One tweet has caused senior Ashley Patrick to lose what mattered most: the chance to walk across the graduation stage to receive her School of the Arts diploma.

The Charleston County School Board voted 4-1 Wednesday to uphold the North Charleston Constituent School Board’s decision, which was allowing Patrick to stay at School of the Arts on strict probation. That means she can’t go to the prom or participate in the school’s graduation ceremony with her classmates, but she will get a diploma from School of the Arts.

Patrick was expressionless as she listened to the board’s decision, and she walked out of the room in tears.

“(Walking with her class) was what she wanted, and that’s the one thing they want to take away from her,” said Dwayne Green, her attorney.

The district administration asked the county school board to remove Patrick from School of the Arts and send her to Twilight, a computer-based alternative program for students who misbehave. The district staff didn’t think a five-day suspension was enough punishment for Patrick’s tweet about a black junior in one of her classes.

In February, Patrick was at home when she posted on Twitter that if the junior “makes one more got damn remark in Roger’s class tomorrow … (expletive) will drop.” Patrick posted a link to a picture of a young white girl squeezing her eyes shut and crossing her fingers. The text on the photo read “I wish a nigga would.”

The reason Patrick won’t be able to go to the prom or graduation is because she is on strict probation, which includes no extracurricular activities. Those involved in the case disagreed about whether prom and graduation were considered extracurricular activities.

The county school board and the district administration said Wednesday that Patrick wouldn’t be allowed to go to either, but North Charleston Constituent School Board Chairman James Perry Jr. said his board never intended for Patrick to miss those rites of passage. His board thought she should be able to attend those functions, he said.

Perry said Wednesday he would attempt to clear up the confusion.

“How we put it is as plain as the nose on your face,” Perry said. “We’re going to get it cleared up.”

Green said he asked the county school board to clarify its ruling in writing and whether it intends to bar Patrick from graduation. He is waiting for that information before deciding how to proceed, he said. Patrick said she prefers not to comment until they receive clarification on that decision.

County school board member Todd Garrett said the board did what Patrick wanted and upheld the constituent school board’s decision without giving any further punishment. Garrett said he understood the constituent board’s strict probation to mean no prom or graduation, and Patrick didn’t ask during the hearing that she be able to go those activities.

If the constituent school board intended for Patrick to be able to go to those events, then she should be allowed, because the county board simply upheld its decision, Garrett said.

Chairwoman Cindy Bohn Coats said the first question she asked during the hearing was what the county board was being requested to decide. The issue was where Patrick would finish her high school career, and Bohn Coats said graduation or prom weren’t an option as long as Patrick was on probation.

No one questioned what “extracurricular activities” covered, and Patrick didn’t ask that those be an option, she said.

“It’s an unfortunate situation that (Patrick and Green) didn’t know what it meant,” she said. “I am sympathetic to their confusion, but every player had the responsibility to do their due diligence prior to (today).”

County school board Vice Chairman Craig Ascue said Patrick had a lesson to learn, and this was part of it.

“There are worse things in life for a high school senior,” he said of Patrick’s being unable to walk at graduation.

Board member Elizabeth Moffly was the lone vote against the majority, and she said Patrick had enough punishment and she didn’t want to prevent her from attending graduation and prom.

“She got the book thrown at her,” Moffly said. “How many punishments can you give someone for one offense?”

Green has questioned whether Patrick was facing a stiffer penalty than others would because the black junior named in Patrick’s tweet was the daughter of Lisa Herring, a high-ranking district leader.

The North Charleston board that backed Patrick is all black; two of the five county board members voting Wednesday are black.

The county board met with Patrick for more than two hours in a closed-door hearing before making its decision. Jay Bender, an attorney for the S.C. Press Association, said the subject of a hearing can ask that it be open, but the school district’s attorney, John Emerson, countered that state law doesn’t mention students when citing who can waive their rights to a private hearing.

