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Page 2: What Is a Super PAC? A Short History - ABC News

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Page 2: What Is a Super PAC? A Short History - ABC News

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A look at how "Super PACs" were born and how they work as Election Day nears.

Aug. 9, 2012 -- To start, what a Super PAC is not: "A popular video game for smartphones."

No shame though if that was your initial thought. A statistically significant number of people, when asked a question like the one in the headline and given four potential answers, chose the option quoted above.

Nor is "Super PAC" the nickname for a "Congressional committee on the budget deficit" (9 percent of respondents). Many would argue that Super PACs are far more efficient than any body formed in the halls of the House or Senate.

Only 40 percent of Americans, according to last week's Washington Post/Pew Research poll, correctly identified Super PAC as groups "able to accept unlimited political donations."

The Most Awesomely Unusual Super PAC Names

For the other half (and then some), here's a brief primer:

Before Super PACs became "super," they were just PACs, or Political Action Committees. The groups could support a candidate or a cause, but were heavily regulated under the terms of campaign finance law. Individuals were allowed to give $2,500 -- no more -- and corporations and unions were strictly forbidden from making donations.

In 2010, that all changed. Two court cases decided in the space of two months re-wrote the book on campaign spending and ushered in the era of the Super PAC. First, there was the Supreme Court ruling now referred to simply as "Citizens United."

The story begins six years earlier, when Conservative nonprofit group Citizens United filed a complaint with the Federal Election Committee (FEC), the body charged with refereeing campaign finance disputes, saying television ads for Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" were effectively -- and illegally, because Election Day was so close -- advocating against President George W. Bush's re-election. The FEC rejected the claim, so Citizens United decided to start a production company of its own. Three years later, its "Hillary: The Movie," an unsympathetic documentary about then-candidate Clinton, was completed and ready to air on DirecTV. But the FEC, backed by a lower court ruling, blocked the group from running ads promoting the film.

By the spring of 2009, the case had made its way to the Supreme Court. After some legal gymnastics, the question before the justices was broadened and on January 21, 2010, the decision came in. The Court struck down all caps on the amount of money a person could give to a PAC.

More controversially, the ruling also declared that corporations and unions could also make unlimited donations.

The groundwork had been put in place and two months later, another court ruling -- Speechnow.org v. FEC -- cleared the way for the creation of "independent expenditure-only" groups, or Super PACs.

Super PACs are barred from coordinating activities with any candidate or campaign, but the dividing line is murky. The two most closely dedicated to supporting the Obama and Romney campaigns, respectively, are run by former aides to the president and his Republican challenger.

When comedian Stephen Colbert founded his satirical "Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow" Super PAC last year, then decided to "run for President of South Carolina," he was forced by law to pass off control -- which he did, to his Comedy Central colleague Jon Stewart. Stewart re-named it "The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC" and issued a statement assuring the public, "Stephen and I have in no way have worked out a series of morse-code blinks to convey information with each other on our respective shows."

As of this hour, there are 593 registered Super PACs, advocating everything from fat old men to hungry young zombies. More notably, there is Priorities USA, which supports President Obama and has spent nearly $18 million (as of June 30) to further his cause since being co-founded by former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton.

Shining a Light on Karl Rove's 'Dark Money' Group

On Mitt Romney's side is Restore Our Future, by far the biggest Super PAC, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. Restore Future has taken in more than $82 million and spent a reported $61,985,504.82. The organization is run by a board including former Romney political director, Carl Forti (who, it should be noted, also helps run Crossroads USA, Karl Rove's big-spending Super PAC).

In all, Super PACs during this maiden campaign cycle have collected more than $316 million, issuing expenditures of $181,217,664.69. With a little less than three months until Election Day, expect those numbers to keep on rising.

Aug. 9, 2012 -- To start, what a Super PAC is not: "A popular video game for smartphones."

No shame though if that was your initial thought. A statistically significant number of people, when asked a question like the one in the headline and given four potential answers, chose the option quoted above.

Nor is "Super PAC" the nickname for a "Congressional committee on the budget deficit" (9 percent of respondents). Many would argue that Super PACs are far more efficient than any body formed in the halls of the House or Senate.

Only 40 percent of Americans, according to last week's Washington Post/Pew Research poll, correctly identified Super PAC as groups "able to accept unlimited political donations."

The Most Awesomely Unusual Super PAC Names

For the other half (and then some), here's a brief primer:

Before Super PACs became "super," they were just PACs, or Political Action Committees. The groups could support a candidate or a cause, but were heavily regulated under the terms of campaign finance law. Individuals were allowed to give $2,500 -- no more -- and corporations and unions were strictly forbidden from making donations.

In 2010, that all changed. Two court cases decided in the space of two months re-wrote the book on campaign spending and ushered in the era of the Super PAC. First, there was the Supreme Court ruling now referred to simply as "Citizens United."

The story begins six years earlier, when Conservative nonprofit group Citizens United filed a complaint with the Federal Election Committee (FEC), the body charged with refereeing campaign finance disputes, saying television ads for Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" were effectively -- and illegally, because Election Day was so close -- advocating against President George W. Bush's re-election. The FEC rejected the claim, so Citizens United decided to start a production company of its own. Three years later, its "Hillary: The Movie," an unsympathetic documentary about then-candidate Clinton, was completed and ready to air on DirecTV. But the FEC, backed by a lower court ruling, blocked the group from running ads promoting the film.

By the spring of 2009, the case had made its way to the Supreme Court. After some legal gymnastics, the question before the justices was broadened and on January 21, 2010, the decision came in. The Court struck down all caps on the amount of money a person could give to a PAC.

More controversially, the ruling also declared that corporations and unions could also make unlimited donations.

The groundwork had been put in place and two months later, another court ruling -- Speechnow.org v. FEC -- cleared the way for the creation of "independent expenditure-only" groups, or Super PACs.

Super PACs are barred from coordinating activities with any candidate or campaign, but the dividing line is murky. The two most closely dedicated to supporting the Obama and Romney campaigns, respectively, are run by former aides to the president and his Republican challenger.

When comedian Stephen Colbert founded his satirical "Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow" Super PAC last year, then decided to "run for President of South Carolina," he was forced by law to pass off control -- which he did, to his Comedy Central colleague Jon Stewart. Stewart re-named it "The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC" and issued a statement assuring the public, "Stephen and I have in no way have worked out a series of morse-code blinks to convey information with each other on our respective shows."

As of this hour, there are 593 registered Super PACs, advocating everything from fat old men to hungry young zombies. More notably, there is Priorities USA, which supports President Obama and has spent nearly $18 million (as of June 30) to further his cause since being co-founded by former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton.

Shining a Light on Karl Rove's 'Dark Money' Group

On Mitt Romney's side is Restore Our Future, by far the biggest Super PAC, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. Restore Future has taken in more than $82 million and spent a reported $61,985,504.82. The organization is run by a board including former Romney political director, Carl Forti (who, it should be noted, also helps run Crossroads USA, Karl Rove's big-spending Super PAC).

In all, Super PACs during this maiden campaign cycle have collected more than $316 million, issuing expenditures of $181,217,664.69. With a little less than three months until Election Day, expect those numbers to keep on rising.

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Super PAC spending has changed the face of election season politics. But only an estimated 40 percent of Americans have any understanding of how they function. This is a brief explanation of the way Super PACs work, the history behind their creation, and who's utilizing them best ahead of Election Day in November.

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Republicans Should Listen to Their Voters, Not Donors - NationalJournal.com

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Republicans Should Listen to Their Voters, Not Donors - NationalJournal.com

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An 18-year-old West Virginia University freshman was elected to the state's House of Delegates on Tuesday, and is poised to be the youngest active lawmaker in the U.S. when she's sworn in.

Saira Blair says she will defer her spring semester classes to travel to the state's capitol in Charleston and participate in the 60-day legislative session from January to March. She will be representing the 59th district of 18,000 people in West Virginia's eastern panhandle, not far from Washington, D.C. She'll make up her classes in the summer and fall.

Blair started to make news in May when, at only 17, she defeated a 67-year-old Republican incumbent in the Republican primary. She turned 18 in July, just in time to meet the age requirement to serve as a state delegate. She is the daughter of Craig Blair, a state Senator. She donated $3,600 of her own money to the campaign. Blair is staunchly conservative, holding anti-abortion, pro-gun, and anti-gay marriage views, according to her campaign website. She is also a proponent of voter ID laws, and she wants to repeal a law in West Virginia that has led to unusually high gas taxes.

