“The judge admitted that whether one is allowed to film certain court procedures comes down to where a comma is placed in the law.”
The Baton Rouge Bus Boycott which occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1953, was the first large-scale boycott of a southern segregated bus system. The Baton Rouge Boycott inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott two years later. [..] The boycott was prompted partly by the 1950 decision by the Baton Rouge city council to support the financially strapped municipal bus company by revoking the licenses of nearly 40 competing black-owned companies.
Today, the Louisiana governor has barred companies expressing opposition to the Israeli government’s Gaza occupation policy from engaging in contracts with the state of Louisiana, becoming the 25th U.S. state to do so.
Then as now, what the State giveth, the State taketh away, so this sort of political correctness masquerading as commercial policy is not exactly new or surprising.
The real curiosity is that twenty-five U.S. states, now including the Democrat governor of a state with a microscopic Jewish population, would be so curiously eager to align their administrations with the territorial ambitions of a foreign government on the other side of the world.
Exactly what articulable public policy objective is being advanced by curtailing freedom of expression in this way? Well, perhaps the objective is not one of public policy, but to respond to a private pressure campaign. The effect, however, is to ensure that company owners that refuse to do business with the state of Israel are also placed at a disadvantage domestically: to be taxed just as heavily but to have fewer commercial opportunities.
If the courts do not curtail this practice (which almost certainly runs counter to the freedom of expression guarantees in state constitutions), one could certainly imagine this anti-boycott ‘tool’ being applied in a variety of ways to force merchants to perform services they would otherwise morally object to.
If it’s acceptable to extort merchants into fulfilling orders from a foreign government and to, say, bake gay wedding cakes, as is presently fashionable, perhaps forcing merchants to support Louisiana’s prison labor regime is a reasonable next step?
“Why the lie? Why keep saying that U.S. soldiers have died protecting our rights and freedoms? Because the truth is too embarrassing and too shameful.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/05/28/memorial-day-is-based-on-a-lie/
“Thanks to a combination of sloppy drafting and clear reluctance to take the executive branch head-on, Corker and Kaine’s proposed AUMF could do the opposite, handing genuinely tyrannical powers over to the president.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/05/01/ndaa-2018-aumf-detention/
“It was a banality of evil that characterized the mindsets of bureaucrats who worked in the Nazi governmental machinery. They were just enforcing the rules. It is that banality of evil that pervades the bureaucracy that enforces the U.S. federal war on drugs.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/03/09/banality-evil-war-drugs/
“States that have legalized either recreational or medicinal marijuana now lead the way in companies which are dropping drug tests.”
“Of course, the policing agencies might just ignore the ruling, and keep violating rights at checkpoints and searching electronics at the border.”
“How free are you really, when all that’s required for the state to take your children away from you is a judge with an ax to grind?”
“The moves make perfect sense. What else should happen to convictions for a victimless crime when that victimless behavior is now no longer a crime?”
Read more: https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2018/may/18/marijuana_conviction_expungements_moving
“Police, with the help of the Trump Justice Department, are doing an end run around the state law requiring that money seized by state law enforcement agencies goes solely to the state’s schools.”
Read more: https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2018/may/23/missouri_cops_diverting_school_funds