Suing the NSA: THREE PRISM-Related Lawsuits - Obama, Holder Named As Defendants

June 12, 2013 - There is a lot of buzz today about "the lawsuit over PRISM" the NSA program created in 2007 to monitor electronic communications.

Most people do not seem to realize that there are at least three separate lawsuits concerned with the NSA's controversial domestic spying program.

One of the suits was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and two other suits are by former Justice Dept. prosecutor Larry Klayman. He is currently the General Counsel for Freedom Watch, Inc.

The Klayman Suits:

"Having already filed a 3 billion dollar class action with regard to the alleged government privacy abuse by the Obama administration and Verizon," reports Before It's News, "Larry Klayman....filed a new $20 billion dollar companion class action suit in DC federal court today. Like the prior class action suit concerning Verizon [filed on June 10], this new case names President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, the heads of the NSA and the 12 other companies who have collaborated with the government in violating the privacy and other constitutional rights of American citizens. The companies named in the suit which are tied to the government’s PRISM- NSA scheme are: Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, YouTube, Apple, PalTalk, AOL, and Yahoo. The users and subscribers of these companies comprise, combined with the Verizon class plaintiffs, a majority of the entire U.S. citizenry and thus these complementary class action suits pit the American people against their government and corporate enablers."

1) Klayman filed a lawsuit on Monday, June 10. This is "the lawsuit against Verizon." This is Civil Action No.: 1:13-cv-00851 and was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. See the full civil complaint here. Klayman  amended it to make it the first class-action lawsuit in response to the publication of a secret court order instructing Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of American customers on an "ongoing, daily basis." The defendants are: Barack Obama; Eric Holder; Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency; Lowell C. McAdam, Chief Executive Officer of Verizon Communications; Roger Vinson, Judge, U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; Verizon Communication; National Security Agency; U.S. Department of Justice. More about this lawsuit at US News & World Report.

2) The suit filed today (June 12) asks for $20 billion in damages and attorney fees plus an injunction to stop PRISM. The three plaintiffs in this class-action lawsuit: Charles Strange of Pennsylvania, and California private investigators Michael Ferrari and Matt Garrison. More at US News & World Report.

The ACLU Suit:

The ACLU file their lawsuit on Tuesday, June 11 in response to "revelations about the NSA's unprecedented mass surveillance of phone calls," says the ACLU website. They say that the NSA program, PRISM, "violates Americans' constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy."

The ACLU's case is No. 13 CIV 3994 as filed with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. See the full complaint at the ACLU website. This case is commonly called "ACLU v. Clapper" because one of the defendants is Keith B. Clapper, Director of National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service.

Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said that NSA's PRISM "goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy."

"In other lawsuits against national security policies," reports the New York Times, "the government has often persuaded courts to dismiss them without ruling on the merits by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs could not prove they were personally affected and so lacked standing in court.  This case may be different. The government has now declassified the existence of the program. And the A.C.L.U. is a customer of Verizon Business Network Services — the recipient of a leaked secret court order for all its domestic calling records — which it says gives it standing."

Also See: My fight against Obama's abuse of power by Larry Klayman Renew America

New York MTA Gives In To Pro-Savage Complaints, Bans Free Speech In Subway

This advert was too scary for New York's MTA

Sept. 30, 2012 - You KNEW this would happen, didn't you? When New York City blogger Pamela Geller went balls-out and bought space in the city's subway stations for her pro-Israel, anti-Jihad posters, it caused instant controversy.

Sadly, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) of New York is composed of spineless pussies who caved in to the screeches and howls of those who objected to the First Amendment-protected posters.  

Freedom of speech is under assault by the Left, folks: The banning of Gellers subway placards comes on the heels of Barack Obama's recent anti-free speech statement at the United Nations, in which he said, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." Obama got that backwards, of course: The First Amendment guarantees you and me the freedom to say whatever we bloody well please about Mohammed, pro or con, or about any other religion or religious figure. The future, then, must never belong to those who would suppress my right to criticize Mohammed, Jesus, Moses, Donald Duck, Winston Churchill, the Chicago Bears or anything else.

The placards simply said, "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad." They were not anti-Islam per se. They were specifically anti-Jihad. Reasonable Americans know what that means: Violent, murderous militant radical Muslims. In fact, the words "Muslim" and "Islam" did not appear in the ads.