Planning to major in Spanish and Economics, Blair says she wants to be a financial adviser when she graduates. She took a break after classes in geography and computer science to talk to TIME about what it's like to campaign in college and the best way to bring more jobs to West Virginia.
Why did you run this year instead of waiting until you were older?
I've grown up with father as a politician since I was six years old. I've always known it was something that I'd be interested in one day. I never knew it would be at such a young age. After my junior year of high school, I decided to run because I attended a program called Youth and Government, where 300 students go down to Charleston, they write a bill, they hear it in committee, and they bring it out on house floor. After hearing some of the bills that students came up with, and seeing that they were fully capable of doing the job that people 40, 50, years older than them were doing, I realized that I didn't have to wait.
What did your parents think when you told them you planned to run?
My parents were surprised. They thought I was crazy for wanting to do it, because they know the lifestyle, and they know that it is a lot of work, and it's tolling on you, but they were incredibly supportive nonetheless, and have been really great helping me along the way.
What was it like running your campaign out of your college dorm room this fall?
It wasn't too terrible. I've been able to keep up my GPA. I would go to classes in the morning, and in the afternoon, I would come to my room and write [handwritten] letters [to almost 4,000 voters].
Were your friends supportive?
They are so excited to see someone their age running that they've helped hold up signs for me and they've helped stuffed envelopes. I couldn't have done it without them.
What sorts of things do you like to do on campus? What do you and your friends do?
I'm very involved with the student government association. I've also been involved in various smaller programs on campus just to test the waters. I've tried knitting club, crafting club, cooking club, and community service. My friends and I like to go out to eat a lot. We just found a new Thai restaurant down town we really like.
What issues are most important to you?
Most important to me is jobs in West Virginia. I've watched too many people get a high school and college education and then leave the state because they cannot get a good paying job. I want to get jobs to West Virginia and one of the biggest ways to do that would be making west Virginia a right-to-work state [which would prohibit businesses from requiring employees to be part of a union or pay union dues].

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An 18-year-old West Virginia University freshman was elected to the state's House of Delegates on Tuesday, and is poised to be the youngest active lawmaker in the U.S. when she's sworn in. Saira Blair says she will defer her spring semester classes to travel to the state's capitol in Charleston and participate in the 60-day legislative session from January to March.

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Read the latest headlines, news stories, and opinion from Politics, Entertainment, Life, Perspectives, and more.

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Transgender military ban must be lifted (Opinion) - CNN.com

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Transgender military ban must be lifted (Opinion) - CNN.com

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Editor's note: Shannon Minter is legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and co-chair of the Planning Commission on Transgender Military Service. The opinions in this commentary are solely those of the writer. The CNN film, "Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story" is about a transgender woman who served for 20 years as a male U.S. Navy SEAL. Beck answered your questions during a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" chat. Follow her on Twitter @TheLadyValor.
(CNN) -- Three years after the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," the now-defunct law prohibiting gay men, lesbians and bisexuals from serving openly in the armed forces, many Americans might not know that a significant form of discrimination still exists: The U.S. military bans transgender people.

Military recruiters are required to turn down attempts by transgender Americans to enlist. If, after joining the military, service members are discovered to be transgender, they are fired. No other federal agency operates this way.

Because of the Pentagon's ban, an estimated 15,500 transgender people serving in the military have to hide and lie about who they are. This has devastating consequences for them, and makes it impossible to access medically necessary health care without risking discharge. Careers are ruined, and the military wastes resources training competent service members and then firing them when their gender identity is discovered.

That's just what happened to Landon Wilson, a transgender man who served as a Navy cryptologist in Afghanistan last year. Landon was so good at his job that his superiors put him up for a promotion. But in the course of preparing the paperwork, a colleague discovered that Landon was born a girl, so he was sent home and ushered out of the Navy.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced three months ago that he is open to reviewing the ban, and the White House expressed support. However, since Hagel's announcement, no progress has been made toward a resolution, and some observers have questioned whether the military could include transgender personnel without difficulty.
Transgender ex-Navy SEAL: Here's a question for you Transgender ex-SEAL on her wife, kids Should military lift transgender ban?
To answer that question, a commission of leading legal, military and medical experts, including the U.S. Army's former chief medical officer, has completed a study on how to implement inclusive policy. The commission, which I co-chair, conducted an analysis of foreign military forces, as well as U.S. military experiences of previously excluded populations.

Our research indicates that allowing transgender personnel to serve will be neither burdensome nor complex. We found that as with any policy change, the implementation of an inclusive approach should be handled in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. That said, we found that the administrative and regulatory changes needed to implement inclusive policy are minimal, and that strong leadership will be sufficient for avoiding any potential problems.

Before implementing the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," the Pentagon created an internal working group that took a year to formulate advice about how to repeal the ban. Its guidance was based on extensive research, including a survey it administered to 400,000 service members. Additionally, the military commissioned the RAND Corporation to complete a simultaneous study on the same implementation questions the internal Pentagon working group was considering.

While the working group and the RAND report produced useful recommendations, the snail's pace approach to implementation was based on the need to build political support, not by any complexities involved in lifting the ban. Because "don't ask, don't tell" was a congressional statute, the administration had to persuade a bipartisan coalition in Congress to support repeal, and the extensive research on implementation helped those efforts. But eliminating the restrictions on transgender service members-and embracing them as equal and respected members of our nation's armed forces-does not require the repeal of any law.

Since the ban can be lifted without waiting for Congress, there is no reason for delay: The Obama administration should immediately announce a moratorium on firing transgender service members, and begin implementing a policy of inclusion. President Obama has made it clear that when Congress will not help him solve the nation's problems, he can and will take executive action to get meaningful work done. Lifting the military's transgender ban is a win-win opportunity because the policy will strengthen both the armed forces and our democracy.
Read CNNOpinion's new Flipboard magazine Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion. Join us on Facebook.com/CNNOpinion..

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Lift ban on transgender military members

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Editor's note: Shannon Minter is legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and co-chair of the Planning Commission on Transgender Military Service. The opinions in this commentary are solely those of the writer. The CNN film, "Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story" is about a transgender woman who served for 20 years as a male U.S.

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Georgia dealers want Tesla store shuttered for selling too many Teslas | Motoramic - Yahoo Autos

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Georgia dealers want Tesla store shuttered for selling too many Teslas | Motoramic - Yahoo Autos

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Autoblog: New Cars, Used Cars for Sale, Car Reviews and News

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Autoblog brings you automotive news; expert reviews of cars, trucks, crossovers and SUVs; and pictures and video. Research and compare vehicles, find local dealers, calculate loan payments, find your car's book value and get a service estimate at Autoblog.com.

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A Tale of Two 9-Year-Olds: The One on the Playground, and the One With an Uzi | TIME

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A Tale of Two 9-Year-Olds: The One on the Playground, and the One With an Uzi | TIME

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A Tale of Two 9-Year-Olds: The One on the Playground, and the One With An Uzi

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You should be absolutely terrified that a 9-year-old's constitutional right to fire an Uzi trumps your right to decide at what age your kids can play at the park unsupervised

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A Canadian’s View On Our Disrespect Of President Obama’s Presidency | The Fifth Column

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A Canadian’s View On Our Disrespect Of President Obama’s Presidency | The Fifth Column

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When the top tax rate really kicks in - CNNMoney

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When the top tax rate really kicks in - CNNMoney

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Sources: James Nunns, Tax Policy Center; OECD Interactive: Tal Yellin / CNNMoney
Footnotes: The top state or sub-central rate may apply at somewhat higher income levels than shown. Countries with an * impose a flat tax. Tax rates rounded.

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Sources: James Nunns, Tax Policy Center; OECD Interactive: Tal Yellin / CNNMoney Footnotes: The top state or sub-central rate may apply at somewhat higher income levels than shown. Countries with an * impose a flat tax. Tax rates rounded.

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Mary Poppins Quits with Kristen Bell - YouTube

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Mary Poppins Quits with Kristen Bell - YouTube

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Subscribe now: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=funnyordie Mary Poppins (Kristen Bell) is working for minimum wage, and really needs a raise.

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California's smartphone kill switch bill has been signed into law | The Verge

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California's smartphone kill switch bill has been signed into law | The Verge

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A bill that requires all smartphones manufactured after July 1st, 2015 to include anti-theft measures if sold in the state of California was signed into law today. California governor Jerry Brown signed the bill, which was introduced back in February, and finally cleared the State assembly two weeks ago. Its aim is to make phones a less attractive target for thieves by requiring built-in tools that let consumers remotely lock, wipe, and disable the devices.

The bill, SB 962, was created by California state Senator Mark Leno along with San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who's been a staunch advocate of anti-theft measures for phones. Ahead of the bill, Gascón urged cellphone makers - including Apple and Samsung - to make stolen smartphones more of a headache for thieves, going so far as to hire security experts to try and bypass the built-in security measures to illustrate that smartphone makers weren't doing enough. An earlier version of the legislation also included tablets, and any other handheld "advanced mobile communications device," language that was stripped out in favor of targeting only smartphones.

