The Speak Free Act is a federal anti-SLAPP bill introduced in the House of Representatives on a bipartisan basis by Reps Anna Eshoo and Texas Republican Blake Farenthold.
SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation and describe lawsuits filed primarily to discourage, harass and intimidate public participation and free speech.
Anti-SLAPP laws provide a way for those targeted via SLAPP suits get the suits dismissed fairly rapidly and avoid being drained by long and resource-consuming lawsuits designed not to prevail on the merits, but to exhaust the target into silencing themselves to get out from under the lawsuit.
The killer cop trainings from Calibre, recently featured in the police militarization documentary Do Not Resist, came back to the Bay Area, only months after Santa Clara sheriff Laurie Smith removed the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Department from hosting a Calibre seminar after it hit the evening news.
The Calibre trainings, (one famous graduate is Jeronimo Yanez, the St Paul police officer who murdered Philando Castile live on Facebook last year), happened in February in Santa Rosa and Sacramento.
Update: Sadly, Catherine was not re-nominated by Governor Jerry Brown. A big loss for California’s consumers.
Catherine Sandoval is one of the most qualified commissioners to ever serve on the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The first person of Latino descent to serve on the agency in its 100-year history, she has been a determined public interest advocate and fighter for real people against the massive corporate interests the agency regulates. Continue reading PUC Needs Consumer Advocates: Reappoint Sandoval→
The Department of Justice filed suit against DirecTV (commonly known as AT&T after the recent merger) for anti-competitive collusion in violation of antitrust law.
The suit comes as DirecTV parent corporation AT&T has petitioned the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission for another mega-merger with Time-Warner’s content division. Continue reading DirecTV Sued For Anti-Competitive Collusion→
Nine years after the death and four years after the filing of a petition to deny license renewal by Media Action Center (a fiscally sponsored project of Media Alliance), the FCC has finally convened a hearing on the 2007 death of Jennifer Strange.
An October letter to the Department of Justice by 52 civil rights and civil liberties organizations (including MA) cited growing evidence that the widespread and illegitimate use of facial recognition devices has disproportionate impact on youth, women, African-Americans and people of Middle eastern descent through identifiable anomalies in the algorithims used. Continue reading Facial Recognition Software: Biased as Hell→
The Bay View newspaper, a reliable source of hard hitting reporting and a much-requested item in prisons across the country, is undergoing a series of official and unofficial bannings as prison strike activism continues. Continue reading Un-Ban The Bayview→
