DENVER, COLORADO- Civil liberties champion David Lane has filed a complaint in US district court challenging Denver's office of the city attorney for instituting a permit process at DIA to prevent public protest. Holding signs has become impermissible at the airport, without the issuance of a permit seven days in advnace, although police are not bothering themselves about signs welcoming homecomers or seeking to connect business visitors with their limo service. That selective enforcement is unconstitutional of course, and the lawfirm powerhouse of Kilmer Lane & Newman is filing suit on behalf of two Occupy Denver plaintiffs. last Sunday, January 29, both were threatened with arrest by DIA police. While two earlier attempts to assemble had capitulated to DPD intimidation, the Occupy Denver activists stood their ground. Why did you file your lawsuit? "We know our rights. We want the POLICE to know our rights." 1. Full text of complaint: Case 1:17-cv-00332 Document 1 Filed 02/06/17 USDC Colorado Page 1 of 14 Civil Action No. IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLORADO NAZLI MCDONNELL, ERIC VERLO, Plaintiffs, vs. CITY AND COUNTY OF DENVER,? DENVER POLICE COMMANDER ANTONIO LOPEZ, in his individual and official capacity, DENVER POLICE SERGEANT VIRGINIA QUINONES, in her individual and official capacity, Defendants. ______________________________________________________________________________ COMPLAINT ______________________________________________________________________________ Plaintiffs, by and through their attorneys David A. Lane and Andy McNulty of KILLMER, LANE & NEWMAN, LLP, allege as follows: INTRODUCTION 1. Plaintiffs Eric Verlo and Nazli McDonnell challenge a regulation of alarming breadth that bans all First Amendment expression at Denver International Airport without a permit. 2. Plaintiffs are concerned citizens who believe that President Donald Trump has overstepped his executive authority by signing the January 27, 2017, Executive Order (hereinafter “Muslim Ban”), which permanently bans Syrian refugees from emigrating to the United States, temporarily bans nationals of seven countries (including permanent legal residents and visa-holders), and suspends all applications to the United States refugee program (even as to vetted entrants currently in transit). 3. Plaintiffs wish to express their disgust with President Trump’s (likely unconstitutional) Muslim Ban. They wish to do so in the same place that hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country have done: standing directly outside of the secure Customs and Border Protection (hereinafter “CBP”) screening area within an airport where immigrants to America enter into the main terminal after clearing customs. Plaintiffs, unlike many citizens across this great nation who have exercised their opposition to the Muslim Ban in airports by chanting, singing, dancing, and praying, simply wish to stand in silent protest, holding signs that express their solidarity with immigrants and the Muslim community. 4. Plaintiffs are banned from doing so by DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT REGULATION 50 (hereinafter “Regulation 50”). 5. Regulation 50 states: “No person or organization shall leaflet, conduct surveys, display signs, gather signatures, solicit funds, or engage in other speech related activity at Denver International Airport for religious, charitable, or political purposes, or in connection with a labor dispute, except pursuant to, and in compliance with, a permit
Tag: Law
Fuck Cops Guy Eric Brandt deployed ACME Kop Katcher Kit but caught Denver’s SIT-LIE ordinance instead
DENVER, COLORADO- That's right, DPD motorcycle gang members fell for Eric Brandt's cop trap, hook line and donut, but as usual, that's not what Eric was after. On this particular arrest date, Eric wanted to test Denver's "Sit-Lie" ordinance and this week Eric had his day in court. The city pressed its case for two days but after only ten minutes of deliberation the jury found Eric innocent. He admitted to sitting down, to purposefully seeking arrest, but his lawyer drove home the import of repudiating unjust law. Denver's ban on sitting or laying down in its Business Improvement District is a prohibition aimed squarely at the homeless. By a five out of six majority the jury vindicated Eric Brandt and refused to convict. The first day was spent hearing the testimony of a 20-year veteran cop so clueless he thought protests required permits, so flaky he denied seeing Eric's donut or the six by four foot box tilting above it. He was so smug he cropped the ACME Kop Katcher Kit out of his crime scene photo, and so dumb he reported verifying Brandt's identity by his RTD disability pass yet failed to deduce Brandt was disabled. This poor officer was so simpleminded that Eric's defense attorney risked being seen badgering him with a mere superiority of faculties. As a result, the officer's misconception about permits was not corrected. The audience knew his MO to be an unconstitutional, the jury got it, as might your average highschool civics student, so the cross examination ended without having to contradict the little officer of the law. But the cop left the stand as he came in, having spent sixteen years of his service on the motorcycle unit, policing marches downtown, following orders and harranging protesters because they don't have permits. And he's back on the beat right now. Otherwise the outcome of Eric's trial was a total victory. For jury nullification. For freedom of expression. For the affirmative defense that performance art trumps a municipality's authority to enforce conformity and order. And for human rights. Everyone has a right to sit down whether or not a chair is provided or deprived for that purpose. Those of us with places to sit, like cars and houses and restaurant chairs, don't need that protection, but the homeless do. No gentrifying business-first politician should be coaxing police to pretend it should be otherwise. The DPD may still issue citations but the likelihood of conviction is now greatly diminished. A civil suit from Eric will now hasten Denver's incentive to repeal the errant ordinance. Downtown Denver's sit-lie law is about to sunset by natural cause, Eric Brandt, force of nature.
