Judge Orders Government to Return $167,000 Seized From Motorhome Driver Visiting His Girlfriend

A federal judge in Nevada has ordered the government to return $167,000 that was seized from a man driving his motorhome on a highway two years ago. The man, Straughn Gorman, was traveling to visit his girlfriend. He was never charged with a crime.

The seizure originally occurred in January 2013, when Gorman was driving his motorhome from Delaware to visit his girlfriend in Sacramento, Calif.

Police stopped Gorman not once, but twice, within 50 minutes while he drove west on Interstate 80, according to documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada.

In the first traffic stop, which occurred near Elko, Nev., a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper stopped the man for driving too slowly in the passing lane. Gorman refused to let the trooper search his vehicle, and the Nevada Highway Patrol officer allowed him to continue on without issuing any citations.

Less than an hour later, Gorman was stopped again by an Elko County Sheriff’s Office deputy, who the highway patrol trooper had arranged to pull Gorman over once more, court documents show. The deputy had a drug-sniffing dog with him, and a search of the motorhome was conducted.

In the two-minute video originally posted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the officer searched the vehicle, where he found $167,000 in cash stored in different places throughout the motorhome.

The officer told Gorman that the cash, his computer, cellphone and vehicle would all be seized under civil asset forfeiture laws.

Though the Elk County Sheriff’s deputy said the dog detected drugs in the motorhome, none were found, and Gorman was never charged with a crime.

Instead, he became another victim of civil asset forfeiture, a procedure that gives local, state and federal law enforcement the power to seize money and property if it’s suspected of being related to a crime.

Via: Daily Signal

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Guns, race remain Obama’s biggest missed opportunities

President Barack Obama, with Vice President Biden, leaves after making a statement at the White House regarding the church shootings in Charleston, S.C., on June 18, the day after the massacre. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The killing of nine black worshipers at a church in South Carolina has compelled President Obama to look back with anger, then melancholy and finally some distance at the two most in­trac­table issues he has faced as president: guns and race.

In the White House briefing room, at a fundraiser at the home of a movie star, before a roomful of the country’s mayors and in a garage in Pasadena, Calif., Obama has reflected not only on the Charleston shootings but also on the missed opportunities and unfinished business of his presidency.

“Increasingly, I’ve spent my time thinking about how do I try to break out of these old patterns that our politics have fallen into,” Obama said in Pasadena, where he recorded a podcast interview that was released Monday. He wondered how to have a normal conversation that’s “not this battle in a steel cage between one side and another.”

The pain laid bare by Charleston has led Obama to an unusually frank assessment of his presidency and an acknowledgment that he hasn’t been the unifying, transformational figure that many hoped he would be.

On Friday, he will travel to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston to deliver another eulogy, this time for a pastor who was one of the earliest supporters of the movement that in 2008 propelled Obama to the White House. That campaign’s most enthusiastic backers believed that a newly mobilized and enthusiastic citizenry could radically improve the nature of the political debate in Washington.

Just hours after the June 17 shootings in Charleston, Obama stood before the cameras in the White House briefing room and spoke mournfully of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney and the eight other parishioners killed during an evening Bible study.

Obama was thinking about the dead. But his frustration and disgust in that moment sprang just as much from the killing of 20 elementary school students in Connecticut three years earlier, his aides said.

Obama has described the Newtown massacre as the “worst day” of his presidency and Congress’s inability to pass gun control legislation as his most stinging defeat.

Via; Washington Post

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California: How not to Handle a Water Crisis

Californians have a love affair with water. It’s used for pools, irrigation, green grasses, and washing cars. Yet, because of the drought the grass is turning brown, cars are staying dirty, and pools might be a thing of the past. American Thinker interviewed people who have some knowledge about this crisis. 

There have been about four years of drought. The water supply has been severely depleted largely due to the all time low level of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which usually provides about one-third of the state’s water. Governor Jerry Brown in an executive order directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement a twenty-five percent mandatory reduction. Cuts will vary from community to community, based upon per capita water use. 

Russell Lefevre, the Torrance Director of the Metropolitan Water District, told American Thinker that to deal with the crisis they went to their twenty-six customers, totalling about nineteen million residents, and imposed a fifteen percent cutback. He also explained that the governor’s plan has nine tiers and the cutback he issued by executive order differs by community, ranging from 8% to 36%. For example, Beverly Hills and Palos Verdes must cut back by 36% while Los Angeles and San Diego’s cutback is 16%. Why is the governor requiring more of a cutback than the MWD?

Via: American Thinker

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California: Redevelopment Agencies Poised for a Comeback

Redevelopment agencies would once again have the power to seize private property for big developers under a bill that passed the California State Assembly earlier this month.

Assembly Bill 2, authored by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Salinas, would give local governments the power to create new entities that would have the same legal authority as redevelopment agencies. These new Community Revitalization Investment Authorities would have the power to issue bonds, award sweetheart deals to businesses and “acquire and transfer property subject to eminent domain,” according to the legislative analysis of the bill.

Property rights advocates warn that the bill’s language contains no restrictions on eminent domain and could resurrect the abuses made possible by the Supreme Court’s controversial Kelo decision.

“It brings back the right of governments to exercise eminent domain against some private parties in order to resell their property to other private parties,” cautioned Howard Ahmanson, Jr., a property rights advocate and founder of Fieldstead and Company. “Only new and wealthy suburbs would be potentially spared from ‘redevelopment,’ the lower middle class and poor would not.”

12 Assembly Republicans back redevelopment, unrestricted eminent domain

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. New London that government agencies have the power to seize property for economic development. The decision was widely criticized across the political spectrum and inspired states to pass tougher laws limiting governments’ eminent domain powers. Here in California, the momentum for property rights reached its zenith in 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown pushed through a plan to end redevelopment as part of his plan to balance the state budget.

Via: California Political Review

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Answers demanded after vets’ disability claims found in cabinet

One number will hang over a congressional hearing Wednesday looking into mismanagement at a U.S. Veterans Affairs regional office in Oakland: 13,184.

That’s the number of compensation and disability claims that were found in 2012, wrongfully stashed in a filing cabinet — some dating to the mid-1990s and many unprocessed. But what the number represents remains the source of fierce debate.

Employees who came forward about the claims say it’s the number of veterans whose much-needed benefits may have been delayed, or not paid altogether, because of what they described as organized negligence that continued even after the cabinet was emptied. …

Via: SF Chronicle

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White House Says It Knows How Many People Enrolled In Obamacare, But Will Only Say It’s “In The Thousands”…

The longer they hold out releasing the data the worse we know it is.

Via: Weasel Zippers

‘YOU MORON!!!’: ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER IN TROUBLE AFTER FACEBOOK RANT THAT RIPS A ‘CRACK HEAD’ PARENT, DUMB STUDENTS

The teacher works at Alicante Elementary in Lamont, a southeastern suburb of Bakersfield, Calif., and posted the following, according to KERO-TV.

Here he rants about a mom who complains he’s too harsh with students, adding that the woman’s third-grader can read only “7 freaking words a minute” and still counts on her fingers while criticizing the mom for possessing only a fourth-grade education and not speaking any English:

(Credit: Facebook via KERO)

Here’s the promised image, implying a family is on welfare:

Via: The Blaze

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