The key text of the bill breaks down what exactly phones need to include:

Any smartphone that is manufactured on or after July 1, 2015, and sold in California after that date, shall include a technological solution at the time of sale, to be provided by the manufacturer or operating system provider, that, once initiated and successfully communicated to the smartphone, can render the essential features of the smartphone inoperable to an unauthorized user when the smartphone is not in the possession of an authorized user. The smartphone shall, during the initial device setup process, prompt an authorized user to enable the technological solution. The technological solution shall be reversible, so that if an authorized user obtains possession of the smartphone after the essential features of the smartphone have been rendered inoperable, the operation of those essential features can be restored by an authorized user. A technological solution may consist of software, hardware, or a combination of both software and hardware, and when enabled, shall be able to withstand a hard reset or operating system downgrade and shall prevent reactivation of the smartphone on a wireless network except by an authorized user.

Ahead of the bill's approval, every major player in the phone industry pledged to make their smartphones harder to steal as part of a voluntary agreement with the CTIA. Apple, Google, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung, along with the five major US cell carriers, agreed on plans to offer customers a way to remotely wipe or make inoperable their devices beginning July 2015. While similar to the kill switch legislation in its end goal, the two main differences are that the CTIA agreement doesn't require the products to ship with the solution, and threatens to keep any handsets that don't abide by the law from being sold.
"California has just put smartphone thieves on notice."
"Today's action was unnecessary given the breadth of action the industry has taken," Jamie Hastings, the vice president of external and state affairs for the CTIA said in a statement. "Uniformity in the wireless industry created tremendous benefits for wireless consumers, including lower costs and phenomenal innovation. State by state technology mandates, such as this one, stifle those benefits and are detrimental to wireless consumers."

In a statement, Senator Leno said simply that "California has just put smartphone thieves on notice."

Preliminary data on reactivation lock tools suggests the feature has already affected crime rates. In June, attorney generals in New York and San Francisco said that year-over-year thefts of Apple devices " plummeted" during the first five months of 2014 thanks to iOS 7's iCloud Activation Lock feature. For San Francisco that amounted to a 38 percent decline in iPhone-related robberies, while New York reported a 19 and 29 percent year-over-year decline on robberies and grand larcenies that involved Apple products. During an identical time period, the same study said there was an increase in robberies involving Samsung devices, which did not have the aforementioned built-in protections until April.
California is not the only state
California joins Minnesota, which passed a similar anti-theft bill in May. However unlike California's bill, it's not asking for a way to remotely disable or wipe a phone, just that the phone needs to come "equipped with preloaded anti-theft functionality," or at least be able to download it later, and free of charge. Under its requirements, it's not just about anti-theft measures on the device, but also deals with devices that are resold. The law criminalizes buying and selling phones between people without documentation, so the state can track where phones are going. It also prohibits used cellphone dealers from paying in cash or selling to people under the age of 18. These are things designed to hinder potential thieves by putting more of the business of selling phones on the record when it too goes into effect next July.

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California's smartphone kill switch bill has been signed into law

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A bill that requires all smartphones manufactured after July 1st, 2015 to include anti-theft measures if sold in the state of California was signed into law today. California governor Jerry Brown signed the bill, which was introduced back in February, and finally cleared the State assembly two weeks ago.

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Why Is Florida Ending Remedial Education for College Students? - NationalJournal.com

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Why Is Florida Ending Remedial Education for College Students? - NationalJournal.com

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Video: Driver Rolls His Subaru WRX STI, Still Wins the Rally - RSsportscars.com

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Video: Driver Rolls His Subaru WRX STI, Still Wins the Rally - RSsportscars.com

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Texas judge orders brain-dead pregnant woman off life support - U.S. News

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Texas judge orders brain-dead pregnant woman off life support - U.S. News

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Larry W. Smith / EPA

A judge ordered a Texas hospital Friday to remove Marlise Munoz, who is pregnant and brain dead, from life support after the hospital acknowledged that her fetus isn't viable.

Tarrant County District Judge R.H. Wallace gave John Peter Smith Hospital of Fort Worth until 6 p.m. ET Monday to disconnect Munoz, 33, from her ventilator, as her husband, Erick, has demanded since November.

Lawyers for the Tarrant County district attorney's office, which defended the hospital, wouldn't comment when asked whether they would appeal the ruling.

Heather King, an attorney for the Munoz family, told reporters: "There's nothing happy about today. It's a sad situation all the way around. We are relieved that Erick Munoz can move forward with the process of burying his wife."

In a statement, JPS Health Network, the hospital's parent company, said it "appreciates the potential impact of the consequences of the order on all parties involved and will be consulting with the Tarrant County District Attorney's office."

The hospital had argued as recently as Thursday that even though Munoz has been brain dead since Nov. 28, withdrawing her from life support "would cause the death of the unborn child."

Courtesy KC Studios Photography

But in a joint affidavit stipulating the facts of the case filed shortly before Friday's hearing, it said that "at the time of this hearing, the fetus gestating inside Mrs. Munoz is not viable."

The hospital had also pointed to a state law that says life-sustaining support can't be withdrawn or withheld from a pregnant person, presumably to "protect the unborn child against the wishes of a decision maker who would terminate the child's life along with the mother's."

In his ruling, Wallace wrote that the law didn't apply because "Mrs. Munoz is dead."

Marlise Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant when she collapsed in November from what doctors believe was a pulmonary embolism - a blood clot in the lung. The fetus is now at about 22 weeks' gestation.

Erick Munoz said in an amended motion filed Thursday that his wife was legally dead, and to further conduct surgical procedures on a deceased body is nothing short of outrageous."

Further complicating Wallace's decision was a statement by Munoz's attorneys this week that they had medical records showing that the fetus was "distinctly abnormal."

There's very little case law over the Texas statute, and Wallace's ruling didn't shed any new light. He wrote that because the law didn't apply in this case, he didn't need to rule on any of the constitutional arguments Erick Munoz had made.

Wallace was hearing the case after Judge Melody Wilkinson recused herself last week when state election and ethics records showed that her campaign treasurer is also general counsel for JPS Health Network, the hospital's parent company.
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Texas judge orders brain-dead pregnant woman off life support

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A judge ordered a Texas hospital Friday to remove Marlise Munoz, who is pregnant and brain dead, from life support after the hospital acknowledged that her fetus isn't viable. Tarrant County District Judge R.H. Wallace gave John Peter Smith Hospital of F

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SCOTUS upholds prayer at public meetings - Josh Gerstein - POLITICO.com

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SCOTUS upholds prayer at public meetings - Josh Gerstein - POLITICO.com

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The ruling is the latest to allow greater involvement of religion in government activity.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday, 5-4, that sectarian prayers can be presented at official government meetings without running afoul of the Constitution's prohibition on establishment of religion.

Acting in a case brought against Greece, N.Y., over its practice of allowing local ministers to deliver prayers at town board meetings containing beliefs specific to particular Christian denominations, the court's majority said such prayers are legally permissible as long as the government does not discriminate among those seeking to present a prayer.

Story Continued Below

The ruling - the latest move by the high court to allow greater involvement of religion in official government activity - clears the way for legislatures and other government bodies to include public prayers that advance the views of specific religious denominations.

( Earlier on POLITICO: Justices struggle with church-state case)

However, the outcome of the case left open the possibility that such prayers might violate the Constitution if coupled with greater evidence of intent to promote a specific religion - or to denigrate one.

"Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court's conservative majority. "The Congress that drafted the First Amendment would have been accustomed to invocations containing explicitly religious themes of the sort respondents find objectionable."

Kennedy also warned that putting restrictions on the content of prayers would put government officials in the inappropriate position of vetting religious views.

( PHOTOS: 21 landmark SCOTUS rulings)

"To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town's current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact," Kennedy wrote.

The court's four liberal justices dissented.

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan said the New York town violated the Constitution by allowing a series of Christian ministers and prayer-givers to appear for more than a decade with virtually no attempt to ensure all voices were at least offered a chance to offer a prayer.

( PHOTOS: Who's who on the Supreme Court)

"Month in and month out for over a decade, prayers steeped in only one faith, addressed toward members of the public, commenced meetings to discuss local affairs and distribute government benefits. In my view, that practice does not square with the First Amendment's promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share in her government," Kagan wrote. "The prayers betray no understanding that the American community is today, as it long has been, a rich mosaic of religious faiths."

Kagan seemed particularly troubled that the prayers took place at a meetings where individuals with business before the government were seeking to advance zoning applications and seek permits - not simply a legislative meeting where only the members of the body would be transacting business.

"When a citizen stands before her government, whether to perform a service or request a benefit, her religious beliefs do not enter into the picture," Kagan wrote. "When a person goes to court, a polling place, or an immigration proceeding - I could go on: to a zoning agency, a parole board hearing, or the DMV - government officials do not engage in sectarian worship, nor do they ask her to do likewise. They all participate in the business of government not as Christians, Jews, Muslims (and more), but only as Americans - none of them different from any other for that civic purpose. Why not, then, at a town meeting?"

The lawsuit the court acted on Monday was brought by two Greece residents - one Jewish and one an atheist - who objected to the prayers. However, their legal arguments did not seek to completely shut down the prayers. Instead, they sought to require that they be non-denominational.

