U.S. District Court judge strikes down Florida's method, such as it is, of determining which felons can get their right to vote back -- though it doesn't rule on the constitutionality of taking voting rights away from felons in the first place (which the voters of Florida will get to decide later this year). Still, Florida didn't exactly have a rigorous system of restoring felons' voting rights; in fact, you might say it had a system constructed to give felons their right back if they seemed more likely to vote Republican in future elections! Talking about a felon's "moral rectitude" is beside the point, of course -- a right is a right.
USDA rejects proposal to increase chicken-killing speeds at poultry processing plants, but also says it will consider waivers on a case-by-case basis. So now we get to say even Trump's USDA the next time some big poultry corporation wants to pump more bile, blood, and feces into our chicken casseroles. The bad news? We might one day have to say even President Rabid Raccoon's USDA doesn't want to kill 180 chickens per minute. Or worse, President Rabid Raccoon will permit such a travesty.
U.S. District Court judge blocks Kansas state law punishing state employees who participated in the BDS (boycott/divestment/sanctions) movement against Israeli occupation of Palestine. Like the law Congress mooted last year that would have made it a crime to get involved in BDS, this law would violate the free speech rights of Kansas's state employees. Of course the state gets to tell state employees how to do their jobs, not if protesting Israel's occupation of Palestine has nothing to do with their jobs. (Laws where state refuse to do business with corporations participating in the BDS movement are, for better or worse, on more solid constitutional ground.)
The incomparable Adam Johnson at FAIR offers "6 Elements of Police Spin: An Object Lesson in Copspeak." Here they are: "officer-involved shooting," "the victim was no angel," "an altercation happened," "police say," "person killed during shooting," and "shot by a police gun" ("apparently an autonomous entity," Mr. Johnson comments). If you're a student of diction, you'll notice how often the "liberal" media uses the passive voice (why say "cop shot person" when you can say "person killed during shooting?") and you might be tempted to say all six problems are really one problem, that being a problem of accountability.
Finally, Pennsylvania state Rep. Rick Saccone, now running as the Republican in the March 13 special election in Pennsylvania's 18 U.S. House district, tends to spend more taxpayer money than other state legislators, but naturally ran in 2010 as a teabagger who'd cut Big Gummint spending. No use protesting, as he does, that "everything in the capitol is done on relationships" and "be(ing) a martyr just by doing it myself" "doesn’t change the system," not when you're cutting state spending on education and libraries while billing the taxpayer for over $60,000 in annual expenses on top of an $87,000-plus annual salary.
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