You may be concerned about Facebook and other companies restricting what may be communicated and who may communicate on the companies’ social media platforms, as well as those companies limiting the ability of people to easily see the posts of people and organizations they follow. The Intercept writer Mehdi Hasan is concerned about something else. He thinks Facebook is doing too little to suppress speech, especially speech critical of Islam and Muslim people.
Continue readingA Thursday Free Beacon article by Joe Schoffstall purports to expose Darius Khalil Gordon, a newly hired Bernie Sanders presidential campaign employee, as having “a history of racial slurs and denigrating remarks directed at gays, Jews, and women.” Some Twitter posts attributed to Gordon are presented in the article as evidence for this conclusion.
All the Gordon tweets but one included in the article are from a period in 2010 through 2012. Do they represent Gordon’s current thinking? It has been seven to nine years since he posted those tweets. It is even worth considering to what extent these years-old tweets ever really represented Gordon’s views.
Following up on his previous call for caution in the effort in the United States House of Representatives to impeach President Donald Trump, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley on Wednesday presented to the House Judiciary Committee oral testimony and an extensive written statement regarding the case as it now stands for impeaching the president. Unlike other witnesses at the hearing, Turley did not give the deed his blessing.
Continue readingIn a March episode of Five Minutes Five Issues, I talked about some fuddy-duddies’ complaints about actors wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes in a South Dakota high school performance of The Foreigner. The complaints led to an apology from the school’s school district for the play having been performed.
Continue readingWhen police stop vehicles for purported driving rules infractions, police will often take advantage of the situation to inquire about other matters in a “fishing expedition” to establish suspicion of unrelated lawbreaking. They also may ask drivers for permission to search the stopped vehicles. This can end up badly for drivers and other vehicle occupants, especially those who do not adhere to the basic self-protections rules of saying as little as possible to cops and refusing permission for searches.
Continue readingState Departments of Motor Vehicles are notorious for slow or bad service. They are also becoming more well known for aiding in the invasion of individuals’ privacy.
Continue readingGeorge Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley is not impressed with the impeachment case being made against President Donald Trump. In a Wednesday editorial at The Hill, Turley contends that United States House of Representatives members arguing that Trump should be impeached for committing crimes of bribery, extortion, and obstruction are setting up for “the narrowest impeachment in history with the most dubious claims of criminal conduct.”
Continue readingSpeaking Wednesday evening with host Kennedy at Fox Business, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) predicted that the shenanigans this week to pass a continuing resolution providing short-term funding for the United States government and extra big-government goodies including authorization for mass surveillance, all without US House of Representatives members having time to adequately review the legislation, is not the end of the story.
Come December 20, Massie predicts congressional leadership “will come in a closed room” with Massie and other representatives “and they’ll say ‘OK now we’ve got the really big omnibus and, if you vote for this, you can go home for Christmas, but, if you don’t vote for it and it fails, we’re gonna make you stay here over Christmas and New Years.’”
Continue readingPeople say there is too little bipartisanship in Washington, DC. But, when it comes to protecting the United States government’s mass surveillance program, there is plenty of bipartisan action by Democratic and Republican leaders. This was on display Wednesday morning in the opening comments of US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Doug Collins (R-GA) during a hearing at which the committee debated and voted on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act.
Continue readingNew Pew Research Center poll results indicate Americans’ support for marijuana legalization continues to grow, with support reaching two-thirds among those questioned and maintaining majorities among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. This state of popular opinion, along with marijuana law liberalization continuing to move forward at state and local levels, are among the factors suggesting the time is ripe for legalization on the national level.
However, the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee is not moving forward with a clean bill to repeal marijuana prohibition that would garner widespread public support and have a good chance of both passing in the Republican-controlled Senate and receiving President Donald Trump’s signature. Instead, the committee is scheduled to consider on Wednesday legislation that, in addition to national legalization, contains marijuana business subsidies and race-based provisions that likely mean the bill will have zero chance of passing in the Senate or receiving Trump’s support.
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