seemed to be leaning towards the front runner Barack
Obama. Yeah Al that’s a pretty slick ole move there. No
matter who wins you won’t be left out in the cold!

Hundreds lined up outside of Concordia University’s Henry F. Hall Building Thursday night to see Rev. Al Sharpton speak on the U.S. presidential election cycle, as well as issues that touched closer to home – like police brutality, animal rights, and reasonable accommodation.

The audience greeted Sharpton, an American civil rights activist and former Democratic Party presidential candidate, with a standing ovation.

“I’m not always treated as kindly in introductions in the States,” he said.

Although Sharpton has not officially endorsed any candidate for president, he called the career of Barack Obama an “ascension” that was “nothing short of astounding.”

He also criticized the Clinton campaign, arguing that a memo it released before last Tuesday’s primaries – which claimed Obama aides met with members of Canada’s Conservative Party to discuss NAFTA – was “suspicious.”

The memo said that an adviser of Obama had met with Canadian officials to say that he would not renegotiate the free trade agreement, which contradicted statements the Illinois Senator had made during his campaign that were strongly anti-NAFTA. After publicizing the memo, Clinton won Ohio, where a large, working-class population blames NAFTA for job losses.

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It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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Bush Tackles Obama's Foreign Policy

President Bush has decided to throw a few barbs
at Barack Obama despite saying that he would stay
out of the fracas. Well we all knew that was not so.
How could he just sit back and not come to the aid
of his buddy John McCain.


Setting aside his stated reluctance to enter the presidential campaign, President Bush on Thursday strongly criticized Barack Obama's expressed readiness to meet with foreign leaders cast as tyrants, warning that such discussions "can be extremely counterproductive" and "send the wrong signal."

He also challenged Democrats' skepticism about the North American Free Trade Agreement, and reminded Obama that Al Qaeda has been seeking to establish a base in Iraq "for the past four years."

At the same time, he said at a White House news conference that he was not yet willing to join the political fray, but his comments suggested otherwise. He worked beyond the edges of the debate, challenging for the first time -- and across a broad spectrum of issues -- some of the tenets of Obama's and Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaigns and the direction in which the Democrats would take the nation.

In the lively 46-minute session with the media, during which Bush bantered with reporters, he delivered a forceful plea for congressional support of his plan to renew anti-terrorist eavesdropping legislation.

He attacked congressional critics of his Iraq policy and expressed curiosity -- as well as uncertainty -- about Dmitri A. Medvedev, the all-but-certain successor to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

But it was in his challenge to Obama's readiness to meet with the pariahs of American foreign policy that Bush plunged most directly into the presidential campaign.

The president said that "sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro" would lend the status of the American presidency to the new Cuban leader.

"He gains a lot from it by saying, 'Look at me, I'm now recognized by the president of the United States,' " Bush said.




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It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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More FBI Dirty Tricks?

My thinking on national security has changed since
911. I mean look if terrorist had to play by a rule
book then they'd certainly not get much accomplish.
So why must our guys continue to do so? Sure some
of the people that come under the FBI's scrutiny are
American citizens but they also aid the enemy.

The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.

Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the privacy breach by FBI agents and lawyers occurred a year before the bureau enacted sweeping new reforms to prevent future lapses.

Details on the abuses will be outlined in the coming days in a report by the Justice Department's inspector general.

The report is a follow-up to an audit by the inspector general a year ago that found the FBI demanded personal data on people from banks, telephone and Internet providers and credit bureaus without official authorization and in non-emergency circumstances between 2003 and 2005.

Mueller, noting senators' concerns about Americans' civil and privacy rights, said the new report "will identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March." The similarities, he said, are because the time period of the two studies "predates the reforms we now have in place."

He added: "We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people."

Mueller offered no additional details. Several other Justice Department and FBI officials familiar with this year's findings have said privately the upcoming report will show the letters were wrongly used at a similar rate as during the previous three years.

In contrast to the outrage by Congress and civil liberties groups after last year's report was issued, Mueller's disclosure drew no criticism from senators during just over two hours of testimony during Wednesday's hearing.

Speaking before the FBI chief, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., urged Mueller to be more vigilant in correcting what he called "widespread illegal and improper use of national security letters."

"Everybody wants to stop terrorists. But we also, though, as Americans, we believe in our privacy rights and we want those protected," Leahy said. "There has to be a better chain of command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just because they want to."

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It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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The New Civil Rights Issue?

Well folks that's the way the mayor of Los Angeles sees
it and and his opponents see it as another attempt to gain
control of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Well whatya
think, can the mayor run a city of this size and and the largest
school district in the country? My answer is no, what's yours?



The high school dropout problem is "the new civil rights issue of our time," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared Wednesday in a speech that drew a line from the efforts to desegregate the South a half-century ago to today's struggles over the performance of Los Angeles students, who are predominantly Latino.

Acknowledging that there is wide disagreement about how many students are leaving L.A. schools, Villaraigosa told a conference on dropout issues that "whatever that number is, we are in a crisis."

The mayor, who is campaigning to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District, insisted that he wasn't "throwing stones" at the school system, many of whose top administrators were in the audience at the Leadership Forum on High School Dropouts at USC. But his speech contained plenty of brickbats.

"Make no mistake: There's a culture of complacency in this school district that's got to change," Villaraigosa said.

Schools Supt. Roy Romer, who was not present for the speech, gave his own talk later, defending the district even as he said he welcomed the mayor's "aggressive" approach to the district.

Ticking off the school system's accomplishments during his tenure — the nation's largest school-construction program, a sharp rise in standardized test scores in elementary schools — Romer said: "That's not complacency, folks. That's change!"

He added: "We have real challenges going forward. But to deny what we have accomplished together would be foolish." He said the reforms the district has set in place would take years to roll out.

The dropout issue has been at the center of local school reform discussions since last March, when a study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University calculated that only 45% of students were graduating in four years from Los Angeles schools. The rate was even lower for Latino students, and much higher for white and Asian American students. African Americans were close to the districtwide average.




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"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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To learn more and hear
excerpts from this treasured
program,click here:
http://www.kingprogram.net/