December 16 was the deadline for candidates running for the vacant U.S. House seat in Ohio’s 8th districts. Twenty candidates filed. See the list here. James J. Condit, Jr., who was the Constitution Party’s nominee for that seat in 2014, filed to run in the Green Party primary. …read more
FrontloadingHQ has been running a series of blog posts, explaining the Republican delegate apportionment rules for each state. So far thirteen states have been covered. The blog’s author, Josh Putnam, has been posting a new state approximately every day. He covers the states in the order of their caucuses and primaries.
For example, here is his Vermont post, which was posted on December 17. He posted Iowa on October 6; New Hampshire on October 12; South Carolina on October 14; Alabama on November 9; Alaska on November 12; Arkansas on November 14; Colorado on December 9; Georgia …read more
(RT) — Under the cover of a late-night session of Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced a new version of the “omnibus” federal government funding bill that includes a version of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, outraging privacy advocates.
The new version combines three bills, two passed by the House, and one – the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) – that had already passed the Senate by a vote of 74 to 21.
Congress strips out privacy protections from CISA ‘security’ bill https://t.co/2br8Tw0ENr
— The Register (@TheRegister) December 16, 2015
A long-standing critic of government overreach in surveillance, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who voted …read more
Fort Worth, TX — Ethan Couch, the 18-year-old who killed four people while driving drunk in 2013, is on the run from police and is rumored to have fled the country after violating his probation. While he was on trial, Couch’s defense was that he had “affluenza,” or he was so rich and spoiled that he was totally unaware of consequences, and thus, not responsible for his actions.
Surprisingly, his plea was accepted by the court and he ended up getting a slap on the wrist, with ten years of probation. Probation is not an easy thing to go through, but …read more
On December 16, filing for the Ohio 2016 primary closed. Here is a list of the candidates who filed for statewide office. Ohio has three ballot-qualified parties: Republican, Democratic, and Green.
No one filed in the Green Party presidential primary, but the party does have a candidate for U.S. Senate, which is the only other statewide office up in 2016.
For the presidential primary, 12 Republicans filed and 5 Democrats filed. …read more
The Syrian refugee crisis is creating national debates on how to handle the influx of people from war torn nations all around the world. Last week the internet was ablaze with the news that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs himself was the son of a Syrian refugee after street artist Banksy created a mural depicting Jobs as a refugee.
It is no secret that modern society has been greatly influenced by the work of countless refugees from all over the planet. Below is a list of perhaps the ten most recognizable individuals who have been forced to emigrate, and not only impacted …read more
Worldwide, tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths per year, and current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030. Cigarette smoke is the leading cause of preventable death in the world. Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. Cigarette smoking is completely legal.
There has never been a single recorded death related to the overdose of marijuana, yet SWAT teams will kick in doors, shoot dogs, kidnap and cage people over marijuana.
In spite of the tyrannical, immoral, and deadly laws against marijuana, and the …read more
Theodore Olson has become the attorney for a group of plaintiffs who were born in America Samoa, and thus are not citizens unless they go through the naturalization process. The case has already lost in the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. Olson joined the case and has won permission from the U.S. Supreme Court to file the cert petition by February 1, 2016 (otherwise, the cert petition would have been due January 2, 2016).
The Samoans include residents of the various states. They cannot vote, unless they use the naturalization process. See this story. Persons …read more
Late in the evening on December 15, congressional leaders from both major parties released the text of the omnibus budget bill. It doesn’t change any laws relating to public funding for presidential candidates. Some members of Congress had been working for a provision that would have ended primary season matching funds and used the money instead to pay for major party presidential conventions. Thanks to the Center for Competitive Politics for this news.
UPDATE: the bill does not relax any existing limits on how political parties spend their money, but it does change some policies on disclosure. …read more
Alphabet/Google (don’t lose sight of the fact that Google is directly intertwined with everything Alphabet does) is trying to disrupt and push forward just about every communications industry they can. And it makes sense since they are the premiere cloud services company on the planet with things like Google Drive, Gmail, and the like. The faster and less expensively people can access those services the better for Alphabet/Google (and in turn, depending on whether you don’t care about the privacy tradeoff with using Google’s services, the better for you).
One of their most recent ventures in the communications space is their …read more
