Was the Grand Jury done right?

From the Nation of Change

It seem from this article I had to post that the prosecutor Bob McCulloch only gave one side of the story to the Grand Jury and didn’t tell them any thing that looked bad for the officer. He in a sense used the Grand Jury like a court case and not as a grand jury.  This whole thing was a joke to think you could get justice in Mississippi. How can you get an indictment when the rules were made up by the prosecutor.

 

On Monday, Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown. But that decision was the result of a process that turned the purpose of a grand jury on its head.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.

It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available. In his press conference, McCulloch said that the grand jury did not indict because eyewitness testimony that established Wilson was acting in self-defense was contradicted by other exculpatory evidence. What McCulloch didn’t say is that he was under no obligation to present such evidence to the grand jury. The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson.

Compare Justice Scalia’s description of the role of the grand jury to what the prosecutors told the Ferguson grand jury before they started their deliberations:

And you must find probable cause to believe that Darren Wilson did not act in lawful self-defense and you must find probable cause to believe that Darren Wilson did not use lawful force in making an arrest. If you find those things, which is kind of like finding a negative, you cannot return an indictment on anything or true bill unless you find both of those things. Because both are complete defenses to any offense and they both have been raised in his, in the evidence.

As Justice Scalia explained the evidence to support these “complete defenses,” including Wilson’s testimony, was only included by McCulloch by ignoring how grand juries historically work.

There were several eyewitness accounts that strongly suggested Wilson did not act in self-defense. McCulloch could have, and his critics say should have, presented that evidence to the grand jury and likely returned an indictment in days, not months. It’s a low bar, which is why virtually all grand juries return indictments.

But McCulloch chose a different path.

Solving the problem

It would be great if the government got on board with putting solar panel on every home and business or any flat surface with solar panels. These would all be hooked up to our smart grid. During the day when power demands are the highest solar could provide this power. For the night time use mainly to light homes and street light and some business natural gas power plants and nuclear plants could take up the slack. We wouldn’t need all the coal plants. Wind power is nice that the wind blows day and night which could help out the grid.

We need a national program to put solar panels on every ones homes. For the poor people the government could help out. Poor people renting could also get help and help the landlord or investment company who owns the apartments by a government program. There’s always a way of doing something it’s just a matter if you want to do it or not. With all the homes covered with solar panels this would have more power then is needed by the country. Power companies would become distribution companies since they wouldn’t have to generate power or not that much power. It would mainly be for the base line power and mostly be at night.

Power companies don’t want you to have solar panels on your roofs because it cuts out their profit. Well, there usefulness has come and gone. They are the dinosaurs of energy. It’s a new world and a new direction.

Power companies are opposed to having batteries to store your power because they want to sell you power. With batteries you could get them charged up during the day and still sell your excess power to the grid. Then as it gets dark going to night the batteries would be used to power your house. Your only using the batteries for a few hours in the evening. Most of the night your sleeping and not using much power. The only thing you would be using power for is for refrigerators, heating water if you don’t have a gas powered water heater, electric stoves if you don’t have gas stoves. Heat for your home but most homes have gas heaters. Going from compact bulbs to LED lights would use even less power for a big savings. Right now the bulbs are a bit pricy. I did find a place in Hong Kong that has real good prices called DM.com (deal extreme.com). They do have those brands that are high priced like you would pay here but the prices they have for LED bulbs made in China are so much cheaper. You can even get bulbs that you can set the brightness and color.

I can’t wait until they have the light panels coming out. They are real low power consumption and can change colors besides being white. I seen some panels being tested at colleges. Right now the price is too high for them. It would be nice to put panels on the ceiling to light the place up. These would be great for the amount of light you get out and such a low power consumption.

I’d like to see the L.I.F.E. program get started to generate power. This would start off by burning a drop of water and get up to 10 million degrees. Then you could feed just about anything into it even nuclear waste and burn it up. It’s taken a while for those lasers to be built and they are just starting testing. I would be like something from Star Trek real futuristic.

Getting a smart grid would also be nice. I was checking out how it was laid out now. I didn’t know they use DC voltage at some  segments of the national grid. With the production of high voltage CMOS parts you can make power inverter and regulators that you couldn’t make just a few years ago. Before you needed to have special transformers and banks of transistors to handle the current to make an inverter. Now it’s so easy to make a DC to DC converter and then run it through a sine wave amp to make your AC voltage They have CMOS parts that handle 30, 40, 50 amps at over a 1000 volts. It’s amazing how far parts have come. They even make multi-part goodies with 4 CMOS parts all in one package that does an digital H  output turning one set of CMOS FETs on while turning the other set off making a real good sine wave. Still it would be nice to have a line conditioner on the power to keep it real regular. The FETs are so fast they can sync to the line voltage so you can feed power from your solar panel array to the power grid. Also charge your batteries at home to use later. A new battery that is still in the test mode it the flow battery which is a type of fuel cell but much cheaper then the ones used by NASA years ago. Now you can charge a fluid and keep the charged fluid in a tank to be used at a later time. It charges up fast and holds a large charge depending on the size of your tank. That would be great for home and business.

