In the wake of two turbulent school board meetings, Randall Bertrand was left wondering what all the sound and fury was about since many speakers’ loud and disruptive message was already made moot by school board votes or state policy.
Rights & Liberties
Gov. DeSantis Reshaped Florida’s Appeals Courts. It Seems to Be Working Out for Him
The question is whether the conservative monoculture DeSantis and his predecessors have built within the judicial branch is willing to check excesses committed by the executive and legislative branches, which the Republican Party has dominated for decades. The question is being answered in the negative.
End the Offensive Discrimination Against Workers: Yes to Commercial Vehicles in Palm Coast Driveways
Palm Coast’s prohibition against small, van-size commercial vehicles in residential driveways is outdated and discriminatory, especially targeting blue-collar workers while refusing to recognize the vastly changing geography of work. This isn’t a majority vote issue. It’s a workers’ rights issue.
Texas Unleashes Bounty Hunters on Women
A Texas law deputizes ordinary citizens to hunt down and sue anyone who helps a woman defy the ban (e.g. clinic staff, taxi drivers, someone who provided money for the procedure) with a minimum payoff of $10,000 if they’re successful.
Texas Rebirths Jim Crow Tactics in Vigilantism-Enabling Abortion Law
The new Texas law that bans most abortions uses a method employed by Texas and other states to enforce racist Jim Crow laws in the 19th and 20th centuries that aimed to disenfranchise African Americans.
L’Darius Smith Is Sentenced to a Year in Jail Over Baseball Bat Incident, Ending Latest But Not Last Court Odyssey
The long, convoluted, at times controversial case of L’Darius Smith ended Friday with his sentencing to a year in jail for aggravated assault, burglary, theft, battery and the improper exhibition of a weapon in a pair of incidents that go back to early 2020 in Palm Coast, that touched on claims of racial prejudice and involved a stand your ground hearing that Smith lost.
Simplistic and Damaging: How Schools Teach 9/11
Narratives reduced to a focus on heroism and simplistic interpretations of good and evil do not help students reflect on the many controversial decisions made by the U.S. and their allies after 9/11, such as using embellished evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And they potentially reinforce political rhetoric that paints Muslims as potential terrorists and ignore the xenophobic attacks against Muslim Americans after the 9/11 attacks.
Florida Is Among World Leaders in Mass Incarceration
Florida and a dozen other states imprison people at the highest rates in the world, without demonstrating that incarceration reduces crime, says the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-partisan research and policy advocacy organization.
9/11: The Road Not Taken
The military and political misuses of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were bound to have bewildering consequences for the nation’s budget and its sense of itself as a free and peaceful society, absent the prevailing of wise, more prudent choices. Those choices did not prevail.
Black Lives Matter: Where We Stand
Black Lives Matter has been called the largest civil movement in U.S. history. Lately, the movement and its leading organizations have become more traditional and hierarchical in structure. Two scholars of worldwide African communities and cultures – Kwasi Konadu and Bright Gyamfi – discuss BLM as both a movement and an organization.