The county school board also specified in its ruling where Patrick must do 20 hours of community service — at a readers program at Liberty Hill Academy — and that she write a 500-word paper on racism and social media.

The suit alleges that Chase engaged in widespread, illegal robo-signing, among other unlawful practices, to commit debt-collection abuses against approximately 100,000 California credit card borrowers over at least a three-year period.

“Chase abused the judicial process and engaged in serious misconduct against California credit card borrowers,” Attorney General Harris said. “This enforcement action seeks to hold Chase accountable for systematically using illegal tactics to flood California’s courts with specious lawsuits against consumers. My office will demand a permanent halt to these practices and redress for borrowers who have been harmed.”

From January 2008 through April 2011, Chase filed thousands of debt collection lawsuits every month in the State of California. On one day alone, Chase filed 469 such lawsuits in California. The Attorney General’s complaint against Chase alleges that, to maintain this pace, Chase employed unlawful practices as shortcuts to obtain judgments against California consumers with speed and ease that could not have been possible if Chase had adhered to the minimum substantive and procedural protections required by law.

“At nearly every stage of the collection process, Defendants cut corners in the name of speed, cost savings, and their own convenience, providing only the thinnest veneer of legitimacy to their lawsuits,” the complaint states.

Chase used California’s judicial system as a mill to obtain default judgments, the suit alleges, using illegal tactics to flood the state’s court system in order to secure default judgments and garnish wages from Californians.
The alleged misconduct includes:

• Robo-signing: Chase illegally robo-signed various litigation filings, including sworn documents, declarations, and verified complaints, without reviewing the relevant files or bank records or even reading the documents before signing.
• “Sewer Service”: Chase failed to properly serve notice of debt collection lawsuits against consumers while claiming they had been served as required by law. This practice, known as “sewer service,” deprives the consumer of any notice of the lawsuit.
• Filing Irregularities: Chase haphazardly assembled its official legal filings. For example, Chase failed to redact consumers’ personal information in attachments to filings, potentially exposing them to identity theft and in violation of California law. In addition, when asking courts to enter default judgments against consumers, Chase consistently swore under penalty of perjury that the consumers were not on active military duty. In fact, Chase never checked. This deprived service members of important legal protections to which they are entitled while on active duty.

How two bald eagles appeared after crash landing. Photo courtesy of Randy Hanzal, Minnesota conservation officer

There was a crash landing Sunday at the Duluth International Airport, but it didn’t involve airplanes. Rather, it was two bald eagles, which were fighting in midair when they locked talons. In a rare spectacle of nature, they were unable to disengage in time before crashing to the runway.

“Apparently, mature eagles will sometimes fight over territories,” Randy Hanzal, a Minnesota conservation officer, told GrindTV in an email. “They will do battle in the air, crashing into each other and grabbing an intruding eagle with their talons.

Photo shows talons intertwined. Photo courtesy of Randy Hanzal, Minnesota conservation officer

“Usually, they will let go of each other before hitting the ground, but in this case, they had the talons so deeply imbedded in each other they may have been unable to let go.”

Hanzal was the one who was called in to collect the birds and deliver them to Wildwoods, a wildlife rehabilitation center in Duluth.

“Surprisingly, the two eagles were remarkably calm as I grabbed them both and loaded them into the back of my truck,” Hanzal said. “I think they were still more intent on winning the battle than any concern for me.”

Hanzal didn’t have a container big enough for the eagles, so he put them in the bed of his truck, covered them with blankets and jackets, and strapped them down with webbing, according to a report in the Duluth News Tribune.

“Halfway to the rehabber, there was a ruckus in the back of the truck,” Hanzal told the News Tribune. “I looked around and saw feathers flying up. One of the eagles jumped out the back, onto my tailgate.”

That eagle flew away, apparently no worse for wear. The other eagle smartly hung around to get treated with antibiotics, fluids, and pain medication. The eagles were both expected to recover.

