As protests against police brutality continue to rage all over America, it is mind boggling how many conservatives still don’t understand that reforming our criminal justice system is an issue they should support. As a former Libertarian candidate, eliminating systemic racism at all levels of government is something that I and other libertarians have always wanted. In a democratic republic, all lives don’t matter until Black lives matter. After all, how is spending billions of dollars on the futile war on drugs or overcrowded prisons a worthwhile use of taxpayer money? How is the over-militarization of police forces not the very definition of big government? How is “qualified immunity” for police officers who murder innocent citizens not a direct violation of our rights and a trait of tyranny?

Tallahassee, FL --Three Florida legislators running for re-election, along with eight voters and the Florida Democratic Party, have filed a legal action to prevent state and local election officials from continuing to destroy election materials critical for verifying election results. The lawsuit filed Wednesday in state court asks that the ballot images automatically created by digital voting equipment used throughout Florida be preserved for 22 months as required by federal and state law and be treated as public records available for inspection and production under such laws. 

Currently, at least 27 of the state's county Supervisors of Elections (SOEs) are preserving the ballot images while the others are not. The lawsuit seeks an order requiring Secretary of State Laurel Lee and State Elections Director Maria Matthews to instruct all SOEs of their legal duty to preserve ballot images and that defendant SOEs be enjoined from destroying the images following the August 18 primary and November 3rd general elections and all elections thereafter.

World BEYOND War, July 2, 2020

The Beginning or the End may have been the beginning of the end.

If you imagine humanity existing a century from now in a society that includes history classes, you can expect, barring major changes, that U.S. text books will describe this as a time of peace, perhaps noting Trump’s failure to assist the Venezuelans with greater humanitarian force, and certainly devoting a few sentences to Trump’s enslavement to Vladimir Putin.

There will have been researchers and professors, who will have gathered up every scrap of information, every document, video clip, deathbed confession, and secret surveillance. They will have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald J. Trump was a greedy fascistic imbecile guilty of an extravaganza of crimes and abuses who was never remotely in the service of Putin, who in fact routinely enraged Putin with sanctions, economic competition, the shredding of treaties and agreements, the expulsion of personnel, the bombing of Russian troops, and endless aggressive militarism and NATO expansion. And that knowledge simply will not matter.

In November 2019, the Washington Post and other major news media accused Children’s Health Defense (CHD) of using Facebook advertisements to spread “misinformation” about vaccines.

The basis for these accusations, which have since continued, is a study published in the prestigious medical journal Vaccine that named CHD as a top buyer of vaccine-related Facebook ads. What the media failed to inform the public, however, is that the government-funded – and therefore co-opted - authors of this study failed to identify even a single example of a Facebook ad from CHD that contained any misinformation.