The suit pointed to a 1983 Supreme Court ruling which approved prayers in the Nebraska legislature that the court's majority described as "nonsectarian." There has been some dispute about how often the prayers there invoked Christianity.

However, the ones in Greece were quite explicit in discussing Christ's resurrection or declaring the prayer was offered "in the name of God's only son Jesus Christ," beliefs that even some Christian denominations do not share.

In a separate dissent Monday , Justice Stephen Breyer said the New York town's practice violated the Constitution because given all the facts involved it did appear that officials were favoring Christianity.

"In a context where religious minorities exist and where more could easily have been done to include their participation,the town chose to do nothing," Breyer wrote. He said officials shouldn't edit prayers, but that the town could - as the House of Representatives does - offer guidelines encouraging speakers to be inclusive in their prayers.

Portions of Kennedy's opinion did not win the support of Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who suggested in a separate opinion that Kennedy had overstated the duties of government officials to be evenhanded in parceling out prayer slots.

In addition, Thomas and Scalia believe the Establishment Clause applies only to the federal government, not to states or localities. So those two justices would have rejected the claims against the New York town without delving into the details of the dispute.

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The Supreme Court ruled Monday, 5-4, that sectarian prayers can be presented at official government meetings without running afoul of the Constitution's prohibition on establishment of religion.

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Does immigration help US economy go boom—or bust?

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Does immigration help US economy go boom—or bust?

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The immigration crisis on the U.S. border isn't just about money-far from it-but it does force the nation to consider an critical economic question: Do undocumented immigrants ultimately contribute more to the U.S. economy than they take out?

Eight years ago Texas saw undocumented immigrants as a positive for its state economy. According to a 2006 financial analysis by the Texas comptroller's office, revenues generated by the roughly 1.4 million undocumented immigrants living in Texas in 2005 exceeded what the state spent on them by $424.7 million. The absence of those immigrants, Texas estimated, "would have been a loss to our gross state product of $17.7 billion."

Times-and attitudes-have clearly changed.

More than 57,000 unaccompanied minors have been arrested crossing the border since last October, 10 times the number in 2012. Most of these were children-increasingly 12 and younger and female-either fleeing violence in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala or seeking family reunification.

Texas is ground zero for the influx of unaccompanied alien children, 85 percent of whom enter the country through its borders. And state officials aren't talking about gross state product now.

In early July, Texas Governor Rick Perry, a potential 2016 candidate for president, told the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security that he was seeking $500 million in reimbursement for a decade's worth of spending by the state on border security and enforcement.

Those costs continue to rise. In June, Perry ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to ramp up border operations, an additional $1.3 million a week. On July 22, Perry announced he would dispatch 1,000 National Guard troops to the border, with a reported price tag of $12 million a month.

"I think we're overreacting to what is obviously a humanitarian problem. And we can't have individual states making up their own policies-that's only going to increase the costs." -Frederick Floss, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott recently ordered all 170 or so state agencies to tally costs related to the surge of child immigrants. If the federal government won't reimburse those costs in full, he'll sue, according to a quote he gave to the San Antonio Express-News on July 10.

Abbott is no stranger to lawsuits against the federal government, having filed more than 25 during his tenure. In the latest case, Abbott is taking on President Obama's immigration emergency-funding proposal, which excluded any refunds to the state.

Read More What triggered the child immigration crisis

To address the crisis, President Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion in additional funding. If Congress doesn't reach a consensus before recessing on August 2, the administration said federal border agencies will begin running out of money by mid-August. The House and Senate introduced proposals that would deal with the problem, largely by providing the administration emergency funds to care for the children, review their cases and probably return most of them to their home countries. Both chambers pared Obama's request for two years of emergency funds to just this year; the Senate is offering $2.7 billion and the House of Representatives $1.5 billion.

The blink of a budget

Texas Attorney General Abbott called President Obama's proposal "offensive to Texas taxpayers." Abbott estimated the grand total would come to at least $50 million, but his office declined to explain how they arrived at that number. "You could get there in the blink of an eye," said Jerry Strickland, the attorney general's communications director.

Others contend that Abbott's argument can be dismissed in the blink of an eye.

"That's a rounding error in Texas' budget," said economist Frederick Floss, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a New York-based think tank that has researched the issue of immigration and state economics. The $50 million figure represents about 0.02 percent of the Texas budget. "I think we're overreacting to what is obviously a humanitarian problem. And we can't have individual states making up their own policies-that's only going to increase the costs," Floss said.

Across the country, controversy is escalating over what happens to undocumented children after they're taken into custody. They need somewhere to stay while awaiting legal review of their cases, and federal officials are struggling to place them.

Obama has asked state governors' help in providing temporary shelters, but many have been reluctant to comply despite receiving assurances that the federal government will foot the bill. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) pays all costs related to the shelters, including transportation, infrastructure, personnel and training, food and clothing, classroom education, mental and medical health services.

Read More Immigration now a top concern in US: Poll

There is minimal to no cost incurred by local communities during the sheltering process, but of concern for some people is what happens once undocumented children are discharged from the shelters. Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, the division of HHS caring for the undocumented children, said in an email that most undocumented children have a stay of "less than 30 days on average." The concern some people have is that children will end up living for years in a local community, where they'll be entitled to education and other government services paid for with tax dollars.

Most children aren't released into the immediate area of the shelters. So far, they've primarily gone to large, established communities of Central Americans across the U.S., according to federal data released last week. Eighty-five percent have been placed with relatives and more than half to at least one parent. Texas is where the highest number of children-4,280-have been released, followed by New York, with 3,347.

A zero-sum game?

The dispersion may be part of why even communities where no shelters are proposed are up in arms.

The tidal wave of children crossing the border has reignited intense passions around the core question of whether immigrants are entitled to receive costly government benefits and services.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick- referencing his faith in referring to the situation as "a humanitarian crisis"-has offered two possible locations as short-term shelters for 1,000 children.

Patrick received a letter of support signed by 21 lawmakers, but Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy of Lynn, Massachusetts, wasn't one of them. Kennedy has complained that her city's services have already been overwhelmed by an influx of immigrant children, telling Fox News that "over 1,000 not-native-born children," primarily Guatemalan, have entered Lynn's school system in the last four years, forcing her to increase school budgets 9.3 percent and to cut other city budgets from 2 percent to 5 percent.

Read More The immigration problem we're not talking about

"Education and health systems are already overloaded," said Steven Camarota, director of research at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. He said that a large fraction of these kids have special needs-related to language, trauma and low-income backgrounds-that will add to the cost. But, he added, "it's not just cost that matters. It's competition for scarce public resources. And part of the resentment is about the laxity, having an open border and an administration bent on releasing everybody and not focused on enforcement."

As he was leaving a statehouse meeting in mid-July, Patrick was asked by reporters to respond to Kennedy's complaints about the cost of additional children in schools. He said having shelters in Massachusetts would have no impact on town budgets and when an immigrant child moves into a community, he said, "it's just as if your cousin moved to town."

The complete economic picture requires a broader perspective than provided by those isolated on the cost or humanitarian side of the debate.

"Child migration will affect certain states and localities differently, based on where costs such as education are incurred but also based on gains in terms of spending for things like shelter and transportation," said Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute. Long-term economic benefits of immigrants entering the workforce should also be considered, she said.

Though immigration may strain some local budgets in the short term, costs and benefits tend to balance out in the end, said Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "We all pay taxes and receive government benefits," Nowrasteh said. "What we see again and again is that the fiscal cost of immigrants over time is about the same as it is for American citizens, which in the long run is about zero."

-By Robin Micheli, special to CNBC.com

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Does immigration help US economy go boom-or bust?

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The immigration crisis on the U.S. border isn't just about money-far from it-but it does force the nation to consider an critical economic question: Do undocumented immigrants ultimately contribute more to the U.S. economy than they take out? Eight years ago Texas saw undocumented immigrants as a positive for its state economy.

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To improve its standing with voters, the White House tries to drum up some trouble for itself

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7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict | Ali A. Rizvi

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7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict | Ali A. Rizvi

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Are you "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine"? It isn't even noon yet as I write this, and I've already been accused of being both.

These terms intrigue me because they directly speak to the doggedly tribal nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You don't hear of too many other countries being universally spoken of this way. Why these two? Both Israelis and Palestinians are complex, with diverse histories and cultures, and two incredibly similar (if divisive) religions. To come down completely on the side of one or the other doesn't seem rational to me.

It is telling that most Muslims around the world support Palestinians, and most Jews support Israel. This, of course, is natural -- but it's also problematic. It means that this is not about who's right or wrong as much as which tribe or nation you are loyal to. It means that Palestinian supporters would be just as ardently pro-Israel if they were born in Israeli or Jewish families, and vice versa. It means that the principles that guide most people's view of this conflict are largely accidents of birth -- that however we intellectualize and analyze the components of the Middle East mess, it remains, at its core, a tribal conflict.

