Category: Uncategorized

On July 2, a Nevada trial court ruled that a petition to recall a particular state judge in Las Vegas has enough valid signatures. The judge who is being recalled will appeal to the State Supreme Court. Nevada recalls for local office require the signatures of 25% of the last vote cast for that office. This is apparently the first judicial recall petition in state history to have enough valid signatures. See this story. …read more

According to an investigation conducted by Dana Liebelson, there are currently 6,000 children throughout the Land of the Free currently being held in prison facilities for adults.
In her alarming report, Liebelson outlines the details of several cases of horrific abuse of children within the US Prison System. She was even able to obtain video of a young girl being held down in what looked more like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie than America’s rehabilitation process.
A 16-year-old by the name of Max is one of the cases Liebelson details in her report. Max is held in a maximum security …read more

Salinas, CA — Last month, the mother of Jose Velasco called police because he was having a mental breakdown. When police arrived on the scene they treated Velasco like he was a criminal instead of a mentally ill man in need of help.
When police attempted to subdue Velasco, he was having hallucinations that there were demons after him, sadly, he was figuratively correct. A struggle ensued in which Velasco attempted to free himself from the grasp of the police, which they saw as a threat, so they proceeded to brutally beat the man down with their batons.
Velasco was soon after …read more

On July 1, South Dakota Republican candidate Annette Bosworth was sentenced to three years probation, because she left her 2014 ballot access petitions unattended in her medical office. Some of her patients signed the petition. Later she signed off as the circulator. Because she didn’t actually see the signatures being placed on the petition sheet, she now has twelve felonies on her record, but at least she was not sent to prison. See this story. She will appeal.
In some states, there is no requirement that the circulator of a ballot access petition even …read more

On July 2, the Sixth Circuit agreed with a U.S. District Court that two Tennessee ballot access laws are unconstitutional. The Green Party and the Constitution Party had filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2013, against the law on how a party remains on the ballot, and also against the state’s loyalty oath for newly-qualifying political parties. Here is the decision in Green Party of Tennessee v Hargett, 14-5435. It is written by Judge R. Guy Cole, a Clinton appointee, and signed by Judges Deborah L. Cook and Helene N. White, Bush Jr. appointees.
The Tennessee vote test …read more

Our second global Bitcoin hackathon, BitHack v2, recently concluded and we’re excited to announce the winners, who will collectively receive over $70,000 worth of prizes. The BitHack is important to us because it taps into a core benefit of Bitcoin: permissionless innovation. Anyone from anywhere in the world could submit a Bitcoin project to BitHack v2, as long as it met our simple guidelines. Over 300 teams registered, and we received 84 qualified submissions from twelve different countries. Many of these submissions came from people who were not able to build payment applications before Bitcoin.

We’d like to acknowledge the following …read more

On July 1, CNN released a poll for the race for the Republican presidential nomination, showing that three candidates are tied for tenth place at 3%. If polls continue in this vein, it will be very difficult for Fox, the sponsor of the August 6 Republican presidential debate, to decide who is in their chief debate (although Fox has already said it will have another debate for those not in the top ten but who are at 1%). See this story. Fox says the top ten candidates will be in the chief debate. …read more

On June 30, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) at a press conference said it is “ridiculous” for debate sponsors to use poll results to decide who may participate in debates. See this story. One wonders if he would express the same principle relative to general election debates. …read more

Hanover, NH — Researchers at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice produced a damning report on the U.S. health care system, describing how evidence-based research has declined and how the pharmaceutical industry manufactures demand.
“The pharmaceutical industry has influenced medical research in its favor by selective reporting, targeted educational efforts, and incentivizing prescriber behavior that influences how medicine is practiced, the researchers say. The pharmaceutical industry has also spent billions of dollars in direct-to-consumer advertising and has created new disease labels, so-called disease-mongering, and by promoting the use of drugs to address spurious predictions.”
The degradation of health …read more

Philadelphia, Pa — A woman on her way to a conference session about surveillance by police got some great material as she was harassed by a cop for parking the wrong way.

The Rhode Island resident was in Philadelphia for the International Society for Technology in Education conference, waiting for a friend in her vehicle. A police officer noticed that she was parked in the wrong direction at the Amtrak 30th St. drop off.
Not satisfied with simply writing a ticket, the cop went into irrational authoritarian mode. Perhaps he was agitated at being filmed, or enraged at the audacity of a …read more