Congress is on the verge of requiring payment card processors to tell the Internal Revenue Service how much money merchants receive through credit card and debit card transactions.

The Bush administration thinks this kind of third-party reporting of revenue would encourage more businesses to report their income accurately. This could help close the gap between what the government is owed in taxes and what it actually collects.

Congress views the requirement as an easy way of raising revenue to pay for other tax cuts or additional government spending. It estimates the proposal could raise nearly $10 billion over 10 years.

Both the House and the Senate included the reporting requirement as a revenue-raiser in separate bills that appear headed for passage: House legislation to shield 21 million taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax (H.R. 6275) and Senate legislation to help homeowners and the housing industry (H.R. 3221).

Thanks to Lew rockwell.com

Awakened by late-night pounding and his doorbell ringing, Palmdale resident Jesus Bejarano found a social worker and two sheriff's deputies demanding he turn over his 20-month-old daughter, Kelly.

The social worker said Bejarano's 29-year-old wife, Cheila Herrera, had tested positive for amphetamines and PCP at Antelope Valley Hospital after giving birth to the couple's son a week earlier.

Their son, Jesse, who was born prematurely and was still at the hospital, had already been placed in protective custody.

"It was terrible," Herrera said of the Feb. 14 ordeal. "It was pretty shocking to us. We didn't know what to do or say. We called my mom, saying, `They are taking our baby away.'

"We started calling friends, but no one we know has gone through something like this. We were crying. We thought, oh my God, they took our baby."

Last month, the couple sued Los Angeles County government for unspecified damages, saying Herrera had never used drugs and the social worker ignored a battery of expensive tests that proved the initial drug-test results were wrong.

Experts say the case highlights widespread problems with California's system of drug-testing pregnant mothers, using urine-screening tests that produce false-positives up to 70percent of the time, and inconsistent compliance by hospitals with a state law designed to regulate the process.

"The system sounds problematic ... because they are doing urine-only screens,and if they are not doing confirmation tests, they are going to have a lot of false positives," said Dr. Barry Lester, a national expert on drug-exposed babies and a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Experts say that in recent years a similar sweep has focused on "meth babies." Up to 80percent of mothers in Los Angeles County whose babies are taken tested positive for methamphetamine, a drug that experts say produces very high rates of false positives.

In Los Angeles County, the number of infants removed from mothers who tested positive for drugs at hospitals nearly tripled from 209 in 2003 to 568 last year, according to county data. California officials said they do not track similar figures statewide.

The effective book ban by the school authorities in Perry Township has outraged teachers and education reformers.

The Writers Diary, a series of true stories written by inner-city teenagers, was put together by a teacher, Erin Gruwell, and has been celebrated as a model for transforming young lives. It was made into a film with Hilary Swank last year.

Her head agreed and Heermann got written permission from nearly 150 parents, but the Perry Meridian high school board urged her to wait for its decision.

Teachers' union officials say that a single board member objected to swearing in the book. The school board member allegedly persuaded the other six officials to ban Heermann from teaching the book. It remains available in school libraries.

Heermann and the union say there was no explicit ban on the book when she handed it out to pupils on November 15. But later that day she received an email from the board advising her not to teach the book. "That was the pivotal moment of my life, when I saw how my students were taken with the book, how they loved it, and then I am told not to let them read it? I said no," she said.

California Highway Patrol officers are holding roving and fixed patrol posts along area roadways to ensure motorists are abiding by the new law, which took effect today.

The law requires drivers 18 and over to use hands-free cell phone devices while operating a vehicle. Drivers under 18 are now prohibited from using any cell phone device while driving.

CHP officers will be posted along several area roadways and highways Tuesday.

In Sacramento County, officers were posted at 6 a.m. at the intersection of Arden Way and Fair Oaks Boulevard. Officers also were to patrol from 7 to 9 a.m. along Highway 99 from Elk Grove Boulevard to Florin Road.

In Placer County, officers were stationed at 6 a.m. at the intersection of Auburn-Folsom Road at Douglas Boulevard in Granite Bay. Officers also were to be posted from 7 to 10 a.m. on Highway 28 at Kings Beach, from 3 to 8 p.m. on Interstate 80 at Castle Peak and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. eastbound Interstate 80 at Highway 174 in Colfax.

In El Dorado County, officers were to be stationed from 7 to 10 a.m. at El Dorado Hills Boulevard between Highway 50 and Olson Lane and from 7 to 10 a.m. on Highway 50 at the agriculture checkpoint in South Lake Tahoe.

CHP officers also will be stationed from 3 to 5 p.m. on Highway 99 at Lincoln Way in Yuba City; from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Highway 49 at Martell Road near Jackson; at noon on Highway 99 at Mangrove Avenue in Chico; and from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Brunswick Basin area near Highway 49 in Grass Valley.

