On June 22, the Maine House defeated LD 742, a bill to ask the voters if they wish to make it more difficult for statewide initiatives to get on the ballot. See this story. The bill would have imposed a distribution requirement on statewide initiatives. Thanks to Thomas MacMillan for the link. …read more
Indio, CA — Two years ago, 23-year-old Alejandro Rendon was murdered by Indio police officer Alex Franco. Rendon was on a bicycle when Franco attempted to pull him over, reportedly for a missing headlight on the cycle.
Expert witnesses testified that the officer shot Franco in the back as he was attempting to flee, but Franco denied this, his department stood behind him, and now he walks free. He was even nice enough to allow an insurance company to foot the $1.9M bill from the settlement and court fees, after Rendon’s family sued the murderer.
Apparently Franco had good reason to shoot …read more
In response to the brutal slayings of nine people in a historically black Charleston church, Lupe Fiasco took to Instagram to address the racist overtones of the crime and the deluded manifesto attributed to alleged shooter Dylann Roof.
The eloquent letter, penned by Fiasco, directly calls into question the superiority of any individual based upon their ethnicity, while forwarding the concept of human “regularity.”
“There is nothing about you biologically or physically that denotes an innate mode of supremacy. For that matter there is also nothing about you psychologically, philosophically, cognitively, academically, socially, architecturally, culturally or even financially that signifies a higher …read more
It’s not just warrantless surveillance. The Patriot Act can harm you in other ways.
That’s why I told Congress to repeal ALL of it through DownsizeDC.org’s “Repeal the Patriot Act” campaign.
Please join me. You may borrow from or copy this letter…
The Patriot Act was sold as an anti-terror bill.
That was a LIE. If it was about terrorists, Americans like convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan would have nothing to worry about.
Instead…
The IRS invoked the Patriot Act’s banking laws to take $107,000 — 13 years of savings — from his store’s bank account. (http://onforb.es/1zzQGrm)
Under the Patriot Act…
* If I deposit more than …read more
Florida’s Secretary of State keeps a list of initiative petitions that is updated frequently. According to the latest list, the initiative for a top-two system is no longer active.
The proponents raised $75,500 during March and April 2015, but only $5,000 during May. See this campaign finance report. Click on the “campaign finance activity” button. Thanks to Rich Moroney for the news. …read more
Austin, TX — An Austin police officer is in trouble for the second time in under a year after an unidentified member of the public requested dash cam footage of an incident involving the officer.
In the eight-minute-long video, you can see officer Mark Lytle harassing a homeless woman in a wheelchair because he “doesn’t like what he’s seeing.” He mentions something about a warrant in the video, but it is unclear what the warrant is for, or if one even exists.
Lytle: “I don’t give a s***…I want you to get this stuff out of here.”
Woman: “Please sir.”
Lytle: “I do not …read more
(TFTP) — The question burning among many Americans is this, are there more instances of police abuse now than in the past, or, is modern technology allowing us to see it, record it, and disseminate now, more than ever?
The answer to that question is a tricky one as the Free Thought Project has reported, the official means of keeping up with police misconduct, was all but non-existent. Luckily multiple citizen watchdog groups have stepped up to the plate and began their own database of police shootings and misconduct.
While finding out just how violent police have been in the past may …read more
Counterpunch has this article by Robert David Steele of Virginia. …read more
TIME Magazine has this story about the lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission that will be filed on Monday, June 22. The plaintiffs will include the Libertarian and Green Parties, and also some of the leading figures from Americans Elect. The lawsuit charges that the FEC has broken its own rules by refusing to consider the petition for a rule concerning general election presidential debates.
The attorney for the lawsuit is Alexandria Shapiro. This is not the lawsuit that has been planned for some time by former Governor Gary Johnson’s Our America Initiative. That lawsuit would have …read more
The US Supreme Court recently issued two seemingly conflicting rulings on free speech. Scotusblog reports the Supreme Court “gave state governments sweeping new control over the messages that can be …