Another fuel cell design is the Bloom Box which runs of natural gas and produces power. It’s cheaper to use then buying power for the power company. They make a smaller unit for home use. I’m sure you could get it to work of bottled gas like propane so you could be off the grid. It would be good to have a combination of these items so you have back-ups of your power system. Having all that power from the sun you could actually split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then use the hydrogen for your heater and have a byproduct of water. You could also charge your electric car up if you don’t have a hybrid. The future is now.

Meet the Senate's New Climate Denial Caucus

—By Tim McDonnell

| Wed Nov. 5, 2014 2:43 PM EST

I don’t generally copy other peoples work but I have to post this article. I can’t believe how stupid some people are. If your going to be be voting on science then it would be a good idea that you knew something about science and what your voting on. Senators and Congress persons need to take a basic science test before they are let to vote on any science subject. The way they shoot there mouth off thinking that they will show them and then come up with the stupidest comments ever. It’s too important to have stupid people voting on science that’s going to effect the world and the worlds population along with plants and wildlife. They couldn’t make a good comment about science if it was biting them on the nose. Maybe you could recluse yourself from voting and be honest and say you don’t know science and it would be wrong of me to vote where the worlds in the balance. People wouldn’t fault you for being honest. They might even look up to you but your paid off but big oil, big coal and big chemicals to cast a vote for them. After all they put you in office just for these favors. Just thank them for all the money and do the right thing,sit the vote out because your just to stupid to vote on a subject you know nothing about. After all you sit it out when you start wars. I don’t see you charging up the hill like Teddy and the rough riders when the war starts. No your hiding at home away from the action. Still you got paid off for that too by the military industrial complex for all those contracts. You get all those kick backs from the venders, the free trips, gold, dinners, cars and bouts, and discounts on loans where you don’t even have to pay the loan back. Do the right thing and say your to stupid to be voting on something so important.

One thing I’ve noticed about pollution around the world. There’s a layer of brown that circles the globe. There’s no place i the world you can go and see to the horizon where there isn’t that layer of brown. Even in the middle of the ocean there’s that layer of brown. Everyone is living in that layer of brown. You don’t notice it looking up but look to the horizon where your looking through that layer, it goes on forever. Maybe it’s because you go from you limo to a building and never go out in the air. You always in a air conditioned building. When you travel your on a plane above it all. Next time your coming in for a landing look out the window and see the brown layer you go through as you land. That layer of gas and dirt is effecting peoples health including your own. Any one that breaths air their health is being affected. It would be real ironic if you don’t smoke yet develop lung cancer. It would just be what you need.

 

Well, folks, it wasn't such a great night on the climate action front. It looks like the millions of dollars that environmental philanthropist Tom Steyer invested in the midterms didn't buy much other than a fledgling political infrastructure to sock away for 2016. With Republicans now in control of the Senate, we're likely to see a bill to push through the Keystone XL pipeline coming down the pike soon. And Mitch McConnell, probably the coal industry's biggest booster, retained his seat.

In fact, McConnell and his climate-denying colleague James Inhofe of Oklahoma—the likely chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee—won a lot of new friends on Capitol Hill last night. It probably won't surprise you to learn that most of the Senate's newly elected Republicans are big boosters of fossil fuels and don't agree with the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming. Here's an overview of their statements on climate change, ranging from a few who seem to at least partly accept to science to those who flat-out reject it.

Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska): In September, Sullivan, a former Alaska attorney general, said "the jury's out" on whether climate change is man-made. (Actually, the jury came in, for the umpteenth time, just this week.) He repeated that position last month, when he said the role human-caused greenhouse gases play in global warming is "a question scientists are still debating," adding that "we shouldn't lock up America's resources and kill tens of thousands of good jobs by continuing to pursue the President's anti-energy policies."

Tom Cotton (R-Ark.): Cotton has seized on a common but misleading notion among climate change deniers: "The simple fact is that for the last 16 years the earth's temperature has not warmed." He admits, however, that "it's most likely that human activity has contributed to some of" the temperature increase of the last hundred years. Still, he supports building new coal plants and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Cory Gardner (R-Colo.): Gardner is shifty on the issue. In a debate last month, he wouldn't give a straight yes-or-no answer on whether mankind has contributed to global warming. "I believe that the climate is changing, I disagree to the extent that it's been in the news," that humans are responsible, he said. Yet at the same time, he admitted that "pollution contributes" to climate change. Gardner doesn't seem interested in cleaning up that pollution: Last year he said the Obama administration is waging "a war on the kind of energy we use every day—fossil fuels… because they want to tell us how we live our lives."

