Seems like all I do when I talk about the Tennessee legislature is complain, and not without reason, but let's give them kudos for passing an anti-SLAPP bill with teeth. SLAPPs, as you may know, are "strategic lawsuits against public participation," or lawsuits designed only to silence otherwise First Amendment-protected speech, and Tennessee's bill (which only requires the Governor's signature at this point) would require the courts to consider motions to dismiss before allowing lawsuits to proceed any further. Hence, a blow to actual frivolous lawsuits; now if they'd just stop obsessing about gay and transgender folks.
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative does the dying cause of conservatism a solid by locating tyranny in corporate behavior for once. He locates that tyranny largely in corporate abridgment of your privacy and not in, say, laws and regulations that enrich banksters and corporate executives at everyone else's expense -- which latter item would upset conservatives as much as liberals, since conservatives profess an abhorrence for concentrated power -- but baby steps, folks. And I'm glad to hear someone else say that social media has as much power to serve bad governmental actors as it does to liberate us from them. I still think dissent is better off expressed than hidden myself, but I guess that's just one of the things that makes me a liberal.
Ho hum, twice as many Fortune 500 corporations paid zero dollars or less in corporate taxes this year, the first under the Republican tax "reform," than in previous years. Nobody could have predicted that slashing the corporate tax rate without closing very many corporate tax loopholes would have resulted in this! One day we'll get it through our "liberal" media's thick heads that tax breaks for corporations are completely unnecessary and illogical, since corporations already get to deduct expenses before paying taxes. I mean, gosh, how much more of this BS must we take?
Also from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: our Administration lets private child adoption agencies take federal or state money and turn away Catholic and Jewish parents. Take federal money, follow federal rules, I've always said, and if our laws forbid discrimination, then you can't take federal money and discriminate, period, end of. But maybe in a year or two they can get a Supreme Court decision that explicitly says NO WE ONLY MEANT TEH GAYZ!!!!!
Our Administration apparently considered dropping off all asylum-seeking immigrants in so-called "sanctuary cities," as a sort of punishment to Democratic-leaning urban areas, I suppose, but although I abhor politicians treating people like they exist to be used, I almost sorta wish he'd gone through with it, just so the good folks in those cities could assimilate the new immigrants with no problems. Then again, if there'd been even one problem with an asylee in any city, you can bet Fox News would talk about it 24-7 for a week, so maybe this is for the best after all. (What a surprise to learn that this was all Stephen Miller's idea! Stephen Miller has a face even a mother could punch.)
Finally, few-if-any politicians handle abuse better than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but I wish she'd handled this incident a little differently. Upon being called a "domestic terrorist" by the Ohio College Republican Federation, she responded by saying "this puts me in danger every time" and "we get a spike in death threats" whenever some right-winger says something that awful. I'm absolutely certain she's not lying, but no one wants to hear a politician talk about how hard they have it. A better response would have been "I eagerly await hearing that you've actually called law enforcement about this very serious accusation and that you're not just making an ass of yourself in public," or "every time you call me a terrorist, you're admitting you can't win an argument with me."
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