HITMAN!- Obama’s new model for lawless international policing
There is a new model for lawless US government policing, where the government can now issue 'a hit' on whoever it pleases by merely offering up a reward 'Dead or Alive' against whoever, and/ or whatever organization worldwide the President designates. No need for warrants, and no need for courts and judges at all, in fact. The sheriff simply aims to KILL! ...Bang! Bang! Bang! You can do it for the Boss, and get paid to do so, too! That's the lack of Law we now have internationally! I think it's time that we throw out all pretense that we are a democracy in the US functioning with rules and regulations for government conduct. Let's admit it now- GOVERNMENT ALLOWS ITSELF TO DO ANY DAMN THING IT FEELS LIKE. Bush and Cheney did not get us there, the Democratic Party, 'liberal' voters, and Obama did. Let's read what has me saying that this is where our country is now at, shall we? ... U.S. puts $10 million bounty on Pakistan terror group's leader The question is not whether this man and his group are either good, bad, or indifferent. The problem here is that Obama has set himself up here as autocratic KING, or perhaps as the Sheriff of Nottingham, where his edicts are now automatically to be Law, no matter any due process to it or not? Can you imagine if the local police were to begin to function in such a manner (and it is merely a matter of a short time before they actually will begin to function this way) as taking out bounties against who the police chief and mayor might designate as criminals? In a matter of a short 2 decades, the US government has gone from claiming to be enforcing international law against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, to now acting much worse itself than Saddam Hussein ever once did in regards to these matters. And we as a population have questioned very little of all of this. We are simply being led down a blind and dead end alley of international lawlessness, that will one day haunt the American people. We have allowed our government to lawlessly defeat its own people and erase all our rights, all simply under the guise of fighting 'the bad guys'. We have been totally stupid and unresponsive to their taking away of our Rights, and now headlines such as the above go undiscussed and unmentioned. Our national soul is now dead. And all to supposedly help capture whom? Our new governmental designated official demon of the day... Hafiz Sayeed? Long Live the King! Long Live the Matrix! Long Live the Military Industrial Governmental Complex! Swear allegiance or you might be 'hit'.
Wall Street Journal in Anti-Mosque Rant.
Saying that moderate Islam doesn't exist, that al Qa'eda and Taliban operatives would kill anybody who expressed in the Arab Countries any non-extremist position. What a Fat Load Of Shit. Again painting Islam as a monolithic entity, no differences between nations or even PEOPLE. Let's put that in Christian Western Moderate terms yes? Since the Crusades pitted Christian against Christian more often that Christian against Muslim, and every war since then, German chaplains instructing their soldiers in Both World Wars to go into battle screaming "Gott Mit Uns" meaning, God is on OUR side, and the British Chaplains same way instructing their Cannon Fodder to scream "God and King!" as they marched in an orderly fashion through the portals of Hell... There must not be any such thing as a Moderate Christian because the Radicals, like for instance Michelle Malkin, and Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck, would have us all killed if we expressed any form of moderation. Although that IS the ultimate logical end of their truly screwed up mindset. There's an internet rule that nobody is supposed to be compared to the Nazi regime no matter how much their plans for a New World Regime goose-steps right along with the Nazi philosophy. That's a huge benefit for Sarah and Glenn and Michelle and Pam Geller and similar Nazi-think-alikes. Do they consider the import of their making war against ANY religious belief? Especially in the name of what many other churches would consider Fringe Elements in for instance Sarah Palin's AOG church or Glenn Beck's LDS church, or Hannity's Catholic Church. The reason they're writing Slave Owner Thomas Jefferson as being not really a Founding Father is because he actually wrote a treatise on Separation of Church and State. Something they deny was the Holy and Unquestionable "original intent" of the Holy, Saintly and of Course Unanimously Christian (even though the first four presidents and Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere and Samuel Adams were Deists, not Christian) They're writing off Jefferson not because of his slaves, a position of which they approve, National Burn the Confederate Flag Day 9/12 but because of his position on Religious Freedom implicitly and explicitly being dependent on No National Religion. He lived in Virginia, which before and even after the Revolution exchanged shots with the Catholic contingent in Maryland. Not a coincidence, but the very names Virginia and Maryland reflect the ongoing war in England at the time over Catholic-versus-Protestant. Neither name has anything to do with the Virgin Mary. It's Mary Stewart, Catholic, and Elizabeth Tudor the Virgin Queen of England who never married and officially never had sex, Their bloody little Christian-on-Christian Crime Spree was just one corner of a Vast anti-Christian Christian Crusade which still goes on. Both Virginia and Maryland not only each banned the other's Major Denomination but also Jews, Quakers and Native American religions. Thomas Jefferson opposed that. If the Muslim Countries had even HALF that kind of track record of Militancy there would be probably only two Muslim fellows left in the entire world, playing
Remember the Y2K plot?