Another wildlife expert told the News Tribune that it is “pretty rare” for fighting eagles to hit the ground like this.

“I have never seen this before,” Hanzal told Grind.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, was convicted Monday on three counts of murder for killing babies by cutting their spinal cords with scissors.

The next step in the case was to have been the penalty phase, when jurors would have weighed whether to give Gosnell a death sentence.

The arrangement erases a need for that phase.

“Like any deal, there’s a give and take on each side. The Commonwealth (of Pennsylvania) took away the death penalty and Dr. Gosnell gave up his right to appeal,” said defense attorney Jack McMahon.

“A big factor for Dr. Gosnell was his family. They’ve been conspicuously absent, and that’s been intentional because of the media focus and whatnot. He has some younger children in high school … and bringing them all forward for a penalty phase is something that troubled him.”

According to a statement from the office of Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, Gosnell “agreed to waive all of his appellate rights in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of parole instead of the death penalty.” He was “immediately sentenced” for the deaths of two babies.

He will be sentenced on remaining charges, including the death of the third baby, on Wednesday, the statement said.

Abortion provider found guilty of murder

Prosecutor was sobbing during verdict

A jury also found Gosnell guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the case of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, who died of an anesthetic overdose during a second-trimester abortion at Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic.

Additionally, Gosnell, who is not a board-certified obstetrician or gynecologist, was found guilty of 21 counts of abortion of the unborn, 24 weeks or older.

In Pennsylvania, abortions past 24 weeks are illegal unless the health of the mother is at stake.

O. Carter Snead, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, said that he wasn’t surprised by the deal.

“From a pragmatic perspective, it can take decades for a defendant to exhaust all of his appeals from a sentence of death. Given his advanced age, it is likely that Gosnell would die on death row before this process runs its course,” he said.

“More importantly, in my judgment, principles of justice are served by a sentence of life without parole in this case. There has been quite enough bloodshed because of this evil man’s actions.”

The doctor’s lawyer said his client is at peace now that “he knows what his fate is.”

“I think, once there is a finality … there’s a certain sereneness about that,” McMahon said.

Gosnell’s co-defendant, Eileen O’Neill, 56, was found guilty of conspiracy to operate a corrupt organization and two counts of theft by deception for operating without a license to practice medicine. O’Neill, a medical school graduate, was not charged with performing illegal abortions.

Both pleaded not guilty.

Eight people involved in Gosnell’s clinic, called the Women’s Medical Society, earlier pleaded guilty to various charges. Four of them pleaded guilty to murder.

A grand jury report from 2011 says the “people who ran this sham medical practice included no doctors other than Gosnell himself, and not even a single nurse,” yet they still made diagnoses, performed procedures and administered drugs.

Defense attorney McMahon, in an impassioned, 2½-hour closing argument, said that none of the infants was killed; rather, he said, they were already dead as a result of Gosnell administering the drug Digoxin, which can cause abortion.

Gosnell also was accused of reusing unsanitary instruments; performing procedures in filthy rooms, including some in which litter boxes and animals allegedly were present at the time; and allowing unlicensed employees — including a teenage high school student — to perform operations and administer anesthesia.

The remains of aborted fetuses were stored in water jugs, pet food containers and a freezer at the clinic, the city’s chief medical examiner Sam Gulino testified.

Former employee Kareema Cross said Gosnell regularly performed illegal late-term abortions that he routinely recorded as “24.5 weeks.”

McMahon, who called no witnesses, accused prosecutors of “the most extraordinary hype and exaggeration in the history of the criminal justice system,” even adding that they are “elitist” and “racist.”

Gosnell has been accused by authorities of preying on low-income, minority women. McMahon argued that Gosnell offered access to health care for people who were poor and without health insurance.

The doctor was first charged in January 2011.

The case has drawn national attention and sharp criticism from anti-abortion activists.

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The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices.

ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were “not supposed to be made public”:

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year… In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

The group says that “no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”

According to Media Research Center Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor, ProPublica’s financial backers include top progressive donors:

ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure”–“progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.

On Friday, the House Ways and Means Committee is scheduled to hold a formal hearing on the IRS conservative targeting scandal. IRS Commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are slated to testify.

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The Montgomery County (Texas) Sheriff’s Office had a big day planned. After becoming the first department in the country with its own aerial drone ($300,000!), they were ready for a nice photo op. And then the drone crashed into a SWAT team.

The Examiner reports a painfully contrived police action-athon:

As the sheriff’s SWAT team suited up with lots of firepower and their armored vehicle known as the “Bearcat,” a prototype drone from Vanguard Defense Industries took off for pictures of all the police action. It was basically a photo opportunity, according to those in attendance.

“Lots of firepower” and a “Bearcat” sure sounds like a good photo op. OK, time to launch the $300,000 drone. Here we go. Launch the drone:

“[The] prototype drone was flying about 18-feet off the ground when it lost contact with the controller’s console on the ground. It’s designed to go into an auto shutdown mode…but when it was coming down the drone crashed into the SWAT team’s armored vehicle.”

Not only did the drone fail, and not only did it crash, it literally crashed into the police. It’s no wonder we’re not able to find a video of this spectacular publicity failure. Luckily, the SWAT boys were safe in their Bearcat.

This would be a fine one-off blooper story if it weren’t for some upsetting implications. This is exactly why we have reason to raise multiple eyebrows at Congress, which wants to allow hundreds of similar drones to fly over US airspace. These drones are still a relatively young technology, relatively unproven, and relatively crash-prone. The odds of being hit by one are low, of course, but should a Texas-style UAV plummet ever happen in, say, a dense urban area, nobody would be laughing. Not all of us are driving around in Bearcats.

“It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole,” he said in an apparent reference to an article on May 7, 2012, that disclosed the foiling of a terrorist plot by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen to bomb an airliner. “And trying to determine who was responsible for that, I think, required very aggressive action.”

In a statement in response, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, disputed that the publication of the article endangered security.

“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” he said. “Indeed, the White House was preparing to publicly announce that the bomb plot had been foiled.” Mr. Pruitt said the article was important in part because it refuted White House claims that there had been no Qaeda plots around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

At a news conference at the Justice Department, Mr. Holder also disclosed that he recused himself last year from overseeing the case after F.B.I. agents interviewed him as part of their investigation. His deputy, James M. Cole, approved the subpoena seeking call records for 20 office and personal phone lines of A.P. reporters and editors.

Mr. Pruitt disclosed the seizure of the phone records on Monday in a letter to Mr. Holder protesting the action as overly broad and “a serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

But in a letter to The A.P. on Tuesday, Mr. Cole portrayed the search as justified and disputed a detail in the wire service’s account of the Justice Department action. While the news organization had said that records from “a full two-month period” had been taken, Mr. Cole said that the seizure covered only “a portion” of two calendar months.

“We understand your position that these subpoenas should have been more narrowly drawn, but in fact, consistent with Department policy, the subpoenas were limited in both time and scope,” he wrote. He added that “there was a basis to believe the numbers were associated with A.P. personnel involved in the reporting of classified information. The subpoenas were limited to a reasonable period of time and did not seek the content of any calls.”

The dispute centered on an ambiguous description in the original notice to The A.P., which an employee of the news organization said was sent as an attachment to an e-mail on May 10 from Jonathan M. Malis, a federal prosecutor, to several A.P. employees.

The attached letter, the employee said, consisted of a single sentence citing the Justice Department regulation for obtaining journalists’ telephone records, and saying that The A.P. “is hereby notified that the United States Department of Justice has received toll records from April and May 2012 in response to subpoenas issued” for 20 phone numbers in five area codes and three states.