By definition, tribal conflicts thrive and survive when people take sides. Choosing sides in these kinds of conflicts fuels them further and deepens the polarization. And worst of all, you get blood on your hands.

So before picking a side in this latest Israeli-Palestine conflict, consider these 7 questions:
1. Why is everything so much worse when there are Jews involved?
Over 700 people have died in Gaza as of this writing. Muslims have woken up around the world. But is it really because of the numbers?

Bashar al-Assad has killed over 180,000 Syrians, mostly Muslim, in two years -- more than the number killed in Palestine in two decades. Thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Syria have been killed by ISIS in the last two months. Tens of thousands have been killed by the Taliban. Half a million black Muslims were killed by Arab Muslims in Sudan. The list goes on.

But Gaza makes Muslims around the world, both Sunni and Shia, speak up in a way they never do otherwise. Up-to-date death counts and horrific pictures of the mangled corpses of Gazan children flood their social media timelines every day. If it was just about the numbers, wouldn't the other conflicts take precedence? What is it about then?

If I were Assad or ISIS right now, I'd be thanking God I'm not Jewish.

Amazingly, many of the graphic images of dead children attributed to Israeli bombardment that are circulating online are from Syria, based on a BBC report. Many of the pictures you're seeing are of children killed by Assad, who is supported by Iran, which also funds Hezbollah and Hamas. What could be more exploitative of dead children than attributing the pictures of innocents killed by your own supporters to your enemy simply because you weren't paying enough attention when your own were killing your own?

This doesn't, by any means, excuse the recklessness, negligence, and sometimes outright cruelty of Israeli forces. But it clearly points to the likelihood that the Muslim world's opposition to Israel isn't just about the number of dead.

Here is a question for those who grew up in the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries like I did: if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories tomorrow, all in one go -- and went back to the 1967 borders -- and gave the Palestinians East Jerusalem -- do you honestly think Hamas wouldn't find something else to pick a fight about? Do you honestly think that this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they are Jews? Do you recall what you watched and heard on public TV growing up in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt?

Yes, there's an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it's a human rights disaster. But it is also true that much of the other side is deeply driven by anti-Semitism. Anyone who has lived in the Arab/Muslim world for more than a few years knows that. It isn't always a clean, one-or-the-other blame split in these situations like your Chomskys and Greenwalds would have you believe. It's both.
2. Why does everyone keep saying this is not a religious conflict?
There are three pervasive myths that are widely circulated about the "roots" of the Middle East conflict:

Myth 1: Judaism has nothing to do with Zionism.
Myth 2: Islam has nothing to do with Jihadism or anti-Semitism.
Myth 3: This conflict has nothing to do with religion.

To the "I oppose Zionism, not Judaism!" crowd, is it mere coincidence that this passage from the Old Testament (emphasis added) describes so accurately what's happening today?

"I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you. Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods." - Exodus 23:31-32

Or this one?

"See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land the Lord swore he would give to your fathers -- to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- and to their descendants after them." - Deuteronomy 1:8

There's more: Genesis 15:18-21, and Numbers 34 for more detail on the borders. Zionism is not the "politicization" or "distortion" of Judaism. It is the revival of it.

And to the "This is not about Islam, it's about politics!" crowd, is this verse from the Quran (emphasis added) meaningless?

"O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you--then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people." - Quran, 5:51

What about the numerous verses and hadith quoted in Hamas" charter? And the famous hadith of the Gharqad tree explicitly commanding Muslims to kill Jews?

Please tell me -- in light of these passages written centuries and millennia before the creation of Israel or the occupation -- how can anyone conclude that religion isn't at the root of this, or at least a key driving factor? You may roll your eyes at these verses, but they are taken very seriously by many of the players in this conflict, on both sides. Shouldn't they be acknowledged and addressed? When is the last time you heard a good rational, secular argument supporting settlement expansion in the West Bank?

Denying religion's role seems to be a way to be able to criticize the politics while remaining apologetically "respectful" of people's beliefs for fear of "offending" them. But is this apologism and "respect" for inhuman ideas worth the deaths of human beings?

People have all kinds of beliefs -- from insisting the Earth is flat to denying the Holocaust. You may respect their right to hold these beliefs, but you're not obligated to respect the beliefs themselves. It's 2014, and religions don't need to be "respected" any more than any other political ideology or philosophical thought system. Human beings have rights. Ideas don't. The oft-cited politics/religion dichotomy in Abrahamic religions is false and misleading. All of the Abrahamic religions are inherently political.
3. Why would Israel deliberately want to kill civilians?
This is the single most important issue that gets everyone riled up, and rightfully so.

Again, there is no justification for innocent Gazans dying. And there's no excuse for Israel's negligence in incidents like the killing of four children on a Gazan beach. But let's back up and think about this for a minute.

Why on Earth would Israel deliberately want to kill civilians?

When civilians die, Israel looks like a monster. It draws the ire of even its closest allies. Horrific images of injured and dead innocents flood the media. Ever-growing anti-Israel protests are held everywhere from Norway to New York. And the relatively low number of Israeli casualties (we'll get to that in a bit) repeatedly draws allegations of a "disproportionate" response. Most importantly, civilian deaths help Hamas immensely.

How can any of this possibly ever be in Israel's interest?

If Israel wanted to kill civilians, it is terrible at it. ISIS killed more civilians in two days (700 plus) than Israel has in two weeks. Imagine if ISIS or Hamas had Israel's weapons, army, air force, US support, and nuclear arsenal. Their enemies would've been annihilated long ago. If Israel truly wanted to destroy Gaza, it could do so within a day, right from the air. Why carry out a more painful, expensive ground incursion that risks the lives of its soldiers?
4. Does Hamas really use its own civilians as human shields?
Ask Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas how he feels about Hamas' tactics.

"What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?" he asks. "I don't like trading in Palestinian blood."

It isn't just speculation anymore that Hamas puts its civilians in the line of fire.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri plainly admitted on Gazan national TV that the human shield strategy has proven "very effective."

The UN relief organization UNRWA issued a furious condemnation of Hamas after discovering hidden rockets in not one, but two children's schools in Gaza last week.

Hamas fires thousands of rockets into Israel, rarely killing any civilians or causing any serious damage. It launches them from densely populated areas, including hospitals and schools.

Why launch rockets without causing any real damage to the other side, inviting great damage to your own people, then putting your own civilians in the line of fire when the response comes? Even when the IDF warns civilians to evacuate their homes before a strike, why does Hamas tell them to stay put?

Because Hamas knows its cause is helped when Gazans die. If there is one thing that helps Hamas most -- one thing that gives it any legitimacy -- it is dead civilians. Rockets in schools. Hamas exploits the deaths of its children to gain the world's sympathy. It uses them as a weapon.

You don't have to like what Israel is doing to abhor Hamas. Arguably, Israel and Fatah are morally equivalent. Both have a lot of right on their side. Hamas, on the other hand, doesn't have a shred of it.
5. Why are people asking for Israel to end the "occupation" in Gaza?
Because they have short memories.

In 2005, Israel ended the occupation in Gaza. It pulled out every last Israeli soldier. It dismantled every last settlement. Many Israeli settlers who refused to leave were forcefully evicted from their homes, kicking and screaming.

This was a unilateral move by Israel, part of a disengagement plan intended to reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians. It wasn't perfect -- Israel was still to control Gaza's borders, coastline, and airspace -- but considering the history of the region, it was a pretty significant first step.

After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.

But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.

Hamas did not build any bomb shelters for its people. It did, however, build a few for its leaders to hide out in during airstrikes. Civilians are not given access to these shelters for precisely the same reason Hamas tells them to stay home when the bombs come.

Gaza was given a great opportunity in 2005 that Hamas squandered by transforming it into an anti-Israel weapons store instead of a thriving Palestinian state that, with time, may have served as a model for the future of the West Bank as well. If Fatah needed yet another reason to abhor Hamas, here it was.
6. Why are there so many more casualties in Gaza than in Israel?
The reason fewer Israeli civilians die is not because there are fewer rockets raining down on them. It's because they are better protected by their government.

When Hamas' missiles head towards Israel, sirens go off, the Iron Dome goes into effect, and civilians are rushed into bomb shelters. When Israeli missiles head towards Gaza, Hamas tells civilians to stay in their homes and face them.

While Israel's government urges its civilians to get away from rockets targeted at them, Gaza's government urges its civilians to get in front of missiles not targeted at them.

The popular explanation for this is that Hamas is poor and lacks the resources to protect its people like Israel does. The real reason, however, seems to have more to do with disordered priorities than deficient resources (see #5). This is about will, not ability. All those rockets, missiles, and tunnels aren't cheap to build or acquire. But they are priorities. And it's not like Palestinians don't have a handful of oil-rich neighbors to help them the way Israel has the US.

