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What/when will there be a decision on the McDonald vs. Chicago 2A case? I thought it was the beginning of June...

The criminal case against oil giant BP has essentially been proven and investigators should be determining how harshly it will be penalized, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said Tuesday. Whitehouse (D-R.I.) — a former U.S. Attorney who successfully prosecuted the North Cape oil spill in 1997 — said that BP "absolutely" broke the law for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "It's pretty much agreed they did that. It's only a misdemeanor statute, but it provides for at least the avenue of criminal prosecution and that leads to potential criminal fines, potential criminal restitution to individual parties who...

Case Drops Hawaii Bid May 30, 2010 7:22 PM By Reid Wilson Ex-Rep. Ed Case (D-HI) will abandon his bid for Congress a week after finishing third in a special election that divided Dems and helped the GOP pick up their first special election win in 2 years. Case made his announcement in an email to supporters today, saying the race has become the "wrong fight" for him. His decision leaves state Senate Pres. Colleen Hanabusa (D) as the only major Dem in the race. "This past week since Election Day has been a roller coaster. We've taken apart the...

May 22, 2010 Republicans Capture House Seat in Obama's Hometown Honolulu -- Republicans scored a midterm election victory Saturday when Honolulu City Councilman Charles Djou won a Democratic-held House seat in Hawaii in the district where President Obama grew up -- the latest triumph for the GOP as it looks to take back control of Congress. Djou's victory was a blow to Obama and other Democrats who could not rally around a candidate and find away to win a congressional race that should have been a cakewalk. The seat had been held by a Democrat for nearly 20 years and...

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President Barack Obama won Hawaii’s first congressional district in 2008 with 70% of the vote, but on May 22 the president’s hometown seat is probably going to fall to the GOP in a special election. Maryland Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen, who runs the Democrats’ campaign operation, told reporters that they would “have to re-evaluate” their efforts to win. Translation: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is likely going to pull out of the race altogether. The news is welcome to House Republicans, but this race shouldn’t be viewed as a bellwether because of the quirks in the Hawaii election. For...

A Washington truism: to conservatives, potentially troublesome judicial appointments justify immediate action no matter how injurious to the smooth functioning of a legislative body. It's been this way since Roe, as Republicans have grasped how the subtle formalism of American life can be influenced by judicial rulings. And so Senate Republicans are holding up the nomination of Goodwin Liu, .. Liu presents a classic dilemma for intellectually honest conservatives: he is undeniably brilliant, undeniably qualified to serve, has a great story behind him (son of immigrants ..) , was a Rhodes scholar, went to Stanford, Yale Law) respected by colleagues...

Cracks are beginning to appear in the military's prosecution of three Navy SEALs accused of striking a most-wanted terrorism suspect they had captured in Iraq. Maj. Gen. Charles Cleveland last week signed grants of immunity for five Navy colleagues of the accused. Some of those five, three enlisted men and two officers, are expected at trial to flatly contradict the prosecution's key witness, according to a Navy source close to the case, which centers on the September 2009 capture of Ahmed Hashim Abed. The witness, the master-at-arms at the base in Anbar province where the captured terrorist was brought, told...

LOS ANGELES, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's majority stake in General Motors Co GM.UL has no bearing on the response of regulators to safety problems at Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T)(TM.N), Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said on Friday. "That argument is baloney," LaHood said when asked about the issue during an appearance in Los Angeles. Questions about whether the government stands to benefit as a GM shareholder from its regulatory crackdown on Toyota gained some steam this week with a number of critics suggesting at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

James O'Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, was "framed" by the media and the U.S. attorney's office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday. The same day the man who first published James O'Keefe's explosive videos exposing wrongdoing at community organizer ACORN came to his defense Monday, claiming the conservative filmmaker "sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney" while the prosecutor made his case to the media, the U.S. attorney involved stepped down. O'Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary...

Larry Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst convicted of revealing classified information, says he worked undercover as an FBI double agent to gather information on the pro-Israel lobby in the United States before the bureau turned on him and pressured him to plead guilty to spying for Israel.

Anti-Semitism was behind the highly publicized arrests last week of rabbis, including three from the Aleppo-Syrian Jewish community in New York and New Jersey, according to Yitzhak Kakun, editor-in-chief of the Shas weekly Yom Le'Yom. "There is a feeling here that the FBI purposely attempted to arrest as many rabbis as possible at once in an attempt to humiliate them," Kakun said in a telephone interview Sunday. "Regardless of the details of the case - I am not familiar with the precise charges and the evidence - you would never see the FBI and police behaving that way with Muslim...

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department conceded Friday that it lacks the evidence to hold a teenage Guantanamo detainee as an enemy combatant after a federal judge last week ruled that his confession was inadmissible. In a hearing last week, U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle ruled that Mohammed Jawad's confession to Afghan officials was inadmissible because it had been extracted through torture. She also questioned whether the Justice Department had any evidence to proceed with a trial to determine whether he can be held as an enemy combatant.

(IsraelNN.com) The Tel Aviv Police Department “invented” a new machine that seemed likely to change the face of criminal interrogations – but it will apparently not be used more than once. The contraption was called a “memory machine,” and was used to persuade a murder suspect that, contrary to his impassioned and repeated claims, he in fact did remember what happened the night of the murder. Maariv/NRG reports that the story began two weeks ago

NEW YORK (AP) - The Associated Press will collect undisclosed damages as part of a settlement of its lawsuit against All Headline News, a site that allegedly misappropriated AP stories online. The AP considered the lawsuit an important test of the "hot news" doctrine, which was established in a 1918 Supreme Court case involving the AP. That principle holds that while facts cannot be copyrighted, news organizations can sue when competitors copy time-sensitive stories.

A man accused of making threatening statements about killing President Obama has been arrested in Nevada, the Secret Service said Saturday. Daniel James Murray was arrested Friday night in the parking lot of the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino in Laughlin, Nevada, said Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a motion Wednesday to drop its case against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was convicted of seven counts of corruption last fall. Justice Department sources told FOX News that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder decided to abandon the case due to prosecutorial misconduct.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Supreme Court refused to weigh in Friday on whether US presidents have the authority to indefinitely detain a terrorist suspect in the United States without charges. But it sent the issue back for a new hearing before the federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, which ruled in July that former president George W. Bush had that power in the case of Ali al-Marri, an alleged Al-Qaeda sleeper agent. The high court's action effectively delayed resolution of an issue that, while different, could have implications for the estimated 245 "enemy combatants" still being held by the...

Books claiming that science disproves ‘young-earth’ creationism are very common, and books that claim the Bible itself does not mandate a literal interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis are not in short supply either. David Snoke’s book A Biblical Case for an Old Earth ostensibly falls in the latter group, though his main reason for rejecting biblical creation is really uniformitarian ‘science’. Books like these generally don’t pose a threat to informed creationists, and this one is no exception. In fact, Snoke could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had actually taken the time to...

CHICAGO — The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama's election. The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer's supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation's highest court. The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.