Daily Links #123: Bill Cosby found guilty

Bill Cosby

• Bill Cosby ^[pictured]: Guilty on all counts of sexual assault. At his age, it’s effectively a life sentence. Good riddance.

• In totally unsurprising news, the Toronto van murderer is affiliated with women-hating incels.

• Here’s an TV show idea: Disgraced accused sexual predator Charlie Rose interviews other disgraced sexual predators like Matt Lauer and Louis CK about #MeToo. I’m sorry to say that’s not a joke.

• Not a repeat: Right-wingers triggered by NRA boycott destroy their own expensive property to own the libs, clearly need more safe spaces.

• Finally, NRA dude is sad that the unarmed hero who stopped the Waffle House shooter didn’t have a gun to shoot the gunman dead with instead.
  (via @fark)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #122: Utah police kill unarmed Black man

Elijah James Smith

• Whatever else Elijah James Smith ^[pictured] may have done, the fact remains that Utah police shot an unarmed Black man dead for obeying their order to remove his hands from his pockets.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Free speech advocates warned FOSTA/SESTA would stifle free speech online. Now that the bills are law, they’re … stifling free speech online.

• Meanwhile, the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules comes into effect today. Any changes will be gradual, and that’s if the multifaceted efforts to restore the old rules on state and federal levels don’t succeed first.

• Actual religious persecution: Russian government continues its crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses, forcing thousands to flee abroad or go into hiding.

• A Minnesota court just ruled that basically everyone on Twitter is now a stalker.
  (via @ScottGreenfield)

• Finally, James Comey’s new book is exactly what you expect from the memoir of the former director of the FBI. That’s not a compliment.
  (via @cjciaramella; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #121: Trump’s trans military ban blocked yet again

Will you look at that: 500 posts. Do I win something?

• Trump’s trans military ban just keeps getting, er, banned by federal courts.
  (via @fark)

• The Supreme Court just made it a little harder for the Trump administration to deport immigrants.
  (via @Popehat)

• What white people can learn from the Starbucks arrests; or, the importance of recognizing, and fighting against, implicit bias.

• You’d think a professional defender of the Catholic Church’s handling of child-diddling priests would know better than to weigh in on the David Silverman affair. (Yes, of course it’s Bill Donohue.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton presents: Eight Rules for Understanding Our Teenage President.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #119: SC cops shoot at man 57 times over $100 pot sale

Julian Betton

• South Carolina cops shot at a man ^[pictured] 57 times, hitting him nine times and paralyzing him, during a drug raid over a $100 pot sale. They claimed they’d announced themselves and that he fired at them first, and an “oversight” agency claimed the shooting was justified; his surveillance camera proved they lied about everything. The shooters and prosecutors have now given him a $2.75 million settlement.
  

• Slate exposes the junk science and blatant lies behind Trump’s trans military ban, including the fact that Defense Secretary Mattis was overruled by Mike Pence who, aided by fellow bigots like Tony Perkins, helped sway Trump to ignore the testimony from actual experts who say the ban accomplishes nothing good.
  (via @fark)

• Trump’s EPA continues to attack and lie about science at every turn.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• You know someone has a bad case of Christian persecution complex when they complain that Sweet Jesus ice cream shop’s name is “offensive”.

• Finally, coal baron Bob Murray apparently thought it would be a good idea to send a complaint letter to the judge who dismissed his bogus defamation suit against John Oliver. The ACLU is amused. The judge is not.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #117: Unarmed Black man shot by Sacramento cop

Stephon Clark

• Sacramento, CA: Unarmed black man ^[pictured] shot to death in own backyard after police mistake cell phone for weapon.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Meanwhile, the Minneapolis, MN officer who shot Justine Damond turns himself in on murder charges.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Having finally lost their cause to keep their old gerrymandered district map, Pennsylvania Republican officials are now moving to impeach the Democratic justices of the state supreme court who ruled against them.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• New Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner promised big criminal justice reforms. And he’s delivering.

