DALLAS – The Dallas County Commission made a last-minute agenda change concerning a controversial appointment to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. John Wiley Price nominated a man named Aaron McCarthy, also known as Aaron Michaels, to the council. However the vote to approve the appointee has been postponed. The nomination infuriated civil rights groups – because McCarthy founded “New Black Panther Party for Self Defense.” The Anti-Defamation League says the group is the “largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in America.” The original Black Panthers call the group a “black racist hate group.” Aaron Michaels is best known nationally as the founder of the radical activist organization the New Black Panther Party.
Attaching a GPS to a car for the purposes of gathering evidence is a search and is prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled. The justices were unanimous in their opinion in U.S. v. Jones, but divided on the rationale. While the majority based its holding on search and seizure law, Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence said the court should rely on whether the respondent’s reasonable expectations of privacy were violated. Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the majority opinion, authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, but also wrote a separate concurrence to suggest that the court may need to revisit privacy issues. Also jo
The question isn’t whether Illinois’ finances are in dreadful shape, it’s how to fix the problem. Or perhaps more accurately, will legislators have the political will to fix it when they return to Springfield for their spring session?
Even though the legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn last year imposed a temporary 67 percent state income tax increase, Quinn’s office expects to have a $500 million budget deficit this year.
Quinn is calling for a 9 percent cut in most areas of state government, except education and health care. But even with cuts at that level, the state would have a projected $800 million budget deficit for fiscal 2015, the year when most of the tax hike expires.
“If foreclosure mediation is such a good idea, why haven’t more jurisdictions taken up the mantle? What are barriers to implementation and program participation, and is the conventional wisdom that mediation takes a long time and is costly supported by the evidence?”
These were some of the critical questions posed last spring by Raphael Bostic, Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) at a workshop hosted by the Access to Justice Initiative at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. in Ma