Will the ACLU weigh in on this issue? They already did, actually. Fox News reported on Sept. 23 that Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, supported Geller's right to run what she called the "patently offensive" ads. "More offensive would be their censorship," Fox quoted Lieberman as saying, "because that would violate the guarantee of free expression of all ideas regardless of how distasteful they are."

Indeed, the First Amendment is supposed to protect speech even if it offends some people.

Frankly, I find the Geller anti-Jihad placards to be much less offensive than Jihadists' videos of beheadings, suicide bombings and hangings. Don't you prefer Geller's approach to protesting against something she dislikes (jihad and savagery) over the manner in which so many Muslims worldwide take?

Was ChrisStevens killed by savages? Well, yes.

You know, like the killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012. Or like the countless numbers of violent protests and attacks and - sure, let's throw these in, too - stoning of women, executions of gay people just because they are gay people, burning hotels and killing guests because they engaged in (gasp) drinking beer ... and so much more.  

"Savage" seems appropriate when describing those things. Doesn't it? Does it describe all Muslims? No, it does not. It only describes the savage ones. This is so simple that it's almost painful.

At first, the MTA used one of their own regulations that allows them to turn down ads if they “demean an individual or group of individuals on account of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation.”

Look at the wording of Geller's placards, and at the MTA regulation that initially banned it, and you see a sort of disconnect from reality. "In any war between the civilized man and the savage," said the placards, "support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad."  Could "savage" be offensive to an unthinking, overly sensitive, guilt-ridden, Jihad-supporting Muslim? I suppose so, but can a reasonable person argue that suicide belt-wearing people bent on killing innocent people just because they are not Muslims are not savages? I think not....

ACLU's Hypocritical Arizona Travel Alert

July 1, 2010 - The ACLU has issued a "travel warning" to people considering a visit to Arizona. According to FoxNews today: American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in Arizona, New Mexico and 26 other states put out the warnings in advance of the Fourth of July weekend. The Arizona chapter has received reports that law enforcement officers are already targeting some people even though the law doesn't take effect until July 29, its executive director said. The ACLU "warning" is incredibly - and typically - hypocritical. I'm not going to rehash the virtues of the Arizona law (SB1070) here. Instead, let's wonder here why the ACLU and others are so concerned about Arizona's alleged human rights violations, while they give the Toilet Republic of Mexico a free pass for its own gross and well-documented brutal treatment of foreigners on its own soil. Some examples: Migrants assaulted by federal agents return to their country (English tranlation from Migrantes asaltados por federales regresan a su país, June 14, 2010) As has happened in other occasions earlier this year, Mexican federal police in Chahuites, state of Oaxaca, assaulted some 300 Central American migrants riding a freight train. A priest from a shelter for transients in that area said that, “As in the previous two assaults, the agents acted brutally……..and kicked them while (the victims) were face down on the ground.” After the assault, a group of migrants complained to the National Human Rights Commission with the help of the local Salvadoran Consul. But afterward, federal police agents threatened them with firearms and demanded that they retract the allegations in front of video cameras. (Source: Tuscon Citizen) Mexico: Hold Military to Account on Rights Abuses (Mexico City) - April 29, 2009 - Mexico is failing to hold members of the military who commit human rights violations accountable, undercutting its efforts to curb drug-related violence and improve public security, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. (Source: Human Rights Watch) Mexico Human Rights - Human Rights Concerns Human rights concerns persist, particularly at the state level where violence surrounds local elections and misuse of the judicial system is common. Federal efforts to combat violence against women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez have continued with limited success. A number of human rights defenders have been threatened and at least three journalists have been killed despite proposed legislation to strengthen human rights protection in the Constitution. (Source: AmnestyUSA.org) Mexico migrants face human rights crisis, says Amnesty "Migrants in Mexico are facing a major human rights crisis leaving them with virtually no access to justice, fearing reprisals and deportation if they complain of abuses," said Rupert Knox, who contributed to the report, Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move. "Persistent failure by the authorities to tackle abuses carried out against irregular migrants has made their journey through Mexico one of the most dangerous in the world," he added. (Source: BBC News) Time to Speak up on Military Abuse in Mexico The Mexican army's human rights record is very troubling. Soldiers deployed in counternarcotics operations have engaged in grave abuses, such as killings, torture, rape, and beatings. And if the abuses themselves aren't worrisome enough for the Obama administration, their impact on the efficacy of the drug war should be. Each time that civilians are abused, Mexican soldiers contribute to the climate of violence and lawlessness in which the cartels thrive. Worse, the force's abuses have cost it public trust and cooperation, both of which are vital to effective counternarcotics operations. (Source: Foreign Policy) Paramilitaries Kill Two Human Rights Activists in Oaxaca In Mexico, two human rights activists have been shot dead in the state of Oaxaca. The victims have been identified as Beatriz Cariño, director of the Mexican human rights group CACTUS, and Jyri Antero Jaakkola, a human rights observer from Finland. They were traveling as part of a convoy attempting to deliver aid to a town that’s been targeted by paramilitary blockades since the 2006 uprising against Governor Ulises Ruiz. (Source: DemocracyNow.org) Mexico rights agency decries slaying of reporter Mexico's National Human Rights Commission urged authorities Tuesday to investigate the killing of a reporter in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, the fourth slaying of a Mexican journalist this year.... The rights commission said in a statement that "the impunity of attacks against journalists is unacceptable." The panel says at least 61 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000 -- 12 last year and four so far in 2010. Press freedom groups say Mexico is one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists. (Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek) With years and years of profound human rights violations on the part of Mexico's military, police and others against it's own indigenous peoples and migrants from neighboring nations, why has the ACLU not issued a "travel warning" for people going there?