The problem is, if civilian casualties in Gaza drop, Hamas loses the only weapon it has in its incredibly effective PR war. It is in Israel's national interest to protect its civilians and minimize the deaths of those in Gaza. It is in Hamas' interest to do exactly the opposite on both fronts.
7. If Hamas is so bad, why isn't everyone pro-Israel in this conflict?
Because Israel's flaws, while smaller in number, are massive in impact.

Many Israelis seem to have the same tribal mentality that their Palestinian counterparts do. They celebrate the bombing of Gaza the same way many Arabs celebrated 9/11. A UN report recently found that Israeli forces tortured Palestinian children and used them as human shields. They beat up teenagers. They are often reckless with their airstrikes. They have academics who explain how rape may be the only truly effective weapon against their enemy. And many of them callously and publicly revel in the deaths of innocent Palestinian children.

To be fair, these kinds of things do happen on both sides. They are an inevitable consequence of multiple generations raised to hate the other over the course of 65 plus years. To hold Israel up to a higher standard would mean approaching the Palestinians with the racism of lowered expectations.

However, if Israel holds itself to a higher standard like it claims -- it needs to do much more to show it isn't the same as the worst of its neighbors.

Israel is leading itself towards increasing international isolation and national suicide because of two things: 1. The occupation; and 2. Settlement expansion.

Settlement expansion is simply incomprehensible. No one really understands the point of it. Virtually every US administration -- from Nixon to Bush to Obama -- has unequivocally opposed it. There is no justification for it except a Biblical one (see #2), which makes it slightly more difficult to see Israel's motives as purely secular.

The occupation is more complicated. The late Christopher Hitchens was right when he said this about Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories:

"In order for Israel to become part of the alliance against whatever we want to call it, religious barbarism, theocratic, possibly thermonuclear theocratic or nuclear theocratic aggression, it can't, it'll have to dispense with the occupation. It's as simple as that.

It can be, you can think of it as a kind of European style, Western style country if you want, but it can't govern other people against their will. It can't continue to steal their land in the way that it does every day.And it's unbelievably irresponsible of Israelis, knowing the position of the United States and its allies are in around the world, to continue to behave in this unconscionable way. And I'm afraid I know too much about the history of the conflict to think of Israel as just a tiny, little island surrounded by a sea of ravening wolves and so on. I mean, I know quite a lot about how that state was founded, and the amount of violence and dispossession that involved. And I'm a prisoner of that knowledge. I can't un-know it."

As seen with Gaza in 2005, unilateral disengagement is probably easier to talk about than actually carry out. But if it Israel doesn't work harder towards a two-state (maybe three-state, thanks to Hamas) solution, it will eventually have to make that ugly choice between being a Jewish-majority state or a democracy.

It's still too early to call Israel an apartheid state, but when John Kerry said Israel could end up as one in the future, he wasn't completely off the mark. It's simple math. There are only a limited number of ways a bi-national Jewish state with a non-Jewish majority population can retain its Jewish identity. And none of them are pretty.

Let's face it, the land belongs to both of them now. Israel was carved out of Palestine for Jews with help from the British in the late 1940s just like my own birthplace of Pakistan was carved out of India for Muslims around the same time. The process was painful, and displaced millions in both instances. But it's been almost 70 years. There are now at least two or three generations of Israelis who were born and raised in this land, to whom it really is a home, and who are often held accountable and made to pay for for historical atrocities that are no fault of their own. They are programmed to oppose "the other" just as Palestinian children are. At its very core, this is a tribal religious conflict that will never be resolved unless people stop choosing sides.

So you really don't have to choose between being "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine." If you support secularism, democracy, and a two-state solution -- and you oppose Hamas, settlement expansion, and the occupation -- you can be both.

If they keep asking you to pick a side after all of that, tell them you're going with hummus.

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7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict

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Are you "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine"? It isn't even noon yet as I write this, and I've already been accused of being both. These terms intrigue me because they directly speak to the doggedly tribal nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You don't hear of too many other countries being universally spoken of this way.

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Supreme Court: No same-sex marriage in Virginia, yet - CNN.com

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Supreme Court: No same-sex marriage in Virginia, yet - CNN.com

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April Dawn Breeden, left, and longtime partner Crystal Peairs are married by the Rev. Katie Hotze-Wilton at St. Louis City Hall on Wednesday, November 5. A Missouri judge on November 5 overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriages and ordered registrars to start issuing licenses to gay and lesbian couples. More than 30 states and the District of Columbia allow marriage for same-sex couples.
(CNN) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday granted a request to delay enforcement of an appeals court ruling that overturned Virginia's same-sex marriage ban. That means gay and lesbian couples cannot legally wed in the state for now.

The Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit last month struck down Virginia's voter-approved ban, following what other state and federal judges have done in the past year when finding such laws to be unconstitutional.

View my Flipboard Magazine.

The high court in coming weeks or months will announce whether it will have the final word, and accept pending petitions from one or more various states, including Virginia, to review their bans on same-sex marriage.

A binding ruling from the justices on the constitutional issues would be one of the most contentious and closely watched from the Supreme Court in recent years, and could apply to all 31 current states that forbid same-sex marriage.
Judges hear four states defend same-sex marriage bans
Virginia's situation was somewhat unique since the state's governor and attorney general have refused to defend the ban in court. That left the court clerk in Prince William County-- a suburb of Washington -- to ask the high court for temporary legal relief.

Lawyers for the clerk applauded the Supreme Court's intervention.

"Virginians deserve an orderly and fair resolution to the question of whether they will remain free to preserve marriage as the union of a man and a woman in their laws," said Byron Babione, senior counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom. "The Supreme Court acted wisely in restraining the lower court from implementing a ruling of this magnitude before the high court has a chance to decide the issue."

But Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring also supported postponing any same-sex marriages until the issue is fully settled.

"Although it is painful to keep Virginia's same-sex couples and their children waiting any longer to enjoy the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, the rule of law requires that this court be afforded the time needed to settle the question," said Herring.

The appeals ruling covered marriage laws in those states within the court's jurisdiction: Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Only Maryland has legalized same-sex marriage.

The divided three-judge panel had concluded that same-sex marriage "makes some people deeply uncomfortable. However, inertia and apprehension are not legitimate bases for denying same-sex couples due process and equal protection of the laws."

Gay rights groups urged swift action from the justices.

"This Supreme Court's stay of yet another freedom to marry ruling underscores the urgency of the court's granting a full review and bringing the country to national resolution by next year," said Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry. "It is time for the Supreme Court to affirm what more than thirty courts have held in the past year: marriage discrimination violates the Constitution, harms families, and is unworthy of America."

The Virginia prohibition has effectively been in place since Colonial days, but only incorporated into the state's constitution in 2006.
Elton John: Jesus would support same-sex marriage
The appeals decision continued a near-unbroken string of state and federal court victories nationwide in the past year, giving marriage-equality supporters unbridled encouragement that their ultimate goal will be achieved: striking all laws limiting the rights of homosexuals to wed.

The issue has been moving swiftly in the judicial front.

A federal appeals court on August 6 heard arguments in same-sex marriage bans in four states: Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee. A ruling is due by year's end. A separate appeals court early next month will hear two other Western states defend current prohibitions: Idaho and Nevada. , and Oregon.

Same-sex marriage is legal in 19 U.S states plus the District of Columbia: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington state.

The challenge to Virginia's ban was brought by several plaintiffs, including Timothy Bostic and Tony London of Norfolk.

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Supreme Court: No same-sex marriage in Virginia, yet

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April Dawn Breeden, left, and longtime partner Crystal Peairs are married by the Rev. Katie Hotze-Wilton at St. Louis City Hall on Wednesday, November 5. A Missouri judge on November 5 overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriages and ordered registrars to start issuing licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

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American justice different for black men (Opinion) - CNN.com

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American justice different for black men (Opinion) - CNN.com

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Protesters march in Ferguson, Missouri, on Thursday, August 21. The St. Louis suburb has been in turmoil since a white police officer, Darren Wilson, fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, on August 9. Some protesters and law enforcement officers have clashed in the streets, leading to injuries and arrests. Editor's note: Matthew C. Whitaker is an ASU Foundation professor of history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of "Peace Be Still: Modern Black America From World War II to Barack Obama." He is also the owner and CEO of the Whitaker Group LLC, a consulting firm. He can be followed on Twitter at @Dr_Whitaker. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- An autopsy report has revealed that Michael Brown was shot six times. It's among the few bits of concrete information released to the public, another being the name of the officer, Darren Wilson, who shot dead an unarmed and (by some accounts) surrendering Brown on August 9 on the street in Ferguson, Missouri.

Police have argued that their silence has been to protect Wilson from retaliatory acts of violence. After all, as possible 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson argued on Bill O'Reilly's Fox show, "Police are individuals, too. They have feelings also." They do, but Brown died without due process and is lifeless in a Ferguson morgue.

