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Victory! California Passes Net Neutrality Bill

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By Katharine Trendacosta / Electronic Frontier Foundation

California’s net neutrality bill, S.B. 822 has received a majority of votes in the Senate and is heading to the governor’s desk. In this fight, ISPs with millions of dollars to spend lost to the voice of the majority of Americans who support net neutrality. This is a victory that can be replicated.

ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast hated this bill. S.B. 822 bans blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, classic ways that companies have violated net neutrality principles. It also incorporates much of what the FCC learned and incorporated into the 2015 Open Internet Order, preventing new assaults on the free and open Internet. This includes making sure companies can’t circumvent net neutrality at the point of interconnection within the state of California. It also prevents companies from using zero rating—the practice of not counting certain apps or services against a data limit—in a discriminatory way. That is to say that, say, there could be a plan where all media streaming services were zero-rated, but not one where just one was. One that had either paid for the privilege or one owned by the service provider. In that respect, it’s a practice much like discriminatory paid prioritization, where ISPs create fast lanes for those who can pay or for other companies they own.   [Read more…]

Campus Rapists and Sexual Harassers Set to Get a Big Gift from the Trump Administration

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By Laura Clawson / Daily Kos

In the age of #MeToo, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is poised to set a policy that lets colleges off the hook for taking sexual harassment seriously and makes life much easier for accused rapists and harassers. DeVos previously rescinded Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual assault because they were supposedly unfair to rapists, and now she’s ready to take the next step with regulations of her own.

The DeVos rules would allow perpetrators to cross-examine their victims during mediation and would “also allow the complainant and the accused to have access to any evidence obtained during the investigation, even if there are no plans to use it to prove the conduct occurred.” Because it’s not already hard enough for assault survivors to come forward—now their assailants will have free rein to dig through their lives and intimidate them in person.   [Read more…]

No One Ever Remembered a Teacher for Raising Standardized Test Scores

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By Steven Singer / Common Dreams

It’s the day before school begins.

I’m out to eat with my family and have just taken a big bite of a juicy beef taco.

That’s when I notice someone standing right next to me at the restaurant.

So I raise my eyes upward, a meat-filled tortilla overfilled with lettuce and beans hanging from my mouth, and I’m greeted with a familiar face.

“Mr. Singer!” the woman says with a nervous smile on her lips.

“Do you remember me?”   [Read more…]

Prisoners Risk Their Lives Fighting California Wildfires for $2 a Day

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Wildfires continue to ravage California. Instead of hiring firefighters to put out the fires, the government is turning to incarcerated people for labor. More than 3,400 prisoners risk their lives every day to tackle the wildfires. While the average California firefighter earns $74,000 plus benefits annually, imprisoned people are paid as little as $2 a day. By relying on prison labor, California avoids spending $80 to $100 million a year.

I first learned about the exploitation of imprisoned laborers during the snowpocalypse that hit Boston in 2015. Imprisoned workers were paid 20 cents an hour for shoveling the city in the freezing cold that no one else wanted to venture out and brave. It dawned on me then that prison wasn’t just about gruesome punishment: it’s about profit. And prison labor is responsible for more of this country’s everyday products and services than is let on.

Today, the United States holds 5 percent of the world’s population and incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. More than 2 million people are separated from their families, deprived of basic human rights, abused, and left to suffer in cages. Incarceration has increased by 500 percent in the last 40 years, even though crime rates have decreased. More than one-half of all federal prisoners are incarcerated for a nonviolent drug offense.   [Read more…]

Verizon Throttling During Wildfire ‘Has Everything to Do With Net Neutrality’- California Firefighters

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As California lawmakers prepared on Wednesday for a key committee vote (it passed) on their state’s net neutrality bill—which, in its current form, would restore the protections repealed by the FCC in December—the Santa Clara County Fire Department accused the telecom giant Verizon of dramatically cutting its data speed as [the department] recently fought the largest recorded wildfire in California’s history.

After Verizon admitted that it slowed the fire department’s data—a despised practice known as throttling—but claimed it was a simple mistake that “has nothing to do with net neutrality,” Santa Clara County Counsel James Williams responded in a statement on behalf of the fire department on Wednesday that “Verizon’s throttling has everything to do with net neutrality.”

“It shows that the [internet service providers] will act in their economic interests, even at the expense of public safety,” Williams added. “That is exactly what the Trump administration’s repeal of net neutrality allows and encourages.”

  [Read more…]

U.S. Prisoners: Why They Strike and Why It Matters

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By John M. Webb / Daily Kos

Amid all of the news about Cohen and Manafort this week, an important story is going under-reported. While it may be tempting to escape into some schadenfreude about our president’s little circle of criminal cronies, prison is no laughing matter. It is a dangerous place where we are literally throwing away our fellow human being beings. Tuesday was the beginning of a massive prisoners strike to protest the conditions in which they live and work.

Men and women incarcerated in prisons across the nation declare a nationwide strike in response to the riot in Lee Correctional  Institution,  a maximum security prison in South  Carolina.  Seven comrades lost their lives during a senseless uprising that could have been avoided had the prison not been so overcrowded from the greed wrought by mass incarceration, and a lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology. These men and women are demanding humane living conditions,  access to rehabilitation, sentencing reform and the end of modern day slavery.   [Read more…]

Criminal Grifting Hunters Doing What They Do

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To the tune of $250,000, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-50th Congressional District) did it, said he and his wife did it, and now a federal grand jury says he’s going to pay for doing it.

