Nearly two dozen young folk file suit against President Trump, alleging that his refusal to deal head-on with climate change's effects would "deny() young people and future generations their constitutional right to a healthy and stable atmosphere and environment." They also sued President Obama over this matter, and I'm not sure they'll win -- what the law commands our government to do about climate change may not be as clear-cut as they'd like. But I am sure that I'm-the-President-so-you-can't-sue-me won't kill the suit.
House votes to approve S.J.Res. 34, which would repeal FCC rules preventing internet service providers from selling your private information at will. It would be grotesquely easy for Democrats to run ads painting (most of) their Republican opponents as anti-privacy or even pro-hacking -- so easy, I suspect, that none of them will do it, since they're all a bunch of smartypants weaklings.
A California state legislator introduces, then thankfully withdraws, a bill that would ban "fake news." Naturally the bill's dragnet would have punished satire like The Onion or The Borowitz Report, which you should be able to tell are satire without anyone's help. How do you fight "fake news"? Same way you always have -- with good works. You just may need to do more good works than you think.
In a peripherally-related development, New York Times holds up past spreader of lies about Saddam/al-Qaeda links as a bastion of "basing...arguments on facts, logic and reason." Lessons: we can't let our horror at how bad media has become make us look upon past practitioners of bad media more generously -- and we really need to stop looking for right-wingers who "seem sane," since this year's "sane" right-winger is usually last year's insane one.
Bill Blum at TruthDig tells us how "Bill Clinton Laid the Groundwork for Trump's Ugly Immigration Policies." Almost tripling immigrant detentions, punishing "sanctuary cities," speeding up deportation hearings, expanding the list of crimes for which you can be deported, even building a big wall on the Southern border -- yep, that was all Bill Clinton, too. Strange how little credit he gets from the right for all of that. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.
Finally, Chris Hayes at The Nation, in writing about "Policing the Colony from the American Revolution to Ferguson," gives us a couple of responses to "why didn't those protestors who got beat up just do what the cops said?" One: how do you know those protestors didn't? Two: how do you know the police didn't make an unreasonable or unconstitutional request? Three: don't you know the Founders were scofflaws? Seriously, though, this is a sprawling, enlightening article (adapted from a book, no less -- A Colony in a Nation, which I'll have to check out).
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