Why does this happen?
• The War on Drugs quota systems (pressure for "stats")
• The "Blue Wall of Silence" protecting bad actors
• Targeting vulnerable people who cops assumed a jury would never believe over a badge. More often than not, their assumption was correct. (cont)
Even today, body cameras are catching this in real-time (often because cops don’t realize the camera captures 30 seconds of video *before* they hit record). In 2017, a Baltimore cop was caught on camera placing a bag of drugs in trash, walking away, and then "finding" it. (cont)
In 1999, the small town of Tulia, Texas, arrested 10% of its Black population for cocaine trafficking based on one undercover cop, Tom Coleman. He had zero audio, video, or paperwork. It was a total fabrication. The governor later pardoned 35 people.(cont)
https://t.co/4T8I6EAQmR
@factpostnews Yall should credit /link to @clevelanddotcom who broke this story. We can only aggregate news orgs that do good journalism if there are still newsrooms
Ohio Republicans secretly awarded Google, Meta, and Amazon $600 million in tax breaks to build data centers.
The tax breaks were written to last 40 years and cannot be undone.
When any white man in the world says "Give me liberty or give me death", the entire white world applauds
When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he's a criminal & treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of him —James Baldwin
It's a precarious time for the free and open internet.
Between age verification, KOSA, NO FAKES, and government stakes in AI companies, we may be looking at the most dramatic federal reshaping of the internet — and how it's allowed to operate — since its creation.
Nothing we're seeing in the news looks good for free speech. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are eager to regulate internet content to a degree it has never been regulated before. And you will be required to verify your identity before accessing that content.
Unfortunately, public opinion seems stacked against free speech and an open internet. There is not the natural and noisy constituency for freedom that there used to be.
Civil libertarians have often had to stand against public opinion to protect freedom. We won with the early internet against great odds. I'm hopeful we will do so here, too. But it may require litigation, as it did in the '90s.
As for federal preemption, it can be a good thing if it protects free speech, as Section 230 did. It can also be a bad thing if it requires censorship.
We'll see how that shakes out. But we shouldn't trade good preemption in one context for burdensome censorship in another.
Sources say Wemby has a big day planned in NYC, shoving people out of line for cronuts, yanking people out of line at the Rafael show at the Met, pushing people out of line at Salt Hank's, wrenching people out of line at Kith, etc etc
Now we know why Peter Thiel packed his bags for Argentina.
Milei just submitted his AI legislative framework to Congress, where he proposes:
- zero regulation on AI development,
- a brand-new "non-human corporation" category for AI/robot-operated entities with limited liability
-a low-tax regime with flexible governance rules.
The Dutch East India Company gave the world the limited liability company in 1602. Milei wants Argentina to do the same for autonomous AI agents in 2026.
The meta media story for all this is that Dems actually do operate in the mainstream media/news cycle and can’t blow it off.
Rs kept pounding Franken, reporters kept finding women who felt like he was too handsy at a meet and greet, and Dems got exhausted answering Qs about it.
Before Platner’s ex-staffer dumped the texts story, Rs were pounding him over his posts and tattoo, and Dems were exhausted with the Qs about it; see Auchincloss on CNN.
When Rs need to be, they are simply better protected against media frenzies. They can roll their eyes at the Trump Derangement Syndrome that the lame, dying media is obsessed with.
Rs unanimously agreeing that Trump’s sig on the Epstein book might be fake, until reporters stopped asking about it, was my favorite recent example.
NEW: A stunning new project from @lawfare's Katherine Pompilio finds that 97 Jan. 6ers who received clemency for their role in the Capitol riot then got arrested, charged, and/or convicted with subsequent crimes—a number much higher than previously reported.