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A state wants Big Tech to pay up, other states power down price-fixing robots and slash drug prices, and scammers get a taste of justice.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Millions of Americans face having to ration heating this winter as the US federal government shutdown and mass layoffs by the Trump administration cause unprecedented delays in getting energy assistance aid to low-income households, a group that helps people pay energy bills has […]

Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, contact information, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work that we use for serious tasks—but that gave us an idea. What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about […]

Amidst plunging polls and righteous rage at his Epstein Memorial Ballroom, the inept manchild faces growing resistance, sublime to ridiculous, to his nascent kingship. Cue anti-ICE whistle kits - “Form a crowd, stay loud" - rainbow church steps, Newsom hawking knee pads, D.C. Jedi suing individual goons, and a successfully mobilized Bay Area, including his iconic bookstore's revival of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's howling edict that his people not "allow their rights to erode/and their freedoms to be washed away."Trump was already underwater with the lowest approval rating for any president, even him, at this point in his reign - see no jobs, high prices, cancelled SNAP benefits, murdered innocents, rounded-up brown neighbors - before his abrupt, illegal obliteration of the East Wing for a gilded obscenity to host his billionaire suck-ups. For many, the travesty is a bitter echo of what in part got us here: Obama's mocking, gaudy, then-hilarious 2011 vision of a lurid purple "Trump White House, Hotel, Casino, Golf Course" with glitzy tyrant chandeliers and half-naked women welcoming you. Now, of course, we are about to have the execrable real thing, a tacky "abomination," born of his "poisonous bravado," bearing the "bombast (of) a dictator-for-life megalomania vibe."Despite widespread horror at a now-$300-million, White-House-dwarfing atrocity for fat cats, smirking, clueless Press Barbie touted the ballroom as "of course the main priority" of the "builder-in chief" with a lifetime of bankruptcies to his tawdry name. Still, the outcry was loud enough for some flunkies to attempt an unhinged distraction: a new, racist, trolling Major Events Timeline on the ballroom that lurches from fake history - for 150 years, everyone has "longed for" it - to George Washington, the Oval Office, the Rose Garden to Clinton/Monica, Obama in a turban hosting Muslim Brotherhood extremists, debauched Hunter in a bath tub with cocaine, Biden with topless transsexuals to, straightfaced, Trump's hellacious, gold-blinged redecorating.Reflecting the same crude regime run by a petty, vengeful bully - who hung along his new "Presidential Walk of Fame" not a portrait of the man he can't admit defeated him but the image of an autopen and just snarled, "You know nothing about nothing" at a reporter questioning him - comes the story from D.C. of Jedi knight Sam O’Hara, 35, who sometimes mocks the masked, armed, camoed thugs parading around his town by walking behind them, playing Star Wars' "The Imperial March" that marks the arrival of Darth Vader, and posts his videos online. Bemused millions have watched his personal protest, audible but not loud, against "a dystopian occupation," but last month he was accosted by one thin-skinned stormtrooper who was not amused. Going home after work, O’Hara was following four Ohio National Guardsmen when Sergeant Devon Beck turned back to threaten him with calling D.C. cops to "handle" him. The Empire quickly struck back: Police arrived, tightly handcuffed him, argued "this isn't a protest" when he explained himself, and held him for a while before letting him go without charges. Now O'Hara and the ACLU are suing four police and Guardsmen under a law that renders individuals liable for punitive damages for infringing on a plaintiff's Constitutional rights. "The law might have tolerated government conduct of this sort a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," argued O'Hara, citing the First and Fourth Amendment and a D.C. prohibition on false arrest, but not "in the here and now."In his complaint, in which he demands a jury trial, O'Hara calls the deployment of military police "a waste of tax dollars, a needless display of force, and a surreal danger" that shouldn't be normalized. Likewise citing a 200-year-old tradition of civilian law enforcement, ACLU senior attorney Michael Perloff defended O'Hara's right to play "The Imperial March" as a "quintessential exercise of free speech." "The government doesn't get to decide if your protest is funny, and can’t punish you for making them the punchline," he said. "That’s really the whole point of the First Amendment." Or, paraphrasing Justice William Brennan on a free nation vs. police state, If you act like an autocrat when you're called an autocrat, you probably are one.Many others are rising up and acting out in the belief that, argues Rev. Rachel Griffin-Allison, "Silence is not neutral. Silence in the face of harm always sides with the oppressor." The senior pastor of Oak Lawn United Methodist Church in Dallas, she and her congregation took to painting their church steps in rainbow colors after an inane order from Gov. Greg Abbott banning "all political ideologies from our streets," including existing rainbow crosswalks or other "political" pavement designs; he said he wanted to "keep roads safe and free from distraction" - a claim, under threat of cut funding, many called "highly questionable" and, given his law requiring the Ten Commandments in schools, deeply hypocritical. The reverend called it "political