Drivers stopped will be educated about the new law and may be issued citations or given a "stern warning," officials said.

Investigators are building a timeline to try to determine what occurred early that morning to David Woodman, a former Emmanuel College student who was living in Brookline. Davis said it is unclear when officers noticed the student's medical distress and began CPR. It was sometime between 12:47 a.m. when police first called for an ambulance for an intoxicated reveler, and 12:53 a.m. when officers called EMS a second time because Woodman had stopped breathing.

"We're rebuilding the incident from the officers' statements as well as witnesses statements," Davis said. "That's as specific as I can be right now."

There was a struggle with Woodman that ultimately involved eight police officers and one supervisor, all of whom were treated at a hospital for stress, which is common, Davis said. The commissioner extended his condolences to the family of Woodman.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino called earlier today for a expedited investigation because it is "best for the family and Boston police that we have all the facts known as quickly as possible."

Howard Friedman, a Boston lawyer who represents the Woodmans, said this afternoon that he has asked the US Attorney's office to have the FBI investigate. The family has scheduled a press conference later this afternoon.

Woodman's parents told the Globe that their son did not receive prompt medical attention while lying unconscious, face down on Brookline Avenue with his hands cuffed behind his back. They also accused police of failing to give them a full account of what happened.

In a story published in today's Globe, Boston police said they immediately administered cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, flagged an ambulance after noticing Woodman was in distress, and did everything they could to help him before he was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. But Jeffrey and Cathy Woodman of Southwick say their son must have been deprived of oxygen for at least four minutes because he suffered significant brain damage.

"We don't know what happened," said Jeffrey Woodman, contending that police have left them with more questions than answers. "We are left to surmise that something occurred while he was in police custody that stopped his heart."

Woodman said his son had a preexisting heart condition, but he led an active life and had been playing basketball earlier that day. He said doctors told him his son's heart was functioning normally.

Thomas J. Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, said he understands the family's anguish, "but nothing those officers did that night caused his death."

He said that the officers, who have not been identified publicly, have cooperated with the investigation, and that the family's questions will be answered.

David Woodman, who was charged with drinking in public and resisting arrest, remained hospitalized after the incident and awoke June 23 from a medically induced coma. His parents said he recognized them but had difficulty communicating and whispered, "What happened?"

He smiled at a Globe reporter during a brief visit Thursday, spoke softly to his parents, and appeared confused. A large scrape was visible near his right eye. On Saturday, he was asking to go home, according to his parents, who believed he would survive and face lengthy rehabilitation.

At 2:30 a.m. Sunday he died at the hospital. The family is awaiting autopsy results.

Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, said Conley "pledged a thorough and impartial review of the facts."
The Boston Police Department launched an internal investigation shortly after the incident into how the officers handled Woodman and will join the district attorney's office in investigating his death, Elaine Driscoll, a spokeswoman for the Boston police, said yesterday. Several officers were treated for stress and have returned to work, she said.

"Based upon what we know thus far we do not believe that any excessive force was used and we do believe officers responded reasonably," Driscoll said in an interview Friday.

The commissioner tried to meet with Woodman's family June 18 but was turned away at the hospital by staff who said the family didn't wish to see him, according to Driscoll.

Cathy Woodman said she was alone with her son, who was on life support with scrapes that looked like road burns all over his face, and felt too overwhelmed to meet with Davis.

David Woodman, who had been a history major at Emmanuel College and planned to return in the fall after taking a semester off, was walking from a bar with friends after the game when they passed about 10 or 12 uniformed officers at the corner of the Fenway and Brookline Avenue, according to two friends who spoke on the condition they not be named.

According to one of the friends, as Woodman passed the officers, he said, "Wow, it seems like there's a lot of crime on this corner."
Officers grabbed Woodman, who was carrying a plastic cup of beer, and as they struggled to handcuff him pushed him face down onto the ground, according to Woodman's friend.

"He wasn't being a punk or anything like that," said the friend. "I don't understand why the officers used such brute force to arrest him."
Woodman's friends said an officer yelled at them to leave, saying they would be arrested if they didn't.

Thanks to Jonathan Turley

On Sept. 4, 21-year-old Joshua Pomier will have served nearly four years in a detention center near San Bernardino, Calif. Pomier is charged with multiple counts of car theft and robbery. There are two deeply troubling problems with the amount of time he has spent behind bars. One, he has not been convicted of any of the crimes he's charged with. He had barely turned 18 years old when he and another juvenile were arrested for the crimes in September 2004. Pomier and family members vehemently protest his innocence. The even more tormenting problem is not Pomier's guilt or innocence, but the absurdly long length of time that he has been jailed awaiting disposition, any disposition, of the charges leveled against him.

