“ICE apparently failed to turn over records after multiple requests. In December, ICE purchased access to two databases of automated license-plate reader data.”
“Clapper said without knowing exactly what the FBI’s concerns were at the time, it’s hard to say if Mr. Trump should have been warned about the use of informants.”
“This is still our country. Don’t just sit there. Do something.”
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?
“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/
“Of course, the policing agencies might just ignore the ruling, and keep violating rights at checkpoints and searching electronics at the border.”
“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
“More than six months later, Customs and Border Protection still has not given back her money. This, despite the fact that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Texas did not bring a civil asset forfeiture case against her or charge her with any crime.”
“The Defense Department is funding a project that officials say could revolutionize the way companies, federal agencies and the military itself verify that people are who they say they are and it could be available in most commercial smartphones within two years.”
“All over the United States, law-enforcement agencies quietly adopt technology that would spark intense debate if they first asked permission. They treat the public they are meant to serve as if its views don’t matter.”
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/the-undemocratic-spread-of-big-brother/560999/