By Jonathan Pedneault/Human Rights Watch

Peaceful protests are protected by the United States Constitution’s First Amendment as well as international human rights law. But a legislative assault aimed at eroding these protections is underway in several state legislatures.
It’s nothing new. Various states have long tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an “unlawful assembly” or a “riot” as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.

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Posted on February 17, 2021

By Sarah Posner/Reveal

The Jan. 6 Save America March, where then-President Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol, opened with a prayer. Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and White House adviser, the Florida televangelist Paula White, called on God to “give us a holy boldness in this hour.” Standing at the same podium where, an hour later, Trump would exhort the crowd to “fight like hell,” White called the election results into question, asking God to let the people “have the assurance of a fair and a just election.”
Flanked by a row of American flags, White implored God to “let every adversary against democracy, against freedom, against life, against liberty, against justice, against peace, against righteousness be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.” Within hours, insurrectionists had surrounded the Capitol, beaten police, battered down barricades and doors, smashed windows and rampaged through the halls of the Capitol, breaching the Senate chamber.

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Posted on February 5, 2021

By David Rutter

Of the 140 flip-the-bird pardons and commutations flung against the presidential barn wall by Trump, none was more amusing and deliciously grotesque than freeing Casey Urlacher from his chains and shackles.
At least Mighty Casey did not strike out and get sent away for five years as a customer recruiter and bagman for a sports gambling ring that raked in millions of dollars from local bettors.
He embodied the only aspect of public life more humiliating to retired Bears megastar Brian Urlacher than those massive highway commercials showing hair growing on Brian’s head. (Let’s all cheer: Hold that hairline; hold that hairline.)
Casey? He is the “Mayor of Mettawa,” which is just like being the “Mayor of Petticoat Junction,” and should not have been subject to criminal law by the Trump DOJ.

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Posted on January 23, 2021

By Human Rights Watch

Japan-based Kirin Holdings should publish its investigation report on the military-owned Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd. and swiftly cut ties with the company.
Kirin announced the conclusion of an investigation by Deloitte Tohmatsu Financial Advisory on Thursday, but declined to publish the report for confidentiality reasons.
“Kirin should regain some trust of consumers, investors and rights groups by releasing the details of its investigation into the operations of its Myanmar military business partner,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Kirin’s business association with MEHL raises serious human rights concerns that need urgent action, not further obfuscation behind an investigation whose results are kept secret.”

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Posted on January 9, 2021

By UIC

New research has found that Chicago neighborhoods with barriers to social distancing, including limited access to broadband internet and low rates of health insurance, had more COVID-19 deaths in spring 2020. The study, led by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, is published in the Annals of Epidemiology.
“We wanted to look at neighborhood characteristics that may contribute to higher death rates in certain neighborhoods in Chicago,” said Molly Scannell Bryan, a research assistant professor at the UIC Institute for Minority Health Research and corresponding author on the paper. “We originally expected that air quality and use of public transportation would be drivers, but we found that heightened barriers to being able to social distance, such as low or lack of internet access, was a more significant driver of COVID-19-related deaths, possibly through a higher risk of infection in those without internet access.”

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Posted on December 4, 2020

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Dear Black students,
The last seven months have presented you with a whirlwind of challenges that undoubtedly disrupted your schooling: The coronavirus pandemic, police killings of unarmed Black people, uprisings for racial justice, Western wildfires and a contentious presidential election in which efforts to disenfranchise voters in Black-majority cities have been bold and deliberate. You have to make sense of misinformation campaigns by politicians who think saying “fake news” will make their lies go away.
With all the distractions and attacks, it may sometimes be difficult to recall our legacy. For generations, we have fought for freedom and freedom’s antecedent, a quality education. Always, the upholders of white supremacy have tried to control us by obstructing our path to the schoolhouse through law, propaganda and duplicity. Now, they are doing it again.

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Posted on November 30, 2020

By Wikipedia

The first person to earn a third term as governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes reduced the state debt and re-established the Board of Charities. His success immediately elevated him to the top ranks of Republican politicians under consideration for the presidency in 1876.
The Ohio delegation to the 1876 Republican National Convention was united behind him, and Senator John Sherman did all in his power to get Hayes the nomination.
In June 1876, the convention assembled with James G. Blaine of Maine as the favorite. Blaine started with a significant lead in the delegate count, but could not muster a majority. As he failed to gain votes, the delegates looked elsewhere for a nominee and settled on Hayes on the seventh ballot.
The convention selected Representative William A. Wheeler from New York for vice president, a man about whom Hayes had recently asked, “I am ashamed to say: Who is Wheeler?”

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Posted on November 22, 2020

By Stephen Engelberg/ProPublica

One reason we love the news business is that things seldom turn out as expected. In the 2020 elections, the voting process went surprisingly smoothly, with record numbers of Americans casting their ballots in new ways. The big failure of 2020, it turned out, was the political polling, which was so wrong in so many places that some people are now arguing that it’s time to spend a lot less effort trying to divine how people will vote.
That argument misses the point. Polls have their uses, particularly when they are used to assess broad questions about what’s on voters’ minds or which issues resonated the most. They seem much less reliable in predicting the future, and that’s okay. It means that we have to treat politics more like other subjects, in which we draw on data, interviews and our past experiences to shape coverage. The rise of the pollster as seer of all matters political is a relatively recent development, a corrective to an era when the “boys on the bus” covered politics largely by anecdote and gut instincts.

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Posted on November 11, 2020

By Nick Shreders

It just seemed that way – just like we warned you it would.
For one thing, most of the swing states counted Election Day votes first, which overwhelmingly skewed Republican. Now imagine a scenario in which every state preprocessed the early, mail-in votes like Florida did – the race would’ve been called before midnight.
Indeed, it appears that the final electoral vote total will be 306 to 232, the exact same totals in 2016. No one said that election was close then because the vast majority of votes were counted by midnight instead of in a days-long, drawn-out process that created the illusion that the margins were alternately shrinking and expanding in the states that mattered. It was a false drama, abetted by a media afraid to just come out and say what was readily apparent.
The reality is that many of us didn’t get it as wrong as a lot of folks seem to think. Let’s take a look by reviewing my pre-election analysis point by point.

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Posted on November 10, 2020

By David Rutter

This is not exactly Reagan’s “Morning in America,” but then, neither was Reagan’s “Morning in America” real either.
Stash the marketing fakery.
Breathe, America.
It’s going to be OK.

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Posted on November 6, 2020