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Not content with a regular prosecution or a vigorous investigation, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said he hopes that Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson will receive a “vigorous prosecution” in the shooting death of Michael Brown on Aug. 9. “A vigorous prosecution must now be pursued,” Nixon said in a five minute video address posted to his website Tuesday. “The democratically elected St. Louis county prosecutor and the attorney general of the United States each have a job to do,” said Nixon, a Democrat. “Their obligation to achieve justice in the shooting death of Michael Brown must be carried out...

In a message this evening, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon called for a "vigorous prosecution" in the shooting death of Michael Brown. "Once we have achieved peace in Ferguson and justice for the family of Michael Brown, we must remain committed to rebuilding the trust that has been lost, mending what has been broken, and healing the wounds we have endured," he said. Watch the message:(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Read the full transcript below: Ten days ago, a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, in broad daylight. Since then, the world has watched a community become engulfed in grief, anger, fear and at times...

It seems Jay Nixon, the Democratic Governor of Missouri, doesn’t think too much of that whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing and has decided instead to call for a “vigourous prosecution” of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot 18-year-old Michael Brown. Not a vigorous investigation, mind you, but a vigorous prosecution. In other words, to hell with the evidence and the mitigating circumstances. Naturally, it doesn’t matter that over a dozen witnesses have corroborated Wilson’s side of the story. VIDEO

FERGUSON, MO (RNN) - Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon made his boldest statement in the shooting death of an unarmed black man on Tuesday, saying a "vigorous prosecution must now be pursued." MORE Man killed in officer-involved shooting near Ferguson In the statement, Nixon said,"The democratically elected St. Louis County prosecutor and the Attorney General of the United States, each have a job to do. Their obligation to achieve justice in the shooting death of Michael Brown must be carried out thoroughly, promptly, and correctly; and I call upon them to meet those expectations." Nixon said the calming of tensions in...

......................"A visibly angry [Missouri State Police Capt. Ron ] Johnson said that officers had come under heavy gunfire from protesters and at least two people had been shot. Johnson said he did not know the condition of the shooting victims. Four officers had been injured when they were struck by rocks or bottles, though Johnson claimed that police had not fired a single shot. Citing what he called a "dangerous dynamic in the night," Johnson requested that protests take place during the daylight hours, so that officers could effectively isolate any troublemakers. However, Johnson said that his forces could not...

Monday on MSNBC's "The Ed Show," host Ed Schultz said Gov. Jay Nixon (D-MO) deployment of the Missouri National Guard to protect the St Louis suburb of Ferguson is "asking for another Kent State."

<p>To understand the roots of the Perlstein controversy, you have to go back to his first book. Before the Storm (2001) told the story of Barry Goldwater’s radical Republican campaign for the presidency in 1964 – an effort infamously summarised by Goldwater’s assertion that “extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. Perlstein’s book was different from all that came before because it was free of authorial voice, letting the protagonists speak for themselves for the first time. Liberals praised his research; conservatives loved his open-mindedness. It seemed that Perlstein had invented an apolitical way of writing political history.</p>

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said Sunday that the Ferguson, Mo., police department's release of a surveillance video showing a man resembling Michael Brown committing a robbery at a convenience store produced a negative reaction in the ongoing unrest over the shooting of the 18-year-old black teenager. "I think it had an incendiary effect," Nixon said in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation." "When you release pictures and you clearly are attempting to besmirch a victim of a shooting, shot down in his own street, a young man, and at the same time you're releasing information...to tarnish him, then properly,...

Sunday on CBS's "Face The Nation," Gov. Jay Nixon (D-MO) said the local police "attempting to besmirch a victim of a shooting" by releasing a video of Michael Brown allegedly engaging in a "strong-arm" convenience store robbery. "I think it had an incendiary effect," Nixon said. "I mean, when you release picture and you clearly are attempting to besmirch a victim of a shooting, shot down in his own street, a young man and at the same time you’re releasing information to try to make it, to tarnish him, then properly, there was a lot of folks that were concerned...

Mo. (Reuters) - Hundreds of demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri, angry at the shooting death of a black teenager by police took to the streets in the rain on Saturday night, hours ahead of a planned curfew called for by the state's governor. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency, as he and other officials seek to restore order after a week of racially charged protests and looting over the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer. The curfew will run midnight until 5 a.m. CDT (0500 to 1000 GMT) until further notice, said...