Even if Brown were guilty of stealing Swisher Sweets cigars a short time before his encounter with Wilson, as some have alleged, there is no death penalty in the United States for such an offense. But a young black man is dead.

We don't know all the details of what happened on that street in Ferguson. But for black men in America, the incident carries familiar, troubling echoes.

Black men occupy and distress the psyches of many white Americans, the way Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" unsettled the white folks of Maycomb, Alabama. Justice, for black men, often seems whatever officers deem it to be. We remain, as the writer and activist Pauli Murray put it, "the pervasive irritant, the chronic allergy, the vague apprehension which (makes) one uncomfortable and jumpy."
Who started violence in Ferguson? Video shows moments after shooting Raising black boys Spike Lee: There's a war on black males
Even as we serve as the cornerstone of American "cool," we continue to be seen by many as aberrant, inferior, threatening, hyper-sexed, and über-violent guests in this experiment in democracy -- still only "in" America and not "of" America, as the great W.E.B. Du Bois wrote more than a century ago

Regardless of what he may or may not have done, Michael Brown's very presence on that Ferguson street would be seen by too many white men as threatening. In what has become a customary occurrence in America, Brown's fate was sealed by being and breathing as a nonwhite man at the wrong place and at the wrong time.

According to a recent FBI report, white police officers in America killed a black person, 18% of whom were under 21, nearly twice a week between 2005 and 2012 -- more than twice the rate of such killings of white youth of the same age. The criminalization, incarceration and slaying of black people, in this so-called post-racial America, remain endemic.
Magazine: The aftermath in Ferguson
Unfortunately, many law enforcement professionals and police departments, but not all of them, seem to care more about safeguarding themselves and their authority than understanding this dynamic and protecting and serving accordingly.

It comes as no surprise then that Ferguson police want to paint a different picture of the circumstances surrounding Brown's death. But as one protester's sign put it, "Ferguson police need better scriptwriters." Their release of Wilson's name Friday was viewed by many not as an act of transparency, but of placation -- and instigation: While naming Wilson, police conveniently released surveillance footage of a man, alleged to be Brown, involved in a strong-armed robbery at a local minimart.

The indirect message here was that Wilson could not be another cop with a jaundiced view of black males and an itchy trigger finger; he was a dutiful white male compelled to use deadly force in the face of a menace. This new narrative is one we've seen over and over through history old and recent: A black man, like Brown, is depicted in the foulest of ways to paper over institutional missteps and white male anxieties, and to grant absolution for the imperfections of both.

As historian and writer Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker, "The parameters of this story have already spread far beyond what happened between Brown and Wilson that afternoon." Is this what concerns the police in Ferguson and beyond; that there are many who would tether this tragedy to broader issues of socioeconomic isolation, criminalization of people of color and others on the margins? That Brown's shooting would expose again the entrenched, systematic authoritarianism in a society that is more diverse than it ever has been, but still vulnerable to stereotypes and intolerance?

The delicate peace that had been achieved in Ferguson on Thursday and Friday has been erased by looting, a declaration of a state of emergency and curfew by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon. One hopes that more unrest will not follow as more details of Brown's death emerge.

"What happens to a dream deferred?" asked the great Langston Hughes. "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore -- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over -- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"
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American justice different for black men

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Protesters march in Ferguson, Missouri, on Thursday, August 21. The St. Louis suburb has been in turmoil since a white police officer, Darren Wilson, fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, on August 9. Some protesters and law enforcement officers have clashed in the streets, leading to injuries and arrests.

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Is this how a dystopia starts? | The Verge

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Is this how a dystopia starts? | The Verge

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A police officer shoots an unarmed minority teenager dead in the streets. Mostly peaceful protests ensue, triggering an increasingly and disproportionately heavily armed police presence. As the days go by, the police impose a ban on certain types of media at certain hours. They refuse to release the name of the officer who killed the kid. They tell the peaceful protesters to go home or face arrest. They roll up in giant armored vehicles, train high-powered rifles on the protesters and fire tear gas at them They harass journalists, body slam them, and then arrest and inexplicably release them. They openly call the scene a " war zone." They say what they are doing is in the name of public safety and security, but to most of the public on the ground and witnessing the events online, things have never seemed more out of control.

You'd be forgiven for thinking the above scenes are from Tehran or Cairo or Tunisia or some other place Americans by and large view as dangerous, conflict-prone, and totalitarian. But if you've been following along on Twitter or other online media outlets, you'd know the sad and horrible truth that these are the events that have taken place over the past few days in early August, 2014, in the small, predominantly black St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.

#Ferguson picture from earlier in the day, high powered rifles trained on protesters pic.twitter.com/OYOur3ZCrA
- David Carson (@PDPJ) August 13, 2014

It's hardly the first time that police in the US have overreacted with brutal force to crackdown on protests over perceived injustice. We all witnessed similar police violence in the breakup of the Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011 and in the Oakland, California, subway protests of recent years. Harsh police clampdowns have occurred in many eras of American history, from the Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Anti-War movements of the late 1960s and '70s, going all the way back to the country's founding, with Shay's Rebellion. At times, there have been provocations that would make such police crackdowns perhaps more understandable: a gas station was set on fire in Ferguson earlier this week, and reports suggest another building has been lit on fire as of Wednesday night. Ferguson is no Los Angeles post-Rodney King, when crime ran rampant, however, it is not entirely nonviolent.

And compared to prior protests, the actions by police in Ferguson seem of a different caliber altogether. For maybe the first time, many Americans are getting a good, hard look at just how militarized and aggressive police forces in their country have become in the past decade and a half. Since 9/11, a heavier police presence has been apparent to residents and visitors of New York and other large cities. But should small town police officers be wearing fatigues, rolling around in armored vehicles, and pointing guns at citizens? The St. Louis County police are doing all these things in Ferguson, and police have the same capabilities in many other cities around the country, thanks in large part to the growing practice of passing down military hardware, a practice green-lit by major US politicians.

I counted 70+ SWAT officers. Guns trained on crowds. Insanity. pic.twitter.com/stev2G6v4b
- Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 13, 2014

A few voices have been sounding the alarm on this creeping police militarization in recent years, most notably in the form of dutiful investigative journalism by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Center for Investigative Reporting. We've seen flashes of the trend in the form of SWAT raids and " SWATings," the latter a life-threatening hoax that involves placing a phony call to police in an effort to provoke a SWAT raid, as my colleagues have written about.

Still, the American public has by and large reacted to these disparate events with handwringing at best, and more predominantly, shrugs of indifference. Like many societies in history, and perhaps more than most, ours is one that allows for passive disengagement from any situation, however ultimately important to our society, unless it directly affects us. Also, there is a vocal minority of Americans who flaunt their own heavy weaponry, a privilege they say is guaranteed to them under the Constitution's Second Amendment "right to bear arms." It's easy to see how that type of arrangement could lead to an "arms race" type mentality on both sides, in which police departments feel they need more firepower to keep up with armed citizens, and vice versa.

the ability to flick the police state on like a light switch, anywhere at any time, is what terrifies me the most
- Chris Ziegler (@zpower) August 14, 2014

Is Ferguson the moment we as a people look at this situation of escalating force and say " enough is enough?" And even if we do, what's the right way to solve the problem? No American police department seems ready to voluntarily disarm to a more restrained level, including the one active in Ferguson. Few American citizens who have spent money and time collecting their own weapons would join them. And fewer still are the violent criminals who would willing cede their tools of destruction. Politicians concerned about electability also seem disinclined to challenge American's gun lobby, or to be the ones who cut police resources only to see crime rise. Can the President alone do anything? Would he, distracted as he is by global conflicts that few Americans support, committing more American firepower overseas? The larger question, where do we go from here as a people?, is even more worrisome. Because from the events in Ferguson alone - filled as they are with racial mistrust and a stark power imbalance, the police at least temporarily with the upper hand- it appears that things are going to get worse before they get better.

Future of news: I'm sitting in St Louis glued to Twitter to see what's up in Ferguson. It's not on a single TV station.
- Eric Garland (@ericgarland) August 13, 2014

It's also easy to blow things out of proportion in the moment, especially now thanks to the ease of publication afforded by the internet. We who follow and report the news immerse ourselves in a stream of live updates posted on social media (nominally Twitter) from the direct witnesses of harrowing events, good and bad. We can't help but feel the drama of the moment. There's a possibility that things in Ferguson could calm down over the next few days and disputes could shift back to the realms of words and TV show appearances. That too would be a tragedy. Like Trayvon Martin's death at the hands of George Zimmerman, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson could join the long list of disgraces that African-Americans have endured throughout our history without much meaningful change for the country as a whole. But if the country is to change, people can't just sit by and wait for Ferguson to blow over. Because at a certain point, it will blow into your town.

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A police officer shoots an unarmed minority teenager dead in the streets. Mostly peaceful protests ensue, triggering an increasingly and disproportionately heavily armed police presence. As the days go by, the police impose a ban on certain types of media at certain hours. They refuse to release the name of the officer who killed the kid.