The regulation requires subpoenas for reporters’ tolling records — logs of calls made and received — to be narrowly focused and undertaken only after other ways of obtaining information are exhausted. Under normal circumstances, news organizations are to be notified ahead of time so they can negotiate or ask a judge to quash the subpoena, but the regulation allows exceptions, in which case journalists must be notified no later than 90 days afterward.

Mr. Cole said the department had undertaken “a comprehensive investigation” before seeking the phone records, including more than 550 interviews and a review of “tens of thousands of documents.” The calling records, he added, “have been closely held and reviewed solely for the purposes of this ongoing criminal investigation” and would not be used in any other case.

The A.P. on Tuesday was still examining whether any telephone companies had tried to challenge the subpoena on its behalf before cooperating. But at least two of the journalists’ personal cellphone records were provided to the government by Verizon Wireless without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena, the employee said. Debra Lewis, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman, said the company “complies with legal processes for requests for information by law enforcement,” but would not comment on any specific case.

Lucy Dalglish, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, criticized the Justice Department’s broad seizure of phone records, saying it would chill the ability of reporters to report the news. The subpoena came against the backdrop of six prosecutions of officials in leak-related cases under President Obama — twice the number prosecuted under all previous presidents combined.

“The message is loud and clear that if you work for the federal government and talk to a reporter that we will find you,” she said.

Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, on Tuesday reiterated that the White House had no involvement in the subpoena and portrayed Mr. Obama as “a strong defender of the First Amendment and a firm believer in the need for the press to be unfettered in its ability to conduct investigative reporting and facilitate a free flow of information.”

Justice Department regulations do not cover information about journalists’ e-mails. But the A.P. employee said the company operates its own internal e-mail server and had determined that the e-mails were not subpoenaed and no one at The A.P. had supplied information about them to the government.

One unanswered question is why investigators seized phone logs for The A.P.’s bureau in Hartford in addition to its New York and Washington offices. One of the reporters who worked on the bomb plot article, Matt Apuzzo, formerly worked in Hartford but moved to another bureau in 2005.

The leak investigation involving The A.P. is being run by Ronald C. Machen Jr., the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. In June, amid a Congressional uproar over disclosures in the news media of national security information, Mr. Holder assigned Mr. Machen and his counterpart in Maryland to lead two leak investigations.

The other investigation is believed to be focusing on disclosures made by David E. Sanger, a New York Times journalist, in a book and in articles in The Times about a joint American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges with computer viruses. The Justice Department has declined to say whether it has issued a similar subpoena in that case, and Mr. Holder would not say on Tuesday if he is also recused from that investigation.

The May 2012 A.P. article disclosed that the Central Intelligence Agency had foiled a plot by the Qaeda branch in Yemen to destroy an airliner using an underwear bomb the government by then had in its possession. The next day, The Los Angeles Times and several other news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that the intended attacker had been a double agent.

By then, officials said, the double agent, who had reported to British, Saudi and American intelligence, had left Yemen and was not in danger. But both American and foreign intelligence officials were furious at the disclosures, which they said alerted terrorists prematurely that the plot was compromised and might discourage potential agents from working against Al Qaeda.

On 29 April, Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), advocated a major shift away from categorizing diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia according to a person’s symptoms. Instead, Insel wants mental disorders to be diagnosed more objectively using genetics, brain scans that show abnormal patterns of activity and cognitive testing.

This would mean abandoning the manual published by the American Psychiatric Association that has been the mainstay of psychiatric research for 60 years.

The DSM has been embroiled in controversy for a number of years. Critics have said that it has outlasted its usefulness, has turned complaints that are not truly illnesses into medical conditions, and has been unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies looking for new markets for their drugs.

There have also been complaints that widened definitions of several disorder have led to over-diagnosis of conditions such as bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Now, Insel has said in a blog post published by the NIMH that he wants a complete shift to diagnoses based on science not symptoms.

“Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure,” Insel says. “In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain, or the quality of fever.”

Insel says that elsewhere in medicine this type of symptom-based diagnosis been abandoned over the past half-century as scientists have learned that symptoms alone seldom indicate the best choice of treatment.

To accelerate the shift to biologically based diagnosis, Insel favors an approach embodied by a program launched 18 months ago at the NIMH called the Research Domain Criteria project.

The approach is based on the idea that mental disorders are biological problems involving brain circuits that dictate specific patterns of cognition, emotion and behavior. Concentrating on treating these problems, rather than symptoms is hoped to provide a better outlook for patients.

“We cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the gold standard,” says Insel. “That is why NIMH will be reorienting its research away from DSM categories,” says Insel.

Prominent psychiatrists contacted by New Scientist broadly support Insel’s bold initiative. However, they say that given the time it will take to realize Insel’s vision, diagnosis and treatment will continue to be based on symptoms.

Insel is aware that what he is suggesting will take time – probably at least a decade, but sees it as the first step towards delivering the “precision medicine” that he says has transformed cancer diagnosis and treatment.

“It’s potentially game-changing, but needs to be based on underlying science that is reliable,” says Simon Wessely of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. “It’s for the future, rather than for now, but anything that improves understanding of the etiology and genetics of disease is going to be better [than symptom-based diagnosis].”

Michael Owen of the University of Cardiff, who was on the psychosis working group for DSM-5, agrees. “Research needs to break out of the straitjacket of current diagnosis categories,” he says. But like Wessely, he says it is too early to throw away the existing categories.

“These are incredibly complicated disorders,” says Owen. “To understand the neuroscience in sufficient depth and detail to build a diagnosis process will take a long time, but in the meantime, clinicians still have to do their work.”

David Clark of the University of Oxford says he’s delighted that NIMH is funding science-based diagnosis across current disease categories. “However, patient benefit is probably some way off, and will need to be proved,” he says.

The controversy is likely to erupt more publicly in the coming month when the American Psychiatric Association holds its annual meeting in San Francisco, where DSM-5 will be officially launched, and in June in London when the Institute of Psychiatry holds a two-day meeting on the DSM.

The parcels of land are available to any gun or firearm accessory manufacturer or distributor who will move to one of the parcels bringing jobs and economic benefits to the area.  Missouri is a leader in the nation as a state dedicated to the principles of the Second Amendment.  The State House of Representatives just gave first round approval to a tax incentive bill (HB630) aimed to providing tax credits to relocating gun manufacturers.

The “Move To Missouri” project has a list of endorsements that is impressive.  The project was initially put together by the landowner John Negri, America’s Voice Now radio program host Michael Evans and Larry Pratt, President of  GOA (Gun Owners of America).   They enlisted some big guns in the state to support the project including, Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, Missouri State Representative Shawn Rhoads, State Senator Mike Cunningham, SCOCOG (South Central Ozarks Council of Governments) and other interested parties.

Lt. Governor Peter Kinder said, “Missouri has a well-earned reputation as a ‘gun-friendly’ state. I am proud to represent a state that values the Constitution and stands against the federal government’s attempts to infringe upon our 2^nd and 10^th Amendment rights. Through the efforts of Larry Pratt, Michael Evans and business leaders in the West Plains area, Missouri can send a clear message to out-of-state gun makers who face burdensome regulations, high taxes and restrictions on their products. That message is, ‘Move to Missouri.’”

The Missouri legislature is also on the cusp of passing the Second Amendment Preservation Act, (HB436 and SB325) which nullifies all federal oversight related to firearms in the state.  The act declares the General Assembly’s position on the authority of the federal government and declares as invalid certain federal gun laws, prohibiting the enforcement of such laws.  The state has made national headlines here and here in recent weeks with their no holds barred approach to declaring their Tenth Amendment rights to simply nullify federal laws that are extra-Constitutional.