Big Brother Pizza, Can I Help You?

Big Brother is watching you, we know this. The Comrade Obama Regime is giving Big Bro even more power to intrude into our (theoretically) private business, and not just with nationalized health care. Here's a video (flash) from the ACLU (click to watch) that is not only funny as heck, it's a brilliant sendup of the nanny state and government intrustion into every facet of our lives. Leave a Comment * Conservative Shirts and More! Follow CNB on Twitter * RSS Feed

Feds Sued by Community Organizations and Publishers, Charge Computer Searches Illegal

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an organizationt that has been working to protect the rights of citizen journalists ("bloggers") since 1990. They have battled unfair laws and attempts to squelch free speech by advocating and representing in courts.

EFF has brought and defended lawsuits "even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations." EFF has a story posted on their web site about a recent lawsuit filed by private citizen groups against the FBI and other federal entities.

The groups are being helped by both EFF and the ACLU: Data Seizure Violates Constitution and Federal Law San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU of Northern California filed suit in federal court today to protect the privacy and free speech rights of two San Francisco Bay Area community organizations after the groups' computers were seized and the data copied by federal and local law enforcement. Both organizations, Long Haul and the East Bay Prisoner Support Group (EBPS), are publishers of information for social and political activists. FULL ARTICLE... EFF also has a link to the full complaint here (PDF).

I recently heard of a few bloggers who could use EFF's services, so I forwarded a link to mutual friend (who was previously unaware of EFF), who in turn passed it along to the bloggers. (You're welcome very much, thank you.) Another threat to free speech: Orwellian-Alinsky Dems CNB RSS Feed

North Side Rapist Arrested (Again)

Thanks to the justice system, the ACLU and liberal legislators, at least two women were attacked last month in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood. According to police, Gerald Holman sexually attacked a Rogers Park woman on June 18, and then sexually - and violently - attacked another woman the following night.

But here's the worst of it.

According to a Sun-Times report, Holman "has a history of narcotics-related convictions, including one in 2007 that resulted in his current three-year parole sentence."

Holman "has a history of narcotics-related convictions." He's been known by the system to be dangerous for a while now. Did that keep him off the streets? No! He was allowed back on the streets by the system that was supposed to protect those two women. The courts allowed him to attack those women.

Holman's public defender, Armando Sandoval, says Holman is married, works at a hotel, and attends Moody Bible Church. Mr. Sandoval will probably tell you that Holman is really a nice guy who has problems just like everybody else, that we should try to understand him, and that society really to blame for his actions.

NBC-5 reports that in one of the attacks, "In the first incident, Holman allegedly sexually assaulted a woman around midnight in the basement of a building in the 6900 block of North Wayne, according to police. He then allegedly stole her wedding ring and other jewelry." What a swell guy. What a great candidate for parole, especially with a history of narcotics-related convictions! Thanks ACLU!

