Scalia: US Supreme Court May Force Americans Into Internment Camps Again

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Photo Credit: CRAIG T. KOJIMAU.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told law students at the University of Hawaii law school Monday that the nation’s highest court was wrong to uphold the internment of Japa­nese-Americans during World War II but that he wouldn’t be surprised if the court issued a similar ruling during a future conflict.

Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944 decision in Kore­ma­tsu v. United States, which upheld the convictions of Gordon Hira­ba­ya­shi and Fred Kore­ma­tsu for violating an order to report to an internment camp.

“Well, of course, Kore­ma­tsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime question-and-answer session.

Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

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Mr. President, Why Do You Oppose School Choice?

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Photo Credit: NewscomIn a largely unreported story, a couple in Pennsylvania is facing charges that could land them in jail for nearly seven years. Their crime? Sending their five year old daughter to a public school outside of their school district.

If it sounds bizarre, that’s because it is. And although breaking the law is never a good thing, the desperate wish of the Garcia family to send their children to a better school is playing out all across our country from sea to shining sea.

The fact is that millions of families have no choice when it comes to deciding on a school that best meets the educational needs of their children. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a school district with ineffective teachers and high crime and violence rates, you are often simply out of luck.

What makes this story from Pennsylvania especially representative of this terrible injustice is that a vast majority of those being deprived of a choice when it comes to education are Hispanic and African-American families. In too many states across the county, only wealthy families have the ability to decide for themselves where to send their children to school. For these families, they can choose to send their children to a better school without being constrained by where they live. Private school choice is a real possibility for these families.

Why not give this same freedom to other families?

This is the question that thousands of families have been asking in cities all across the country as part of the National School Choice Week shining a positive spotlight on the need for effective education options for all children. In rallies in city after city as part of a national whistle-stop tour, families have been joined by lawmakers, advocates and everyday Americans united by the common sense idea that every child should get the best possible education – whether it’s at a public, private, charter school, or through online learning or homeschooling.

And yet, this idea has powerful detractors who are more concerned about protecting the rights and interests of the adults in the system than the educational needs of millions upon millions of children stuck in underperforming schools. Among the fiercest opponents of school choice include the Obama Administration, which has tried to stop meaningful school choice options. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which has been serving as a lifeline for thousands of low-income families in our nation’s capital, is a prime example. It’s an effective program: 91 percent of students who used a scholarship to attend a private school of choice in DC graduate high school, and researchers Patrick Wolf and Michael McShane note that every dollar spent yields a $2.62 return on investment. Yet this Administration decided to side with the teachers’ unions and the powerful special interests by trying to eliminate funding for the OSP.

It’s not just choice in the nation’s capital. The Department of Justice spent much of last year suing the state of Louisiana’s school voucher program. Evidently, calls from grateful parents like Ms. Coretta Pittman, who praise the program for the ability to send their children to a safer school, fell on deaf ears at the Department of Justice and the White House.

For all of the President’s calls to increase opportunity in his latest State of the Union, this Administration’s own policies are hindering the ability for hundreds of thousands of students to succeed by attempting to limit their school choice options. Perhaps the President would care to know that in states that have expanded school choice measures, the racial achievement and attainment gaps have begun to narrow.

Until the President and this Administration embrace education reform policies like school choice, his rhetoric on freedom and opportunity will not match up with his actions.

Israel Ortega is the Strategic Initiatives Manager at The Heritage Foundation and the Editor of Libertad.org – The Foundation’s Spanish language website, www.libertad.org

This article appeared originally at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.

House Conservatives: ‘Overwhelming Support for Doing Nothing’ On Immigration

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Guillermo AriasSeveral influential conservative Republicans on Wednesday put House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders on notice that immigration reform legislation is dead because they don’t trust President Obama to honestly implement any new legislation they might pass.

“Until we have that trust, there will be no immigration reform,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador, an Idaho Republican who backs reform including helping the 11 million illegals in the United States to stay.

Labrador said that it was a mistake for the GOP to get caught in a pre-election fight on the issue before the president can prove he will enforce current immigration laws and the GOP wins the Senate so that the party can offer a united front.

“The problem we have is really a problem of trust with this administration,” he said. “The president has lied and lied.”

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Cuts in U.S. Defense Spending Force Hard Strategic Choices

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Photo Credit: gregwest98Big budget cuts over the next decade will force the Pentagon to make painful cuts to personnel and readiness and could make it hard to execute a global security strategy, defense analysts predicted on Wednesday.

Teams of analysts from four think tanks, who unveiled the results of a defense budget-cutting exercise at a Capitol Hill briefing, all found themselves slashing large numbers of civilian and uniformed personnel, along with ships and fighter jets, to help meet tough budget targets facing the Pentagon.

“It is very, very hard to reach the required level of budget savings in the first … (five-year planning period) if you don’t touch personnel, readiness or both, frankly, because that’s where the money is,” said Nora Bensahel, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

“You can’t do it by just picking out a few systems here and there,” she said.

The analysts unveiled their thinking on the 2015 defense budget and U.S. military strategy just a month before the Pentagon releases its own budget for the upcoming fiscal year as well as the Quadrennial Defense Review, a document produced every four years aligning U.S. strategy and resources.

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New Surveillance Technology Can Track Everyone in an Area for Several Hours at a Time

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Photo Credit: David McNew/Getty ImagesShooter and victim were just a pair of pixels, dark specks on a gray streetscape. Hair color, bullet wounds, even the weapon were not visible in the series of pictures taken from an airplane flying two miles above.

