donal brown

Democratic senators in the U.S. Congress found themselves in new territory as they resorted to Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain records of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh who was associate White House counsel for President George W Bush. (FindLaw, August 9, 2018, by George Khory, Esq.) The nonprofit Fix the Court filed a lawsuit in federal court in July seeking records of Kavanaugh’s work on the Starr commission in the 1990s and his

CNN reporter Jim Acosta has garnered approval from some quarters for standing up to the Trump administration for their hostility towards the press. But he also drew some criticism from sympathetic observers who think he has gone too far in becoming the story himself. Todd S. Purdum, The Atlantic, August 7, 2018, thinks Acosta’s confrontation is counterproductive an instance of that when Acosta asked Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if she viewed the press as

The Inspector General for the Federal Communications Commission found that there was no denial-of-service attack during the public input before the FCC repealed net neutrality. The incident occurred in May of 2017 after an HBO host urged his audience to submit comments to the FCC supporting neutrality. The audience was blocked from filing comments as the system shut down. The FCC claimed denial-of-service attacks was the cause of the shut down. (Free Press, August 7,

A federal district judge in South Carolina ruled that Charleston’s law requiring tour guides to obtain a license violated their First Amendment rights. “The [tour-guide] licensing law imposes real burdens on those hoping to be tour guides in Charleston,” the court’s opinion reads, “[b]ut the record demonstrates that the City never investigated or tried to use any less speech-restrictive alternatives … [And so the court] has no choice but to strike the licensing law down

Google is verging on establishing a censored search engine in China that will exclude search terms on democracy, government criticism, peaceful protest, religion and human rights. They are working closely with the Chinese government to develop the app. Google has not been active in China for several years in protest of its censorship laws. (The Intercept, August 1, 2018, by Ryan Gallagher) In a press release by PEN America, August 2, 2018, Summer Lopez said,