“That permission, unsurprisingly, is contingent on keeping government officials happy. Rub those officials the wrong way and they’ll strip you of permission to travel the roads, leave the country, or even make a living. That’s not a recipe for a free country.”
Read more: https://reason.com/archives/2018/07/24/permitted-lives/print
“Incarceration rates are on the rise alongside economic inequality, and children aren’t exempt. Quite often, the only crime these children have committed is that they’re from vulnerable families or suffering from mental health issues.”
Read more: https://otherwords.org/let-me-tell-you-what-forced-separation-feels-like/
“Trump officials have vowed to prosecute Assange and destroy WikiLeaks. The central oddity of Assange’s case — that he has been effectively imprisoned for eight years despite never having been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime — is virtually certain to be prolonged once Ecuador hands him over to the U.K.”
“It’s not a stretch to say that it’s one of the most important lawsuits to ever cross the desk of a federal judge. The core of the Bill of Rights is in play, and a wrong result could formalize a slide into authoritarianism that began long ago, but accelerated after 9/11.”
Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/
“One out of every 14 children in the U.S. has had a parent imprisoned. Today there are over two million children are growing up in U.S. households in which one or more parents are incarcerated.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/396226-children-are-one-of-the-war-on-drugs-casualties
“The stated purpose of the bill was ‘to authorize funds for Federal-aid highways, highway safety programs, and transit programs, and for other purposes.'”
Read more: https://thepointsguy.com/news/irs-blocking-americans-from-getting-passports/
“In turning to greater use of emigration controls, the US is embracing ever greater control of its domestic population and its resources. Such oversight of US citizens, however, was almost completely unknown in the nineteenth century.”
Read more: https://mises.org/wire/you-now-cant-leave-us-unless-irs-lets-you
“The ‘lesson’ Finley learned here is pretty clear. Power usually wins.”
“It defies all reason that a man could go to prison for three decades for taking a sexy picture of a teenager who was deemed fully capable of consenting to sex. This is a travesty of justice, a violation of consenting adults’ sexual freedoms, an abuse of mandatory minimum sentencing, a blow to states’ rights, and an absurd waste of the FBI’s time.”
Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2018/07/05/sexy-pictures-17-child-porn-arrest
“A Clinton era federal law called the Adoption of Safe Families Act hands out federal funds to states based on the number of children the state takes from parents.”