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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PB...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, there was something of a spat between Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump announced a panel to study “anti-conservative bias” on social media, and went on some crazy Twitter tirades that raised complicated content moderation questions, and we wrote about what a mess the whole thing was. Then, Trump released a draft of an executive order about social media that was...
There’s a great deal that is absurd about copyright law in America, but its most basic absurdity remains the length of time for which the copyright monopoly applies. The length of copyright protection a work gets depends on a number of factors. Was the work published before or after 1978? Was it renewed, if the former? Was it published anonymously or by a named individual? Was it work for hire?...
When NPR sued Donald Trump Tuesday, it had an easy argument to go with. Normally, in First Amendment retaliation cases against the government, you have to pull together a bunch of disparate strands to prove the retaliatory intent of the actions. But as NPR noted in its filing, and as Justice Scalia once wrote about obvious constitutional violations: “this wolf comes as a wolf.” Trump’s executive...
Elon Musk may claim he’s leaving the government, but regardless of whether he or anyone DOGE leaves the damage has been done, and their potential legal exposure to it remains. And with this decision earlier this week, some of the litigation pursuing it made headway.
As we’ve written before, Judge Chutkan has had Musk and DOGE’s number for months, noting early on in this case, New Mexico v. Musk...
Any bit of data that isn’t nailed down by court precedent will apparently find its way into the hands of the US government.
For years, the DEA has been data mining traveler data in hopes of finding people carrying around “too much” cash. This effort has been such a windfall for the DOJ that the DEA has paid hundreds of thousands in rewards to airline and Amtrak employees that tip them off to...
Remember “Liberation Day”? The day when Trump launched those apparently freedom-loving taxes on all Americans by declaring war on global commerce so hard that we were even planning on taxing penguins on uninhabited islands? Well, some of you might recall that the Constitution distributes power, and doesn’t give it all to the President. And Trump’s tariffs are supposedly based on “emergency”...
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Hey, if we have to be fair (and we don’t), we can trace some of this intranational movement to policies that predate the current shitshow we’re somehow expected to believe is the host to the Leader of the Free World.
A patchwork of marijuana legalization laws has led directly to law enforcement camping out on the borders of weed-friendly states, hoping to bust (but hoping even more to steal...
So you might recall that Republicans recently have been making a gigantic stink about how the $42.5 billion in broadband grants included in the infrastructure bill hadn’t actually connected anybody yet. I pointed out in detail why things have been admittedly slow; a big reason being that we had to completely remap broadband access after decades of corruption and incompetence.
After whining...