The one that was supposedly broken by U.S. Customs on one side of the border and the RCMP on the others. That would be Customs before they became the Terrorist acronym "ICE", under the Liberal Bill Clinton, and the Canadian Cops, who, according to the Right Wing Screaming Club, are wimps whose idea of Torture is serving the tea with 2 sugars instead of3 a tad cooler than it's supposed to be served and forgetting to begin and end a sentence with the word "Sir". Seems the Rush Limbaugh "professional torturers" who know all there is to know about the Law, the Constitution that is the basis of that Law and how to interrogate people, wanted to have instead of a usual method of arresting, booking, and charging a Human Being with a felony, wanted to skip straight to the pulling out of fingernails, waterboarding and Crucifixion. Seriously, Right wing freaks, listen up... Torture is a sex crime, a violent rape. The persons who engage in torture are in fact Rapists. You would commit our national security into the hands of Perverted Assholes who get sexually aroused by human beings screaming in pain. They need a check-up from the neck-up, not a cushy government job, not guaranteed unlimited immunity from prosecution from their Violent Sexual Predator Rapes. And the MORONS who support these policies of allowing Torture Freak Sadist Rapists to hold the lives and deaths not only their bound and helpless victims but also the lives and deaths of Americans everywhere who are put at risk because they're wasting their time and our money Getting Their Pathetic Little Rocks Off. If you're Stupid enough or Insane Enough to trust YOUR safety, and of course mine, to people who are that Mentally Off-Balance that they enjoy, sexually, the pain of others then you also need a Check-up from the Neck-up.
Is it really illegal to boycott Israel?
It is not illegal for US consumers to boycott anyone's products. But the business decisions of companies affiliated with Israel do enjoy some curious protective constraints... It's ironic that as the US enforces rigid sanctions against international companies which violate its embargo against Cuba, the US has enacted laws simultaneously which prohibit its companies from complying with trade restrictions called by others. As a further embarrassment, the antiboycotting measure specifies just one boycott, literally: the League of Arab Nations boycott of Israel. So while American consumers are free to make the buying decisions they wish, it is illegal for an American business to adjust its business practices to boycott Israel. In other words, as much as social justice activists might like to ask a department store not to carry Ahava beauty products taken from Occupied Territory shores, the store would be prohibited by US law to do so as an act of compliance. For another example, fashion labels such as DKNY and cK could decide to discontinue carrying undergarments manufactured by Delta Galil from settler farms in Palestine, but they couldn't do it because of someone's boycott. (Delta Galil supplies clothing to the Gap, Banana Republic, Structure, J-Crew, JC Penny, Pryca, Lindex, DIM, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Playtex, Calvin Klein, and Hugo Boss.) This law makes a commercial boycott impossible to resolve between customer and business, but ultimately results in more pressure being applied to the source cause, which are the policies of Israel. According to the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, Office of Antiboycott Compliance, in the 1970s two laws were enacted "to counteract the participation of U.S. citizens in other nation's economic boycotts or embargoes. These 'antiboycott' laws are the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act (TRA). While these laws share a common purpose, there are distinctions in their administration." Antiboycott Compliance The Bureau is charged with administering and enforcing the Antiboycott Laws under the Export Administration Act. Those laws discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, and certain Moslem countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott. Compliance with such requests may be prohibited by the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and may be reportable to the Bureau. The law specifies boycotts called by foreign nations, leaving the possibility that US citizens can declare themselves the originators of a boycott. However other language makes clear that no boycott is to contravene the US government's declared trade policy with Israel. To elaborate on the EAR: Objectives: The antiboycott laws were adopted to encourage, and in specified cases, require U.S. firms to refuse to participate in foreign boycotts that the United States does not sanction. They have the effect of preventing U.S. firms from being used to implement foreign policies of other nations which run counter to U.S. policy. Primary Impact: The Arab League boycott of Israel is the principal foreign
Prohibition is Stupid- there is something wrong with the law
'Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them have been found out – but when one is grateful that most law-breakers go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.' YES, there is something wrong with the law, when the law is made by elites to deliberately criminalize millions of poor people so as to further brutalize them. See Financial Times columnist Clive Crook (good name!) writing about Prohibition- A criminally stupid war on drugs in the US When elites do something as overtly and obviously dysfunctionally stupid as promoting Prohibition and a 'War on Drugs' then there is almost always a covert reason for why they are doing it, too. Same is true with all their other war making policies. When a 'Global War on Terrorism' produces more terrorism than it eliminates yet the elites keep on pushing it, then there is a covert reason for doing that, too. What would those covert reasons be? Begging the elites to stop it because their overt reasons don't add up right just will not succeed. They continue to do what they are doing for hidden reasons, and often even hidden from themselves reasons as well. One of those hidden reasons is that what the program is really about is building a security apparatus to protect themselves, and not really to be used against drug spread and terrorism spread. They simply need a society blindly following authoritarian orders that are used to keep themselves, the elites, in power. Consider these 'wars' as excuses to build a security structure around themselves. It is a welfare program for the building of a group of security 'servants' for the top dogs. It is a program to make the lower classes of society more miserable and therefore more demoralized and self-destructive. Demoralized and self-destructive people are less able to rebel when there is military, courts, and police around every corner of their lives.
Regulation, testing, law, and deception
In America we are seeing a convergence of the meltdown of all capitalist for-profit driven systems breaking down all at once, whether it be the Financial System, the Health System, the Legal System, or the Educational System. At the heart of the problem is that regulations, testing, and law have been turned into their total opposites by the American Business Community, as they search out profits with an unparalleled, in the history of Humankind, greed and avarice. In Education, we see Big Business mandated testing being used to dis-educate youth. In Finance, we see the regulatory agencies acting to allow fiscal business anarchy. In law, we see the legal code twisting and turning itself around to codify and legalize torture. In the Health System the regulations are being used by the corporate world to protect their abuse of the elderly and sick, rather than to keep that from happening. In short, American capitalism has become most adept at hijacking regulatory systems under their control, and then using them to produce chaos and dysfunction. NCLB Testing Said to Give 'Illusions of Progress' Doesn't what this article talks about in education seem quite related to the economic meltdown? Pity the youth for the inheritance America is giving them.
This deformed thing we call Justice
America seems poised to possibly elect a law professor into the White House later this year. Funny that this legal specialist, who taught LAW for 10 years at the University of Chicago, has remained strangely silent as the US government instituted torture into its legal codes, eliminated Habeas Corpus, and trampled whole sale on the US Constitution. I don't remember a bleep of protest from this legal specialist during these recent times. Where were you Barack Obama? Your specialty is law, you hide that fact??? It's because you kept so silent, is it not? You and your party are collaborators, aren't you? But this is not about Barack Obama and his loud silence. It is about America's attitudes toward the police. It is about this deformed thing in America we call Justice. It is about how the people trust the police's word, even though there is so much evidence that the police consistently fabricate testimony, fabricate evidence, and fabricate the supposed need for their own reproduction as a cancer upon our country... one that is growing, growing, growing., just like the military. I opened up Parade in the Springs GagShit newspaper this morning to see the question posed, 'Do we need more police?' Shouldn't the question actually be, 'Don't we need less police?' or 'Are we actually safer with this growing number of police plaguing the US?' What would your answers be to these questions? Please tax me more, I want more jails? I borrowed this phrase 'the deformed thing we call Justice' from Joe Bageant's column titled Old Dogs and Hard Time Joe is the closest approximation we have today in America, to having a live Junior version of Studs Terkel on hand. His writings always seem to highlight the real working class issues in America, and I love reading him! Power to the People, Joe! Here is my last question... Can we really have anything other than a deformed 'justice' in a country that hates the common person so much? We don't respect the common people, for all they do is just work without being able to buy that much. How despicable is America's attitude toward them. Dominant elite culture thinks it a crime that poor people who work and consider them lowest on the totem pole! Shame on the common people for being so low and poor!, You Guys. It's a crime these days to be working poor! Don't you know it? Yes, many in America really still want to imprison yet more of the poor and working class. For that, we need yet more police, yet more 'law', and yet more weaponry. These perverts... this lowe echelon of worker rabble... are seen to be like foreign Muslims almost.