David Perdue (R-Ga.): "In science, there's an active debate going on" about whether climate change is real, Perdue told Slate this year, adding that if there are climate-related impacts to Georgia's coast, some smart person will figure out how to deal with them. Perdue has also slammed the Obama administration for waging a "war on coal" and has called the EPA's new carbon emission rules "shortsighted."

Joni Ernst (R-Iowa): Ernst is another rider on the "I don't know" bandwagon. "I don't know the science behind climate change," she told an audience in September. She also hedged the question beautifully in a May interview with The Hill: "I haven't seen proven proof that it is entirely man-made." But she supports recycling!

Bill Cassidy/Mary Landrieu (La.): This race is going to a runoff. Landrieu, the incumbent Democrat, has never been much of a climate hawk—she recently said humans do contribute to observed climate change but criticized Obama for "singling out" the oil industry for regulation. But at least she's better on global warming than Cassidy, her Republican challenger, who flatly denies that climate change exists. He said last month that "global temperatures have not risen in 15 years."

Steve Daines (R-Mont.): Daines is a harsh critic of Obama's energy and climate policies, which he said "threaten nearly 5,000 Montana jobs and would cause Montana's electricity prices to skyrocket." While in the House, he signed a pledge that he will "oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue." He believes global warming, to the extent that it exists, is probably caused by solar cycles.

Thom Tillis (R-N.C.): During a North Carolina Republican primary debate, all four candidates laughed out loud when asked if they believed climate change is a "fact." Ha! Ha! Then they all said, "No." Later, Tillis expanded on that position, arguing in a debate with his Democratic rival, Sen. Kay Hagan, that "the point is the liberal agenda, the Obama agenda, the Kay Hagan agenda, is trying to use [climate change] as a Trojan horse for their energy policy."

Ben Sasse (R-Neb.): Sasse hasn't said much about climate science, but he supports building the Keystone XL pipeline and opening up more federal land for oil and gas drilling. He also wants to "encourage the production of coal."

James Lankford (R-Okla.): As a member of the House, Lankford called global warming a "myth." He also, along with Gardner, Cotton, Shelley Moore Capito (R. W.Va.), Cassidy, and Daines, voted to prevent the Pentagon from considering the national security impacts of global warming, even though top Defense Department officials have repeatedly issued warnings that climate change could worsen conflicts around the world. Lankford also floated an amendment to an energy appropriations bill that would have blocked funding for research related to the social costs of carbon pollution.

Mike Rounds (R-S.C.): Rounds appears to accept at least some of the science on climate change. As governor of South Dakota, Rounds said that "there are a number of different causes that we recognize, and the scientists recognize, are the cause of global warming," and that humans are "absolutely" one of those. He fervently supports the Keystone pipeline.

Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.): In a debate last month, Capito said, "I don't necessarily think the climate's changing, no." Then she clarified that her opinion might change with the weather: "Yes it's changing, it changes all the time, we heard it raining out there," she said. "I'm sure humans are contributing to it." I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Capito is also a founding member of the Congressional Coal Caucus.

This post has been updated.

Make it Easier to get Job, Mitch said.