According to WBBM 780, Cook County Judge Laura Sullivan ordered Gerald Holman held without bond. "Holman has been charged with two counts of home invasion with a firearm and one count each of aggravated criminal sexual assault and attempted aggravated sexual assault, according to a release from Chicago police." [Source]

Let's hope that this time the system puts him away for a much, much longer time.

Holman is allegedly a Cubs fan.

Thirty Years of Living on the Streets

She's known simply as "Mary." She's been living on the streets of Chicago for at least 30 years.

I first got to "know" Mary in 1979. She was a fixture in the Rush Street bar district in Chicago. She was known for flashing her breasts for a buck. Over the past 29 years, I've seen Mary repeatedly in various parts of Chicago. While living in Los Angeles, I'd run into ex-Chicagoans who knew Mary. They gave her a buck. She showed them her breasts.

These photos were taken two days ago on State Street, in the Loop of downtown Chicago. The amazing thing is that Mary, living on the street for three decades or more, has not visibly aged much. She's always looked like hell, and she's not quite right in the head. I don't say that to be cruel; it's just sad truth.

It's a shame that the Democrats and ACLU got the Government to kick people like Mary out of institutions and onto the streets decades ago while Lyndon Johnson was the president. They said that it was a violation of the civil rights of people like Mary, who obviously cannot hold a job, to force them into an institution where they would get three squares a day, medical care, and be away from rapists and thieves. No, better to let them be "free" to fend for themselves and eat out of dumpsters.

A Cold Day in Hell

Brrrr! Don't put that winter coat away yet! Here's a headline that you did not expect to see today.... or like, ever: ACLU opens investigation of Islamic public school in Minnesota. Brrrr.....

Why You Should Not CAIR

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) positions itself publicly as a sort of Muslim version of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL). But there are profound differences. For one thing, the ADL generally does not call law enforcement officers "crackers" and other racially charged names whenever a Jewish person is arrested. In the summer of 2007, a couple of Egyptian men were arrested when explosives were found in their car. CAIR immediately jumped into the fray, charging racial profiling before they even knew all of the facts. CAIR and their lockstep supporters assumed that the law enforcement officers were racist and proclaimed that the men were just carrying fireworks. This proved to be untrue, and CAIR - in a very rare move for CAIR - has backed down and admitted that they were wrong. Canada Free Press has an excellent report about this case: The Council on American-Islamic Relations has backed off on its defense of two Muslim college students caught driving near a sensitive U.S. Navy base with explosives and a how-to video on bomb making. Last August, when police in South Carolina arrested University of South Florida students Ahmed Mohamed and Youssef Megahed for possession of four pipe bombs and a homemade video on how to make detonators for improvised explosive devices, CAIR sprang to the students’ defense. FULL ARTICLE at CFP... RELATED:

• Senator Joe Lieberman “Alarmed” by CAIR
• Why US Muslims live in peace
• My Battle With CAIR
• Mark Steyn Is Not Alone
• CAIR official: everybody must get stoned!
• Political Correctness Will Destroy Us
• ACLU and CAIR Team Up to Fight Anti-Terror Efforts….Again
• CAIR Adhering To Muslim Brotherhood’s “The Project” To The Letter
• CAIR And The Bullying Of America
• Even if it's true, CAIR will complain
• FBI Rebuts CAIR Scare Tactics