His bail was set at nearly a half million dollars, and there have been several delayed court dates. During that time, he has been relentlessly pressured to accept a plea bargain that will require him to serve a lengthy prison sentence. Pomier has refused, and continues to protest his innocence.

Pomier is African American, and his dragged out incarceration without being convicted of anything is not unusual. In fact, he's a near textbook example of how thousands of mostly black and Latino young adults and juveniles languish for months, even years, in America's jails with high or no bail, receive shoddy or non-existent legal counsel, and are browbeaten and even threatened by harried, overworked, and often indifferent public defenders and prosecutors to accept deals.

The Coalition for Juvenile Justice estimates that on any given day, nearly 30,000 youth between the ages of 14 and 18 years old are locked down in juvenile detention centers nationally for interminably long periods awaiting disposition of their cases. Even with the plunge in juvenile and adult crime, the numbers of youth and young adults incarcerated for lengthy pre-detention jail time nearly doubled in the 1990s. During the same time, the rates of excessive pre-trial detention time dropped for white youth.

The young adult defendants are nearly always faced with excessively high bail, and for juveniles, no bail. In the juvenile system, most states do not permit bail. Juveniles are considered wards of the court, and pretrial release is solely at the discretion of the judge. High bail, or lack of bail, clog court calendars, and overcrowded jails virtually ensure that defendants such as Pomier get lost in the system without any disposition of their case. In one study, the Sentencing Project found that blacks on average were held for a year or more without any action on their case.

Remember when we were a nation of laws, not men?  When your position didn't entitle you to run the peons down in the street?

Well -- the FEMA man's in jail now, it's true.  But the attitude -- well, that's probably here to stay.

"This immoral self expression goes beyond free speech," said Dicks in a statement released Thursday. "It rises to the crime of indecent exposure/disorderly persons."

It's a style that irks many -- a few cities nationwide have banned the rear-revealing pants -- but the order also raises serious questions about how it would be enforced, if it disproportionately targets young black men and if ultra-low riders should be considered Constitutionally protected.

So, is Dicks going too far?

Greg Gibbs, an ACLU attorney in Flint, said how people wear their clothing is a form of expression but cautions that not all of those forms are protected by the Constitution.

"The issue is: Does it violate the First Amendment?" said Gibbs, adding he plans to research the issue further.

Some Flint residents are all for busting those who go bottoms out.

"It's overdue," said Sam Berry, 73, of Flint.

Gwendolyn R. Allen, 72, of Flint agreed.

"It's so disgusting ... It's disgraceful."

Claude Carter, 49, of Flint sees the issue differently though. He said wearing pants in that manner is a fad -- not a crime.

"I see young and old wearing their pants that way," said Carter. "It doesn't annoy me."

The crackdown on buttocks is an apparent response to "significant" complaints from citizens, according to Dicks.

Under the chief's orders, any sworn officer who sees "sagging/exposing buttocks" will have probable cause to make an arrest under the city's disorderly person ordinance -- a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine and three months in jail.

Thanks to Wendy McElroy

Josh Raykin had never spent even a night away from his parents.

That is, until Arapahoe County snatched the 8-year-old from his home after an abuse allegation that social workers dragged their feet investigating.

The ordeal began while Josh was playing outside one day before dinner in April. A neighbor knocked on the door to tell his dad that police had come to take Josh away.

The strawberry-blond kid with pale blue eyes was born in 1999 after Michael and Melanie Raykin tried for 15 years to conceive. Michael, a courier, and Melanie, a hairstylist, work extra hours to send Josh to Denver's Montclair Academy and give their boy advantages they never had as kids in the former U.S.S.R.

"He means everything to us," Michael says.

But on the sidewalk late that day in April, deputies wouldn't let him go near the son whom the county suspected Raykin of molesting in ways too intimate to be described in these pages. Deputies said the allegations came from Michael's young nieces -- girls the couple hadn't seen since they went into foster care months earlier because of abuse allegations in their immediate family. The girls also had pointed the finger at their grandfather, but charges were dropped.

"They blew my mind. I didn't know what to say," says Michael, whose most serious brushes with the law had come with a few speeding tickets.

Mother, father and son were forced to sit on their curb as neighbors watched and whispered, and deputies waited for a case worker to arrive. Josh, complaining he was hungry and cold, started hyperventilating.

Once the social worker came two hours later, he wouldn't release the boy to his aunt nearby, nor tell the Raykins where he was taking Josh. Instead, he told Melanie to pack a bag for the boy she had never once left once with a sitter.

Josh screamed, "Leave them alone. They're the best parents in the world," as the case worker prodded him into his car.

