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Category Archives: Free Speech

How Trump Could Remake the Supreme Court for a Generation

The Nation: Donald Trump is poised to become the first president since FDR to have appointed the majority of high-court justices. His potential picks are terrifying.This article appears in the March 2025 issue, with the headline “The Supreme Trump Court.” Donald Trump’s first term as president gave the republicans control over the most dangerous body of the most dangerous branch of government: the Supreme Court. With the help of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, along with timely retirements and untimely deaths, Trump was able to secure a 6–3 hard-right majority on the court and use it to make the Republicans’ least-popular policy dreams come true. In the brief years since, the court has undermined labor rights, stripped back voting rights, and reduced pregnant people to the status of second-class citizens whose bodies can be controlled by Republican state legislatures eager to use them for labor without compensation.The Democrats might have used Joe Biden’s four-year interregnum to begin to claw back the Supreme Court from the Republicans’ grip. Particularly during the first two years, with the Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, they could have added additional justices to the court. Had they done so, abortion rights could have been saved, voting rights could have been protected, and Trump may have been ruled ineligible to ever run for office again. Instead, the Democrats did nothing. As the Supreme Court revealed its full moral turpitude to a disgusted public, Congress failed to impose even minimal ethical standards on the justices or cut the court’s funding, while Biden sent court expansion to die in a useless commission. Now we will experience a time of consequences. Vulnerable communities will pay the price for the Democrats’ inaction—and as bad as the court’s rulings have been in recent years, they are likely to get worse..In the case of either of these events, the Supreme Court will not just have a Republican majority by 2029, when Trump leaves office; it will likely have a Trump majority. Trump is now poised to become the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have appointed a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court. His justices will outlive him, and their impact on law and policy will outlast whatever temporary tragedies Trump brings forth through his executive orders. To have that kind of decades-long impact, Trump will require some help from the current Republican justices who are past their sell-by date. Clarence Thomas is 76. Sam Alito is 74. John Roberts just turned 70, and while he is unlikely to retire, life starts to get a bit less certain when you hit your eighth decade. Republican lawmakers and Trump himself will actively pressure these Republican justices to retire and offer them golden parachutes or whatever else their corrupt little hearts desire….Still, in the cauldron of contenders for the nation’s highest court, there are a few names that keep bubbling to the top. Let’s discuss the five most likely people Trump could nominate to entrench one-party Republican rule on the court…”

The List of Trump’s Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF

Gizmodo –  “It’s fascism, plain and simple.Every federal agency in the U.S. is currently trying to figure out how to purge forbidden words from documents posted online, in a desperate attempt to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to purge “DEI” from every facet of American life. And nowhere is that effort more bizarre… Continue Reading

Anatomy of an AI Coup

Tech Policy News: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology for manufacturing excuses. While lacking clear definitions or tools for assessment, AI has nonetheless seized the imagination of politicians and managers across government, academia, and industry. But what AI is best at producing is justifications. If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability… Continue Reading

Trump Freezes All Grant Funding to Libraries, Archives, and Museums

everylibrary – “While this “pause” will negatively impact millions of Americans, it will also considerably impact libraries. rump has demanded a freeze on all federal grants and for all agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.” The memo also calls for each agency to perform a… Continue Reading

A Spy in Your Pocket?

DemocracyNow – Ronan Farrow Exposes Secrets of High-Tech Spyware in New Film “Surveilled” –  “Is that a spy in your pocket? In a holiday special we speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow and filmmaker Matthew O’Neill about Surveilled, their new HBO documentary looking at how high-tech surveillance spyware is threatening democracy across the globe.… Continue Reading

Some Justice Department Lawyers Look for Protection and the Exits

WSJ  via MSN – “Justice Department lawyers who have angered President-elect Donald Trump and his allies are facing tough  decisions about whether to stay in government—and how to best protect themselves from threats of retribution after Inauguration Day. Dozens of prosecutors and agents have worked on cases that potentially make them vulnerable, such as special counsel … Continue Reading

New law in NJ limits the banning of books in schools and public libraries

WHYY: “When Martha Hickson was the librarian at New Jersey’s North Hunterdon HighSchool, she fought against attempts to ban books that her critics labeled as inappropriate because they contained sexual content, and she became a target of book banners. “I received hate mail, shunning by colleagues, antagonism by administrators, and calls for my firing and… Continue Reading

Arkansas Law Criminalizing Librarians Ruled Unconstitutional

AP: “A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional. “I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim… Continue Reading

Review of DOJ Process to Obtain Records of Members of Congress, Media

DOJ Oversight and Review Division 25-01. Redacted For Public Release. A Review of the Department of Justice’s Issuance of Compulsory Process to Obtain Records of Members of Congress, Congressional Staffers, and Members of the News Media: “In the spring and summer of 2017, CNN.com (CNN), The New York Times, and The Washington Post published articles… Continue Reading

Rebel Yell

Tablet – Part I: Donald Trump broke the back of the GOP establishment by driving blue-collar and lower-middle-class politics in a Southern direction. His gentry Republican critics have only themselves to blame. Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in… Continue Reading

Beyond Fairness in Computer Vision: A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Harms and Fostering Community-Rooted Computer Vision Research

Timnit Gebru and Remi Denton (2024), “Beyond Fairness in Computer Vision: A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Harms and Fostering Community-Rooted Computer Vision Research”, Foundations and Trends® in Computer Graphics  and Vision: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp 215–321. DOI: 10.1561/0600000102. “The field of computer vision is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, with its use in surveillance… Continue Reading

Librarian Amanda Jones Files New Defamation Lawsuits

School Library Journal – Amanda Jones has had enough. Again. The 2021 School Librarian of the Year, who has sued online harassers in the past, filed two new federal lawsuits on Tuesday. Jones is suing Dan Kleinman for defamation and “false light”—an invasion of privacy that arises from publicity that unreasonably places the plaintiff in… Continue Reading