• The 400 residents of Dewey, Delaware must be nothing but hardcore gangbangers, because the town’s 11-officer police force requested, and obtained, 31 military vehicles and other gear through the Pentagon’s 1033 program.

• Finally, just a reminder that nine years later, Sean Hannity still still hasn’t been waterboarded as he promised he would be “for the troops”.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #116: Officials misbehavin’ edition

• It may interest you to know that the NYPD lies in court so often they have a name for it – “testilying”.
  (via @Snowden)

• Seattle, WA district attorney’s office ratchets up their prostitution-related caseload to meet quotas set by a privately run anti-sex-worker organization that pays them yearly grants. This is amazingly messed up. (Of the over 100 clients arrested last September, roughly half had their charges dismissed because police had illegally wiretapped them.)
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Alabama sheriff legally rerouted $750K meant to feed inmates to pay for his beach house. Reporter breaks the story. Days later, the source who blew the whistle is arrested on drug charges and held in one of the sheriff’s prisons.
  (via @G_Padraic; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Wisconsin school district limits discussions of racism after an MLK Day exercise on social privilege made the majoritarily White community uncomfortable.
  (via @jeffelrod; retweet by @Popehat)

• In several death-penalty cases in the 1970s, prosecutors in Muscogee County, Georgia systematically excluded Black jurors in handwritten notes where they marked their names with ‘N’ (White jurors were marked with ‘W’). Of 44 potential Black jurors, two were allowed to serve.
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @Popehat)

• Finally: Look, I understand that guns in schools is a sensitive topic. But can we still agree that “hand gestures” by a six-year-old cannot possibly warrant a police investigation for “terroristic threats”?
  (via @TimCushing; retweet by @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Supreme Court rejects last-ditch Pennsylvania GOP attempt to block new district map

In which we finally reach the close of the Great Pennsylvania Gerrymandering Affair:

The Supreme Court has denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block new congressional maps that could tilt several key races in Democrats' favor from being used in the midterm elections.

The court issued one sentence to reject the request. There were no noted dissents.

GOP leaders of the state House and Senate asked the court for an emergency stay blocking the implementation of the maps, which were unveiled last month by the state Supreme Court after it ruled that the previous maps had been gerrymandered in violation of Pennsylvania's Constitution.

Lawyers for House Speaker Mike Turzai and Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati argued that the state's high court overstepped its authority in setting a deadline for lawmakers to draw new maps -- and then, when the GOP-led Legislature missed that deadline, producing new maps drawn by an expert selected by the court.

Of course, the state Supreme Court wouldn’t have needed to impose a deadline or bring in an independent expert to draw the new map if state Republicans could be trusted to do an honest job of it. And the new map wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place had those same Republicans not gerrymandered the original so badly that the court ruled it “plainly and palpably violate[d]” the state constitution.

The new map is here to stay. Whilst it won’t make for a Democratic turnover – the state’s electorate is still solidly red – it does virtually guarantee some Republicans who only hold their seats due to the old map’s tricks will lose them come the next elections.

Daily Links #113: Abstinence advocate controls family planning funding

Valerie Huber

• The perils of having Republicans in power: Almost $300 million in family planning funding is now controlled by an anti-abortion abstinence advocate. ^[pictured]

• Appeals court throws out a man’s conviction after a trial judge ordered him to be electrocuted three times to silence him. That judge needs to be fired yesterday.
  (via @washingtonpost; retweet by @Popehat)

• The Arctic just had its warmest winter on record.

• Oregon becomes the latest state to pass its own law protecting net neutrality.

• Finally, here’s everything you need to know about Jehovah’s Witnesses in five minutes:
  (via Friendly Atheist)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #111: House passes bad anti-sex-trafficking bill

• US House of Representatives passes an anti-sex-trafficking bill that would restrict online speech, endanger sex workers, and do absolutely nothing to fight sex trafficking.

