This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”
Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the...
Oh hooray. Another part of our new normal under Trump 2.0. Here’s the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with the gory details:
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom.
According to a 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused of obstructing a U.S. agency...
Here’s a puzzle: How do you write a law that’s so badly designed that (1) the people it’s meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act.
The bill started with the entirely reasonable goal of addressing non-consensual intimate imagery online. But then something went wrong...
When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don’t quite say “we want to censor speech” (after all, they pretend to be the party that “brought free speech back.”) Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it’s got nothing to do with the content, even as they can’t hide their true intentions and motives. And so we have DC US Attorney Ed Martin, who has decided that the...
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Does anyone want to be OK with this just because it might end up barely clearing the legality bar? Is this what the US wants to be known for: the forcible expulsion of anyone originating south of our borders just because the current administration doesn’t want to share space with undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants? Is it time to cut Lady Liberty off at the knees and shove her...
State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own technology continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction of a new “right to repair” law in Wisconsin, groups like U.S. PIRG note that all 50 U.S. states have now at least introduced such bills.
But so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon have actually passed laws. Ohio could be...
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a failed “fact check” by another commenter:
Hey twinkle farts, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to authorize the government to detain enemy aliens. Further, the executive order didn’t need to receive the law. And the law was used to justify the...
It’s time for the third in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix and Best Deep Cut, and today we’re looking at the winner of the Best Visuals category: A Warning by DigNZ.
One of the requirements for digital entries in these game jams is that they be playable in the browser, which puts a limit on...
Bethesda has something of a history of embracing its modding communities. This has historically included not being aggressive on matters of IP against modders, attempting to build an economy around the modding community itself, and even being quite tolerant of fan-made expansions and the like of the publisher’s titles. This was all well and good until Bethesda was acquired by Microsoft....