Just doing what you do when you’re a criminal grifter with all the sense of a dissipating cloud of vaporizing campaign dollars fraudulently spent on personal expenses via campaign debit card.

Aug. 21, 2018 will be a day that will live forever in Duncan Hunter family infamy.   [Read more…]

Michael Cohen Implicates Trump in Felonies: Cohen’s Attorney Says There’s More to Come

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Lanny Davis, who serves as attorney for former Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen, stated yesterday that Cohen is willing to talk to special counsel Robert Mueller about crimes that go beyond those Cohen admitted on Tuesday. According to Davis, Cohen will provide evidence about the “possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.” And Cohen will also testify that Trump knew about the theft of documents from the DNC by Russian hackers before that information became public.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen plead guilty to eight counts including felony violations of campaign finance laws, During this plea, Cohen stated that he undertook these crimes at the direction of “a candidate for federal office.” making Trump literally an unnamed co-conspirator in multiple federal offenses. 

But Davis, appearing on MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow program, made statements that went beyond implicating Trump in admitted crimes. Davis’ statements made it clear that Cohen was willing to talk to the special counsel, and was able to speak directly to the area of a conspiracy involving the Russian government.   [Read more…]

The Monster Is Out Of Its Cage

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By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

A word on Colbert’s beloved “truthiness.” Amidst the eruption over Rudy ‘Foot-In-Mouth’ Giuliani’s claim that “truth isn’t truth,” after the mockery and analysis and Orwellian analogies, let’s remember this isn’t a blip or aberration – it’s who Trump and his fellow, enabling madmen are.

On Tuesday, Giuliani muddied the deeply swampy waters with a “clarification” that his statement “was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements… Sometimes further inquiry can reveal the truth other times it doesn’t.” Umm, okay. But still nope.

Coming after Trump’s over 4,200 “alternative facts” and “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening” etc etc etc, Giuliani’s flub is, in fact, Trump’s epitaph, his mantra, his jingle, the perfect awful soundbite for “an entire enterprise (that) has been a lie, a fraud, a grift, a cruel deception.”   [Read more…]

Marijuana, Opioids, and Alcohol: It Is Time to Change the Paradigm

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By Egberto Willies / Daily Kos

America needs a paradigm shift when it comes to how it deals with products that affect our moods, psyche, and our overall well-being. We must do so based on data instead of ideology, and deprogramming many will be difficult. But marijuana must be completely decriminalized.

Houston cannabis activist Ashley Miller appeared on Politics Done Right to bring awareness to many issues about marijuana, aka weed, aka cannabis. Her first goal was to dispel the notion that there are any valid reasons why marijuana is illegal. Second, she hoped to activate Americans both locally and throughout the country. As one listens to all the arguments and discourse about marijuana, there can only be one conclusion: the product should not be illegal.

  [Read more…]

Don’t Get Distracted: 565 Immigrant Children Are Still Held by U.S. Authorities

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By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Amid a news cycle dominated by the day-to-day chaos, antics, and scandals of the Trump presidency, new government numbers released on Thursday offered a grim reminder that the humanitarian travesty sparked by President Donald Trump’s inhumane family separation policy is still ongoing, despite the fact that it has faded into the background of corporate news coverage.

In court filings on Thursday, lawyers for the Trump Justice Department said that 565 immigrant children remain separated from their parents and held in detention facilities more than three weeks after the court-mandated deadline for reunification.

While immigrant rights activists and advocacy groups have continued calling attention to the crisis and working tirelessly to ensure that every child is ultimately reunited with their families, much of the media “has largely moved on, worn out and dazzled by other outrages,” observed Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur.   [Read more…]

Democrats Have Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

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By Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos

The results of an Ohio special election last week that many viewed as a harbinger for November—and that should have been a gimme for Republicans—aren’t even final yet. And yet even as the GOP candidate in Ohio’s 12th congressional district, Troy Balderson, clings to a lead of less than one percent over Democrat Danny O’Connor, a Washington narrative is developing that the Democratic advantage could all fall apart under the weight of either longtime liberal Nancy Pelosi of California or progressive phenom Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, depending on which article you read. 

It’s preposterous. As has been widely reported, House Democrats need to win 23 seats to regain control of the lower chamber and they have some 69 target districts that are less red than OH-12 and ripe for the picking. And yet there’s some scary myth out there that Pelosi’s too establishment and Ocasio-Cortez is too progressive and their mere presence is killing Democratic chances this fall.

Seriously, is this a joke? Just take note, they’re both women and supposedly they’re both the death knell for Democratic success this fall. The New York Times reported last week, for instance, that calls to “Abolish ICE,” partly led by Ocasio-Cortez, had “many Democrats fretting in competitive races.” In the meantime, reporters can’t seem to get enough of perseverating over some 50 Democratic House candidates who say they won’t back Pelosi for speaker if they’re elected or re-elected—something she actually encouraged them to do. Wow, it turns out Democrats truly have the big tent Republicans had been lauded for in theory for decades, but now that conservative advantage has morphed into a liberal liability and Democrats are doooomed!   [Read more…]

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