* Ferguson, Missouri, endured a fourth night of pitched battles between police and protestors * SWAT officers and 500 protestors faced-off in St. Louis suburb * Tear gas was then fired as the crowd chanted 'Hands Up! Don't Shoot' * Smoke bombs were also lobbed into the crowd after dark Protestors responded by attempting to throw Molotov cocktails * Earlier two reporters were arrested and then released without charge * Demonstrations in the St Louis suburb were sparked by police shooting of an unarmed teenager Michael Brown on Saturday night * Missouri Governor Jay Nixon cancelled all appearances on Wednesday...

Even as criticism of Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and other prominent politicians began to mount for their lack of comment on the ongoing crisis in Ferguson, Mo., Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul penned a thought-provoking op-ed on the situation in Time magazine. "If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off," Paul writes. "But, I wouldn't have expected to be shot." He goes on to make the case for a demilitarization of the police in America within the framework of a broader criticism...

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) on Thursday called on President Obama to use executive authority and declare martial law in Ferguson, Mo., where protesters have clashed with police after the shooting of an unarmed black teenager. “My own feeling is right now is President Obama should use the authority of his office to declare martial law,” Lewis said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” “Federalize that Missouri National Guard to protect people as they protest,” Lewis, an icon of the 1960s civil rights movement, said it is “unreal” to see what the police are doing in Ferguson. “People have a right to...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon on Thursday ordered the state Highway Patrol to take over security in Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb roiled by four nights of unrest over the police killing of an unarmed black teenager. The governor moved after police came under intense criticism for their handling of the protests, including firing tear gas into crowds on Wednesday night and arresting two reporters. Nixon said that Ferguson in recent days looked “a little more like a war zone, and that’s unacceptable.” The head of the Highway Patrol, Capt. Ron Johnson, told reporters: “I understand the anger and fear...

Forty years ago public outrage about the actions of President Richard Milhous Nixon, lead by his long time liberal critics, forced him to be the first U.S. chief executive to resign the presidency. Critics screamed about Nixon’s extra-legal and extra-constitutional conduct as protestors ringed the White House chanting “Jail to the Chief.” Nixon’s men had spied on their fellow citizens, allegedly used the IRS to harass their political enemies, waged war without the consent of Congress and used the CIA in an effort to hide their crimes. No man, Nixon’s critics assured us, was above the law. For his transgressions,...

At the time, it must have all seemed unforgettable: the endless revelations of wrongdoing, the painful congressional investigation and, finally, the soft black-and-white image of Richard Nixon resigning the presidency.But ask today’s students about the events of Watergate 40 years ago and odds are that many have never heard of the scandal, or, at best, are vaguely aware that something happened once that lives on in a suffix attached to the occasional controversy. major reason is that in U.S. classrooms and textbooks, the discussion of Watergate is going the way of the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Petticoat Affair: increasingly...

'The CIA plotted twice to assassinate President Richard Nixon during the years before the Watergate scandal because the agency was angered when 'Tricky Dick' turned dovish and began to withdraw troops from Vietnam, according to an explosive book from a longtime Nixon confidant due for release on Monday. One hit was planned to occur at Nixon's Key Biscayne, Florida vacation house. A second plot to kill him was to culminate during a Miami speech in 1972. When both plots failed, writes best-selling author Roger Stone in 'Nixon's Secrets: The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the...

During his farewell remarks in the White House East Room on August 9, 1974, President Richard Milhous Nixon told the truth. Nixon remains a controversial and tarnished historical figure. But his impact on America was significant. Only Franklin Roosevelt’s name appeared on as many national ballots (five). His presidency, though now remembered by many for the way it ended, was actually filled with great achievement and success in many ways. Nixon was a brilliant visionary. But he also had a weakness. It was a failure to tell the truth that became Nixon’s undoing. The highly publicized tapes of what he...

Washington (CNN) – Four decades after President Richard Nixon resigned, a slight majority of Americans still consider Watergate a very serious matter, a new national survey shows. But how serious depends on when you were born. The CNN/ORC International poll's release comes one day before the 40th anniversary of Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974. With the Watergate scandal escalating, the second-term Republican president had lost much of his political backing, and he faced almost certain impeachment and the prospects of being removed from office by a Democratic-dominated House and Senate. There's a big generational divide over the significance of...

It was Nixon who devised and pursued what came to be called the Southern strategy. This was, in the admirably concise wording of Wikipedia, an appeal “to racism against African-Americans.” Nixon was hardly the first Republican to notice that Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation had alienated whites both in the South and elsewhere — Johnson himself had forecast that Southern whites would desert the Democratic Party. But Nixon was the GOP’s leader and, in January 1969, the President of the United States. The White House, it seemed, would not do a damned thing for African-Americans. -snip Even-steven, you might say,...