bullying.""A rainbow is not a political statement," she said. "It’s a universal symbol of inclusion, hope, and pride in diversity (representing) a safe space for a community that’s been marginalized. The rainbow is for everyone." Undercutting Abbott's brazen fear-mongering, she noted the multi-hued crosswalks were funded by private donations and approved by the city, and their re-painting action was "not one of defiance, but of faith, a visible witness to the gospel we preach...When the forces of power try to erase symbols of inclusion, the Church has a choice - to retreat into comfort or to step forward in courage. We choose courage. This is not a political act; it’s a pastoral one. It says, 'The love of God meets you exactly as you are.'" Many elsewhere are also fighting back with courage. In and around besieged Chicago, organizers have rallied groups of hundreds of volunteers to create 30,000 anti-ICE kits packed with warning whistles for ICE sightings, handouts about how and when to use them, and bilingual flyers detailing migrants' rights: "Immigrants keep us moving forward." Last week, when masked agents descended on a Chicago suburb - variously claiming they were looking for an escaped dog, gang member, sex offender - residents texted one another - “ICE IS HERE," "Fucking helicopters," "On our way" - before emerging to scream, film, tail and honk at them. "You don’t belong here,” one yelled. "Our neighbors, our community members, they do belong here.”In California's diverse, liberal Bay Area, which just won a billionaire-bought reprieve from ICE invasion, officials and residents were organized and mobilized after months of Trump threats and his announcement troops were finally going there to bring down its record-low crime rate and "make it great." Good luck on that With Marvin Gaye blaring, pre-dawn protesters at Alameda's Coast Guard base blocked the entrance, bore signs urging "Protect Our Neighbors/ Protegemos Nuestros Vecinos," and faced off against about 100 agents already there who quickly fired flash-bang grenades, injuring several. Are we great yet? "In the Bay we're involved, and our kids know what's happening," said one father. "They’re going to see they’re not wanted here."Officials were just as adamant. If ICE was loosed on them, state and city attorneys would be "in court within hours, if not minutes." Newsom, slamming voter suppression and "a direct assault on the rule of law,” vowed to sue "within nanoseconds"; he also added to his satirical, union-supplied Patriot Shop "KNEE PADS FOR ALL CEO’s, UNIVERSITIES, AND GOP BENDING THE KNEE TO DONALD TRUMP." Meanwhile, Steve Bannon's witless, flip-flopping "vehicle of divine providence" called off his "surge" after some tech oligarchs told him to - what, no Fox or Loomer or Goebbels? - and San Francisco's mayor "very nicely" asked him to. At immigration court the next day, Aztec dancers led a cleansing ritual and defiant protesters called for a general strike.The crisis also sparked the return of a seminal voice as City Lights Books unfurled banners quoting co-founder, poet, veteran, pacifist and "philosophical anarchist" Lawrence Ferlinghetti's “Pity the Nation,” a 2007, George W-era lament against tyranny. Beginning in 1953 and over seven decades - he died age 101 in 2021 - Ferlinghetti nursed the hub of free speech and Beat poets, thinkers and dissenters that was City Lights; he also fiercely defended Allen Ginsberg's 1955 Howl - "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked" - in an obscenity trial that ended in a landmark victory for the First Amendment. Despite "the iron circumstances of the world," Ferlinghetti was always seeking "a renaissance of wonder," and he was not afraid. Be like him, and California, Chicago, D.C., all the rest.Update: A federal judge in Portland, Oregon rejected Trump's request to lift her order blocking the deployment of goons there, at least for now. And a judge in D.C is still hearing arguments to remove over 2,000 troops from there. 185K views · 5.8K reactions | This is how Fox News indoctrinated a whole generation. | Bill Jubran www.facebook.com PITY THE NATIONPity the nation whose people are sheep And whose shepherds mislead themPity the nation whose leaders are liars Whose sages are silenced And whose bigots haunt the airwavesPity the nation that raises not its voice Except to praise conquerors And acclaim the bully as hero And aims to rule the world By force and by torturePity the nation that knows No other language but its own And no other culture but its ownPity the nation whose breath is money And sleeps the sleep of the too well fedPity the nation oh pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed awayMy country, tears of thee Sweet land of liberty!– Lawrence Ferlinghetti (after Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran)

The Daily Wire shockjock is not just astonishingly bigoted towards Muslim Americans - he is also astonishingly ignorant about Muslim Americans, too. Watch me debunk his BS and teach him a lesson.

This week’s latest political scandal centers around Graham Platner, a candidate for the Maine Senate seat long occupied by Susan Collins. Platner is endorsed by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna, for what are widely recognised as “populist” politics that include gun rights, housing affordability, and Medicare for All. This particular fracas is unusual in that it involves a Nazi tattoo but, in a twist, has many on the left defending a man who sported one on his chest for nearly 20 years, was recently found out with it, and proceeded to deny he knew it was a Nazi tattoo. The resulting controversy reveals a lot about the left’s enchantment with a particular model of masculinity, and the extent to which leftists are willing to jettison their avowed leftist politics for fear that they might lose yet another election.