• As Trump ^[pictured] makes noises about violent video games causing mass shootings, remember that endless studies have proven him completely and utterly wrong.
  (via @mccanner; retweet by @Popehat)

• New York man wins $1 million lawsuit after an NYPD officer tried to frame him for drunk driving to cover up how the cop blew through a stop sign and crashed into his car.
  (via @natemcdermott; retweet by @KFILE)

• Pamela Gellar’s daughters did not fall far from the bigoted tree.

• Finally, your headline of the day (and an uncomfortably informative article):
  (via @radleybalko)

Source: The Hill

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Alex Jones sued for discrimination and harassment. News at 11

I have some shocking news. You sitting down? Glass of water still on the desk, un-sipped? Here you go:

Two former staffers at InfoWars have accused founder and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of discrimination and sexual harassment, the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday. Jones allegedly bullied staffers, made anti-Semitic and racist comments, and groped one worker, according to two Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints obtained by the publication.

That’s right: The man who built his company on being a screaming train wreck on camera is actually a terrible person generally, and he fosters a workplace culture that encourages shitty behavior in his staff as well. Who could’ve guessed.

Next they’ll be telling us there are jerks over at Breitbart, too. I don’t know what to believe anymore.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Daily Links #110: Seriously, please sign that petition to prevent censorship of Canada’s Internet

Oy, Canadians! Have you signed that petition to save our Internet from censorship yet? The deadline is tonight.

Once you’ve done that, here’s your news dump.

• US Supreme Court refuses to review a lower court ruling blocking Trump’s attempt to end DACA.

• More good judicial news: A federal court rules that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination, rebuking the Trump admin. which argued the contrary.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• In reaction to the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal, Michigan lawmakers want to greatly extend the statute of limitations for sex crime victims. For some reason, the Catholic Church isn’t happy with this.

• Florida Republicans advance two bills to put more guns in classrooms, because when you reject all sensible solutions, cartoonish ones are all that’s left.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton at Dispatches From the Culture Wars addresses the terrible, tribalistic defenses of Lawrence Krauss against his sexual harassment allegations. You know it’s bad when the pro-Krauss arguments are the same used by Roy Moore’s supporters.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

US Supreme Court okays indefinite detention for immigrants

Some bad immigration rights news today, courtesy of a godawful Supreme Court ruling that essentially allows the government to keep immigrants, including legal residents, in indefinite detention:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that immigrants, even those with permanent legal status and asylum seekers, do not have the right to periodic bond hearings.

It's a profound loss for those immigrants appealing what are sometimes indefinite detentions by the government. Many are held for long periods of time — on average, 13 months — after being picked up for things as minor as joyriding. Some are held even longer.

The case, Jennings v. Rodriguez, has implications for legal permanent residents whom the government wants to deport because they committed crimes and asylum seekers who are awaiting a court date after turning themselves in at the border.

This case is a travesty. The lead plaintiff, Alejandro Rodriguez, is a legal permanent resident who was convicted of joyriding as a teen and then of “misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance” – presumably, he was found with a bit of pot – as an adult. There are native-born delinquents who get off with a stern warning for worse (presuming they’re White, of course), whereas Rodriguez was held in a detention camp for three years. It’s bad enough that fellow Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer dubbed the ruling “legal fiction” in his dissenting opinion.

There is some slight hope; the Supreme Court has kicked the case back to the lower Ninth Circuit court for reconsideration, which means this could still reach a different conclusion further down the line. But immigration lawyers aren’t holding their breaths. The immigration branch of the US legal system has always been a hot mess, and it’s only worsened under the Trump administration, which has given ICE and Border Patrol all the leeway they want to persecute and dehumanize the desperate people who cross the border hoping to find a better life. This ruling just reaffirms immigration advocates’ fears: The US government can do whatever it wants to migrants, up to and including dropping them in a prison camp and leaving them to rot, and there’s little anyone can do about it.

(via retweet by @pzmyers)