But what the images revealed — to a degree impossible just a few years ago — was location, mapped over time. Second by second, they showed a gang assembling, blocking off access points, sending the shooter to meet his target and taking flight after the body hit the pavement. When the report reached police, it included a picture of the blue stucco building into which the killer ultimately retreated, at last beyond the view of the powerful camera overhead.

“I’ve witnessed 34 of these,” said Ross McNutt, the genial president of Persistent Surveillance Systems, which collected the images of the killing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from a specially outfitted Cessna. “It’s like opening up a murder mystery in the middle, and you need to figure out what happened before and after.”

As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Although these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that police, businesses and even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track their movements.

Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said. They’ve been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in demonstrations for police. They’ve also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician, who commissioned the flights over Ciudad Juárez.

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Just When You Thought Google Glass Couldn’t Get Creepier: New App Allows Strangers to ID You Just by Looking at You (+video)

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Photo Credit: Google Glass/FacebookHave you ever seen someone wearing Google Glass out at the bar? Like a real person at a real bar actually wearing Google Glass? If so, you know how absolutely ridiculous they look. Which may be the only factor we have that will stop this:

A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information, just by looking at you and scanning your face with their Google Glass. The app is called NameTag and it sounds CREEPY.

The “real-time facial recognition” software “can detect a face using the Google Glass camera, send it wirelessly to a server, compare it to millions of records, and in seconds return a match complete with a name, additional photos and social media profiles.”

The information listed could include your name, occupation, any social media profiles you have set up and whether or not you have a criminal record (“CRIMINAL HISTORY FOUND” pops up in bright red letters according to the demo).

Photo Credit: NameTag

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Olympic Threat: US Warns Airlines About Toothpaste Tube Bomb

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Photo Credit: Wong Maye-E/AP PhotoThe Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning to U.S. and some foreign airlines traveling to Russia for the Olympic Games to be on the lookout for toothpaste containers, which some intelligence indicates may actually hold ingredients that could be used to construct a bomb aboard a plane, a senior U.S. official told ABC News.

The official did not provide further details about the warning or the intelligence that prompted it, but an official with the Department of Homeland Security, while declining to discuss the specific warning, said the department “regularly shares relevant information with domestic and international partners, including those associated with international events such as the Sochi Olympics.”

“While we are not aware of a specific threat to the homeland at this time, this routine communication is an important part of our commitment to making sure we meet that priority,” the official said. “As always, our security apparatus includes a number of measures, both seen and unseen, and DHS will continue to adjust security measures to fit an ever evolving threat environment.”

A federal law enforcement source said the information is largely intended for foreign carriers and the generic threat is not directed at the U.S. homeland. The Russian government has been informed, the source said.

Still, Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Sub-Committee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, said he has been briefed on the threat and said it should be taken seriously by American travelers, the airlines and officials at the Olympic Games.

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Study: Fatal Car Crashes Involving Marijuana Have Tripled – Now 1-in-9

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesAccording to a recent study, fatal car crashes involving pot use have tripled in the U.S.

“Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana,” Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia, and co-author of the study told HealthDay News.

Researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health gathered data from six states – California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and West Virginia – that perform toxicology tests on drivers involved in fatal car accidents. This data included over 23,500 drivers that died within one hour of a crash between 1999 and 2010.

Li reported in the study that alcohol contributed to about 40 percent of traffic fatalities throughout the decade.

The researchers found that drugs played an increasing role in fatal traffic accidents. Drugged driving accounted for more than 28 percent of traffic deaths in 2010, which is 16 percent more than it was in 1999.
The researchers also found that marijuana was the main drug involved in the increase. It contributed to 12 percent of fatal crashes, compared to only 4 percent in 1999.

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Calls Mount to End Ban On Oil Exports as US Production Booms

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Photo Credit: Fox News When the Arab oil embargo of 1973 shocked the U.S. into long gas lines and rationing, Congress approved what was a no-brainer at the time — a ban on exporting crude oil produced at home.

But today, with domestic oil production booming, some are questioning whether that ban should stay in place. The new concern is that the U.S. has more oil than its refineries can handle.

“This ban threatens record-breaking U.S. oil production and American jobs by creating inefficiencies, gluts and distortions,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, recently testified at a congressional hearing.

Murkowski has sent a letter to the White House asking President Obama to lift the ban on oil exports, even as the U.S. still imports 40 percent of its oil.

Supporters of lifting the export ban argue that oil is a world commodity — and more of it on the global market will drive everyone’s gas prices down and create jobs in the U.S.

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‘American Idol’ Singer Clay Aiken to Run for Congress in North Carolina

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/LUCY NICHOLSON/FILESFormer “American Idol” singer Clay Aiken said on Wednesday he will run for U.S. Congress as a Democrat in his home state of North Carolina, where he once worked as a special education teacher.

Aiken, 35, is likely to face a tough battle in his efforts to unseat Representative Renee Ellmers, a Tea Party Republican favorite, in the state’s conservative 2nd congressional district.

The entertainer tried to position himself as a political outsider who wants to change Washington by giving a voice to people in need.

“I’m not a politician,” he said in a video on his campaign website. “I don’t ever want to be one.”

Aiken described past challenges he had faced after his mother left his abusive father and worked hard to provide what little she could for his family.

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