From FAIR, one of my favorite headlines ever: "Lockheed Martin-Funded Experts Agree: South Korea Needs More Lockheed Martin Missiles." Long story short: the Center for Strategic and International Studies (or CSIS) has provided glowing testimonials to the "liberal" media about a certain missile defense system at least 30 times over the past year -- and guess how many of those "liberal" media outlets even disclosed that the CSIS gets money from that missile system's manufacturer, Lockheed-Martin? If you guessed "zero," you're smarter than all the pointy-heads who love saying TEH MONEYZ DO NOT MAKEZ US CORRUPTZ!!!!!
Pema Levy at Mother Jones thinks "The Voting Rights Act May Be Coming Back from the Dead." How? In Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act on the premise that the massive voter suppression that prompted its passage had disappeared -- but that voter suppression is now coming back, as many federal court decisions have said. Nobody Could Have Predicted That, of course (or, as Justice Ginsberg, might say, nobody could have predicted you'd get wet in a rainstorm after deciding you don't need an umbrella anymore), but for the Voting Rights Act to "come back," I'd think you'd be counting on, say, John Roberts to get up and say "I was wrong." I'm not going to hold my breath.
Trump Administration cites '70s pro-segregation ruling in asserting that courts can't divine Mr. Trump's intention in writing his Muslim ban. I'm no great fan of divining everyone's "intention" from their actions -- unless the obvious intention is, as it is here, "to deprive people of their rights," and I've often found it's not terribly difficult to divine such intentions from evil actions. Maybe Mr. Trump's lawyers will next argue that what he says on the campaign trail doesn't have a one-to-one relationship to his intentions -- an argument that would be a lot more compelling if Mr. Giuliani hadn't already told the whole world that Mr. Trump wanted to do a "Muslim ban," but "legally."
ACLU files class action lawsuit alleging that Madison County, Mississippi law enforcement officials have "placed the black community of Madison County under a permanent state of siege." With checkpoints, roadblocks, and house searches, because they just can't shake their apparent nostalgia for the Jim Crow era. It's bad enough that residents have set up a Facebook group to warn each other about checkpoints and roadblocks, and that news might convince a Justice Thomas that the people have devised a solution and no more government intervention is needed.
FCC claims that a denial-of-service attack caused problems on its website Sunday night -- and it had nothing at all to do with John Oliver's call for viewers to contact the FCC about net neutrality. And they said the same thing in 2014! I'd be a schmuck to believe that -- particularly when I recall that Tom Wheeler's FCC didn't want to issue strong net neutrality rules, either, until we, you know, made them.
Finally, Irish police are investigating comedian Stephen Fry under an anti-defamation law over his famous statements calling God "capricious, mean-minded, (and) stupid" for "creat(ing) a world that is so full of injustice and pain." I have a different take than Mr. Fry on "bone cancer in children" (why do innocent people suffer? At least in part to shame those of us who allow, create, or enable that suffering), but only dictatorships go after people like this. Besides, who can assert they're the aggrieved party here? God has, after all, never seemed particularly litigious to me.
Comments