He spent a week with an Aurora foster family that required the Jewish kid to pray to Jehovah at each meal. They took away the Pokemon toothbrush and stuffed toys that his mom had packed for him. They shut off his shower after five minutes. And most days, he says, they made him wash toilets with a washcloth.

For one sleepless week, the Raykins made phone calls, met with lawyers and sat in Josh's room "taking turns breaking down." Human Services refused to allow them even one phone call to tell their only child they loved him, were fighting for him and would come for him soon.

Melanie says social workers kept pushing her to say her husband molested their son, insinuating that such an admission would set Josh free. They suggested that Josh having once kissed his cousins on the lips -- as is the norm in his parents' culture -- was a sign that he had been molested. As social workers saw it, Michael's habit of buying his son toys and taking him to the movies was "grooming" to cover up sexual abuse.

Though counties normally interview kids before yanking them from their homes, it took Arapahoe County a week after removing Josh for that interview to take place.

Andre Moore, 44, of the 4800 block of Walnut Street, is accused of posting the video called "Dissin Philly Cops" on YouTube.com.

Moore was charged yesterday with aggravated assault, terroristic threats and other crimes. Arrest documents said he works as a security guard at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.

The video allegedly shows a man brandishing a large, silver semiautomatic pistol and calling Philadelphia police "nothing but a bunch of liars, especially the 18th District. . . . That's why I rejoice whenever they shoot a cop in Philadelphia 'cause I hate them."

According to a probable-cause affidavit, the man then removes the ammunition magazine from the gun, racks the slide, points the pistol at the camera, and pulls the trigger as he speaks.

"Look, it's easy. . . . Get one in the chamber," the affidavit quotes him as saying. "Boom. . . . When you shoot the cops you shoot them dead. OK? Anywhere in the head or heart."

The video, which is one minute, 18 seconds long, was posted June 7 on YouTube, the affidavit says.

It quickly came to the attention of local police and the Attorney General's Gun Violence Task Force, said Kevin Harley, communications director for Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett.

"We believe these were terroristic threats that are not protected by the First Amendment," Harley said, "particularly when he encourages people to promote violence in Philadelphia and when he shows people how to use a gun to shoot a cop."

Investigators identified Moore by speaking to employees at Einstein and by comparing the video to his driver's license photo, the affidavit said.

Yesterday, after I vented a bit on the lack of rain barrel options at Big Box stores, a reader tipped us off to a very interesting issue in her state of Colorado. Rain barrels there, you see, are outlawed. Colorado state law mandates that any water falling from the air is not yours. In fact, according to their site, its already been "legally allocated" -- so, you don't actually have any rights when it comes to using precipitation that falls on your property. Here's the exact wording:

Colorado Water Law requires that precipitation fall to the ground, run off and into the river of the watershed where it fell. Because rights to water are legally allocated in this state, an individual may not capture and use water to which he/she does not have a right. We must remember also that rain barrels don't help much in a drought because a drought by its very nature supplies little in the way of snow or rain.

Additionally, any and all water that comes from tap may only be used once. "Denver water customers are not permitted to take their bath or laundry water (commonly referred to as gray water) and dump it on their outdoor plants or garden." Even if that said water is ecologically-friendly?

Thanks to The Agitator

A federal court in Indianapolis ruled Tuesday that a major portion of the revised Indiana sex offender law cannot be enforced.

The ruling came one week before the new law would have gone into effect.

The modified law would have required that convicted sex offenders, after they served their sentences and probation and parole time, agree to have their personal computers searched at any time and to allow their Internet access to be monitored.

Tuesday, U.S. District Court in Indianapolis ruled that requirement of the new law went too far.

"These plaintiffs have rights under the Fourth Amendment," District Judge David F. Hamilton wrote in his ruling. "The state may not force them to waive those rights under threat of criminal prosecution for failing to do so."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana filed the lawsuit as a class action on behalf of convicted sex offenders a few days after this year's session of the General Assembly expanded the requirements of the sex offender registration law.

NC: Expired tag justifies a search incident

Defendant was arrested for driving on an expired license of a vehicle after a stop for a worn and tattered paper tag. That permitted a complete search of the interior. The rule as to vehicles is different that dwellings. State v. Carter, 2008 N.C. App. LEXIS 1159 (June 17, 2008):

Defendant relies on a series of cases that state an arresting officer may lawfully search only for property connected to the crime with which he is charged. However, none of the cases relate to the search of a defendant within an automobile, and as such are irrelevant. Defendant attempts to graft on to the above-stated rule not only a requirement that the search be only for evidence of the crime for which the defendant was arrested, but also a requirement that the illegal nature of that evidence be immediately apparent. In none of the many cases cited above (Brooks, et al.) in which our Courts have considered this type of search has either been made a requirement.

Comment: So--what about an arrest for speeding? Does that justify a search incident in N.C.?