Policing by America’s Reich
Last week it was news about a woman named Hope in New York, whose cousin had called the police because another cousin had sexually molested her. When the police came they ended up arresting the victim, taking her to jail, then assaulted her again with 7-8 heavy and thuggish cops jumping on her, stripping the clothes off her, and leaving her naked in a jail cell! Just yesterday, millions of Americans saw police dump a paralyzed man out of his wheelchair onto the floor of the police station, like he was just so much trash. Where do these attitudes and policing methods come from? How did the cops get to think that this sort of stuff is normal in the US? These attitudes come out of the airports, out of Guantanamo, out of the Colorado Springs city council, where similar policing attitudes and methods were glossed over when used against elderly St Pat's Day paraders in the city last year. I remember Elizabeth being hauled across the pavement just an hour or so after having given her a ride to be there. She could not walk to the area where we were to start the parade and I had had to ask a cop to let my car though the barricade just for her to get to the Bookmobile. Later, after being assaulted by the cops, she had to face the city bringing criminal charges against her in the aftermath... for supposedly being part of a plot to block the parade from going on! These police attitudes come as the American Reich has begun an electrical arms race across the country, with Taser International being the Lockheed of police weaponry. Our city and county governments think nothing about now spreading these devices into the schools! These attitudes come from Iraq and Afghanistan, where our bombers drop ordinance down onto children below, just as if they were so much trash. This is policing today, in the American Reich. This is a new system in place, that uses torture on POWs even as our own local city flies flags about American POWs once held in Vietnam from the flag masts of the downtown post office right here in The Springs. The American Reich doesn't see the incongruence in their idiotic national pride about being the supposed repository of all democracy as they police as they are now doing. They have become more thuggish in simple increments, and now do not see the distance downhill they have actually traveled. We live in a scary place and in scary times, but unlike in New York with Hope and here in The Springs with Elizabeth, at least in Florida these cops who dumped the paralyzed man on the floor from his wheelchair are now facing some troubles of their own. Yet, there are many more places where those in charge are totally
Jamie Leigh Jones is still locked in a box
When they teach in math class about the square roots of numbers, you invariably encounter the paradox of negative numbers. Since neither two positive factors nor two negatives can produce a negative, you're told the square root of a negative is "irreducible" and you must leave the equation be. It turns out that this explanation was really a matter of convenience, because later in the year students revisit the square root of -1 and learn it can be called an imaginary number. Now you were expected to solve the equation, and zoom, math took off from there. I remember feeling betrayed that math had become an abstraction, so comfortable was I to be stuck at the simpler impasse. I use this analogy to contemplate some oversimplifications about law which are being used to temper moral indignation at the machinations of our government. We're told, for example, that we've subverted the rule of law in Iraq, that enemy combatants are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, that Guantanamo Cuba falls neither under Cuban law nor our dominion. We're told the International Criminal courts do not have jurisdiction over Americans and we're told our contractor-mercenaries are exempt from anyone's prosecution. Those legal impediments to justice are not only imaginary, to say it in legalese, they're balderdash. My math teacher had a educational reason to maintain that the square root of -1 was unsolvable. Whatever motive does anyone have to keep the American public in the dark about the suspension of human rights? NBC has just trumpeted the tragic case of Jamie Leigh Jones, but presumes simultaneously to reinforce the aforementioned balderdash. Two years ago Jones was gang raped by KBR coworkers in Iraq and kept in a shipping container until she was able to convince one of her keepers to lend her a cell phone. Her father then called a congressman who called the State Department who sent agents over to KBR's compound in the Green Zone to set her free. Since that time, the feds have dropped the case, the rape-kit evidence has gone missing, KBR claims it has been ordered to conduct no investigation, and Jones is left with no recourse but to file a civil suit. Now she is being told that an arbitration clause in her contract prevents her from doing even that. The truths being asserted, as indignant as they might make us feel, are that contractors in Iraq are outside the reach of any law. Specifically Iraqi law, as dictated by Viceroy Bremer's famous contractor indemnity clause, but by inference, US law, because Iraq is a "sovereign nation," and International Law, because otherwise our whole country could be held accountable for what it's perpetrated there. I've even read it asserted that two years marks the expiration of Jone's right to redress from her attackers. Wherever have you heard of so short a statute of limitation for rape? Another assumption attempts to bolster the impregnability of arbitration clauses which have become de rigueur in corporate employment contracts. Such clauses may forbid civil