How can you make it easier to get a job when your a senator or congressman? What does that even mean? They going to have the Easy Job Store? When it comes to road blocks gumming up the works Mitch McConnell does come to mind. He said he was going to oppose everything Obama would put out there, when Obama took office and he did. He also blocked everything that was sponsored by the democrats. Between Mitch and those Tea Baggers,they are like blind people in a mine field. Obama still hasn’t got many cabinet appointment yet because they have been blocked. Nothing like the government only being half there because of Mitch and his brainiac ideas. Now he says if the republican take control that he’s going to make the economy recover just like George W. Bush did for 8 years. How soon people forget the perils of George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction. “It’s only going to cost us $50 million dollars for the whole war in Iraq. Well that ended up costing some $4 trillion dollars and they still aren’t done. Then there’s those extreme right wing religious zealots who rather talk about abortion rather then what is needed for the country or how to make peace in the world. I know where the jobs are coming from, it’s the all volunteer military. Where do they get the people to volunteer? From states with poor young girls who couldn’t get an abortion so the kids when they reach 18 they go into the military because they can’t afford to go to college since college is only for the elite, rich, 1% people at the top. It’s amazing how the extreme right wing religious zealots can’t remember what happened yesterday and vote for the same thing that’s harmful for them again and again. If you tell them that the republican are going to bust the unions by taking away collective bargaining or pass a law called “Right To Work.” Then no one supports the union but gets all the benefits of the union but the union can’t bargain for higher wages. They are told some lie like they will be free to choose or be independent but without a functioning union. If you told them they are shooting themselves in the foot for the republican party they would go for it. Not only are you going to be paid less we are going to take away your health care so the CEO can have a raise. So there will be more money for the stockholder and you get less but for some reason that doesn’t sink in. They keep worrying about petty wedge issues that don’t mean anything but they have been presented the wedge issue where it causes fear and so they vote because of the fear and don’t look at what they are voting for. They vote a party and don’t bother to see what the party is really doing. Since they vote in people who were a witch for a  while in college and now are a extreme religious zealot but don’t know anything about the real world. The things that come out of her mouths and people don’t see how stupid they are but they vote for her because of her religious views. It’s clear there are many of these religious right zealots that don’t have a clue about science which deals in facts. They still say there’s a debate on climate change and global warming. You could tell them the sky is blue but if it’s a scientist saying that and not some sort of religious nut they will say your wrong, it’s not blue, there’s a debate over that.  It’s amazing how TV Ads just brain wash peoples minds but then they were close minded to start and as long is it’s one party they believe in because someone in the past told them to vote that way they will over and over. I talked to a few of those closed minded people over the years. I found that they will quote ads word for word and not know what it means or base anything on what people have done in the past. I’ve seen interviews of people on TV and it just amazes me that a woman would say I’m voting for that guy because of the way he looks. The guy could be an axe murderer and people will vote for him because of his looks. Then there is the person that says he’s going to cut the red tape to make business work better. That means they are going to get rid of laws such as environmental laws which keep people say and prevent things like chemical that cause cancer from you. The business would claim that it’s a nanny state costing us jobs and we don’t need that. People eat it up too. There are those AM radio talk show hosts that get paid for saying the things they say. It’s hard to believe that these same people would believe what they say since what they are saying is fiction. They say what they say to make people mad. Once you get these people with wrong information they repeat it to anyone who will listen. The best tea bagger quote I ever heard was an older man saying, “I want government out of my Medicare.” The guy didn’t know that Medicare was a government program, how stupid is that. There is a person running for congress who says i his ad that he going to keep our water from being stolen from the south. People believe that crap. He wants to put an end to the tunnels under the delta but he won’t vote for something like a cannel around the delta. He’s playing with this like it’s a game. Water will be going south for the farmers and for Los Angeles. Restoring the delta is a good project that needs to be done. Many of the levees are falling apart. Many levees were made over a hundred years ago and were made with junk. If a quake happened near them they would fall apart and flood the islands. They are growing food on these islands which are meters below the water line. The islands were at one time the same level and the levees were there to keep the ground dry to grow food. Sure it’s rich soil and grows food just fine but the cost in keeping the ground dry is ridiculous. The islands have been sinking since they were made and should be returned to the delta as wetlands. Growing anything out there on man made island that are sinking is just stupid. II just can’t believe what people think are pertinent and what stuff is irrelevant, they can’t tell the difference. If it’s cute and fuzzy then some people will think it’s important over having water for millions of people. What really is a waste of land is turning farmland into housing tracks so a few people can make money. People don’t care about climate change but are more worried about the car they are driving and if gas is cheap enough. The houses made today the big clones at high prices with little substance. Why people want something they can’t afford and a house too big to  take care of. They have rooms they never go in. So much dead space built into the house to impress but not to have any function. The country wants a better country and knows it needs to be fixed but no one wants to pay for it. Business has enough money to buy the political system so they don’t have to pay tax which the country desperately needs. The lower class people can’t afford lawyers to make tax shelters in a different country. It’s sad how corporations game the system then even stupider is the Citizens United case that the Supreme Court who said that corporations are people and money is speech. That was the worst thing the Supreme Court has ever done to the country. There will need to be a correction to this one day. What about that Sarah Pallin as a vice president. Was was McCain thinking. Why is it that the right always attacks the media except when they use it to spread lies. So Pallin peaks her head out of her hole ever once and a while just to open her mouth and make a fool of herself. And yes there were guys that would vote for her just on her looks. I’m thinking that’s how she got to where she is this way. Didn’t matter what was between her ears the guys were thinking what was between her legs.

Well, in closing the countries a mess and there’s one party that going to do what Bush did and we will have another mess when they get voted out of office. Hopefully they won’t start another war with a country that didn’t do anything except have oil. Speaking of Iran, did you hear the CIA gave Iran the plans to a nuclear bomb? They got a Russian scientist to give them the plans and he told them about how the plans were changed so it wouldn’t work and set you plans back a few years but since you know that then you could correct the defects and be ahead of the game. Wonder who’s idea that was to do that?