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Are we getting it wrong on inequality? - Forum:Blog Forum:Blog | The World Economic Forum

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Are we getting it wrong on inequality? - Forum:Blog Forum:Blog | The World Economic Forum

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The Gatsby Curve: How Inequality Became a Household Word - Businessweek

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The Gatsby Curve: How Inequality Became a Household Word - Businessweek

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Alan Krueger stuck his head into the office in Washington, D.C., where the Council of Economic Advisers keeps its pool of research assistants and offered a deal. Krueger, then the council's chairman, needed a name for a graph. He offered a bottle of wine to the researcher who could come up with the best one. The winner: "The Great Gatsby Curve." That was in 2011. Krueger admits now that he's not sure he ever delivered the wine.

On Dec. 4, President Obama gave a speech about income inequality in Washington. A family in the richest 1 percent, he said, has more than 288 times the wealth of the median family. The likelihood that a child can escape her parents' circumstances is lower in America than in "most of our wealthy allies-countries like Canada or Germany or France." Although the president didn't pull out any graphs, Obama borrowed two ideas for his speech that make inequality easier to understand: the 1 percent and the Gatsby Curve. In part, the president-and the pope in Evangelii Gaudium, an Apostolic Exhortation released on Nov. 24-are able to talk about income inequality because two groups of economists spent the better part of a decade coming up with easily digestible ways to describe it.

For much of the 20th century, academic economists accepted the ideas of Simon Kuznets, who in 1971 won a Nobel prize for his work on inequality. In the 1950s, Kuznets looked at IRS returns going back to the introduction of the personal income tax in 1913 and discovered that income inequality had been dropping in the U.S. He suggested that for developed economies, economic growth lowered inequality. "It was a nice theory for the golden age of growth," says Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics. Out of curiosity in the 1990s, Piketty, then a young Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, applied Kuznets's approach to tax data for his native France, eventually running it all the way forward to 1998. Then, with Emmanuel Saez, another French economist, he did the same for the U.S. In 2003 they published their finding that income inequality had started to rise in America in the early 1980s, about a decade after Kuznets accepted his Nobel.

Other economists, relying on household surveys taken by the U.S. Department of Labor, also found growing inequality. But the Frenchmen used IRS data that goes back much further than Labor's numbers. By 2007, the two were able to show that the income share of the top 1 percent had reached a level not seen since 1928, the Jazz Age of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby.

Around the time Piketty began his work on income inequality, economists Gary Solon and David Zimmerman took a new approach to studying a related topic, social mobility. Solon and Zimmerman used data from a University of Michigan study of 5,000 families that started in 1968 and continues today. By the late 1980s, the Michigan study had detailed information on two generations of Americans showing that social mobility was much less prevalent than previously estimated. The poor were staying poor, and the rich were staying rich.

In the late 1990s, Miles Corak at the University of Ottawa applied that approach to Canada. He also began the complicated econometric work necessary to compare social mobility among countries. Corak made it possible to see whether the American Dream measured up to the Danish Dream. (It doesn't.) In 2004, again inspired by a theoretical paper by Solon, Corak produced the first version of a graph that compared developed economies according to income inequality and social mobility. The graph shows that countries with the highest income inequality, such as the U.K. and the U.S., are also the most likely to pass economic status from one generation to another. "I gave it some technical title," says Corak, "nothing that sparks the imagination."

That had to wait for Krueger. For a speech late in 2011 at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, Krueger publicly gave Corak's graph the name that has stuck. "The Gatsby Curve has been around for a decade," Corak says. "Only when it got that label did it become something that people could hook on to." Krueger owes someone a bottle of wine. Perhaps Obama does, too.

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The Gatsby Curve: How Inequality Became a Household Word

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Alan Krueger stuck his head into the office in Washington, D.C., where the Council of Economic Advisers keeps its pool of research assistants and offered a deal. Krueger, then the council's chairman, needed a name for a graph. He offered a bottle of wine to the researcher who could come up with the best one.

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Inequality and Web Search Trends - NYTimes.com

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Inequality and Web Search Trends - NYTimes.com

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In the easiest places to live, the Canon Elph and other digital cameras dominate the top of the correlation list. Apparently, people in places where life seems good, including Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming and much of the large metropolitan areas of the Northeast and West Coast, want to record their lives in images.

One explanation is that cameras have remained a top-selling piece of technology throughout the last decade. "A few years from now, the distinguishing feature may be iPhones," predicts Mr. Varian, a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped design Google's online advertising auctions.

Beyond cameras, subjects popular in the easiest places include Baby Joggers, Baby Bjorns and baby massage; Skype and Apple devices like the iPod Nano; a piece of workout equipment known as a foam roller; and various foreign destinations (Machu Picchu, New Zealand, Switzerland and Pyeongchang, the South Korean host city for the 2018 Winter Olympics). The phrase "pull-out" is also relatively popular in the easiest places. It presumably refers to either a kind of sofa or a kind of birth control.

There is evidence of the nation's cultural divide in the results, with "Zoolander" (a 2001 movie starring Ben Stiller) and Vengaboys (a Dutch dance-pop band) popular in the easiest places and Kenneth Nixon, of the rock band Framing Hanley, popular in the hardest places.

There is also modest evidence of a contrast that academic sociologists have noted between the relative importance of individuality in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and community in working-class neighborhoods.

"Holiday greetings" are a popular search term in the easiest places, especially California, Connecticut, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. In many of these areas, people no longer live near most of their relatives or childhood friends - and need to send holiday cards with updates on their lives. These are also the places where people would seem most likely to order personalized greeting cards online, chock-full of family photos, or to send digital cards.

By contrast, across much of the South, stretching from Oklahoma to Kentucky to Georgia, "holiday greetings" were a relatively rare search term. These are also the states where the population is still dominated by native residents, as well as places where "Merry Christmas" may be a more popular wish than "Happy Holidays."

Another such tidbit: "baby shower cake ideas" was a popular search subject in the hardest places, while "best cupcake" - that single-serving-size version of a dessert that used to be shared - was common in the easiest places.

For all the ways that the differences here may simply reflect cultural preferences, however, the main lesson of the analysis is a sobering one. The rise of inequality over the last four decades has created two very different Americas, and life is a lot harder in one of them.

Income has stagnated in working-class communities, which helps explain why "selling avon" and "social security checks" correlate with the hardest places from our index. Inequality in health and life expectancy has grown over the same time. And searches on diabetes, lupus, blood pressure, 1,500-calorie diets and "ssi disability" - a reference to the federal benefits program for workers with health problems - also make the list. Guns, meanwhile, are in part a cultural preference, but they are also a health risk.

Given all these troubles, you can understand why religious web searches that are relatively more popular in places where life is harder have such a dark cast. "They are not just about religion but about apocalyptic religion," notes Dan Silver, a cultural sociologist at the University of Toronto.

In the places on the other end of the spectrum, the picture is much brighter. People have disposable income to buy new technology and take faraway vacations. Their time spent prostrate on a foam roller or out running with the baby in a jogging stroller is more than enough to make up the occasional cupcake. And of course they are intent on passing down their way of life to the next generation, via Baby Bjorns and early access to technology.

That last point may be the most troubling. The different subjects that occupy people's thoughts aren't just a window into American life today. They're a window onto future inequality, too.

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In the easiest places to live, the Canon Elph and other digital cameras dominate the top of the correlation list. Apparently, people in places where life seems good, including Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming and much of the large metropolitan areas of the Northeast and West Coast, want to record their lives in images.

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Ferguson: Curfew declared in wake of protests - Chicago Tribune

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Ferguson: Curfew declared in wake of protests - Chicago Tribune

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Missouri Gov. Nixon Declares State of Emergency, Issues Curfew in Ferguson - NBC News.com

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Missouri Gov. Nixon Declares State of Emergency, Issues Curfew in Ferguson - NBC News.com

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Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon implemented a curfew and declared a state of emergency in Ferguson because of the rioting and looting that have followed the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer there. The curfew will begin at midnight and be lifted at 5 a.m., said Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, who was put in charge of security in the community embroiled in anger and mistrust of authorities.

"In the morning this community will rise with the sun to renew its quest for justice," Nixon said during a rowdy afternoon news conference. The governor was often interrupted by calls for answers to questions about the investigation into Brown's death, and how police might carry out the strict curfew. "We won't enforce it with trucks, we wont enforce it with tear gas. We will communicate, 'It's time to go home,'" Johnson said.

"This is not to silence the people of Ferguson, of this region or others, but to contain those who are drowning out the voice of the people with their actions," Nixon said. Brown was shot to death last Saturday afternoon.

IN-DEPTH
- Elisha Fieldstadt

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Missouri Gov. Nixon Declares State of Emergency, Issues Curfew in Ferguson

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Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. SUBSCRIBE Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon implemented a curfew and declared a state of emergency in Ferguson because of the rioting and looting that have followed the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer there.