Unequal Hatred For All

Two white people were brutally murdered by some black men back in January. I've been watching this story for months, more interested in how the media handled it than the actual murder. The most interesting thing about the way the media handled it was, frankly, that they did not handle it. Virtually no coverage. Why? Because it was too uncomfortable for editors to categorize. To sensitive. Too challenging to the meaning of "hate crime," which is what some are insisting it was. I admit I was reluctant to jump on the story until now, partly because it was hard to substantiate due in no small way to the lack of mainstream media coverage. It was difficult to tell the nutter reports from the legit ones. Needless to say, a lot of white supremicist types jumped this story early on. It was all over the neo-nazi sites and similar web pages. But today it's front page news in the Chicago Tribune, and you don't get more mainstream than that. The story is about the double murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, "a young Knoxville couple out on an ordinary Saturday night date" back in January 2007. The murders were incredibly heinous and brutal. Both Channon and Christopher were carjacked, kidnapped, raped and ultimately murdered. Both Channon and Christopher were white. Their accused killers are black. Was this a "hate crime?" An excerpt from today's Chicago Tribune story (emphasis mine): But it's not just conservative whites and extremists who have criticized the national silence over the Knoxville case. "Black leaders are not eager to take this on because it's one more thing that would cast a negative light on African-Americans," said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an author and nationally syndicated black columnist who has written frequently about the reluctance of black leaders to denounce crimes committed by blacks against whites. "There's already an ancient stereotype that blacks are more violent and crime-prone, anyway." Country music star Charlie Daniels, who lives 150 miles from Knoxville, contrasted scant coverage of the Christian-Newsom murders with the national media frenzy that erupted last year when a black woman accused three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of raping her at a party. Which begs the question: Was the black woman who falsely accused the Duke lacrosse players herself guilty of a hate crime? The boys were found to be innocent. The accuser was found to have lied repeatedly; she fabricated the crime that she accused them of. Why? Out of hate? Writer Ellis Washington was an editor at The Michigan Law Review and a law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He graduated from John Marshall Law School and is a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. Washington recently wrote a column titled "Are hate crime statutes constitutional?" An excerpt (emphasis mine): The irony of the hate crime statutes is that they were conceived, promoted and enacted into law by socialists, progressives, liberals, leftist pols and activist groups like the ACLU, People for the American Way, MoveOn.org, NAACP, NOW and the Human Rights Campaign, and codified into law by liberal activist judges who have nothing but utter contempt for the original intent of the constitutional Framers and the rule of law. However, in line with the zeitgeist of this post-rationalist age, they carve out a class of special punishments against the criminal defendant that has violated one of their protected groups – minorities, women, atheists, gays, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, illegal aliens. This, dear reader, is the height of cynicism and a shameless perversion of the rule of law and the Constitution. FULL ARTICLE... A few years ago, some gay people in the largely gay "Boys Town" Chicago neighborhood raised the roof about some idiots in a car driving around yelling things at them. "Fags!" I've had drinks with friends in some of the clubs in Boys Town, and you regularly hear gays calling each other "fags." It's like some blacks, who shout "Hey Nigga!" at each other from across the street. The gays didn't like the guys in the car calling them "fags." I don't blame them. Sure, the idiots in the car meant to insult. The remarks were probably meant as hateful. But was it a "crime?" The offended gays said it was. But what if the situation was reversed? Let's ramp it up. If a straight person kills a gay person, is it a "hate" crime? Let's cut to the chase and ask, if somebody is different from their victim, does that make the crime a "hate" crime? One more notch: If a white person kills a black person, is it a hate crime? If a black person kills a white person, can it be a hate crime? If a dwarf kills a tall person, is it a hate crime? Presidential Candidate Ron Paul says this about hate crimes legislation: Hate crime laws not only violate the First Amendment, they also violate the Tenth Amendment. Under the United States Constitution, there are only three federal crimes: piracy, treason, and counterfeiting. All other criminal matters are left to the individual states. Any federal legislation dealing with criminal matters not related to these three issues usurps state authority over criminal law and takes a step toward turning the states into mere administrative units of the federal government. FULL ARTICLE by Ron Paul... If a murder is classified as a "hate crime," is the dead victim more dead because the killer hated him? Of course not. But it adds a new layer to the legal case. It costs the taxpayers more money. It also causes resentment amongst members of groups that are not "protected," as Ellis Washington notes. The question, "Why don't we have the same protection against 'hate crimes' that that group does?" is a valid - and frequently asked - question. RELATED: Black Racism: The Hate Crime That Dare Not Speak It's Name Outside the local Wichita press, however, virtually the only media to report this hate crime were Frontpagemagazine.com and the American Renaissance newsletter. While the federal government rushes to Los Angeles to investigate an incident in which a handcuffed youth was slammed into the hood of a car and punched by an officer, a pall of silence still blankets the horrendous racial murder of four young people whose murderers are now on trial. The difference in the responses to these two stories can hardly be attributed to anything other than the skin color of the perpetrators and the victims involved. Apparently the sexual torture and brutal executions of four promising youngsters is of no interest to the nation's moral guardians, because the victims happen to be white. FULL ARTICLE... ABC News: New Details Emerge in Matthew Shepard Murder Six years ago, on a cold October night on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyo., 21-year-old gay college student Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten, tied to a fence and left for dead.... The story garnered national attention when the attack was characterized as a hate crime. But Shepard's killers, in their first interview since their convictions, tell "20/20's" Elizabeth Vargas that money and drugs motivated their actions that night, not hatred of gays. FULL STORY... House Passes Hate Crimes Bill Protecting GLBT Americans, Women, and People with Disabilities - FULL ARTICLE... CAIR's Hate Crimes Nonsense - article by Daniel Pipes Specifically, the number of "anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States" has gone up dramatically. FULL STORY... RealClearPolitics - Articles - Why Not Hate Crimes For All? The bill simply asserts that hate crimes affect such commerce and are committed using articles that have "traveled" in interstate commerce. FULL STORY...

