Tag: freedom of speech

George W. Bush calls out racial injustices and celebrates protesters who ‘march for a better future’

Washington Post logoFormer president George W. Bush addressed the nationwide protests in a solemn yet hopeful statement Tuesday, commending the Americans demonstrating against racial injustice and criticizing those who try to silence them.

Bush closed his statement, which came a day after peaceful protesters were cleared by force to make way for President Trump to come outside, by pointing to a “better way.”

“There is a better way — the way of empathy, and shared commitment, and bold action, and a peace rooted in justice,” Bush said in the statement. “I am confident that together, Americans will choose the better way.” Continue reading.

The Supreme Court gives free speech to fake doctors, but not real ones

Washington Post logoThe Supreme Court this week declined to review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit’s decision in EMW Women’s Surgical Center v. Meier; this had the practical effect of upholding a Kentucky law requiring abortion service providers to, among other things, perform an ultrasound and play a fetal heartbeat recording to a woman seeking an abortion.

Things were different, however, when antiabortion advocates last year challenged a California law requiring crisis pregnancy centers — established, the law said, specifically to dissuade women from having abortions — to post truthful information about the limits of their services and the availability of state-sponsored family-planning services. The Supreme Court viewed that law as an impermissible form of forced speech and held, 5 to 4, that it violated the First Amendment.

In the California case, NIFLA v. Becerra, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that California could not coerce speech from the activists who run and work at the antiabortion centers. The majority held that the law “impose[d] a government-scripted, speaker-based disclosure requirement” in violation of the First Amendment.

Donald Trump tells Putin journalists are “fake news”, something Putin doesn’t have to put up with

Once again, Donald Trump is envious of Vladimir Putin’s government-controlled media in Russia. Just what an American president sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution should do to defend the American people’s freedom of speech and the press.

Trump threatened Time reporter with prison — and then griped about never being named Man of the Year

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump threatened a reporter with prison after a photographer tried to snap a photo of his letter from Kim Jong Un.

According to a transcript of his interview with Time‘s Brian Bennett, the president asked to go off the record to show off the letter.

When the magazine’s photographer tried to take a picture of it, Trump became enraged.

“Excuse me — under Section II — well, you can go to prison instead, because, if you use, if you use the photograph you took of the letter that I gave you,” Trump said, according to the transcript.

View the complete June 21 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.