"we’re not talking about anyone being burned or stabbed or cut or anything like that.
We’re talking about people being made to stand in awkward positions, have water put into their nose and into their mouth.

Nobody suffered any lasting injuries from this."

Snip:
They are the elite of the elite: Although they account for far less than 1 percent of lawyers who filed appeals to the Supreme Court, these attorneys were involved in 43 percent of the cases the high court chose to decide from 2004 through 2012.

Snip:
Of the 66 most successful (at getting Supremes to hear their cases) lawyers, 51 worked for law firms that primarily represented corporate interests.

Snip:
The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court.
None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) on Wednesday called on President Obama to “purge” his administration of the CIA officials who were involved in the "enhanced interrogation" program detailed in a new Senate report.

“It’s bad enough to not prosecute these officials but to reward and promote them is incomprehensible,” Udall said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “The president needs to purge his administration.”

Udall reiterated his call for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan, saying he should no longer lead the agency because officials hacked into the Intelligence Committee’s computers during their investigation and deleted a file.

He also spilled some findings from the so-called Panetta review, which was not included in the Senate panel’s report but is expected to paint a damning picture of the CIA’s public statements about the interrogation program.

“Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture,” Udall said.
“The CIA is lying. This is not an issue of the past, this is going on today.”

Republicans in the Michigan House of Representatives have passed a bill that would permit religious people to discriminate on the grounds of sexuality.

The state’s House passed HB 5958, known as the ‘Religious Freedom and Restoration Act’ – which claims to “limit governmental action that substantially burdens a person’s exercise of religion”

Snip:
However, civil rights experts say the bill is concerning far-reaching, and would allow people and businesses
to effectively discriminate as they please on the basis of religion.

Looks like police in Chicago have a tricked out surveillance truck equipped with cell site simulators, a.k.a. Stingrays, that force nearby phones to send data to cops instead of to phone company cell towers. Did those cops get a warrant for that?

Anonymous has released a video featuring what appear to be Chicago police radio transmissions revealing police wiretapping of organizers' phones at the protests last night the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps using a stingray. The transmissions pointing to real-time wiretapping involve the local DHS-funded spy 'fusion' center.

We told President Obama that we were not the “People’s Spokespeople”.
We told him that we had neither the power, positions, nor desires to stop the eruptions in the streets and that they would continue until a radical change happened in this country.
We told him that we had no faith in anything, church or state.
We told him that the country was on the brink and that nothing short of major capitulations at all levels of the government to the demands of the people could prevent it.
Straight talk like that.

If we don’t get what we came for, we will shut it down. President Obama knows that and we know it. No meeting can stop that.