ACLU: Adult Child Lovers United

"Children" or "Child," perhaps. "Adult Child Lovers United," maybe? I'm just asking. Charles Rust-Tierney, former ACLU Chapter President and Sick Bastard, gets his just desserts. Sentenced to 8 years for having 'graphic and violent' child porn ... a U.S. magistrate described [it] as "the most perverted and nauseating and sickening type of child pornography" she ever had seen. [Charles Rust-Tierney] was the Virginia ACLU president until 2005 and served on the group's board until the day he was arrested. ABC News: Former ACLU Chapter President Arrested for Child Pornography RELATED: ACLU To Represent NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) WorldNetDaily: ACLU defends child-molester group CNN.com - Parents of murdered child sue child-sex advocates ... The ACLU's 30 Years War Well, for the past 25 years the American Civil Liberties Union has conducted a legal war on the Boy Scouts. The American Liberal Liberties Union Wall Street Journal - May 22, 2007 Those of us who loved the ACLU, and celebrated its willingness to defend the rights of Nazis and others who had no regard for our rights... A repentant radical leftist observes Memorial Day 28 May 2007 by Barbara ... by the American Legion - a veterans' group with 2.7 million members, each of whom served in active military duty during time of war - to announce that they had had enough of the ACLU's attacks on veterans' memorials and Boy Scouts.

Gonna Hang Ourselves a Christian!

This is just wrong, if it's true. If the only reason that this woman was turned away from the shelter was because she is a lesbian, well, the shelter is wrong. While the facts are being sorted out, and make no mistake, it's literally "he said, she said," it is interesting to watch so many people just assume that the Christian pastor is and his organization discriminated. If they did, then shame on them. If they did not, then shame on everyone for assuming guilt before guilt is proven. The ACLU has filed city and state discrimination complaints on for Wang and will file a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court as well. In other words, this is still being investigated. But a lot of people are already tying hangman's knots, gittin' ready for public hangin'. Hey! Gonna hang ourselves a Christian!!! Alex Blaze at the Bilerico web site wrote: Michelle Wang, a Chicago lesbian originally from Indianapolis, says that she was turned away from a homeless shelter because of her sexuality. This comes on the heels of the Task Force study that found that 20-40% of homeless youth are LGBT and the NY Times story on discrimination against queer youth in homeless shelters and indication that homeless advocacy groups won't ask for federal funding for diversity training or LGBT-focused programs because they fear that the Religious Right will retaliate by taking away funding from homeless shelters. Again, if she was discriminated against, that is wrong. But it's equally wrong to assume that Ogle or his organization are guilty of that. The legal investigation is only beginning. Hey, folks, remember the Duke lacrosse "rape" case? Slow down, okay? Alex Blaze finished with this: "So is this Falwell's legacy?" Blaze is obviously not aware that Reverend Bud Ogle, "a Presbyterian pastor who co-founded the Christian ministry that runs the New Life shelter in the North Howard Street area," is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the same group that defend the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a group of men who are devoted to sex with underaged boys. Rev. Bud Ogle, a Presbyterian pastor who co-founded the Christian ministry that runs the New Life shelter in the North Howard Street area, was apologetic for Wang's troubles but said he believes an inadvertent clerical error was at fault and not any intentional discrimination. Ogle, who described himself as a lifelong ACLU member, said the shelter's program manager had committed the last two beds to a family but failed to note that in a bed-count record. FULL STORY at Chicago Tribune...

Sicko ACLU Leader Indicted for Child Porn

No! How can this be?!? Well, let's just hope the ACLU comes to his defense! A former youth sports coach who is a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia has been indicted on child pornography charges. The indictment states that 51-year-old Charles Rust-Tierney used a computer in his 10-year-old son's bedroom to view child pornography. He's charged with one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing it. FULL SICK STORY...